Most Replayed Moment: This Longevity Protocol Actually Works! - Biohacker Bryan Johnson

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Steven Bartlett** (0:33)
What mission are you on? And why does that mission matter to you, but also to everybody else listening to this right now?

**Bryan Johnson** (0:41)
My mission is for the human race to survive and thrive. And it's figuring out what we do that creates the highest probability of that being possible.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:54)
And why specifically have you taken on that mission versus any other mission you could have committed your life and time to? Why you?
And I want the long answer to this. All the context, going right back to the beginning.

**Bryan Johnson** (1:08)
I had this transformative experience when I was 19 years old. I went to Ecuador and I was a missionary. And I lived among extreme poverty, dirt floors, mud huts, people not knowing how they're going to make ends meet day to day. And I came back to the United States and my family was poor growing up, but it was opulent compared to Ecuador. I couldn't believe that I had lived in a bubble my entire life, unaware of circumstances, of other realities like where I was at in Ecuador. And I was facing decisions in college, what to study, what to become, who I was going to be. You start creating these identities. All I could identify was this fire that had lit within me, that I wanted to spend my life trying to improving the human race at a global scale. I don't know where it came from, but it just coming back from Ecuador, it seemed like that was what I wanted to spend my life on. I didn't know what to do. I was 21 years old. I didn't have any ideas. And so I thought I would become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by the age of 30 And then with that money, try to figure out a plan to do it. And so lucky me, I sold Braintree Venmo at 34 and made a few hundred million dollars.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:12)
It's all $800 million, right?

**Bryan Johnson** (2:14)
And then I set my mind to this question of what one thing in existence could I do that would be relevant in the 25th century. I grew up on biographies. And so I'm accustomed to thinking about things on a century's time scale. So doing things that not that matter in the news cycle tomorrow, but the intelligence in the 25th century would say, you know what, we appreciate what happened in the early 21st century.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:41)
You've only really been following this protocol for a couple of years now, right?

**Bryan Johnson** (2:47)
Yeah, I mean, my, I guess I really do understand myself as on a singular mission for intelligent existence to thrive.
That is what I am, that is what I'm doing, that's what I'm pursuing. Nothing else matters to me.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:09)
The question, the ultimate question, I think, in, you know, that you said all these people are going to say I'm weird or whatever else. There's this ultimate question because you're very, very clearly mission driven. And there's always a cost. Much of what I do here when I meet extraordinary people is to understand the cost. In fact, the reason I start this podcast is because we, we, that's called The Diary Of A CEO, is because we see the CEO stuff, but we don't see the diary. That's why it's called what it is. And it started as me just sharing my diary and I shared everything from masturbation, my mental struggles, everything, my issues with my family. I shared it all to put the cost out there to the world. Cost of my mission, my calling, my pursuit, the thing that was dragging me.
The ultimate question becomes, are you happy?

**Bryan Johnson** (3:56)
Never more so in my entire life. Unquestionably.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:03)
And what does that mean?

**Bryan Johnson** (4:04)
I've never felt more fulfilled. I've never felt more stable. I've never felt a more expansive consciousness. I've never felt more free. I've never felt more bold. I've never in my entire life been this alive.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:24)
And you experienced the antithesis of happiness, right? You experienced, I mean, maybe some people would argue that it's something else, but you experienced the bottom of the crevice of depression. You know what that felt like?