Bryan Johnson sits down with HOF investor Sabrina Halper for an in-depth conversation that spans philosophy, biology, and technology. Bryan Johnson is the world's most measured human. He is investing millions to slow and reverse his aging. In 2021, he set a world record by reducing his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months.  In this conversation, Bryan confronts many of the criticisms around his pursuit and presents his vision for the future of humanity.

Previously, Johnson sold his company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800M in 2013. Johnson is also the founder of Kernel, creator of a non-invasive neuroimaging system, and OS fund, where he invested $100M in the predictable engineering of atoms, molecules, and organisms into companies now collectively valued over $6B. 

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Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:55 - Leaving a religious community and searching for truth in the unknown
3:00 - Distrust of authority and mind
3:57 - Building the Blueprint protocol & outcomes of epigenetic reduction
6:38 - Measuring alternative inputs and finding causal links
8:07 - An average day in Bryan's life
8:55 - Negotiating with pain 
10:20 - Reframing temptation
12:40 - Reversing age of biomarkers 
13:55 - Living forever?
14:25 - Gene therapy
16:58 - Defending anti-longevity stances
19:35 - Confronting criticism + presenting  a new era for humanity
25:56 - Artificial Intelligence & civilization scale goal alignment 
29:40 - Paradox of choice, new power structures of body and mind
36:30 - How Blueprint affects his life
40:00 - What Bryan is most excited for

Follow Bryan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson or Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanjohnson_/?hl=en. 
Connect with Sabrina on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SabrinaHalper. 
Engage with HOF on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HOFCapital or visit https://hofcapital.com/.

Reach out to Shalper@hofcapital.com with any feedback, requests for guests, or if you're building something to bring the future closer.

Well, Brian Johnson, welcome to Tomorrow Talk.

I am so, so excited to have you on the show today.

And thank you for welcoming me into your home where all things Blueprint take place.

Today I'm so excited to dive into your motivations and philosophies behind Blueprint, but I think first it's important to set some context.

You built and sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal in 2013 for $800 million.

At that point, you had hundreds of millions of dollars.

You were working on some of the coolest technology companies.

What was your life actually like at that time?

What were some of those events that made it complicated?

I was born into a deeply religious community And I think I underestimated how deeply it really was ingrained in me.

When you grow up in a fishbowl, you don't realize you're in a fishbowl, and then you learn there's a whole bunch of other fishbowls in the world, and you're just continually discovering other realities.

I think I was on this journey of trying to figure out how big is reality that I can experience and Slowly moving my way out of that singular reality where I'd grown up and that included my relationships the community All the exposure I had to every source of intelligence I had, I was trying to pull out from underneath that.

It's like it requires a complete recreation of self, basically.

The hard thing is I didn't know how to orient myself.

I couldn't pull out a compass and identify where I was at and where I needed to go or even a map that showed me the possible territory terrain I could travel.

It's how to kind of just like walk out step by step and try to find out how big is the space, where could I potentially play, what am I missing with my self-awareness, how could I increase my self-awareness to understand what I'm not seeing.

So really trying to rebuild my mind in every functional way to try to create a map of existence.

In that moment, because I think so many people have moments like that in life, like what were those types of things that you turned to to try to like redefine what you actually wanted your life to look like?

I mean, it was first a collapse of confidence in authority figures, where I'd grown up with everyone telling me about this singular reality that was going on, a certain thing is true, without any voice to say, you know, you may also want to consider the following point of views, and here are some other ways to understand reality.

But no 1 gave me those toolkits in my in my thinking.

And so after I emerged from that I thought, how do I trust any authority figure ever to give me proper advice?

And that really was the first layer when it came crashing down.

And The second 1 was when I studied cognitive behavioral therapy and I learned that my own mind was a disaster.

And my biases, and my own hypocritical thinking, my irrationality, that in any given moment, my mind was spinning up some story of some variety.

And I really couldn't trust the thoughts that came in default, hadn't trained my brain yet.

And then it just kind of succession after succession came where I arrived at this observation that I really could not trust what my mind, the observations my mind were making, nor could I trust authority figures around me, nor could I trust, and so it was kind of like this collapse of all things around me, of what firm ground can I stand upon, and how long will it be firm before it collapses?

Because I don't think there's any permanent firmness.

It's all going to collapse at some point.

Similarly, within the wellness and longevity community, there are so many unknowns.

Like, How did you even go about creating this protocol?

That's exactly what we were trying to do is health and wellness mirrors that of religion, where it's typically centered around a guru that has some kind of community based upon something, their life change or some story.

And the community typically isn't persuaded by facts so much as by story and narrative.

And then the scientific community wasn't helping itself in that there was this idea that eggs were good for you, then they're bad for you.

And then people say, we can't trust science either because they don't know what's going on and everything's just going to change all the time.

And it created this problem in the community generally where people are like, well, what do we do?

And I'd say that what we tried to do is we said, okay, if we tried to eliminate all human opinion from the situation and we took a different approach and we said, we're going to measure every organ of the body.

We're going to legitimately say, hey, liver, how are you doing?

And can you speak to us via data with MRI and blood draws and a bunch of stuff?

We take that data and then we match it up with scientific evidence.

We say, what are optimal clinical outcome ranges for liver health?

Like what do you wanna see in a liver and what state can you get the liver in?

And because there's like a liver looks and acts like a 10 year old and a 20 year old and a 30 year old, you're not gonna mistake an 80 year old liver with a 10 year old liver.

And so there's a biological characteristics you can map.

And so we just measured the organs, matched it with scientific evidence, and then said, okay, we're just going to look at this from a measurement and evidence perspective, and we're going to repeat it again and again.

We don't care about opinion anywhere, We just want the evidence.

And in doing that, we've produced in me the best health of my life.

And then on, well, I guess like the most impressive things, we've reduced my speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.

So I now accumulate aging damage at the speed slower than the average 10 year old.

As a result of all these endeavors, I also have 50 perfect biomarkers.

So if you look at my cholesterol, triglycerides, testosterone, they're all in the optimal clinical reference range, not just reference range.

And then other things that are interesting, like my body's 3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and other things.

So yeah, we basically figured out a protocol where we achieved remarkably impressive biomarkers.

And so I tongue in cheek say, blueprint is the best protocol ever created in human history.

When you are measuring so many different things at once, how do you create like causal links between things?

And also looking at the blue zones and things like that, like relationships, your optimism, all these other things have associations with your overall health.

So how do you measure those types of inputs, I guess?

1 is some things have very specific targets.

So a specific supplement or exercise or something, whether we're looking like, whether is my tendon, my tendons and ligaments in my knees getting better or worse?

We can look at the ultrasound and we can map it back to certain things.

Or is my liver enzymes, are they improved or not?

So you can sometimes do very targeted interventions, which isolate some variables.

Others are more system-wide effects like rapamycin.

We can sometimes target, sometimes look at systematic.

But we do try to isolate as much as possible, however imperfect it is.

But I mean, we have chosen to do more things rather than less and try to make up for in measurement as a way to try to make sense of what is doing what.

Could you walk me through, in a short version, what is your average day like?

What is that blueprint, regimen, or schedule?

It starts at roughly 5 in the morning and then I complete a 4 hour morning routine and that includes taking 50 pills, a certain drink, exercising for an hour, doing a half hour or so of therapies and then getting ready for the day.

I've got a full day of working already, yeah.

You say that you are feeling better than you've ever felt before.

What do those hard moments during this protocol look like?

Is it when you're really hungry or you're really tired?

I mean, I don't know about you, but the things I most value in my life have been achieved on the other side of pain.

So when I encounter discomfort in anything, whether it be in hunger or in working out where I'm too tired or in a relationship or in something else, and I somehow figure out how to negotiate with that pain and when either in a completion of a great workout, or I'm pushing through to get homework done, or that extra little bit to do your work just that much better, I feel great.

I think a lot of us feel great when we negotiate and push through pain.

And so I'd say Blueprint has been, the primary objective for me is negotiating with pain.

Is it's very painful and it requires enormous discipline.

And there's so many jumping off points where you say, oh, I'm too hungry and you eat.

Or I don't feel like working out today, you bail, or like, I just want to go out with friends and drink instead of going to bed on time.

And really it's a negotiation with pain, is can you, because I mentally know these things are good for me.

And so the question is, can I actually do what's in my best interest?

Or am I going to jump off and be like, can't take it anymore.

So to me, it really is comes down to my, that's my primary focus.

That's such an interesting way to frame it.

I also think it's very tied to this concept of temptation.

I feel like temptation is like this core fundamental of the human experience.

It's part of our like earliest religious texts, you know, like Adam and Eve.

There's this narrative that like what makes us feel good can be bad for us and I'm just curious like how have you reframed temptation like in the early days of blueprint when you're like oh I'm starving I want to eat that I would love a drink right now or like you know I do a wanna I have FOMO and I want to go hang out with those people and it's 12 a.m.

Yeah, so it's funny on your Adam and Eve comment, it's funny that you went there.

It's been the most commonly requested thing.

And I want to do an Adam and Eve photo shoot for the launch of this, of if we're going to rebirth humanity, what is it?

And as part of the photo shoot, I want to include a snake.

And I want to make the observation that we are the snake.

The story of course is the devil's the snake and there's this outside person trying to get us to be evil and we're the righteous ones and we're the good ones and we have this epic battle against evil.

I want to make the argument that we are the serpent.

We've just been deflecting it the whole time.

And I know that through this process of blueprint, I've had to go through and identify all of these versions of myself, most of which don't do things that are in my best interest.

They're the ones that want to not do exercise, eat too much, bail out with friends.

But to answer your question, I've had to remap my pleasure centers so that if I'm looking at a a pint of ice cream, I can model out my brain, if I eat this, I know what I'm going to feel like, it's not good.

Like you may get that pleasure for 15 seconds or 2 minutes or 3 minutes or whatever the number is.

And then there's, I don't know, 3 days of pain as you're working off that feeling in your body as you're cycling through, why did I do that?

I can model out the entire experience and be like, no, really not worth it.

It's so interesting because we have probably all been through that experience thousands of times in our life and we still do it.

And it's like, it's really wild that even as like super, you know, intellectual evolved beings, we still consistently fall into these things.

Looking at you today, how old are you chronologically versus biologically?

And then biologically, I'm hundreds of different ages.

Which biomarker or body part has proven to be the most difficult to reverse aging on?

I've hearing damage from shooting guns as a kid, so we have not had any success with my left ear.

Yeah, I'd say the hearing is probably 1 of the hardest.

This concept of entropy, that there's a gradual decline into disorder and sort of a law of the universe everything follows this including ourselves.

You can and you've managed to slow it down.

Do you see a world where you can ever just pause it?

If I try to start at the basic premise of we exist, we are currently, we're all existing, we think.

And I think most of us in life don't have plans to die.

Or what's the ideal number of years to live in a healthy way?

I would invite asking that question differently.

So to me, the question that's relevant is, do you wanna live tomorrow?

And you probably have things going on tomorrow you want to do.

So if we feel healthy and we're feeling physically healthy, mentally healthy, I think most people would say, Yes, I'll sign up for tomorrow.

And that's the only thing we care about as a species is do we want to exist tomorrow?

It plays to our, our sensibilities of how we try to solve the thing right in front of our faces all the time.

Forever is built off of endless tomorrows.

It's really just a compounding of tomorrows.

And we as a species, thinking long term is not our best sweet, not our best strength.

Modern day humans are trying to get their next dopamine hit.

So it's like, where in the next 15 seconds am I gonna get my stimulation from?

Right, it's like we're living on these timescales that are kind of insane.

Looking at sort of the longevity space as a whole, there's a lot of interesting innovations going on in the gene therapy space.

What's the limit of what you would and wouldn't try just in general?

We are extremely rigorous in safety and efficacy.

So I would say we're potentially more safe than anyone else right now in terms of we are measuring everything.

We also have a more robust measurement protocol than nearly anyone.

And so we take risks but they're calculated risks based upon evidence and based upon measurement.

And if we did a gene therapy, be the same thing it would be because we've done all of our homework, we have all the safety and efficacy protocols in place.

Are there any current projects and research going on at other labs that you find super interesting?

They're all so close and they're all just 1 or 2 years away, which means they're probably 3 to 5 years away.

We're at such an interesting point in this field where it's at the tip of our fingers and I think everyone feels that way.

And it's like all generations wanna maximize their ability and access to it.

1 anti-longevity stance that people like Elon Musk, 1 reason he's sort of cited as not investing in a space, not putting his own time or resources into it is that he believes people don't change their minds, they just die.

So this idea that for society to adopt new ideas and for new generations to come to power, you need the old guard essentially to die out.

No 1 grows up, gets more power and wants to give it up.

And a lot of people don't change their minds.

I mean, okay, so the observation is we have this insurmountable engineering problem that people can't change their opinions.

We have an insurmountable problem of wealth transfer, like, okay, of all the hard engineering problems in the world, I wouldn't put those at number 1 and number 2.

I mean, yeah, we have other harder problems.

I wouldn't even raise those as even humorous suggestions that would justify that course of action.

That's not a reason to sort of not work on the side

OK, 1 other 1 other thing I sometimes think about is just like, what are the secondary consequences of life extension?

I think about things like, people might have multiple jobs, right?

They might get to have like multiple careers in their lifetime.

You know, family dynamics might change because you're going to know a lot more generations of your family, retirements later.

Is there anything you've thought about just like obvious or non-obvious sort of consequences of life extension?

I do think about this a little, but not a lot, because I equate this with the horse manure problem of New York City.

Where the horses were the dominant mode of transportation hauling around these different things.

And there was so much horse manure in Chicago, it was in New York, it was very problematic.

And so people were trying to solve the horse manure problem.

And when the Model T came along, Henry Ford built that and horses went away.

And so oftentimes the problems that you're identifying as needing to be solved, just get solved by virtue of the technology being developed.

And then other problems emerge that you never expected.

And so the car introduced all kinds of new problems in society that we're still trying to solve.

And so I think it's interesting to identify what we think the problems are, but it's likely more important to have the self-awareness that we don't, we probably have not identified the correct problems.

You have always sort of been at the center of your own research and development in a way that like, I can't really think of Any other CEO that has done this, like for ketamine, for kernel, you took ketamine to measure your brain and for blueprint, you're obviously like patient number 1.

Is it to show commitment or what's your philosophy around it?

It's the best way to understand your subject matter.

To be in the trenches doing it, building it, using it, trying it.

There's just no better way of building a product than being the product.

But if someone were to read sort of just like 1 article with a headline that read something like, you know, tech founder spends millions of dollars to achieve like biological age of 18.

That might seem like a vain conquest sort of for eternal youth.

And when you read historical biographies, you learn about people in a certain time and place that discovered something that was cool.

And then they start doing it or using it, and then society slowly learns.

And so then sometimes you find out in a situation where it's like 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years later, some people in the world find out of this really cool thing that happened, that they would have learned about this thing sooner, they would have made big life changes.

And what I'm trying to communicate is a lot, we currently have this assumption that we are inevitably going to decay on our way to death.

And what I'm trying to communicate is that may not be true.

We may be here right now in a new era of being human, where we could imagine continued lifespan and health span.

But it's possible that it's here right now.

And so what I'm trying to communicate to everyone is, hey, we currently have these cultural norms that support this idea that we're all gonna die.

So therefore we go out and we drink and we smoke and we stay a plate and we grind and we try to do all these things because we assume this short lifespan.

And I'm saying those things are not a good idea because they accelerate your aging and they're gonna put you on a path of disease and death.

So what would be the more interesting thing for everyone is to say, you know what, a brand new era is here.

We don't know yet what's possible, but you don't want to be caught on the tail end of life when these things become possible.

I guess like the rebuttal on that would be do you do you believe this sort of narrative?

1 is that, you know, age is beautiful, and death is a part of life and this natural cycle and don't fight it.

The other thing is value comes from finite things.

Just like How do you think about those 2 ideas?

Those all sound like really pretty justifications for death.

And this is the thing, humans are really good at storytelling.

And you take any given behavior a human does, it doesn't matter what it is.

You can create dozens of pretty stories to support that behavior.

So never be convinced by a pretty story, because your brain has an endless number of things to justify that given thing.

And stories have led to a lot of destruction in human history.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, and you, like, if...

It's really hard to imagine a new reality you haven't experienced.

So if we were to try to break our brains and imagine a reality where we say our shared collective interests, the only thing we cared about was continually existing.

We just want to be here together with each other.

Now, of course, there's thousands of questions that spin up like, who's alive and who gets priority?

Like, yes, of course, of course, of course.

But instead of this race towards wealth accumulation and status and power and all the games we play right now, and towards all of our biochemical reactions of how we make ourselves, soothe ourselves with the challenges, what if we just as a species said, this is so precious and so remarkable that we exist.

Let's protect it with everything we have.

I think that you should write a sci-fi book about this because I think sci-fi has often been what has allowed people to even imagine future scenarios that they can't otherwise like really accept being possible.

I'd say the most common narrative against what you're doing I've seen is that like are you living if so much of your life is spent preserving life?

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Bryan Johnson on reducing his biological age, longevity, human alignment, & negotiating with pain.