If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, Bryan is a person who has given his life—and his body—over to the science of longevity. That means that he has essentially turned himself into a human lab rat, undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human marker imaginable in order to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging.
What he’s found is unconventional, to say the least: He eats dinner at 11 a.m., he has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, and he measures his nighttime erection lengths—just to name a few of the hundreds of things that you probably have never heard of a person doing in the name of health and longevity.
But it’s not just that Bryan wants to reverse aging and live forever. He also thinks we’re at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality. He believes he’s akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he’s on the frontier of something big—something that will change everything about humanity as we know it.
In that way, this conversation is not just about wacky exercise routines and unusual supplements. It’s a philosophical discussion about the meaning and purpose of life, and what we’re all doing here on this planet.
Today on Honestly, Bryan Johnson tells us about why and how he’s not going to die.
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“…Don’t die is the zeroth order of priority for existence. Once you exist, the most important goal is to still exist.”
Many people have committed great evils simply in pursuit of the above. Longevity may be Bryan Johnson’s religion, but it won’t provide a moral code that’s worth living. I appreciate his quantitative approach to health and free public access to the resulting data but find his driving philosophy morally bankrupt.
Let me posit a scenario: If he’s out taking a walk, gets hit by a drunk driver, and finds himself in need of a transplant, his philosophy is more likely to lead him down the Chinese organ transplant model than any other because this model is the best option for securing a healthy organ. The moral quandary of imprisoning healthy people and extracting their organs on demand is never addressed by the above guiding principle. Even if you can grow perfect, healthy organs on demand, you will inevitably run into the same quandary in some other area.
Bari, tell Suzy (since she seems to be so concerned about it) that plasma draws are the fastest, most effective route to reducing microplastics in the body. Blood draws are just as effective but cannot be done as frequently. There’s a study on Australian firefighters (the chemicals they spray on fires contain high levels of microplastics) that came out in the last few years that demonstrated this. Activated charcoal was also shown, in Petri dish tests, to bind to microplastics. If you go the binder route, just make sure you’re eliminating regular as the bind is a loose one and has more likelihood of failing the longer it remains in the body, thereby releasing the toxins and forcing the body to reprocess it, ultimately causing more harm than good.
Does anyone have the link to the microplastics study/analysis Bari referenced?