Bryan Johnson & Kate Tolo On Curing Their Incurable Diseases, Addressing The Disparity In Women's Health & The Don't Die Mission
Bryan Johnson and Kate Tolo discuss their dual diagnoses of incurable diseases (autoimmune gastritis and endometriosis), their $2.6 million quantified health protocol measuring 1,900 biomarkers, and their mission to reframe humanity's relationship with existence and mortality around the principle of saying 'yes to existence' rather than pursuing immortality.
Summary
Bryan Johnson, an anti-aging entrepreneur, and Kate Tolo, a content creator and his partner, sit down to discuss their intertwined health journeys and philosophical mission called 'Don't Die.' Both received diagnoses of incurable diseases within their health optimization project—Bryan has autoimmune gastritis attacking his stomach lining, while Kate was diagnosed with endometriosis after seven years of undiagnosed symptoms, receiving her diagnosis in 42 days through coordinated medical efforts (compared to the typical 6.5-year diagnostic timeline for women). Kate's protocol involves measuring 1,900 biomarkers over 100 days to understand how the female body changes through the menstrual cycle, addressing a significant gap in scientific understanding of women's health. The couple frames this work as a 'legibility project'—making women's bodies and experiences comprehensible within a scientific framework that has historically been built on male-centric research. They discuss the broader context of their work, including the use of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) created from Bryan's blood, which he describes as banking raw biological materials for potential future organ regeneration rather than 'cloning.' The conversation explores their philosophy of 'yes to existence,' which Bryan describes as distinct from seeking to 'live forever'—instead prioritizing conscious affirmation of being alive in each moment. They discuss their use of psychedelics, particularly psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT, as tools for expanding consciousness and understanding reality. Kate articulates her early observation, at age six, of how humans operate through invisible rules and programming, which connects to her current work trying to make visible what has been invisible. Bryan shares his personal evolution from his Mormon upbringing, entrepreneurial success, and eventual recognition that material success didn't fulfill existential needs. The couple discusses their approach to building anti-entropic systems—structures that can persist across centuries—and how they've shifted from hosting Don't Die summits to using social media for broader reach. They emphasize their focus on helping humanity develop ideological and value systems to navigate AI emergence and technological disruption. Rich Roll challenges Bryan with a psychological theory linking his childhood trauma, alienation from his Mormon community, and subsequent pursuits to transcend mortality, which Brian neither fully accepts nor rejects, emphasizing the complexity of self-understanding. The conversation addresses criticism about wealth privilege, the entertainment value of their presentation contrasted with serious scientific intent, and the healthier relationship with death needed in modern culture. Kate discusses her struggle with being 'seen' and her tendency to operate as 'the space between objects' rather than as an object herself, while Brian describes his constant process of shedding and rebirthing himself. They conclude with discussions of practical behavior change (Bryan's 'different Brians' framework and the importance of morning decisions constraining evening choices), the role of psychedelics in consciousness exploration, and the importance of honest conversations about death and legacy with aging parents.
About this episode
Bryan Johnson and Kate Tolo are entrepreneurs, partners, and the subjects of the Netflix documentary "Don't Die." This conversation explores the couple's challenge to a presupposition around our mortality. We discuss AI, consciousness, Kate's endometriosis diagnosis, and our culture's relationship with death. I appreciated their openness. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Get 50% OFF your first subscription order to Go Brewing's Beer Club👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com/richroll50 LMNT: Get a free 8-count Sample Pack with any purchase👉🏼https://www.drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL Birch: Get 27% Off Sitewide👉🏼https://www.BirchLiving.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://stories.rivian.com/richroll Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 50% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼https://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Key Insights
- Women typically take 6.5 years to receive an endometriosis diagnosis, whereas Kate received hers in 42 days through coordinated multi-modal diagnostic approaches including specialized ultrasounds and MRI protocols, revealing how expertise and persistence can dramatically accelerate medical diagnosis.
- The female menstrual cycle causes significant fluctuations in biomarkers like cholesterol (up to 19% higher in the first half of the cycle), but standard medical reference ranges don't account for cycle phase, meaning women are being potentially misdiagnosed based on testing at the wrong time.
- Bryan argues that women have historically been 'illegible' to science and society because they're more complex than the male-centric scientific models that have been built, similar to how ancients couldn't understand planetary motion because they assumed Earth was stationary.
- Bryan claims that the distinction between 'living forever' and 'don't die' is linguistic—that being excited about tomorrow is the same as living forever, just constrained in a way the human mind can process without triggering existential dread.
- Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) created from Bryan's blood were reverted from biological age 48 to age zero epigenetically, creating raw biological material that could theoretically regenerate diseased organs, but this does not reverse somatic mutations accumulated over a lifetime.
- Bryan describes having 'different Brians' at different times of day—morning Brian has high willpower and decision-making capacity, while evening Brian around 7 PM is biochemically depleted and prone to self-destructive behavior—and solved this by giving morning Brian authority to make rules that evening Brian cannot override.
- Bryan claims that approximately one in ten women suffer from confirmed endometriosis, but the true prevalence is suspected to be much higher because the disease presents so generally that many women never receive diagnosis and attribute symptoms to normal menstrual pain.
- Kate observed at age six that adults unconsciously operate according to rules and programming imprinted on them, and humans don't realize they're running a program—an insight that drives her current work to make visible the invisible structures governing human behavior.
- Bryan argues that biological age measurements vary widely in reliability depending on the modality and algorithm used—some wearables are essentially 'washouts' while others like brain volume via MRI or Eight Sleep's AI model trained on sleep data can predict age within 3-4 years of accuracy.
- Bryan contends that the materialist definition of consciousness is inadequate and that his psychedelic experience suggested a single vast consciousness with the material world as a projection of it, fundamentally altering his convictions about what's real.
- Bryan claims that social media's 'uniContext' flattens social contexts that used to be separate (church behavior vs. home behavior), creating constant comparison and turning everything into negative content production, which psychologically destabilizes people who can't orient themselves.
- Bryan argues that religions like Christianity have proven to be more 'anti-entropic' (resistant to entropy/decay) than even the world's most powerful companies, persisting for 2,000 years without a CEO, suggesting the structure of belief systems contains wisdom about how to build institutions that outlast individual leaders.
Topics
Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Go Brewing. Fall is beer season. You got your game days, you got your tailgates, you got people gathered in somebody's kitchen. And here's the shift that I really love. At every single one of these gatherings now, somebody isn't drinking, maybe a lot of somebodies. The old move was to hand that person a seltzer and an awkward apologetic look, but no longer. The new move is to hand them something genuinely great, and that's Go Brewing, started by my friend Joe Chura, and a mission I believe in enough to have become an investor. They were one of the first breweries in the country to go all-in on non-alcoholic, and the…
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