The other interesting thing about the book, and it also comes up in your book of essays, is this simultaneous obsession with living forever without enjoying life.
[Laughs.] Right.
What I always find so fascinating when I watch Bryan Johnson — and I don’t mean to be insulting anybody’s life decisions here — but I don’t want to live like that.
Archival clip of Bryan Johnson: Your life goal is to drive down your heart rate. The reason is because the lower your heart rate goes, the better your sleep. The better your sleep, the better willpower. More willpower, better exercise, better food.
When your heart rate is high — bad sleep, bad willpower, no exercise and bad food. So resting heart rate is the most important marker of your entire life.
I think the reason he is so fascinating to people, in part, is his constantly having this level of self-examination, this level of self-diagnostics. I mean, you have a partner now, and so the first thing you do is you go online and talk about her vaginal biome.
Archival clip of Johnson: Good relationships are really rare, and Kate is important to me because she really does feel like my other half.
Archival clip: Biohacker Bryan Johnson recently boasted about his girlfriend’s top 1 percent vagina, sparking interest in at-home vaginal microbiome tests.
Yes. Have to get that vaginal biome. [Laughs.]
With Clavicular, it’s like you’ve divorced getting hot from the point of getting hot. He talks about how he can’t have a girlfriend given the life he leads. He is not fertile.
Archival clip:
Interviewer: Wait, why are you infertile right now?
Clavicular: So it’s just like a negative feedback loop when you’re not needing to produce testosterone anymore because your body realizes: OK, we’re getting it from an exogenous source.
Interviewer: So you’re not producing any testosterone naturally?
Clavicular: No. No.
Interviewer: None?
Clavicular: No.
Interviewer: Oh, I’m not taking T.R.T., bro.
We have these urges, right? We want to live because we want to enjoy. We want to be hot because we want love and children.
And this severing of all of these urges from the things the urges are supposed to do, this severing of the pursuit of desire from the thing that desire is supposed to ——
It’s incredible. Taking testosterone to look good, to attract a mate — but at the same time, taking all this testosterone causes shrunken testicles, which probably will not allow you to propagate.
