Transcription
Foreign. [Music] I'm just getting home. I agreed to be filmed today, and I just had a laser treatment on my face. It looks like my face has a really bad sunburn, so just so you know, if my face looks all messed up, that's why. My body has a whole bunch of stuff too; looks like skill. I got fish scaled today; it's all from my back too. But what they did today actually is they they had this laser; she was basically just like shaving off imperfections and scars. So we did it for the face. She also had a hair application, a laser for hair growth, and then we did the body as well.
So today, I we're gonna film my my nightly routine. A lot of people have asked about this, and specifically in the context of recently I shared on social media that I had an entire month of perfect sleep, a 100 score using the wearable Whoop, and I didn't really have any context on this, but people were were blown away that I was able to achieve not only 100 once, but for an entire month, every single day. A lot of people said that in years of wearing Whoop, they'd never achieved 100. And so people are curious what I'm doing for sleep. The nightly routine is really about prep for sleep, so I'm hoping I can share with you what I've been learning for the past couple years through a bunch of trial and error. What I have found is sleep is my number one priority in life; it's more important than anything else, because when I sleep well, life feels amazing and possible, and when I don't sleep well, it feels challenging and miserable. I'm going to walk you through the entirety of what I do on a on a nightly basis. Some of it is Blueprint Protocol stuff, but a lot of it is really sleep preparation.
When I get home, the first thing I do is I change my shoes. I have outdoor shoes, and I have indoor shoes. This is a Brian thing; it's not really a Blueprint thing. This is like the hygiene standards of the world; these are the hygiene standards of this house, and we like to separate those too. I have my lunch bag with me; I have two meals that I took with me. And so when I get home, the first thing I do is I'm going to put this on the ground, not on the countertop. I eat everything by about noon, 11 A.M. to noon, and that gives my body about eight hours to digest food before I go to sleep. And when I do that, my resting heart rate is between 45 and 50, somewhere down there. And when I do that, I'm highly likely to have a good night's sleep. So today was for the third meal of the day was asparagus, white beans, sweet potato, and some tomatoes. So I'm going to clean up these dishes, Talms, and I try to maintain an Immaculate house where everything is orderly. That's nice that we both agree on that; we uh we agreed on this protocol that we'd have a proper labeling mechanism for the dishwasher. Clean workspace allows me to have a clean mind. When things are cluttered, I'm I'm a bit bothered by it. It's a pretty small effort to try to maintain a really organized environment.
After we get things cleaned up, I'll take a few pills. So I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism when I was 21 years old, so I take levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid daily. They also take 81 milligrams of aspirin three times a week; there was some good evidence on that. And then right before bed, I'll take my melatonin. I take pills right when I wake up, and then I take it with my morning drink, and then I do a lunch, and then again tonight. So I guess I take pills like four times a day, five times a day. So we're about an hour earlier than what I normally start the routine because we're shooting here, but I'll show you a couple things. I'll start with some HRV therapy, yeah, heart rate variability, HRV. It is a representation of your nervous system. And so when you're stressed out and you're in fight or flight mode, you're in a heightened state of stress, and when you're chilled out and relaxed, you're trying to get your body to be in a more relaxed state. We've tried a lot of devices over the years, probably 15 or so. This one is from Parasymp and it attaches right here to this part of the year. I've been doing 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. So this device is emitting electrical current, and so we have a vagus nerve that is through the side of our head; in the air is a connection point, then down through our chest is an entry point for a lot of things. People use the Vegas nerve for all kinds of treatments and disorders, and so by putting this thing here, it just electrically stimulates. So I can feel a really light source of electricity. HRV is a a pretty significant biomarker for health and wellness; it also has very clear association with age. So as you're younger, you have a higher HRV; as you get older, your HRV goes down. And so over the past couple years, I've been able to almost double my HRV. I started in the low 30s range, and now lately I've been hovering in the low 60s, which is a remarkable improvement. I think my low 30s probably represents where I was at in my life as as an entrepreneur accustomed to running myself into the ground, ragged, willing to work all night with kids and trying to do all that stuff. And so now I've shifted my identity that I'm not that way anymore; I really prioritize other things, and my nervous system is really important to monitor because it really is a it's a representation of how I'm doing internally, of how stressed I am versus how relaxed and stable I am in life.
While we're here, I'll show you a few other things we've been experimenting with. 10 minutes before bed, I'll use this is Pulsetto, and it goes around the neck, and that's for 10 minutes. I'll be doing that for the past week, and it's been really effective. This is an iTera 100. I have a dry eye condition, which we found in our routine visits, so my tear ducts weren't producing the right amount of fluid for my eyes, so my eyes get dry, which is not good for eye health. Does FDA approve? You put this on the side of your nose, right here on this nerve, and then you press this button, and it vibrates; it's for 30 seconds. And so in in a clinical study, they showed that it dramatically improved tear production of the eyes. Before I was using eye drops five times a day for my eyes to be sufficiently moisturized, and now I do this twice a day, and I have a similar effect, and it avoids having to put these drops in my eyes. It is pretty funny the first time you do this; it's like the most intense anticipatory sneezed you could ever imagine. These are Skullcandy headphones; they they don't have noise cancellation because it gives me a headache, and I use this for audio cardio. So I've been trying to rebuild my hearing; I have hearing loss from shooting guns as a child and also having music too loud. So this ear is aged 64, between the ranges of I think it's 4,000 Hertz and 12,000 Hertz; I'm basically deaf. So I use these every day and do 60 minutes of stimulation in those frequencies, and so it's stimulating the hair follicles, and there's some evidence that this is uh helpful to people. We have yet to see a benefit; we're still early on, but I do this.
A couple other goodies: this is a spirometry device. We have been measuring lung health for quite some time. My lungs were in fantastic condition when we first started measuring this, and then when I got COVID in November, I had some pretty discouraging lung damage, which was an eye-opener for me because I'd seen a lot of reports; I didn't know what it'd have and what effect it'd have on me if I got it. And so we've been trying to rebuild my lungs from that. This is a Sense8; this you'd swear over the neck; it hangs here on your chest because you can get the vagus nerve here or or here; there's quite a few places you can interact with it. With Blueprint, we probably trial five to ten new things in any given week; it's the identification of the thing, the evidence that supports it, whether it's strong or emergent. One thing we've been trialing lately, which was kind of funny, was using theta waves for improved sleep at HRV; it's all I'll play this for you, just something you can find on YouTube; this is what it sounds like. Can you get that? Okay. The first time that I listen to this, we we found some evidence this might be interesting, and so I turned it on; it was like 5:30 in the evening; I turned on the speaker, so it was broadcasting; there's a few of us here hanging out; I didn't think anything of it, and I was on the couch talking to my mom, and I got so tired; I just became paralyzed, like I needed to lay down. I was like, "Mom, I'm so sorry; I need to stop this conversation right now because I need to lay down." It just had this immediate and dramatic effect on how tired I was, and it increased my sleep quality and my HRV for 10 solid days. So we're still trialing this out; we need to see if this is sustained or if it's going to break up, but it's an example of we're always trialing new things, and we're trying to find stability and permanence of this stacked process, because this nightly routine is the accumulation of, you know, a few dozen things that we've trialled that have worked, and we keep the one the things that have worked and just stack it up so that we get better every single week.
But I guess the reason why I focus on this HRV therapy and the nighttime routine so much is I find that like the things I'm working on in life have such a small tolerance for error on emotions, and if I've had a bad night's sleep and I'm working on a problem the next day and trying to think through something like my obsession is that the future of Being Human, the future of intelligent existence, and if I'm thinking through a question or a contemplation or imagination or a problem, I noticed that even one night of a mediocre sleep changes dramatically how I feel about the problem, and the solutions that come up for that vary dramatically. And so it's why I take this routine so seriously. And so I hope that what I'm going to show you tonight really does help you establish whatever routine you do to stabilize yourself, because once you get there, it's such a a beautiful and valued place to be, and you may experience what I did where before I had this huge roller coaster of emotions; it had dramatic effects of whether I was cheerful or snippy or annoyed. Getting these Basics right made life much more enjoyable; I think it made me a better person to be around, and I think it dramatically improved what I'm able to try to contribute to the world. It really is worth the effort; there's probably like nothing else you can do in your life that's going to have a better yield for your conscious existence.
Dishes are put away; HRV therapy is commenced; I've taken my pills; and so next thing I would uh get ready for bed. So I'd wash my face, brush my teeth, and get ready to hang out with Talmadge. We have an hour every night before bed; we spend it with each other; it's our favorite time of the day. We read, hang out, we talk, we do whatever, but we're both ready. So then when bedtime arrives, we can just both walk upstairs and go and get into bed; we don't have anything to do because at that point we're tired and just want to get to sleep. [Music] Now we're in the bathroom; we're going to get ready for bed. Seeing my face in the mirror in this light, it's really red. The practitioner I work with, she's been doing this for 10 years, and she said she's never had someone who has a pain tolerance as high as me, and so now that she has some comfort with me, she just she went all out for skin care. We've been able to measure my skin age; we use a multi-spectral imaging device, so we're able to look at like 10 different biomarkers from the multi-special imaging. We try to measure the bioage of my skin with all these different measurement approaches, and so and then compare that against the interventions we do. The more powerful things we do are really lasers; the lotions and the creams I use, they're okay, but they're not really the things that make a big difference. But I use a CeraVe wash; I use both CeraVe PM, which has the hyaluronic acid, and then I also use the CeraVe sunscreen, which also has the AMS as well. And because I've done several videos around my face, there's been a lot of Patrick Bateman comments from the American Psycho. So for those of you who know that connection, you should see my business cards; new card, what do you think? And then are you put on a peptide serum? And then oral care. So this is important; there's been a lot of connection to oral care with the rest of the body; it's not just having clean teeth or the avoidance of cavities; there's also it's interconnected with brain health and microbiome health. And so I do three things: floss, I'll do a water pick for gum cleanliness, then tea tree oil. The evidence supporting this is my dentist is I think in her late 20s, and I recently saw her, and my plaque index was lower than hers; it's also lower that lower than challenges she tried very hard to get my gums to bleed, and she couldn't do it. We also have been successful; we've worked on oral health, and I've reversed my oral health age by over 20 years as indicated by the gum recession and the detachment. And so we've had significant repair; a lot of that had to do I think one with diet, where eating bad foods is just bad for oral health; number two is I had bruxism for over 20 years, so I think my life was so stressful that I would go to bed with that stress, and I would just grind away, and it was really bad. I had dentists who would tell me this was the case, and they would recommend a mouth guard, so I would do something like I would buy a sports mouth guard that was soft and chewy; I think it just encouraged me to do it more. We use this device; I'll post this in the show notes, but it basically arrests your entire mouth; you put it in, and it has this band that keeps it together, so just a straight jackets your mouth. And for the first time, it actually arrested my bruxism. Sometimes I like we we're doing these filmings, and I have these really mixed emotions where like am I really on camera explaining how I'm brushing my teeth? What the hell's going on? Like how did this happen, and why am I doing this? But then I remember it for so long I suffered, and I didn't have any of these things right in my life; I didn't have sleep right; I didn't have oral care right; my teeth were rotting; my gums were receding; I was grumpy; I hated life; I was depressed out of my mind. And so yeah, I mean like so I have these mixed emotions where I'm doing this on camera, but then I remember like how much would I appreciate it if someone who cared about me would have said like, "Let me just help you with a few of these Basics; like let's just get you in a nice place where you're steady and you're happy; you're not dealing with receding gums and having to go to the dentist because you have these problems." And I don't know, um, it's weird; I never thought that future contemplations of human would be me in the bathroom talking about brushing my teeth. Foreign. Last step is two minutes of teeth; one minute 37 seconds later; this is the tea tree oil, and then so that's all wrapped up, and then I have a tongue cleaner; another thing in life that I wish I would have learned before. And then I have everything ready for the morning, so when I wake up, it's all situated. So the first thing I'll do in the morning is I'll take my body temperature with this inner ear device; I'll take these three pills; I'm trying to improve my ferritin levels right now, so I'll take these three pills; water from here; I'll start my HRV therapy with this device; I'll turn this light on, and I will get a few minutes of exposure; it mimics sunlight. So again, the goal is to not think about anything ever, because if we're trying to push the frontiers of anti-aging, saying what is possible with a perfect protocol, like what what can someone imagine their body being like if they're to implement a perfect protocol, I need to have an infrastructure in life that allows me to implement these things, so we can just stack a hundred things in a given day. And so it's really important that everything's organized and structured so there's no thought is required ever. I'll change out of my clothes; I'll get some shorts on; we're going to film this for my OnlyFans account, so make sure you sign up there. The last things we'll do: I have a hair concoction; I don't want to put it in right now; it's going to make my hair all wet. We've been playing with this gray hair reversal stuff; we've been building; I think I've reduced my gray hair by about 30 to 50 percent. I equally hate dyeing my hair and gray hair, so it's kind of which one do I want, and I've chosen to dye my hair, which I know is not good because they're toxins; I equally dislike seeing the gray, and so I'm really working hard to get rid of the gray hair, and this concoction we have, if it works, we might make it available for others. Okay, so face is washed; mouth is clean; I've got my testosterone patch on; this is two milligrams; this is to offset my 20 caloric restriction; I only need 2,000 calories a day, which is less than the recommended daily allowance for my body activity level and age, and so to offset my testosterone to keep it at the normal level, level two milligrams a day. So normally I would go downstairs; we do our nightly routine; Thomas and I would hang out, but let me stop and show you my my bedroom quickly. [Music] I imagined trying to utilize everything I'm good at in life and building a really valuable technology product; in the case of my former company was Braintree, Venmo, building software for payments, and it was easy for me to lose myself in that relationship where I wanted the product to be perfect and thrill our customers, but I was willing to basically give everything I had to build that technology. But doing that, it came at a cost where I didn't sleep very well; I was stressed out; I was basically willing eagerly willing to sacrifice everything about my personal health in order to build a great technology product. I think that's kind of backwards in that I was basically sacrificing myself for technology instead of the other way around, and I've shifted that frame in my life where my health and wellness is now the number one priority, and I want technology to be in service of that. The Sleep score is not just about getting perfect sleep every night; it really is about getting everything in my life in a proper state so that I can achieve this; that means of my nervous system to be steady and stable, for me not to be stressed out, to not be accelerating aging, disease, and decline. So it really is an entire system overhaul of my health and wellness and for life. So the Sleep score is representative of this much bigger phenomena of what I think is important, of a resetting in our society where we are no longer willing to be martyrs for the improvement of technology; we want to have technology be the service of us being our very best selves. With that said, I'll walk you through a few things I have in the room. So first you'll see it's blacked out; the the windows; this is a permanent situation where I have a temperature-controlled bed; this is Eight Sleep, so it modulates the temperature throughout the night, hot and cold; the sheets I have are grounded; we found some good some evidence on that; I have two air filters in the room that we're playing with, but trying to maintain optimal air quality; and then for my my pillow setup, when we did a full body MRI, we found a time bomb where I have a bilateral jugular vein stenosis, which have these we have these two pipes on the side of our necks, and they drain blood from the brain, and if there's block if there's a stenosis in there, then you have pluggage, and it
Keeps it; stays up in the brain. And so we found that I had stenosis of my jugular veins, which means I wasn't getting proper flow out of my brain. And so, as a result, I had white matter hypertensities; I had some pressure in my brain. It was a very scary situation.
Then we tested various pillows and pillow heights and configurations. The one that proved to have the greatest flow is this really skinny pillow at the base; it was the thinnest pillow I could find. And then this guy, which has an indentation for my neck. And we found that when I laid on my right side, I had the best flow; on my left side, I had the second-best flow.
To summarize, for people who are wanting to improve your sleep: make sure you have a routine every night that you stick to; that you’re going into your evening knowing you’re going to prioritize sleep. So you have a wind-down period; you have specific things you want to get done in a certain course. Go to bed at the same time every night; so just know that’s what you do. And treat sleep as a non-negotiable. It’s not something that can be wished away, negotiated away, or just ignored; it just exists, and you have to work with it as it exists, but you can’t negotiate with it.
And then your management of stress levels in life is really important. Because if you go to bed and you’re ruminating on things of the day and you’re upset, you’re going to have a very terrible night’s sleep, tossing and turning, and these things will just be cycling through your mind; you won’t be able to get it out. Other basic things like getting the room to be blocked out—those are some of the basics that should get you off to a good start. And, uh, yeah, hopefully they’re helpful.
Let’s go downstairs. This is our brand new laser that arrived. We’re getting some FDA clearance on this, so we can’t open it yet, but hopefully in the next couple of days, so we can get it to work. It’ll be our third laser here at the clinic.
Show your food. So Thomas and I eat the exact same thing every day. This is the delicious dish we had today: asparagus, sweet potato. What do you think about this sandwich? This is exciting for you.
I actually opened it up. Yeah, I—because I expected a soup, and not that I don’t like—
I know I expected a soup, too.
Yeah, and I saw it and I got like—I saw sweet potato.
Yeah, I know; that’s the same reaction. So yeah, so I guess it kind of changes, but this is like sacred time for Talmadge and I every day. Talmadge and I have been in this routine; we’re together every night. And we missed a night together, and we both felt like there was a violation of the sacredness of our nighttime routine. Talmadge will finish up his food; we will watch something, talk, we’ll do something.
His mother and I got a divorce like eight years ago, and we—we had split custody and wasn’t seeing Talmadge as much as I really wanted. And so this last year, Tom was decided to complete his senior year and live with me. It’s been a really cool experience because Talmadge left his born into religion just like me. When you’re born into a religion, it’s—it’s hard. If you haven’t experienced—have that experience, it’s hard to articulate to someone else. You’re given a singular reality; you basically say like this is the only reality that exists; we are the good people; people who are not part of this are the bad people. And you kind of have this—this tribal game, and it’s hard to understand how much that defines your relationship with reality and everyone who you interact with. And so when I left the religion, I had to go through this process; it basically relearning life from a new perspective. And so Talmadge has been doing that for the past year.
So every night Talms and I talk about the day’s events; what happened to school, friends who said what, who did what, all the social complexities of interactions that happened in high school. In the evening here, Thomas and I get to talk about all the different ideas we have in life. A few things that are on my mind recently, I guess I think that the whole world is talking about right now is chat GPT and the progress that’s been made in artificial intelligence. And this kind of goes back to the three observations, which I think are relevant on planet Earth. If we go out and we zoom in on planet Earth and come up with the clearest possible assessment we can of reality, I’d say there’s three things going on: one is that artificial intelligence is improving incredibly fast in ways which we cannot predict; number two is the biosphere of our planet is in question; and three is we humans are dangerously at each other’s throats.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a plan for Humanity, and it was kind of a ridiculous endeavor, but it was—it was kind of tongue-in-cheek, where we plan for everything; we plan for marriage and kids in college and death and everything in between, queer advancement, but we really don’t have a plan as a species; we just kind of fly by the seat of our pants. We do things individually, but not really on a large scale. In many ways, it ties back to this—what these core principles are at Blueprint, what we’ve been doing. And at the core of it, we humans have this propensity towards destruction and violence, and it’s not something that we can easily change. This goes back to the situation where I had a personal problem of committing these acts of self-destruction to myself, whether it be in the form of too much food or the wrong food or energetical sleep. But these things were leading to me committing to self-destructive harm, and I was helpless in stopping myself from doing these things; there’s just—I could, no matter how much I planned, you know, how no matter how much I desired it, I just couldn’t stop it; I was helpless.
I think the human race has a similar problem; we treat planet Earth, and we’re helplessly self-destructive; we’re ruining the only home we actually have in the universe, and we just can’t stop ourselves from doing this. And now we’re going to bring online this incredibly powerful form of intelligence in the form of AI into the hands of us that are helplessly hopelessly powerless in the face of these self-destructive tendencies. I don’t know what exactly we do other than we just need to fire the version of ourselves that we know are helpless in the form of these self-destructive behaviors. And that’s kind of a wacky idea, but Blueprint kind of proves out this core concept where, as an individual, I do things that are not in my best interest, and I can’t stop them. And so is there a part of me that would behave differently in a more peaceful and constructive way? And the solution was to ask my organs to be in control and do that. And so I found an alternative to my mind running the show and doing these things to my body; run the show and been able to achieve this ideal health. The same system could be applied to planet Earth; the Earth is equal to being a body, where you basically take millions of measurements of planet Earth; you’re looking at the prop—the evidence for proper biosphere, and then you manage the Earth according to these constraints.
But I guess if we try to be as sober as we can in the situation, our history is littered with violence and destruction, and it’s no different than how it is today. I just don’t see the thinking in the world in any encouraging way that suggests to me that we’re somehow going to bring online this incredibly powerful form of intelligence; nation-states are going to compete with each other; companies are going to compete with each other; individuals are going to try to arbitrage the situation. I think we need a proportional response in our thinking and planning to the situation; I don’t think that what we’re doing now is in any way close to being proportional to where—where it needs to be.
These routines we go through, the protocols we do, a blueprint—to me, it’s all really part of this bigger structure of acknowledging that we need to evolve the species in significant ways. And it feels uncomfortable; it feels foreign; it feels offensive; it’s like it just breaks all of our models; it breaks everything which we hold sacred. And I think anything short of that is—is actually going to be inadequate as an appropriate response to the situation. [Music] That wraps the—the nightly routine. I would say that for those of you who are wondering that Blueprint is not an endeavor for me to try to live 200 years or indefinitely; this is not a quest for immortality; it’s not a vanity project which I’m trying to do. I’m trying to approach this in a systematic way and say if we’re going to have a meaningful conversation about the future of being human, we can talk about philosophical concepts; we can talk about regulation and all the stuff we know are going to come up, but really it starts with the habits we have individually, the expectations we have of society and of each other. And you know, when our minds are in a good spot, when we are in a good spot, it’s just going to be a different dialogue; we’re going to treat each other differently; less acrimony, maybe less tribal warfare, and perhaps a change in disposition that we’d be more cooperative.
So normally I would at this time, you know, we’d head on up to our rooms; we get at the base of the steps here; Talmadge—we’re challenging me to erase; I would tell him no because he beat me and I don’t want to get hurt. So given we have a—we have a few minutes before bedtime, we’re going to don our blue light-blocking glasses, hang out for a bit, and then we’ll call it a night and hopefully log another perfect night’s sleep. [Music]