Transcription
Don't die. Simple, simple advice that we're all trying to not do on a regular basis. Also, the title of a recent documentary that was released this past weekend on Netflix that certainly is getting a lot of talk. Don't die. That's basically what I say to myself every time I go skiing.
Now that I'm older, for sure, fear sets in. So, there's a documentary called "Welcome to Talking with Docs." I'm Dr. Brad, and I'm Dr. Paul Zel. Not Dr. Brian Johnson. You wish you were, CTS, don't you? You're turning into it, I think. My wife joked about this a little bit, saying, "Send help." I think there are some things that I resonate with for sure.
All right, well, let's talk about the documentary then. At the end, we'll give you our opinion as to whether it's worth watching and if you are going to watch it, sort of what mindset to have when you watch it. Agreed?
So, who's Brian Johnson? Why? What's this about? Brian Johnson is a guy who's killing himself trying not to die. I think that's one way to look at it. Some people feel that way. Is he killing himself trying not to die? I'm not sure. Very interesting guy, smart guy. He made a lot of money in the tech world with a company called Braintree that bought another company called Venmo, which was like the digital payment system. He cashed out to the tune of somewhere around $400 million and then now is on this health journey essentially to reduce not only his age but also the rate at which he ages going forward.
Right, so trying to pursue the true Fountain of Youth at a tune of about $2 million a year, using a ton of the money that he made. Yes, to this cost. And he sadly stopped working. This is now his job and his focus and his life. All right, full-time job.
Yeah, so is he a nice guy? When you watch the documentary, what do you think? I think he's a unique individual. I think he was a nice enough guy. I thought he was working hard to be like a good dad. Exactly. I think everybody's got stuff. But yeah, I think he seemed like a nice enough guy. He seemed like a reasonable guy. They showed him in his relationship with his son. He seemed to have a very good relationship with his son.
They'd been estranged for a while back, but he's had some hard knocks, right? Faith in his religion, which is a big stressor in life. Lost a marriage, a big stressor. And I think he had a bit of a nasty breakup with a fiancée and some accusations about stuff. I don't really know the details occurring there. And then some being estranged from some of his children, two of his three kids. These are some of the tough things.
So, is this just a giant midlife crisis he's going through? Well, I guess kind of. Okay, all right. Yeah, so that's him. But I think I guess the first thing is about him too. I also think some people say, "Oh, he's doing it to make money." I mean, the guy's got a lot of money, so I'm not convinced that that's his goal. I think it's for his personal gain, like to try to live longer. And I think there's a hint of altruism there. I think he maybe feels like he's taking that weight of the world, saying, "Listen, maybe I can make a difference."
Okay, seems like a nice guy and seems like his motives are intact. Yes. Okay, now what about the show? Let's go through, if you're going to watch this hour and a half documentary, what are you going to see?
So, it focuses on his new company called Blueprint, right? Which originally, I guess, it's been in development for years, a couple of years or something. And was just really following his protocol from the minute he wakes up till the minute that he goes to bed and showing what he does to reduce his aging.
Right, which is an ironic name in my opinion because he doesn't spend a lot of time in the show talking about his own genetic makeup, like his family history of illness, because that's huge. I mean, there's that nature versus nurture effect. But from a nature point of view, like your genetic inheritance from your parents and grandparents and such, that plays a huge role in your health.
Sure, undeniable. Do you think that he maybe doesn't talk about that because you can't alter that though? No, I... But it's not a matter of altering, but it's a matter of getting ahead of it. Depending on your genetic history, that may mean you need to do certain screenings as opposed to others. I feel like he's doing everything as if he had every disease. I think he's acting like he has the worst genetics ever, and he is, I feel like, covering every single base.
Yeah, possibly, possibly. But I just think it was an ironic name because, you know, he's trying to do a bunch of stuff to alter the natural sort of process. Sure, which, and when I think of blueprints, I think of your genes. Right, okay.
So, decent guy, motive theme intact. And the movie shows his life. It also shows a lot about his relationship with his son, with his dad, and his mom, stuff like that. That's fine.
Okay, and now let's go through what he's doing to not die. Okay, okay. So, it starts with his... He has a very specific sleep routine. So, he wakes up between 4:30 and 5:00. He goes to bed every night at 9:30. Yes, no, 8:30, I think it is. Yeah, he gets 8 hours and like 27 minutes or something of sleep. Very specific. All of his sleep is monitored. He has a very regimented sleep routine. Not negotiable.
Okay, so we talk about that all the time. One of the pillars of health, sleep's important. Yeah, critical. Take that box.
Yeah, okay. What about exercise? Yeah, do you want to go more into detail? So, when he wakes up, when he's doing like his morning routine in front of the mirror, he actually has a light. So, not that's going to create vitamin D, but that's going to increase, sort of suppress melatonin production, increase serotonin more for mood. There is some soft scientific evidence that these mood lights for seasonal affective disorder do work, so that's kind of his thing.
Takes, I think, in the order of 90 supplements a day. Yes, yes. Okay, so yeah, which is ironic. The light's ironic because isn't he in LA or California? Yes, they get a lot of light there, right? But he's very concerned about exposure to UV, right? So, he's sort of taking away the natural light with an artificial light, yeah, to reduce the risk of skin cancer.
I guess. Talk about 90 supplements. He has a very restricted feeding window, about six hours, where he is on a daily caloric deficit. He consumes 2,250 calories a day, which in my mind, I thought, well, if it's a caloric deficit every day, aren't you going to lose weight? But I guess what happens is your metabolism slowly adjusts and becomes more efficient. Absolutely.
So, another thing that we often are very concerned with is your caloric intake and reducing portion sizes and such. Okay, so you know what I mean in terms of the healthy eating? Yes, I think he takes that box. Yeah, he's a whole food, plant-based eater in addition to multiple supplements. We'll give him a healthy eating. We think many of you might disagree with that as healthy eating, but sure, you know, it's avoiding the toxins.
Definitely. He's not doing alcohol, he's not doing drugs, he's not smoking, seemingly no processed food. No processed food, yeah. And very intentional about macro content as well as very specific nutrient-driven food choices.
Right, takes up... So, we get the sleep, the food. Yep, okay. In terms of pillars of health, exercise definitely is in an exercise routine. Obviously, a regular ex. He's even supplementing that with electrode stimulation. Yeah, when he's not contracting his muscles, he's lying there and letting a machine contract his muscles for him for just over an hour a day.
Combination of cardio and resistance training, a very, very thoughtful 35-exercise regimen that hits everything. As well as he has like a stimulator for his abs that stimulates like 20,000 sit-ups or something, which, hey, that's cool. Minus, yeah.
Okay, so in terms of the sleep, the food, the toxin avoiding, and the exercise, yep, I'm all for that stuff. Yep. Now, you mentioned 90 supplements. Yeah, it's a lot. Seems excessive. It does. It does seem like a lot.
So, we would say there's a handful of supplements that have good evidence, and that includes things like vitamin D, B12, calcium if you're deficient, magnesium certainly is on the side I'd say of leaning towards evidence. And then you could discuss whether niacin or coenzyme Q or resveratrol, those kinds of things. But also garlic, ginger, and then these NAD-type supplements to reduce anti-aging and antioxidant effects.
Those is little turmeric or cumin he takes. So, starting to lose me a bit with body cement personally. Okay, losing me a little bit. And when I watch them, I think this isn't for the common person. No, okay. First, it's way too expensive. It's not practical.
And B, if the way you might want to approach it is like you're watching someone do a science experiment. I think he is, yeah, with an N of one. Unfortunately, a really bad science experiment because when you do a science experiment, you take one variable that you vary and see what the effect is, and you do that in many, many people to make sure that what you're observing, the results you're observing are not due to chance.
Right, in his case, he's taking many variables, altering many variables at once, and doing it in one person. Yes, so from a scientific theory point of view, it's a bad science experiment. I think he would agree with that, but it is basically what a lot of what he's doing is a science experiment because of the lack of evidence for sure.
Okay, and like you said, so many things changing. Like he was taking human growth hormone for a while, took it for 100 days, had to stop because his intracranial pressure went up 15%, so they thought it wasn't safe, so he stopped doing that. And there's a role for human growth hormone for people who are deficient in it and developing children who need it.
But for the common person to take human growth hormone, definitely no evidence to support that. Did you know that your head, hands, and feet can keep growing if you take human growth hormone even beyond skeletal maturity? You know, like some of those professional athletes that take human growth hormone, they have like really big heads. I thought that's really weird.
I guess because of the way that the cartilage is affected even if you have closed growth plates. Yeah, it's not recommended. And he does take testosterone for sure. Takes testosterone. All right, so there I'm starting to get lost on all the extra supplements he's taking. Yes, okay.
I'm not sure if some of the medications that he's taking fall into the supplement side of things, but he also takes daily metformin. Yeah, testosterone, the immune-modulating medication he takes. Yeah, so... Oh, the rapamycin. Yeah, I'm not sure if he's still taking that or not, but definitely was.
Which, of course, you know, often is taken in transplant patients or something like that where you have to suppress the immune system. But based on some very robust animal data in mice that showed drastic significant improvement. Plus, he also does something called plasmapheresis where he takes young people's blood. So, he gave some to his dad, his son gave some to him, and they talked about some mouse studies there where they actually literally sewed a young mouse to an old mouse, and it made the old mouse's organs reverse age.
I don't think his son would have gone for that if you asked him. Well, he joked about that. He said, "I can't be sewn to a young human."
Yeah, okay, so you're going to... Instead of having this continuous plasma exchange, you can do this intermittent, like a blood transfusion, but obviously pretty wacky. For common, certainly pushing. And then I'd say the last most aggressive one was getting on a plane, going to Honduras. And there's a little island that Honduras owns and controls, a town called ironically Prosperity, or appropriately, where there's kind of no rules, and you can kind of do things that are off-label in other countries and not approved.
With some, we don't know the details of the scientific guidance that's involved or the ethics. Not much. But my company to receive something called Follistatin, which is deemed to be a gene therapy, which also is theoretically beneficial for longevity. Right, and that type of gene therapy is not typically what you think of when you think of gene therapy. When you think of gene therapy, you think of altering your genes or your genome in one way, either deleting or inserting a section of your genes to create certain proteins or stop creating certain proteins.
In this case, it's not affecting his genes, so it is a little bit safer in that sense. And the legitimate scientists that were on the show said, "Listen, the trouble with gene therapy is yes, you target one specific thing, but the neighboring things have kind of a lot of unknown effects, and often you can alter those cells' reproduction rates and potentially lead to things like cancer or other negative consequences that we just don't know about."
So, yeah, we always are concerned with that whenever any kind of gene therapy. And you got to think, you know, a cell in the cell cycle is programmed to die eventually by apoptosis. The cell has to eventually die. If the cell doesn't die, and if something goes wrong with that process, apoptosis, that's where you end up. That's one way to end up with a cancer or a tumor.
Sure, and of course, when you think of trying not to die, if you think of it on the building blocks of life, your cells, if you're trying to make them not die, then you have a tumor. Sure, and the whole purpose of Follistatin was to increase his muscle mass and bone density. And I think after his first treatment, his muscle mass went up 7%.
And this is a guy already whose body fat is in like the 5% to 6%. He's in like the 90-something percent for strength. He can bench like 240. Like he's an ultra-fit, yeah, it's his full-time job. Crazy fit guy.
Okay, so now you've lost me even more. You start talking about going to Honduras to get treatment. And we've had patients. I've had patients, yes, who try this stuff. "I went to Honduras, I went to Colombia, I went here, I went there, and I paid for these stem cells, I paid for this, I paid for that." And how many times has that worked in my career that I've seen people do that? Zero.
Yeah, it's never ever worked. Okay, if you're thinking of going and spending $20,000 on some experimental treatment, whether it's for cancer or for arthritis or trying not to die, in my experience, what I've seen over the last 20 years is a success rate of zero. And you may experience some early seeming success that fades over time, and it's hard to measure that.
And that could be placebo, could be related to something else that's added, like maybe a traditional treatment is added to some new unproven treatment, and then you get the proven treatment benefit and say, "Oh, it worked."
Yeah, if you had done it and you've had success, leave a comment. We won't believe you, but leave a comment. Anything to be honest. Wait, what do you think about this?
So, that right there, that's a red flag for me. Going to Honduras to get some... Now, I've had some experience with ethical review of research. Sure, in Honduras? No, because I tried, but I couldn't get a job.
Yeah, because there are no jobs because there's no ethical review board, right? So, you know, there's a rigorous set of guidelines that we use when we review research to make sure that it's ethical, to make sure that we're... The chance of doing harm to someone during this scientific study is very, very low, right? As low as possible.
An informed consent is obtained. There's a lot of guidelines that we go through that we have to know in order to let a clinical study occur. Yeah, see, that's not being done there, so that to me is just concerning.
Well, the thing is, he's looking at kind of best evidence for all these different things, but a lot of it is not proven in humans or weak evidence in humans or a lot of animal data, and he's extrapolating that. And could it be possible that this works? Sure. Is it possible that metformin can improve longevity?
There is actually an ongoing trial called the TAME trial, treating aging with metformin, where they're giving people who are not diabetic metformin to see if this improves your cardiovascular health, your kidney health, your essentially your age. It's an ongoing trial, and there's a lot of excitement about this, and it may show something.
But what Brian Johnson is doing, he's just going ahead of that and saying, "Listen, I'm just going to do it." And there are other people in the longevity space, a lot of them are very excited about and are doing it themselves, again off-label. But this is dangerous, and it's not practical for the average person.
And we're kind of more like, let's... Our whole channel is like, where are the facts? Just because there's no facts doesn't mean it doesn't work, but we're going on the best existing evidence. I remember in the show they had one legit scientist saying, "Oh, he blocked me when I have to come," because that scientist said, "Hey, why don't you, with some of your millions of dollars, fund the TAME trial?"
So, that's maybe his altruism is not as altruistic as we thought. Fair enough, because if it was, perhaps he would take some of his massive fortune to support... Maybe he is, but it wasn't shown in the show whether he's taking some of his massive fortune to support some proper clinical trials. Agreed, right?
Because that would have been a huge help to humanity if he could help on the TAME trial to see if metformin does actually have that regard. Yeah, so we've gone now. We've gone from your eat well, exercise, avoid toxins to go overseas and get experimental injections and things that work in mice but we don't know if they work in people.
So, along those lines, sure, started losing me. And then the other pillar that he talked about, which I thought was good too, was social interaction at the end. Yeah, he talked about that, right? And you can tell when he had his son, he had some social interaction going on, which was good.
And he recognizes that as a pillar of health because he's alluded to it in his show, said, "You know, the evidence shows that if you're socially connected, you live longer." And he said, "I'm not so brazen to think that that's not important."
Like he, which I thought was good, he lives a relatively solitary life or did, and I think he's working to change that through his... He is. At the end, he started this, as he's been referred to as a cult, where he has followers and he meets his followers and they go for hikes and things like that.
Yeah, which is cool. That is cool. It's a little Forrest Gump, but it's cool. Yeah, so that I thought was... I thought that was a... I would agree with that, right? The social interaction.
I'm a little confused why there's so much hate towards him. I think our world, unfortunately, is really full of hate, and people like to crab on people's ideas, which I think, what's the point of this? We don't crab on people that go and party 20 nights in Vegas and, you know, they're Hollywood stars or whatever. No one says anything about them.
Yeah, or less people say, but like who cares? He's not hurting you, so who cares? Really, he's not telling you that you have to do this. Who cares? Yeah, I never, at no point when I was watching the show, was I like, "Oh, I hate this guy."
I know, like, and then he showed some of the comments, and people are like really angry. And yeah, oh, he's trying to make money from... Well, listen, you don't have to go to his Amazon affiliate and buy his black lentils if you don't want. Yeah, he's just trying... His recipes are free.
Yeah, actually made a bunch of them this weekend. Did you really? Yeah, yeah, my wife and I. But yeah, I don't know. Like, at the end of the day, what did you think? Would you recommend this show to watch for people? How do they watch it?
I think if you're interested in health longevity, I think it's worth a watch. It's mostly light-hearted. I think to try to take it and apply it specifically to your life would not be practical, but I think obviously the discipline that he exhibits is admirable.
I think it's an odd way to spend your entire day, waking up from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed just trying to really not die and to try to be healthy. I think that that's hard. I don't... Where's your joy? But if that's your joy, I guess then that's for him too.
But I think, yeah, the eating well, the exercise, the sleeping, the avoidance, like all the pillars of health. So, he's mostly pillars, and then he just kind of creates that seventh pillar of like wonky stuff, experimental stuff.
I agree. I think it's a... You know, it's not a way of life. It's a scientific experiment. It's not a good scientific experiment. Is this science you're watching, or is it entertainment? This is entertainment. This isn't science you're watching. This is entertainment.
So, you're going to be entertained watching it. I think having said that, do you think it could provide some useful information? I think it's entertainment that you could learn something from, and that is those pillars, right?
But the problem is, wouldn't want you... The Honduras stuff, the gene therapy stuff, the unproven supplement stuff, all that to taint the other stuff. You're like, "Well, this is all BS." Agreed. I wouldn't mind someone to watch and go, "Forget it, he's nuts. It's all PL are stupid."
Yeah, vitamin D, stupid. Most of the stuff he's doing is... I agree with stuff. We alluded to some of the stuff, the wonky stuff, the four billion supplements, the traveling somewhere to go get experimental medicine where regulations don't exist.
Yeah, that stuff I think is wrong. And I think too, I think in order to advance things in our world, people like this have to exist. Like, I'm sure the Wright brothers, people are like, "Are you guys crazy? You're going up." You know what I mean? They crashed a bunch, and I think you need people like that as long as I think he doesn't do damage or hurt anybody else in the process.
He's an adult, and if he gets hurt, unfortunately, that'll be... But someone said, "I hope he gets hit by a bus," or something. I'm like, "Yeah, no, that's horrible." Yeah, I don't agree with that.
So, I think his brand's credibility would go up tenfold if he did fund, help fund, or was involved in some proper clinical trials. Agreed, that could help people learn about aging. Maybe he'll do it. Maybe Brian Johnson will reach out to us and say, "Hey, I'd love to come on Talking with Docs and talk to you guys about this."
Yeah, yeah, I don't think so. I think he might wait. Text him, Brian. No, I think he's going to rant and call us.
Yeah, okay. Now, now you know, like we always say, the pillars I think are sensible. But if you like this kind of stuff, please like it, subscribe to our channel, leave a comment, forward it to a friend that you think might be interested in how to potentially alter their life to live a little bit longer, and some of the other stuff that may be in the future.
Let us know what you thought about that show. Yeah, don't die. Yeah, if you liked it, if you didn't like it, if you think you'd recommend it to someone or if you wouldn't. There you go.
And remember, you are in charge of your own health. Unfortunately, you're not entirely in charge of when you're going to die. You can try and delay that as much as possible by watching Talking with Docs. There you go. We're the original "Don't Die." Yeah, we're live better. We're live better. See you next time.