How I Sold My Company To PayPal For $800 Million | Bryan Johnson (#388)

Sam Parr

You said earlier, "I wanted to make a certain amount of money by age 30." What was your number? What was your target?

Bryan Johnson

On the lower end, it was $7,000,000. I had built out my spreadsheet model and assumed a certain rate of interest. I basically said, "If I make a certain amount of money, this is an annuity that will be good enough for my entire life," assuming I don't need capital to do anything, like just writing or something. Then, if I do something in the world, I have knocked out something like $150 to $300 million as a basis that would get me started on that path.

Sam Parr

We're officially live! So Brian, I've been messaging you for like 6 or 8 months now. Basically, I'll give a very brief background, and you can tell us a little bit more because inevitably I'll miss something. You started a bunch of stuff. The biggest thing is probably Braintree. I think you bootstrapped that, right?

Bryan Johnson

I did

Sam Parr

So, you bootstrapped that and sold it for something like $800,000,000 to PayPal. You guys also bought Venmo, which I think is one of the greatest acquisitions of all time because you bought it for kind of nothing compared to what it is now. Then you've done a bunch of other things. You've done Kernel, which is interesting, and you have this fund that's kind of interesting. But the thing that I started reading about is your new project called Blueprint. The simple way of describing it is that you have your biological age and then you have your chronological age. Your chronological age is just how many years old you are. Then you have your biological age, which measures a bunch of different things like your organs and your blood. You're basically trying to reverse your biological age faster than your chronological age goes up, which inevitably means you live forever. I mean, is that basically it? And you're blogging and sharing everything along the way, is that right?

Bryan Johnson

great job

Sam Parr

so there I brian

Shaan Puri

what is your chronological age and what is your current biological age

Bryan Johnson

I left my mother's womb 45 years ago, and biologically, I'm a few hundred different ages. For example, if you're looking at the age of your heart, you can characterize the age of the heart through a few dozen markers. You can do the same thing with other parts of the body. So, you're actually a collection of a very large number of markers because different parts of the body age at different speeds. Your life choices and environment also affect that.

Sam Parr

So, I want to ask you all about this blueprint thing because I think it's amazing. But can I ask you a few questions about Braintree first?

Bryan Johnson

please

Sam Parr

So, Braintree... I mean, you guys are owned by PayPal now. Another competitor to yours, I think, is Stripe, which is... you know, these are like high-tech companies. Pretty complicated things. How on earth do you bootstrap a business like that? I mean, I think by like year 3 or year 4, you're doing like $8 or $9 million in revenue. I mean, you guys kind of took off. So I understand how you're able to bootstrap it once you got to maybe $10 million in revenue, but how on earth do you make something like that from scratch?

Bryan Johnson

I was I guess it started when I was 21 I decided that I I wanted to try to do something meaningful for humanity I grew up reading a whole bunch of biographies about people who had done things their time and place and I admired people who tried to identify the thing on the horizon that was barely reachable during their lifetimes and they went after it and at the age of 21 I didn't know what that was and I didn't know how I could do it and so I thought you know given my options I said I might as well I'll become an entrepreneur I'll make a whole bunch of money by the 8:30 and then at that? I'll try to go after something and so it was a naive contemplation of how to go about doing things I've grown up in a small town basically you know with my grandpa on a farm I didn't meet my I didn't meet an engineer until I was 21 or 22 years old so it was very much a a farm boy like raised in a deep deeply religious community and so I did a bunch of start ups and I just accidentally fell into payments because I I was building a start up I was struggling to pay my bills I had a child at the time and I would do anything for money I applied for 60 jobs nobody even contemplated hiring me and so I found this job to sell credit card processing services door to door and so I agreed to do it and it was a 100% commission and I became the company's number one salesperson in a in a matter of months doing it part time while building my start up and so I just accidentally stumbled into payments and learned there was this big opportunity paypal had grown up during the internet but they had stopped really innovating for a couple years and so developers didn't have the tools they liked and so I started braintree and we landed a big deal early on with opentable they were accepting credit cards as a a form of to increase the likelihood of the person would show up for the reservation but they didn't wanna store the credit card data because they had compliance issues and so we built out a custom solution for them that allowed us to store credit card data on our side instead of them so they didn't have the compliance to still accept credit cards and so from scratch we built this payment system first for them then we expanded out to more general merchants and we got a few customers like airbnb github uber we helped uber do their no like the payment experience where you get in the car you arrive at your destination you leave the car no exchange of payment information no signing of receipts no printing out receipts we started doing a few things like that and we really made our headway into high-tech companies going very quickly they prefer to use our software

Shaan Puri

You just said a bunch of things that were all super interesting. First of all, you're kind of like Elon Musk without the fame. You had your kind of payment system; he had X.com and PayPal. Now you're doing a brain interface and stuff like that. You do these moonshot projects, trying to live forever. I think you're a fascinating dude. You said something about door-to-door sales, and on the podcast, we've talked about this before. Our producer, who's not here today because he's having a baby, is Mormon and did his mission. We talked about what that's like. We've also discussed Cutco and some of these door-to-door textbook companies, where it really breeds this amazing entrepreneur. You have to learn sales, work hard, and face rejection all the time. It's like this rite of passage. I think if you come out the other side of that and were successful at door-to-door sales, I would bet on you for any role in my company. But I've never done it, so I'm just talking out of my ass here. Is that accurate in your view? How do you think about door-to-door sales, and how did you become number one when you don't seem like the most charismatic guy?

Bryan Johnson

I mean

Shaan Puri

I don't know if you had the kind of the same haircut back then but like I don't know I don't know what

Bryan Johnson

the hell I did for you

Shaan Puri

that's funny

Bryan Johnson

I mean it's I guess the one thought on this you know my my kids are 19 17 and 13 and they're currently going through these important life decisions on what they study in school and what they try to do I'm doing everything I can to help them focus on cs math and physics like these are the tools that you these are the language that you wanna be fluent in to be architects of the future and in many ways my choice of doing the door to door sales was just a it was my hacker attempt at paying the bills with a child while I buy time before I start something new and it was out of desperation it was like I was seeking it out and so it was just a and it was also the case just dealing with the reality of my skills I had grown up in this farm like community deep people that just didn't have any engineering background and so the the thing that I enjoyed the most about the sales was it's not doing a high pressure sales tactics and it's not trying to manipulate somebody it's not trying to perfect the skill it's about getting in and figuring out the system like what is really going on and if you if you jump into the world of payments in the year 2007 when I started this it was defined by deep distrust that it was a game where credit card payments is really expensive and when a when a business owner gets their credit card monthly invoice it's so complicated they have no idea what's going on and the providers make it even more complicated in how they report things and so it creates this opportunity for people to be extremely deceptive and create high commissions and so and look at that system opportunity number 1 be honest be transparent be honest and be trustworthy and then number 2 is because there was so much skepticism on this businesses didn't know how to differentiate why should I do this work with this company versus that company when in reality most companies were mostly the same there was it's very hard to differentiate in payments and so 2 is making that known so again the the customer has a very clear understanding and then 3 is just being reliable and and competent like that you know that when the customer interacts with you and your team they say what an amazing experience and so it was once you figure out how the system worked it was very easy to solve and so I would just walk in and like the moment you walk in the store they can tell you're not a customer by the way you're dressed and maybe the way you're walking whatever and they immediately hate you and so you have to overcome this animosity from the get go and so I would take out a $100 bill I'd say I will I will give you this for one minute of your time and if you say no to me you can keep it and I they'd be like alright whatever this sounds fun what do you got and I would just walk them through these basic principles like here's what's going on here's what they're doing I'm really no different to anyone else you're just gonna find something clean and transparent and reliable with me and most people would be like okay I just I just want it to be done like I don't want to deal with any more deception I don't wanna have to change again I don't want these machine leases and so it was it was really just again it's system deconstruction and reconfiguration and it was the skill set that I tried to build again and again through every business I built walking into a a new world and trying to figure out what is really going on and then how to deconstruct it and then maneuver with it

Sam Parr

Was the early product just like an agency where you were getting your friends to help install these credit card processors? Or, you know, what was that early version one of Braintree? Because you said you're not an engineer. What did that look like? This is pretty complicated stuff, it seems.

Bryan Johnson

The first product was for OpenTable. It allowed someone to make a reservation, put in their credit card number, and have it stored. So, to the user, it appeared as if they were entering their credit card information into the OpenTable system. In fact, they were entering it into our system behind the scenes. As for who built it, I had a team of software engineers do it.

Sam Parr

and how did you fund that

Bryan Johnson

I had made enough money from selling this stuff door to door that I could bootstrap it and hire them.

Shaan Puri

How much did you make, roughly? Did you do it for like a year or something like that to cover the bills and all that? Say, create a stash.

Bryan Johnson

11 months in, I remember at the 11-month mark, my portfolio of customers was generating, I think it was like $59,000 a month in revenue. I thought, "That's interesting," right? I mean, I'm coming from this world where my family would decide whether to spend our $5 family date budget on going through a car wash or going to get something at a restaurant. We grew up in such a frugal environment. Then, seeing that it was $59,000 a month was eye-opening. I had always wanted to build something. I was not willing to trade my time for money. You know, if someone was going to say, "I'll pay you $15 an hour to do blank," I didn't want to make that exchange. I wanted to say, "I am willing to take $0 for an indefinite period of time in exchange for the opportunity to make a whole lot more." That was true; I didn't make any money until I was really 34 years old. The entire time, I was working for basically $0. But that's when I started seeing what kind of money you could make in payments on this residual revenue basis.

Shaan Puri

the 59,000 that was what you were getting as your residuals or that's what the company was getting as

Bryan Johnson

you the

Sam Parr

company was and

Bryan Johnson

they were giving me a cut yeah

Shaan Puri

And so, you're getting a cut of that. You're saying these things where you're like, "I knew I didn't want to trade time for money," or "I wanted to do the biggest technological breakthrough," and I didn't know what that was. So, I first decided to make some money, and by 30, I'll have that figured out. You're saying these things that, as a 21-year-old, most people don't know or have the perspective or wisdom to think that way.

Sam Parr

it's pretty profound

Shaan Puri

And you're also saying you grew up kind of like on a small farm in a deeply religious community. So it's not like you were surrounded by other technologists or business mentors. Where is this coming from? Did you read "Think and Grow Rich"? Or did you read any biographies or books that changed your way of thinking? How the heck did you do this as a small farm boy to get this type of thinking in your brain?

Bryan Johnson

Yeah, I could probably make up an answer. It seems to me right now I have no idea.

Sam Parr

What books do you read? What biographies? You said you read a lot of biographies. What were you reading that changed your life?

Bryan Johnson

I probably read over 100, maybe even 200 biographies at this point. For example, I would go on deep dives to try to understand certain world history events, like World War II. One biography I read is about a gentleman named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was trying to assassinate Hitler. Through his story, you can understand World War II, Germany, and Nazism from the perspective of this individual and his plans, as well as his observations about what other people were doing in the community. I found that these biographies provided a backdoor to understanding events as they were taught to me in school. In school, you get a highly compressed version of history, like, "Alright, everybody, let's get on the same page. If we understand these big things that happened..." But you really miss out on the nuance. We all know how flawed historical accounts can be because of the nature of humans and the way people write history. These biographies helped me start to piece together an understanding of reality that was much more nuanced and sometimes contrary to primary narratives. It invites me to always reject the first narrative that's offered and to understand it not as a factual statement, but as a wishful attempt to be understood and accepted.

Sam Parr

You said earlier, "I wanted to make a certain amount of money by age 30." What was your number? What was your target?

Bryan Johnson

Well, on the lower end, it was $7,000,000. I had built out my spreadsheet model and assumed a certain rate of interest. I basically said, "If I make a certain amount of money, this is an annuity that will be good enough for my entire life," assuming I don't need capital to do anything. Like, just if it's time, like I'm writing or something. Then, if I do something in the world, I had mapped out something like $150,000,000 to $300,000,000 as a basis that would get me started on that path.

Sam Parr

when you sold when you were 34 right

Bryan Johnson

yes

Sam Parr

And what did you walk away with? Were you able to hit the north end of your target?

Bryan Johnson

yeah I hit 300,000,000

Sam Parr

What is that? You know, you're a religious farm kid who doesn't know much, and then in a matter of 11 or 12 years, you're able to walk away with, you know, north of $300 billion. What does that feel like? And what do you do with that money once it hits your account?

Shaan Puri

you don't seem like a victory dance kinda guy wait a second

Sam Parr

but true

Bryan Johnson

That's true. That is true. It's very true. It's sobering because, you know, it's bigger than what you realize, but you don't know in what ways. It wasn't the case that I had a long list of things I wanted to buy that were just waiting for this cash to come in. I don't think I've spent any money for a long time. Looking back now, even my most aggressive expectations on how life would change weren't even close to how significantly my reality would change over the years with that event.

Sam Parr

well what do you mean what changed

Bryan Johnson

I mean your your relationship with the world fundamentally changes I mean in any relationship there's power dynamics of wealth and power and status and age there's all sorts of things that that shape human interactions and it creates a different entry. For everything because now we all know this from our experiences when you engage with people of different powers of different levels it changes the dynamics of your relationship with them expectations interests rationale justifications it just alters everything about I mean I remember one of the one of the first stories that I heard somebody shared with me is is larry bird I don't know if it's true the second or third hand but larry had a group of good friends that he went back and saw and he had just made money I think signing it for the nba he sat down to have dinner with his friends and larry was like you know I got it don't worry about it and his friends are great larry it's amazing thank you so much 2nd time happens and everyone's quiet assuming larry's going to pick up the bill he does 3rd time it's just like of course larry's going to pick this up and probably take it somewhere else and so larry from his perspective just like it you know the fun was removed because now instead of me being able to do something be generous with someone I'm now in this expectation and so it deterred him from wanting to interact with people because there was this expectation on him that anything he did there will be this expectation and so it just it is a I think anyone who's experienced fame or anything of the sort there are these underlying dynamics of human attractions which are just a reality for everybody and yeah it would have been helpful I think thinking back if I could have spoken to somebody and if they said hey like let me just share 5 really important things with you on what it means to have money and how you can best navigate this because it it's taking me some time to learn

Shaan Puri

Well, there's probably going to be like 150,000 people that listen to this. You could be that mentor for them. So, what would you say? What are those 5 things? Or give us at least 3.

Bryan Johnson

One is **transparency of intent**. You know, when you're with somebody, it's very important that you establish why you're doing what you're doing and the roles you're going to play with each other. If it's ambiguous, then it creates complications in your relationship. It's unpleasant for anyone to be surprised in a relationship about what somebody really wants. So, just transparency: "We're doing this under these conditions." Two, I'd say that **money is not a resource** that is necessarily viable for the things that allow you to acquire. It's most valuable for the time it creates, which you can use to solve problems. So, utilize it wisely—not on acquiring frivolous things, but on solving fundamental problems of time. And then three, there's a weird psychological relationship with it where you are not that, and it is not you. It's important to have an identity independent of that because it can get very confusing if you don't maintain those clear boundaries.

Sam Parr

What did you do? I know that I read that you invested $100,000,000 into your fund, which you guys have invested in all types of cool stuff. It seems like you've had some really good outcomes. Mhmm. And then you started a company called Kernel that we could talk about a little bit. What did you do with the rest? This is a good question that Sean always asks. He goes, "What do you do with your money?" You know, like if you had a pie chart, where would it be? Just boring index funds and bonds? For a long time, Sean was heavy into crypto and heavy in cash. What about you?

Bryan Johnson

it depends on what your objectives are I mean I think good advice for me at that. Would have been you are an entrepreneur you're always going to be an entrepreneur cash is king like don't put your money in anything that's gonna be a liquid so there's been times over the past couple years where I desperately needed cash and it was not I didn't have liquid levels that I wanted and so liquidity for entrepreneurs is really important number 2 is that like the the enter the movement that fell west fund was like okay wait I did bring to venmo primarily a software engineering objective within an established industry of payments I was moving into science and the question I was trying to solve for for example could we build a global biological immune system so we all know that if a problem in the world arises and that problem can be addressed by software engineers coding in their computers to solve the problem we're pretty good at that as a species if a problem arises in the world that requires the engineering of biology of atoms and molecules and organisms we're not there yet we don't have the ability to deploy millions of people who can just engineer biology at a moment's notice and solve problems like is the coral reef dying because the water is too acidic we need carbon capture like we need you know whatever the the problem is and so I wanted to invest in companies that would basically serve as the foundational building blocks for humanity of building this infrastructure so we could actually engineer with the reliability adam infrastructure so we could actually engineer with the reliability atoms molecules and organisms so if I wrote this in this blog post like if for example a pandemic happened it would be amazing if we had these capabilities to build up the biological infrastructure of detection vaccine creation you know remediation and whatnot and that actually hand actually was true ginkgo bioworks one of my first investments ended up working on the mrna vaccine and I thought it was just this idea of like if we've done very well mastering programming bits we are emerging now powerfully in the engineering of biology and so some of the companies like we are doing synthetic biology engineering one company is doing they're storing information on using dna so instead of a hard drive made of the material we're accustomed to they store it on dna because that's nature's hard drive another company is doing nanotech building these structures atom by atom like literally assembling them like legos and so the companies and they've been successful like some of these are breakeven some of these are are are profitable and so I wanted to do this because branch of enel was was really nice to teach about software engineering I wanted to understand science and engineering of science and so it was really a great educational experience for me of getting deep in the trenches with a bunch of phds entrepreneurs across the range of all these different scientific disciplines

Sam Parr

How much do you think... I want to talk about the health stuff in a second, but how much do you think Venmo alone is worth right now? You guys bought that for $28 million. I think only 5, 6, or 7 years into Braintree, like pretty early into Braintree's existence. Did you pay mostly cash for that? I mean, how did you finance that deal? And what do you think that it's worth now? Because you keep saying Braintree and Venmo as if Venmo is as powerful or as valuable as Braintree.

Bryan Johnson

I don't know the current values. I mean, I sold the company several years ago. I know it's very valuable, and so is Braintree. This was a decision I made when I sold Braintree, Venmo, for $800,000,000. It was a decision of, "Okay, so I'm now 34 years old. I want to move on to this next stage of life." Accumulation of money was not my objective. I could have stuck with the company, and we could have made a bit more, you know, viable. But it was like, "Okay, so if I do this, it's $300,000,000. That's a good enough starting base to go off into these other things." Because they were going to be in the areas of deep tech, I knew they would take a decade or so to start. It was just going to be a long startup process. Looking at the prime of my years, I thought, "I'll take this. I'll have a go at this and try to do something meaningful there." But it was just a calculation of time and reconfiguring my life towards that.

Shaan Puri

And so, you've now... let's say that's 10 years ago, 10 or 11 years ago. We're basically 11 years in and $100,000,000 in. At the beginning, you probably had a bunch of things that were bets you thought were interesting, predictions maybe, of what the world might look like in 2022. Can you, as best as you can, give us a summary of what you were right about, what you were wrong about, and where you think the big promise is now?

Bryan Johnson

The venture fund has been remarkably successful, especially as a newbie in this world. The number of good investments relative to bad investments is extremely high. I'd say we've done remarkably well on the deep tech side with synthetic biology, genomics, and nanotech. On Kernel, I think we nailed the technology selection. Initially, the idea was: could we make brain measurements ubiquitous in society? We can measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way, except for our brains. We don't have good technology for that.

Shaan Puri

explain explain what kernel is people listening probably don't know a

Bryan Johnson

kernel is

Shaan Puri

so like

Sam Parr

I mean, I've just seen it as like a helmet that you put on. You think something, and you could change something on a computer because of your brainwaves.

Bryan Johnson

and so if you think about like so wearables are a familiar concept we put this thing on our fingers or our wrists and it gives us data like sleep stats respiration rate heart rate cardiovascular expenditure and exercise like we get these this set of data and it's pretty easy to acquire and then we can use this information to help us understand our health and wellness we currently can't do that for our brain so if I have a question am I in the early stages of cognitive decline do I have anxiety if so what kind of anxiety do I have depression what kind of depression is is my lifestyle conducive to states of focus or not what is my emotional reaction to things just really basic questions and the most people think that their self awareness is basically the sensor system that captures their brain like because I'm conscious and because I can feel when I have a headache it basically is a robust enough sensor system to do it and that's not correct so much happens in our brain that we are unaware of and there's so much data in our brain that is informative to what we wanna do and so this what we at kernel what we've done is we've built a neuroimaging helmet like you said sam you just put it on your head it takes 1 minute to set up it uses light to measure the brain activity and these brain activity patterns are extremely informative so for example I did I was a pilot participant for a ketamine study ketamine is has been used for the treatment of depression we use it as an off label study with healthy people but the question is what does ketamine do to your brain and you know you of course someone can do ketamine they can be like hey sam how was ketamine like I don't know they got a different dimension and I think I feel better but I'm not sure but it it's kinda like you know how was your sleep for the past week it's an extremely imprecise answer and you're going on this subjective self assessment your memory is fading you don't really know and it's like it's a disaster and so this this measurement system is basically meant to standardize the measurement of the brain and so the part part of the challenge was building the device of identifying is there a technology in existence that can be built that makes brain measurement mainstream so everyone does it for everything and the second is can we find applications for early markets and so we've built the tech we have a few papers coming out and now we're in the product market fit finding the first application for the technology

Sam Parr

When you... so for the listeners, if you just Google "Brian Johnson Blueprint," you'll see it. I don't know what the URL is. Is it just for the Blueprint? What is it?

Bryan Johnson

Blueprint.brianjohnson.co. What? Sorry, Tom. One final comment on this. Just to make this maybe an attempt to make this intuitive: when people begin experiencing cognitive decline—and this may be true for intoxication with alcohol too—we just did an alcohol study. When your brain is impaired, like we just saw with moderate alcohol, your brain compensates for the deficiency. So, you can't pick up the impairment, but you can record it and identify it. However, at a certain level of intoxication, your brain can no longer make up for that impairment, and then it reveals itself in impairment and behavior. This is also true for someone who may be experiencing cognitive decline. You may be along the path of cognitive decline and think, "I feel great, I seem great, I'm moving great, everything's great," but you just can't pick it up. So, it's the value of, "Oh, wouldn't it be amazing if I had the ability to measure my brain on a routine basis that informs me of these things that I myself cannot identify?" Now, wouldn't it be neat if everyone did it and it was just incorporated into standard care across all things and how we dealt with our mental health and wellness? You know, all the above.

Shaan Puri

Is there anything people can do if they're in cognitive decline? Or is it just sort of like, "Well, I've measured this sad news"? Alright, you know, well, I don't... don't have a Sean sober up.

Sam Parr

Have you guys ever seen on 23andMe or something like that? They used to have a test for Alzheimer's, which is genetic. There's a particular type of gene that you could have that increases the likelihood of developing it. 23andMe used to do this thing where they said, "Alright, you have it, but before we can even tell you if you have it, you have to sign this paperwork saying you're not going to assume this is a diagnosis and you can't flip out." Well, I have it, and then I did flip out. Eventually, they removed that feature, I believe. I don't think they have it anymore because they said people were just flipping out too much. One of the reasons they removed it is that they would tell you that you have this gene, and then they were like, "Good luck." They suggested things like putting picture frames upside down, so you have to work harder to figure out who's in the picture. They said that might help strengthen your brain. In general, when I was researching, I was like, "Oh shit, I have this gene. What do I have to do?" People were like, "Good luck," you know? Just like, "I guess hopefully you'll be alright." But there weren't that many actionable things. So, what can you actually fix about any of these things?

Bryan Johnson

We think about it. Alright, so we are accustomed to the idea of society having engineering standards. We know that when we buy an appliance, it's going to fit through our front door. We don't have to measure our front door or look at the dimensions on the website and think, "Is this going to fit or not?" Because we know that the door size is standard and the appliance size is standard. It can be moved into my house. That's true for so many things we do in life. We just know these standards when we agree to build society. We have millions of invisible standards, but we have very few standards about our brains because we can't measure them. We know the timing that's appropriate for green, yellow, and red lights. We know the reaction time of humans to those lights. We know braking power and people's stop times. So when we do have data, we can actually determine that we do not have engineering standards around the brain, depression, anxiety, or cognitive decline because we have no measurement. So fundamentally, the way to create a step change, a functional change in the world regarding how we deal with our minds, begins with measurement. Once you have numbers, science begins with numbers and counting, and then ecosystems form around that. Genetics, I think, is kind of like that. It's not as numerical as what brain measurement could be, but that is a fundamental thing. If you give everyone the numbers, you give them the opportunity to build solutions around those problems.

Hubspot

this data is wrong every freaking time

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Hubspot

Woah! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago that I totally missed.

Bryan Johnson

hubspot grow better

Sam Parr

So, this blueprint—your blog, I don't know what you're calling it—your experiment, it's pretty wild. I saw what you used to look like. You weren't bad looking, but you definitely were thicker than you are now. Your jawline is like crazy cut right now, and you just look way different than you used to. I mean, it's pretty fascinating. And you know, Braintree is amazing. You've built something incredible. This blueprint thing is like way crazier, unique, and odd, and it's awesome. I've read it, and if I remember correctly, I've been following it for a bunch of months. You do regular updates. At first, you got down to like 6% body fat, and then you thought, "Okay, I think 6% is a little bit too low. Let's go to 7.5%." You're also eating this nutty pudding, I think you called it. So, you have a vegan diet, and you're just eating nuts and tons of vitamins, which appears to be not tasty, boring food. You've gone all in. The premise behind this is, I think you had this blog post that said something like, "Late night Brian no longer gets to make decisions." You know, you're at home at night, and you're hungry, and you would just go and snack and eat bad food. You decided, "No, I'm no longer letting that guy make any decisions. He no longer has a say. We're letting experimental Brian make the decisions from now on." This thing's crazy, man. Why are you doing this, and what have you found to be actually meaningful versus not meaningful?

Bryan Johnson

and by the way yeah

Sam Parr

You're doing the "knees over toes guy" thing. I noticed you're walking backwards and doing the tibialis raises. This guy was onto something; you're doing it, and it looked like it.

Bryan Johnson

I am yeah I mean so so blueprint and for me this goes back to the age of 21 and to me this is the best answer I've ever come up with in my life if you bay if you pose a question how can we imagine the human race and intelligence generally surviving itself and thriving like what is our plan as a species to thrive blueprint to me is the best idea I've ever come come up with and most practical idea I've ever come up with to address that and so from the outside perspective it appears to be health and wellness and antiaging and whatnot that's all true but really it's a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence and so the the way this I would bridge this is this began in from a basically I had a problem of overeating every day every night at 7 pm I would overeat I'd either have a second serving for dinner or a third serving or have desserts or do something that I would consider to be self harm like eating too much food the wrong food and it was just causing bad things to me I couldn't sleep well it was I was overweight like all the above and so I tried everything to fix it and I couldn't and so I playfully said I'm going to fire evening brian because the brian who wakes up in the morning he exercises he does really well eating same with lunch brian but this 5 pm to 10 pm brian like boy is he a rascal he's always making the wrong choice like I could absolutely rely upon him to make the wrong choice and he always had an infinite number of reasons on why today was okay to do the thing and so I was like you know what I've had it like he's done he's absolutely out and so I play through up this blog post of like all bryans got together we had discussion we're like brian even brian you're making this thing awful and so I just I revoked his authority from 5 pm to 10 pm to eat and so what started off as like this playful thing now turned into what I'm what I basically have done to my my entire system is I now only eat what my body asks for according to data and science

Sam Parr

have you not done that at all have you had any splurges since you've started this and do you ever intend to do that

Bryan Johnson

I have had infractions yes although this is I think this is I think this is the most interesting part of the entire thing so just to decode the starting. This is a big deviation from how society is structured right now right now our minds have unquestioned authority in deciding what we eat so if you think about your daily life you go to the store and you walk down aisles you're like maybe this maybe that you decide how much you put on your plate you decide if you go to a restaurant you're presented with a menu you decide if you're going to have a pizza party you decide if you're going to eat doritos like you're making these decisions all the time and it's a combination of how you feel what you want like you know that you're trying to be good or whatever but you're basically giving your mind unquestioned authority to do it blueprint flips that and it says my mind has 0 authority my body has a 100% authority so it the measurement of my heart and liver and lungs and dna methylation patterns it directly asks for what it wants via data and I can never override it and so in this idea so the the thought experiment is if you could achieve perfect health and maintain perfect health but it but it required you to accept basically what an algorithm was doing to deliver what you eat and when you eat would you do it and then in that thought experiment sam and I've had this conversation 100 of times now the reaction people have is almost this fear response and their conscious mind panics and it it's like I I see it like a computer screen scrolling of like infinite number of questions but like what if cheetos pizza party 7 to play like whatever and then it like the mind is panicking for the contemplation of loss of control that it can't do the things that it thinks that then the mind says the only way I can be happy in existence is if I still get to choose what I do when I do it and the mind cannot get over it it cannot just say hold tight like is it let me just contemplate is it possible that I am a self harm machine I cannot stop myself from committing self harm I probably will never be able to do it and if I keep on doing this it's probably gonna lead to a pretty well outcome and so it's such an interesting interaction of rolling through this thing of and I think it's really on par if we say like what are the major things that have impacted humanity of is the earth the center of the universe or you know it did is there an evolutionary force creating all things on earth I think this one could be on that scale of a societal understanding that our unquestioned granting of authority to our conscious minds is at the root of all of our problems in society and so the contemplation here is if if I imagine this could I stop self harm from happening inside of brian because just like there's wars going on and there's all these tribal factions of the world the same thing is going inside of me with my own body and my cravings and whatever else I've achieved goal alignment within myself on this program and so that's that's really what this whole thing is about is it's it's trying to think through how could I achieve goal alignment and we hear a lot about ai goal alignment with humans and that being an existential threat but I think the more interesting starting.

Bryan Johnson

Is it not for me to look on the other side of my eyeballs and say, "Let me find everyone else who's got a problem in the world"? Instead, let me look at myself and say, "What is my own internal chaos and war, and can I even try to resolve conflict within myself?"

Shaan Puri

There's a part of me that's like, "Wow, this is incredible." I'm going through the blueprint site, looking at the routine and the photos. I mean, you're completely shredded! This is amazing. So, there's part of me that's like, "Wow, this is incredible." Then there's another part of me that's like, "You're doing the thing a little bit where it's like, is this mayo?" No, he's calling it aioli. It's like, "Oh wow, this is not only just great for your health; this is transcendence for the race and society." I'm like, "Okay, maybe I could see how that's true." But it does seem like you're not actually... it's not that your body is deciding. Your brain has just decided, "I'm gonna use data about what my body wants instead of impulse." Regardless, when I look at this, I'm like, "This is amazing." But man, you know, this looks like a full-time effort, a PhD-level intelligence, and a bunch of money to be able to do this.

Sam Parr

I think he said his cost by

Bryan Johnson

the way

Sam Parr

his cost I think say like $3 a month like it's not like crazy

Shaan Puri

Well, I think it's $3 a month, but it's also like the mental energy that you would have to put towards doing this is... you know, the real cost. But you did it in service of other people too, so... What is the 80/20? What have you discovered to be the highest leverage changes? I know it's in this [document], but say it out loud because not everyone's going to go read the whole thing. So, what are the highest leverage changes that you were able to make during this experiment?

Bryan Johnson

the first shot on this maybe just a reflection why is it in society do we accept this ferocious system to invite everyone to commit self harm like when you walk into the grocery store I mean it is violence all outright violence through the representation of advertising and ingredients and sugar and you're in there and you're supposed to be on on equal footing with that like no way we're all matched and the same thing when we're sized up against algorithms it's a totally unfair match in society we just gleefully allow the self harm and so the individual is pitted against algorithms and capitalism like good luck individual on trying to keep your shit together and so it's just it's an unfair thing and I think it's a it's just bad for everyone to be in this game but then in terms of like the basics for people it's really understanding that trying to win this game with willpower is a losing game if you put yourself in a situation where you have option a and option b you're probably going to lose 50% of time or more and that's the whole thing I've been trying to do with blueprint is yes it's expensive right now yes like it's difficult this always happens with innovation it's always expensive and accessible and then in time it gets better and that's why I openly blog about all the things I'm doing is I'm trying to get this out so others can improve upon it the I think the most important thing that someone could do to win here would be to accept the basic principle that it's a system that drives what you eat it's not your decision making

Sam Parr

But what about the specific truths? Are there any truths or hypotheses that you believe to be true? For example, you made a great analogy with the door frame, how it's standard and how bodies aren't necessarily like that. Has going vegan made a huge difference for you? Is there anything about, for example, how a lot of us sit in chairs for 80 hours a week, staring at screens and working really hard? Is there any point where you're like, "Oh, you know, actually..."?

Shaan Puri

he's in a piston squat right now doing this whole interview yeah

Sam Parr

Are you like, "Well, you know, 30 hours is..." I think in the... what's the Israeli guy? He wrote the book *Homo Sapiens*. In one of his books, he was like, "You know, hunter-gatherers worked only 30 hours a week," and that kind of seems like an ideal number. Is there anything like...

Shaan Puri

just sapiens no homo okay my bad

Sam Parr

My bad, this is inclusive. So, yeah, is there any truths that you've discovered for you that maybe are not right for everyone else?

Bryan Johnson

I started I got my pilot's license several years ago and in doing so I was assessing the risk of death and one of the stats that that stood out to me was that over 70% of incidents in aviation were attributable to amateur pilots and so while I went through the certification of every plane I flew I was typewritten in every plane and you know whatnot I refused to fly alone because I knew the risk of error was just the math was there the stats were there the same is true with health and wellness I tried to do this on my own you know almost like going around this little bag listening to podcasts reading books reading literature and trying to put little gems of insight into my bag and try to piece together my own protocol it's the same as trying to fly an airplane by myself even though I study it I get typed in it my error rate is just gonna be very high and so and then 3 is that the the value here in this conversation would not be somebody feeling motivated in this moment of doing something good because tomorrow they're going to fail and it's also the value here is not debating is a vegan diet better than a carnivore diet to me the the real essence of this conversation the only way this conversation can be of value besides of all the chatter going on in the world of every no everyone else talking about this is 1 is there a engineered solution that actually solves this from a system perspective and 2 can you do so with data it doesn't do anyone any good to debate is carnivore better than vegan it's a meaningless conversation data is the only thing that matters and so that's why I publish all my data is like it's I mean I'm vegan for ethical moral reasons but I'm not vegan because I think it's it's you know I didn't at the at labor of abstraction we just put the data we're agnostic to these inputs and so that's really what I'm trying to say this is not a health and wellness gig this is not a diet trend this is really trying to get the structural formation of what it means to be human our relationship with food our relationship with happiness and and you know like how we structure our lives and it's also trying to say let's get past these silly tribal debates at these layers of abstraction which are meaningless and they just confuse everyone because then people immediately say 1st they say eggs are bad for you then this they're good for you no one knows and they just stop at that?

Bryan Johnson

When in reality there are more right answers than wrong in terms of doing this in a methodical way

Sam Parr

You know, before we started recording, Sean was just gushing about how jacked and ripped you are and how he thought you looked great. Is it mostly... are you getting any more attention from women, or is it all just guys like Sean who are eyeballing you? Because whenever I get in shape, I'm like, "Oh yeah, my wife's gonna love this," and she's like, "I guess you look alright." It's always dudes. It's only men.

Bryan Johnson

I think, Sam, I would say the person who is the happiest is me. You know, I had terribly complicated emotions looking at myself in my worst years. I felt so much shame, guilt, and lack of respect because I just felt out of control and powerless. Now, when I look at myself, I have such positive emotions. I'm stable, things are reliable, and I trust myself. I trust the systems that are built. It has transformed my relationship with myself and what I think I can become as a person, as well as the relationships I have. So, it's hard to articulate how significant the psychological shift has been for me and my own understanding of my identity.

Shaan Puri

Wow, you just gave a really great answer to a really dumb question. That was amazing! I'm glad you did that because we set you up with sort of a goofy question, and I think you said something really profound there. I wanted to ask you... you said something like, or it's a bit of a cliffhanger. You were like, "You know, willpower is not the answer." And you said, "The good thing that could come of this is not that you listen to this podcast and you're motivated to go eat two pounds of veggies tomorrow," because you know you'll revert. You're up against this, you know, the grocery stores, the sugar casino basically. And then, you know, all your social media is just this algorithm designed to hook you. You are sort of... yeah, David versus Goliath here. Or I guess that's a bad analogy; David won. But, you know, you are powerless compared to the onslaught that's coming at you, trying to get you to make a certain decision. But you didn't quite say... you're like, "You know, there's a system." But if, okay, if I take that, I'm like, tomorrow I wake up, Brian's gone, and I'm like, "Alright, today is about a system." And I'm gonna be like, "Wait, what the heck was he talking about? What's the system? What am I supposed to do?" And that's where I would stop. So I want to make sure we don't leave it at that. What would you say is the approach that you advocate for? Because you say it's the data. Is it, "Oh, I should begin tracking certain markers; that's the step to take," and then let my own intuition ride? Is it, "I gotta fire evening Sean," because I had the same problem? I have the same problem now that you described you had. Then what would you say is the actionable way forward that sort of is the sustainable, successful path?

Bryan Johnson

Yep, I'd say three things. **1. Fire the worst version of yourself.** Whatever you do, whatever the circumstances are, identify that person and fire him. Be successful with that one act. **2. Make a firm commitment on one step towards the system.** For example, for me, that's calories. I eat 1,977 calories per day—that's it, not anymore. That is my absolute budget, and I cannot go over it. Set a firm boundary that that's what you're going to do, and you're going to stick with it. **3. Start refining the details of what those calories are and when you eat them.** You want to pack more nutrition in over time, but just acknowledge that you yourself are powerless to win in a moment-by-moment willpower game. Structurally set up the path to win. Fire the worst version of yourself to build that muscle. Set very clear boundaries, and then you can refine. Don't worry about taking on the whole thing all at once; just take this baby step, and then you'll build this muscle. Like my 17-year-old, he does the identical things I do. You know, Sam, you came back and asked, "How many times have you made infractions?" He went through this whole thing of how many times he had to make the error of eating too much, making an exception, or breaking the protocol. It was something like... I don't know, I forget what we talked about, but it was in the thirties range. In the morning, he'd be like, "Dad, I failed." And I'd be like, "Fine, fine." But he finally got to the same point.

Bryan Johnson

Where I did, where you can get to that moment, and you're tempted to do something. You can model out exactly how it's going to feel to do that thing. You can model out exactly what it's going to feel like after you've done that thing. You can model out your sleep and you can model out your next morning—how you feel about yourself. Pretty soon, the simulation becomes so clear in your mind. You're like, "Yeah, I know there's nothing in that series of events where I win. Like, literally nowhere. Why am I going to do it?" Then it just becomes a... where, you know, people ask me, "Do you have cheat days?" and I'm like, "No." A cheat day sounds awful to me. It sounds like the worst feeling in the world to be full and to be regretful. No, that's the last thing in the world I want to do. These baby steps help you build up your muscles, and then it just becomes a way of being.

Sam Parr

You’re clearly incredibly unique. You’re very insightful and wise. When you talk to me, I think, "Oh man, this guy has a lot of things figured out." But you’re also very precise, and you follow the data. Were you a good manager, do you think? Did people like working with you and for you, or did they find you to be just too challenging because you’re so... you? You’re just so very unique.

Bryan Johnson

Yeah, I joked with my team at Braintree that I didn't care what they thought; I only cared to learn what their significant others thought. It's very hard to get someone's real opinion of you because it's difficult for someone to be honest. But we all know that when we go home from work and we're talking to our significant others, that's the truth serum in action. You know, that's where we really say something. I do have some data where people have said I'm the best boss they've ever had in their life. I'm sure other people dislike the way I do certain things, but I certainly care deeply about being a high-value person in these people's lives. Not only do I want to be a good steward of the business, but I also want to create an environment where they can become their best selves.

Sam Parr

Was that a learned behavior? Was that like a learned behavior? Were you like, "Well, if I treat people right, I'm going to get my outcome"? Or was it just... is this how you were raised? What motivated that?

Bryan Johnson

yeah it just feels like the right way to do things I mean like if if you think about like more structurally in society we accept this exchange of spending our life points for a system of rewards that includes status and wealth and something else and I suppose why I bring this up is I think we all know how much money is in our bank account we know how much we weigh we know how many followers social media followers we have but we don't know for example our speed of aging like how fast are you aging in this moment and if you had aging points like your bank account would you spend them a certain way and so what I'm saying is we have fundamentally accepted that we are on this decline in life we're going to spend our life points we're going through the grave and the things that may live on may include our reputation or like our our contribution or whatever and I suggest now that may be the opportunity for us to flip it so if you say in the year 2022 if you're looking at the horizon of possibilities for humanity like what is the thing you can barely see which is barely imaginable you would say basically don't spend your life points recklessly if you can live long enough this there may be a new wave here so like blueprint I'm trying to do 2 things I'm trying to maximally slow my rate of aging because entropy is very strong you're not gonna beat it so I'm rate I'm currently aging at 0.76 so I for every 365 days a year I age 277 so I basically get like october november december for free and then for the for the for the months I do age then the progress is to reverse that aging that has happened so that I can be the same biological age and so if we have aging points we have an asian bank account then society could shift instead of us saying we're gonna be a martyr for wealth or status or whatever would it change in that balance and would it more be about humans so we become obsessed about what we could become as a species not what our technology can become

Shaan Puri

Right, and let me ask you, a lot of people who listen to this are entrepreneurs. I think one of the cool things when we have somebody like you come on, versus, you know, our buddy who's doing like vending machine arbitrage, is that he tells a different story. His story is like, "Oh, this is great! I got this income stream coming in, and I was able to quit my job and do this thing." That's one sort of inspiring story. This is a different one, which is about spending your creative and entrepreneurial energies on things that really matter, both to you and your lifespan, as well as to human civilization. What do you wish people were working on? What opportunities do you see where you're like, "Man, we need more talent and brains going and trying to solve X," or "This breakthrough just happened and really nobody's doing Y," or "If I had more time, I'd be doing this other thing." I'll give you an example. We had Palmer Luckey on, and we were like, "Cool, you did Oculus, now you're doing Anduril." He was like, "Yeah, but before that, I was playing with this idea of reforming the prison system this way or creating this oil-based food that's like zero-calorie food that would just run straight through you." He had these crazy ideas and said, "I think somebody could go do these things." Do you have any ideas like that? Ideas where you think, "I think somebody could go do X."

Bryan Johnson

I do a lot of them, but I would say I'm really obsessed with one: **goal alignment** or **cooperation**. At the basis of everything that exists on planet Earth, there's a singular question at play: **Can it cooperate?** So this blueprint thing, this question is, "Can I bring world peace to Brian in my body?" The answer is yes, I did. Now, my mind is in a whole other place, right? The negative self-talk, like all the stuff that goes on in my brain, that's an entirely different project. But the blueprint is applicable to climate change. It's the same thing. If we were to measure the world with millions of data points and let the Earth speak, then we work within those constraints. That's the solution for how we can coexist with a healthy planet. Right now, our minds overrun the planet. We do what we want, when we want, and how we want, and it comes at the expense of our planet. Just like we're committing self-harm to ourselves, we're committing harm to the Earth collectively. It's the same problem. So if you think about **goal alignment** within ourselves, between each other, with planet Earth, and with AI, it's a gigantic computational goal alignment problem. The idea of this AI alignment problem we've talked about now, like between AI and humans, is that we don't have goal alignment within ourselves, let alone between humans and then humans and AI. It's kind of a crazy notion. If you look at the number of disconnects on that entire stream, and the starting...

Bryan Johnson

In most people's assumptions, it's "let me start with what I can see and how I can change people's behavior" versus looking inward. So, I'd say yes, I have ideas, but none of them matter because unless we can solve cooperation, what is it that we have to look forward to as a species?

Shaan Puri

So, what's an example of that? You talked about basically goal alignment first with your body, right? You were able to solve that, and Blueprint is a good example. What's another example of how you would take this idea of cooperation or goal alignment? What would be a more specific approach, or product, or service that could be created along those lines?

Bryan Johnson

I mean, the brain... I would love to tackle my brain next, and that's what Kernel is. If I have this device, I can measure my brain. If you think about it in terms of what we eat today as dietary input to our bodies, consider this: what is my diet for my brain? The news sources, the social media sources, my friends, my environment... We have no idea what's happening. We haven't measured it. So, is it possible that we basically consume 90% junk food for our brains in a given day? That's just the way society is structured. I'd love to address that by getting a baseline of where my brain is at. More broadly, I've been talking to several people who specialize in math and computational methodologies to try to figure out if there are mathematical approaches, in the same way that John Nash came up with game theory. Are there mathematical approaches to think about how we might solve this between humans, between humans and AI, and between human AI and the planet? You know, again, I can do this with my body. It's a pretty straightforward thing to do now, but it's just going to get more complicated the more agents you have in the game.

Sam Parr

So, I've worked with Tim Ferriss in the past, and I remember an example where we would be walking our dogs together. I'd say, "Oh Tim, that's a cool dog leash," and he'd respond, "Oh, this dog leash is interesting because it's made of horse's hair, which is good for the dog for this reason and that reason. I found it in Japan." Then we had Balaji on the podcast, and he would go through these complex answers. We would just ask him what he had for breakfast, and he would give us a profound response. Palmer Luckey was kind of like that too. You are 100% in that same ballpark. I might make a stupid joke or ask a simple question, and you give a pretty profound answer. What's interesting is that you do this thing that Elon does, where you ask a question and then pause. Most people don't do this; they don't take the time to think. They might not talk for like 10 seconds, and I try not to interrupt because most people are uncomfortable with that. One time, I interrupted you when you got silent. By the way, the key to good interviews is not to interrupt, so I kind of screwed that up. But you are really thoughtful. In one way, it's exhausting because everything you say is profound, and I find myself thinking about it. I want to ask you all these questions about that too. On the other hand, it's refreshing. I mean, it's just enlightening. You're just an interesting human. Your intensity could be off-putting for some people, but for me, I'm into it. You're just a very unique person. I think it's really interesting to hear your perspective. Even if I don't think you've said anything that I agree or disagree with, that's okay. You're just an original thinker, and I dig it.

Bryan Johnson

thank you sam appreciate that

Shaan Puri

What's, give us, before we go, what's one of these contraptions behind you? Give us, what is one of these interesting things?

Sam Parr

that's just a keurig machine isn't it

Shaan Puri

yeah one of them looks like a sodastream or something that looks like a genetic sequencing machine

Bryan Johnson

that'd be funny like got me like you know I got coke and pepsi and

Shaan Puri

yeah is that a fucking red bull body too

Bryan Johnson

Yeah, so, a couple of weeks ago, we bought a medical-grade, hospital-grade ultrasound machine. Part of this has just been buying the kind of equipment that allows us to do the stuff we're trying to do. For example, ultrasound. If you look at the pyramid of measurement, wearables are like part of the first category. Then you get to biofluids, like blood draws and urine, and whatever else. Imaging is an entirely different quality class. So, if you want to get really good data on yourself, it's ultrasound and MRI. A lot of the stuff we're doing in Kernel requires this. We really had to build up this infrastructure. One of the reasons why this is so expensive is that we basically built out a mini clinic or hospital here with all the stuff we have, and such. We're a lot of the consultants.

Shaan Puri

in your

Bryan Johnson

house mhmm

Shaan Puri

And are there like four dudes that are your physicians monitoring you at all times? Or what's going on? What's your team? What's your stack for people with...?

Bryan Johnson

with the yeah

Shaan Puri

the body stuff

Bryan Johnson

For the ultrasound, we have five sonographers. One sonographer specializes in the heart, another does lungs, pancreas, liver, and kidney. Another one focuses on musculoskeletal issues, and the last one does Doppler for the brain. For example, we just did one of the ways to quantify working out. We're using ultrasound to measure tendons, ligaments, and all the component parts of my joints: ankles, knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders. Then, we implement these exercise regimes and look at the changes. We ask ourselves, "Are they working?" and to what degree. So, everything we do is quantified. It's not like, "Oh, this thing makes me feel better." Feelings rarely matter with anything we do. The hardware and the specific team are crucial. Just like we have five sonographers to run the ultrasound machine, we have specialists in lungs, specialists in the heart, and specialists in other areas. The team is about 25 or so, maybe now altogether, with different specialties.

Sam Parr

Man, this is crazy. Sean's answer to that question is like, "I just got a poster of dogs playing poker, one shoe, three AirPods, and a couple of empty Diet Coke cans." Like, we ask you, it's just like, "Oh, you mean that ultrasound?"

Shaan Puri

I'm... I see. I don't need all this measurement. Like, if you just export my DoorDash history, it'll tell you how I'm...

Bryan Johnson

aging yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like a greyhound right

Sam Parr

yeah does chick fil a make you older or younger

Bryan Johnson

what are

Shaan Puri

Your thoughts on ranch, dude? Brian, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming on. We talked about you way back as like this awesome guy, and it's amazing to get to meet you, hear some of the stories, and ask our questions firsthand. So, I appreciate you coming on.

Bryan Johnson

yeah thanks for having me