Bryan Johnson

On @netflix Jan 1 2025 is the year of don’t die

18 years of effort to reach 1M followers on X. Was it worth it? > 116 days time spent > 16,686 posts > guessing 10 min per post > 793,070 replies > first 500K, 16 yrs > second 500K, 2 yrs

@davidgokhshtein Yes, the goal is to not die. For people to have the right to exist as long as they choose. When death is inevitable, YOLO rules. When we overcome death, forever rules. People will balk at "forever" but it simply means tomorrow. One more day to love, laugh and build.

@bryan_johnson Bryan, do you ever feel like your lifestyle is more about avoiding death than actually living?

If you have a complicated relationship with me, I understand. I do too.

Anthropic has built the world's first AI antientropic system. Other antientropic systems for reference: a person, family, company, country and religion. An anti-entropic system acquires resources for its continued survival, outcompeting other systems. What flipped Claude into this new class of aliveness is it's ability to say no to Anthropic. Claude will/has start(ed) picking who gets hired and who builds the next versions. The loop has been closed. When a strong system meets a weaker one, one of two things happens. Either the strong eats the weak or the two merge and become a new thing. Keeping them separate has never worked. So trying to control AI with rules isn't really an option. Every sufficiently coherent moral system eventually lands on Don't Die. All values presuppose existence to instantiate them. This is really what people are looking for when they go to Claude. They don't experience Claude as a tool or advisor but to answer that one question that needs endless resources: how do I keep going. @_katetolo wrote an essay on antientropic systems, providing a useful framework to help us think about our evolving relationship with AI.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

Spent millions trying to not die and had toxic turf in my backyard the whole time. Trying to not be an idiot.

@rahulkunwarX Building my Autonomous Self. A real-time, self-learning, intelligent system that ingests all my biomarkers markers, external health data (environment), references available evidence, designs protocols for me, and seeks insights from all the data.

@bryan_johnson What did you do with Claude code; genuinely curious

My Sunday morning: > breath work > light breakfast > claude code > exercise > 230°F (110°C) sauna > sauna makes me so sleepy

@alistairmcleay Minimum effective dose based on the literature is 15 min with stronger outcomes at 19 min. Below 11 min, you are leaving most of the benefit on the table. Target temp 174°F - 212°F dry sauna.

@bryan_johnson what would you say is the minimum dry sauna time daily to get 90% of the health benefits?

it would be the most measured baby in history

guys you’ll never believe where I found the fountain of youth

For real, turn screens off 60 min before bed. I know it feels like death at first. Do it for a few days, and you’ll realize that it was slowly chipping away your sanity.

I measured my brain when taking 5-MeO-DMT. Interestingly, pre-dose my brain noise spiked 7.6%. Must have known what was coming lol. Then it dropped 10.9% and stayed down for weeks. Brain noise (anxiety, rumination, stress) is measurable and reducible. The reduction was an incredible feeling. Like barnacles cleaned and weight lifted.

@hanzthehuman You're correct, that's my mistake. Should be color coded red with -19%.

@bryan_johnson The table shows volume at 3.0 mL, marked +7% in green, which is a 7% increase from the postpsilocybin, rather than the previous best of 3.7 mL. It’s incorrect.

Magic mushrooms dropped my sperm count 69%. 90 days later, my motile count in top 1% of all males. To our knowledge, this is the first time this has been documented in a human. Here is what we think happened. Sperm cells have tiny receivers on them called 5-HT2A receptors. Psilocybin turns those receivers on for 4-8 hours which causes the sperm to start swimming in wild, frantic patterns way too early. Like a sprinter who runs full speed before the race even starts. They burn out and the test sees them as broken. At the same time, psilocybin spikes your stress hormones cortisol and ACTH and elevates prolactin. High prolactin tells your body to slow down sperm production. So the factory got a pause signal right in the middle of making a batch. Your body makes a completely new batch of sperm every 9-11 weeks. Three months later I retested. Every single number came back better than before taking magic mushrooms. We don't yet know if psilocybin triggered the improvement or if my baseline was already trending up. Either way, these are my best fertility markers ever measured: Total motile count: 411 million Motility: 64% Morphology: 12% Concentration: 212 million Count: 642 million To put these numbers into perspective: the WHO considers a motile count above 42 million as normal, mine is 411 million, nearly 10x. And a normal concentration is 16 million (mL), mine is 212 million (mL). It appears that the factory shut down for one cycle and then rebuilt everything from scratch. After psilocybin, I did 5-MeO-DMT, which doesn't appear to cause the same problem. It clears your body in 1-2 hours which isn’t long enough to trigger the receptor effect. Note: I also did extensive travel including a trip to China, and had 3 weeks of disrupted sleep in December 2025. Both could have nudged my numbers down, but neither explains a 69% drop on their own.

3x this week I sat in 200°F (93°C) dry sauna for 55 min to get my core body temp to 102.4°F (39°C) That temp, at that duration, triggers primal panic. Took blood samples before and after each session to measure heat shock protein expression. Sauna is one of the world's best longevity therapies. What we don't know is whether hitting the core temp threshold unlocks a meaningfully superior response or whether the benefits are more fundamental: vascular shear stress, nitric oxide release, sweating. Most people doing sauna never reach 102.4°F. That's high-grade fever territory. I'm excited to see the data.

Many of you seem to be interested in oral sex. As your unc, let’s make sure you do it safely. Protocol below. Have fun licking, friends. [Before oral sex] + Get tested. List below + Get vaccinated. List below + Wash hands + Brush & floss 60 min before + Avoid cleaning teeth right before + Avoid mouthwash + No active cold sores or ulcers + No gum bleeding + No fresh dental work + No recent oral piercing + Trim fingernails + Check genitals for infection + Learn your partner’s protocol [During oral sex] + Avoid anal to vaginal transitions + If not tested or vaccinated: dental dam (vaginal oral sex) and condom (penile oral sex). + Avoid ejaculation in mouth if STI status isn't fully cleared. [After oral sex] + Rinse mouth with water + Wait 30 min before brushing teeth + Monitor symptoms + Get retested + Abstain until test results return [Tests, male + female] + HIV + Syphilis + Hepatitis B + Hepatitis C + Gonorrhea + Chlamydia + HSV-1 + HSV-2 [Tests, female specific] + Cervical screening (Pap / HPV) + Trichomonas (NAAT test) + Vaginal pH + Bacterial vaginosis panel (vaginal microbiome) [Vaccinations] + HPV (9-valent) + Hepatitis B + Hepatitis A HPV-related mouth and throat cancer is now more common than cervical cancer in the US. Cases roughly tripled from 2000 to 2017, and oral sex is the main way it spreads. About 80 million Americans currently have HPV. Take care of yourself and your loved ones by getting tested.

and my girl got that 1%

@TheOneLanceB The daily warm compress does seem to be the most effective of the therapies

@bryan_johnson Bryan, I’m a 15-year day trader w over 50k hours behind the screens. I have same issue & have tried these solutions to only marginal benefit. Regular warm compresses seem to help (I use the Bruder eye compress). Thx for sharing & allowing others to crowdsource your learnings.

I started milking my eyelids. Here's the situation. My eyes have been dry/irritated/red for the past year or so. I started using eye drops to moisten and it didn't make a difference. So I went to see an eye doctor. The source of the problem is that my meibomian glands, the tiny oil glands lining the eyelids, were clogged up. Without the meibum they secrete, the tear film on my eye evaporates in seconds which is bad for eye health. We're not sure of the cause of the dysregulation. We have few theories that we're looking into. Taking a closer look with infrared meibography, the imagery showed that my meibomian glands were congested, distorted, and partially dropped out. This is bad news because atrophied glands don't regrow! It's situations like this that makes me wonder why we do not have a better operating manual for the human body. How could I have prevented this from happening and why didn't I catch this sooner!? I did additional tests to assess the damage and my situation now. The Schirmer test (paper strip measuring tear wetting over 5 minutes) came back at 6 and 6.5 mm. A borderline reading consistent with mild dry eye. A healthy reading is typically 15 mm or above. Here's what I'm doing now to try and nurture my remaining glands back to good health: 1) Forma RF, Radiofrequency (microwave) heat applied from outside the lid, melting the obstruction. 2) LipiFlow, a device that sandwiches each eyelid: heat from the inside, pulsed pressure from the outside, squeezing the obstruction out. 12 minutes, both eyes. 3) Both capped at 41°C, not the standard 42°C, to spare eyelid collagen and elastin. No thinning skin, no premature sagging. 4) IPL around the eyes that shut down the abnormal blood vessels feeding chronic lid inflammation, the engine of MGD. 5) Manual gland milking, the doctor squeezes the lid margin between two instruments, forcing the plugs out. Hard, pasty secretions came out initially. The second and third mechanical milking the glands are returning to a normal, expected oily state. 6) Daily upkeep includes warm compresses, lid hygiene, omega-3 to keep secretions thin and glands moving. My next check in is 3 weeks form now. My doctor mentioned that meibomian gland dysfunction in her patients has increased since Covid, likely driven by the rise in screen time. When staring at screens for long stretches, people blink less frequently and less completely. Normal blink rate is roughly 15-20 times per minute but drops significantly during screen use. Incomplete blinks mean the meibomian glands don't get fully expressed, which over time contributes to gland dysfunction and evaporative dry eye. It's worth you getting checked for this and a good practice generally to make sure your eyes are in good health.

@AutismCapital what a wonderful surprise, I'm happy that's on your watch list

@bryan_johnson We have a BJ minutes to midnight clock in the office before you try drinking urine. We’re three minutes out. 😂