Bryan Johnson: How He Is Getting Biologically Younger, Selling His Company for $800 Million, and More

Episode 388: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) about starting Braintree - which he sold for hundreds of millions - and is his current businesses as Founder/CEO of Kernel and his own personal project Blueprint, where he's working to reduce his biological age. ----- Links: * Braintree * Kernel * Blueprint * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (03:25) - Background starting w/Braintree (15:30) - Financial plans and life changes (21:45) - Where do you put your money (27:05) - What does Kernel do (36:55) - Blueprint blog (57:40) - Ideas for others to go and do ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  On the lower end, it was $7 million. I had built out my spreadsheet model and assumed a certain rate of interest and 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, just if it's time, I'm writing or something. Then if I do something in the world, I had mapped out something like 150, 300 million as a basis that would get me started on that path.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  We're officially live. So Brian, I've been messaging you for like six or eight months now, but basically I'll give like a very brief background and you can kind of like tell us a little bit more because inevitably I'll miss something. But you started a bunch of stuff. The most, probably the biggest thing is Braintree. I think you bootstrap that, right?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  So you bootstrap that, sold it for like something like $800 million to PayPal. You guys also bought Venmo, which I think is like the greatest acquisition, one of the best acquisitions of all time because you bought it for kind of nothing compared to what it is now. And then you've done a bunch of other things. You've done Kernel, which is interesting, but you and you have this fun. That's kind of interesting. But the thing that I started reading was your new thing called Blueprint, which the kind of the, I'm kind of an idiot. And so the stupid way of describing it is like you have your biological age and then you have your chronological age. Your chronological chronological age is just how many years old you are. And then you have your biological, which is it measures a bunch of different things like your organs, your blood, and you're basically

• 1:43Sam Parr?

  trying to reverse your biological age faster than the chronological age goes up, which inevitably means you live forever. I mean, is that, is that basically it? And you're blogging and like sharing everything along the way. Is that right?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Great job.

• 1:57Sam Parr?

  So there.

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  Brian, what is your chronological age and what is your current biological age?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I left my mother's womb 45 years ago.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And biologically, I'm a few hundred different ages. And so you, 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. And so you're actually a collection of some very large number of markers because different parts of the body age at different speeds. And then your life choices and environment also affects that.

• 2:37Sam 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?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Please.

• 2:46Sam Parr?

  So Braintree, I mean, like, you know, 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, you know, pretty complicated things. How on earth do you bootstrap a business like that? I mean, I think by like year three or year four, you're doing like eight or nine million in revenue. I mean, you kind of, you guys kind of took off. So I understand like how you were able to bootstrap it, bootstrap it once you got to maybe 10 million in revenue, but how on earth do you make something like that from scratch?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  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 in 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 set, I might as well, I'll become an entrepreneur. I'll make a whole bunch of money by the age 30. And then at that point, I'll try to go after something. And so it was a naive contemplation of how to go about doing things. I'd grown up in a small town, basically, you know, with my grandpa on a farm.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I didn't meet my, I didn't meet an engineer until I was 21 or 22 years old. It was very much a farm boy like raised in a deeply religious community. And so. I did a bunch of startups and I just accidentally fell into payments because I I was building a startup, 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 100% commission and I became the company's number one salesperson in a matter of months doing it part-time while building my startup.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  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 of 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 form of to increase the likelihood the person would show up for the reservation. But they didn't want to 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, but 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,

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Uber. We helped Uber do their

• 5:29Speaker 01

  no

• 5:31Speaker 01

  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 preferred to use our software.

• 5:48Shaan 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're like, you had your kind of payments, he had X.com and PayPal, you had your payments thing. Now you're doing like a brain interface and stuff like that. You do these moonshot projects trying to live forever, that sort of stuff. So I think you're fascinating, dude. You said something about door-to-door sales. And on the pod, we've talked about this before, which is That, you know, our producer, who's not here today because having a baby,

• 6:18Shaan Puri?

  you know, he's Mormon and he did his mission and we talked about, you know, what that's like. We've talked about, you know, Cutco and some of these like, you know, door to door textbook companies where it really breeds this like amazing entrepreneur because you have to learn sales. You have to be able to work hard, face rejection all the time, you know, that sort of thing. And it's like this rite of passage. I think if you come out the other side of that, you were successful at door to door sales. I would bet on you with any role in my company, if you're successful at door to door sales. But I've never done it. So I'm just talking out my ass here. Is that accurate in your view? And how, you know, I guess, how do you think about door to door sales? And how did you become the number one when you don't seem like the most, you know, charismatic, you know, sales guy?

• 7:05Shaan Puri?

  I mean, 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.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  You don't say that.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  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 of 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. These are the tools that you, these are the languages you want to 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 wasn't like I was seeking it out.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Doing 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.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And so in looking at that system, opportunity number one, be honest. Be transparent, be honest and be trustworthy. And then number two 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 two is making that known. So again, the, the customer has a very clear understanding. And then three is just being reliable and, and competent. Like the, 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,

• 9:40Speaker 01

  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 hundred dollar bill and I'd say, I will, I will give you this. Uh, we're one minute of your time. And if you say no to me, you can keep it. And I, they'd be like, all right, 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 than anyone else. You're just going to 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 want to have to change again.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I don't want these machine leases. And so it was, it was really just again, it's system. Uh, 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 new world and trying to figure out what is really going on and then how to deconstruct it and then maneuver within it.

• 10:45Sam 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 V1 or brain tree? Because you said you're not an engineer. What did that look like? Because this is pretty complicated stuff, it seems.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  The first product was for OpenTable. It was just allowing someone to make a reservation, put in their credit card number and have it stored. So to the user, it appeared as if I was entering my credit card information in the OpenTable system, when in fact they're entering it into our system behind the scenes. And so

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Who built it?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  I had a team of engineers, of software engineers do it.

• 11:19Sam Parr?

  And how'd you fund that?

• 11:20Speaker 01

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

• 11:26Shaan 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? Save, create a stash?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  11 months. And I remember at the 11 month mark, my, my portfolio of customers were, uh, were generating, I think it was like 59,000 a month of revenue. And I thought, that's, that's interesting, right? Like, I mean, I'm, I'm coming from this world where my family, we would decide whether to spend our $5 family date budget on going through a car wash or, you know, going to go in and get something at a restaurant. Like, uh, we grew up in so, in such a frugal, uh, environment. And then seeing that it was like $59,000 a month. Now, I'd always been wanting to build, I was, I was not willing to trade my time for money.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  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 zero. For an indefinite period of time, in exchange for the opportunity to make a whole lot more. And that was true. Like, I didn't make any money until I was really 34 years old. I was the entire time was working for basically zero. But that's when I started seeing that what kind of money you could make in payments on this residual revenue basis.

• 12:41Shaan Puri?

  The 59,000, that was what you were getting as your residuals? So that's what the company was giving you?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  The company was, and they were giving me a cut. Yeah.

• 12:47Shaan Puri?

  And so you're getting a cut of that. And so you, you're saying these things where you're like, I knew I didn't want to trade time for money. Or like, I wanted to like, do the biggest like 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 wisdom to think that way.

• 13:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's pretty profound.

• 13:11Shaan 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 these other like, you know, by other technologists or, you know, you know, business sort of like mentors. So where is this coming from? Did you read? And even this like $100 bill trick, like, you know, did you read like, how to think and grow rich? Or like, what, did you, did you read any biographies or books that like change your way? Or how the heck did you do this as a small farm boy to like, get this type of thinking in your brain?

• 13:41Speaker 01

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

• 13:46Sam Parr?

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

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I've probably read over 100, maybe even 200 biographies at this point. And like, for example, I would go on deep dives of trying to understand certain world history events like World War II. And so one interesting biography I read is of a gentleman Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was trying to assassinate Hitler. And so you understand World War II, and he was deeply religious. You understand World War II and Germany and Nazism through the frame of this individual and his plans to go about and his observations about what other people were doing in the community. And so I found like these, these biographies providing

• 14:35Speaker 01

  This backdoor on how to understand events as they were told to me in school. In school, you have this highly compressed version of history of like, all right, everybody just go on the same page if we understand these big things that happened. But you really miss out on the nuance. And we all know how flawed historical accounts are because of just the nature of humans and the way people write history. And so these biographies helped me start to piece together an understanding of reality that was much more nuanced and sometimes contrary to primary narratives. And so it invites me to always reject the first narrative that's offered and understand

• 15:20Speaker 01

  it not for a factual statement, but for a wishful attempt to be understood, to be accepted.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

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

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Well, on the, on the lower end, it was $7 million. I had built out my spreadsheet model and assumed a certain rate of interest and 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, just if it's time, if I'm writing or something. Then if I do something in the world, I had mapped out something like 150, 300 million as a basis that would get me started on that path.

• 16:05Sam Parr?

  When you sold when you were 34, right?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:09Sam Parr?

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

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hit 300 billion.

• 16:17Sam 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?

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  You don't seem like a victory dance kind of guy.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Wait a second.

• 16:37Sam Parr?

  But true.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. That is very true.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  It's so burning because you know it's bigger than what you realize, but you don't know in what ways. And so 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. And I think now, looking back now, even my most

• 17:20Speaker 01

  aggressive expectations on how life would change weren't even close to how significantly my reality would change over the years with that event.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Well, what do you mean? What changed?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I mean, your your relationship with the world fundamentally changes.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  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 point 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.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Somebody shared with me is Larry Bird. I don't know if this is 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 up 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. Second time it happens. And everyone's quiet, assuming Larry's gonna pick up the bill. He does. Third time, it's just like, of course Larry's gonna pick this up and probably take it somewhere else. And so Larry, from his perspective, was just like, yeah. 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

• 19:05Speaker 01

  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, um, I think anyone who's experienced fame or anything of the sort, uh, there are these underlying dynamics of human attractions, which are just a reality for everybody. And, uh, yeah, it would have been helpful, I think, thinking back, uh, if I could have spoken to somebody and if they said, hey, like, let me just share five really important things with you on what it means to have money and how you can best navigate this because it's taken me some time to learn.

• 19:38Shaan 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 five things? But give us three at least.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Uh, one is, uh, transparency of intent. You know, when, when you're with somebody,

• 19:58Speaker 01

  it's very important that you establish why you're doing what you're doing and, um, the roles you're going to play with each other. If it's ambiguous, then it creates complications in your relationship. And so, um, it's a, it's unpleasant for anyone to be surprised in a relationship of what somebody really wants in a relationship. So just transparency, like, uh, we're doing this in these conditions. Um,

• 20:26Speaker 01

  two, I'd say that, um,

• 20:32Speaker 01

  money is not a, a resource that is valuable for, necessarily for the things that life to acquire, is most valuable for the time it creates, that you can solve problems with money.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And, uh, so utilize it wisely, not on acquiring frivolous things, but on solving fundamental problems of time. And, and then three is, um, there's a weird psychological relationship with it where, uh, you're not that and it is not you. And to have an identity independent of that because it can get very confusing if you don't maintain those clear boundaries.

• 21:19Sam Parr?

  What did you, so I know that I read that you invested $100 million into your fund, which you guys have invested in all types of cool stuff and it seems like you've had some really good outcomes. 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, like where would it be? Like just boring index funds and bonds. It was Sean for a long time. He was like heavy into crypto and heavy cash. What about you?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  It depends on what your objectives are. I mean, I think good advice for me at that point 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 going to be illiquid. So there's been times over the past couple of 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 two is that like the movement into Westfund 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 example,

• 22:32Speaker 01

  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's too acidic? We need carbon capture blank. We need, you know, whatever the problem is. As I wanted

• 23:15Speaker 01

  to invest in companies that would basically serve as the foundation of building blocks for humanity. Of building this infrastructure so we could actually engineer with 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, whatnot. And that actually was true. Ginkgo Bio worked one of my first investments. I ended up working on the mRNA vaccine. But it was just this idea of like, if we've

• 23:52Speaker 01

  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 break even, some of these are profitable. And so I wanted to do this because Brain Tree Venmo was really nice to teach about software engineering.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  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 PhD entrepreneurs across the range of all these different scientific disciplines.

• 24:51Sam 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 had bought that for 28 million, I think, like only five, only like five or six or seven years into Brain Tree, like pretty early into Brain Tree's existence. Did you pay mostly cash for that? I mean, how did you finance that deal? And what do you think that that's worth now? Because you keep saying Brain Tree Venmo as if like Venmo is as powerful or as valuable as Brain Tree.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I don't know the current values. I mean, I sold the company several years ago. I know it's very viable, and so is Brain Tree. And so this was a decision I made when, when I did sell Brain Tree Venmo for 800 million, 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. And I could have stuck with the company and we could have made more, been more valuable. But it was like, okay, so if I do this, it's 300 million. That's a good enough starting base to go off into these other things. And because they were going to be in the areas of, you know, deep tech. I knew they would take a decade or so to start. It was just going to be a long startup process.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And so, and looking at the, you know, 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.

• 26:16Shaan Puri?

  And so you've now, let's say that's 10 years ago, 10, 11 years ago.

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  We're basically 11 years and a hundred million dollars in. And you probably at the beginning had a bunch of things that were bets that you thought were interesting. Might pan out predictions, maybe of what, what the world might look like in 2022.

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  Can you, as best as you can, give us the summary of like, you know, what were you right about, what were you wrong about? And where do you think the, the big sort of like, um, promise is now?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  The venture fund has been remarkably successful, especially as a newbie into this, into this world.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  The number of good investments relative to bad investments is extremely high. So I'd say we've done remarkably well on the deep tech side with synthetic biology, genomics, nanotech. On kernel, I think we nailed the technology selection. Initially, there was, the, the idea was, could we make brain measurement ubiquitous in society? That we can pretty, we can measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way, except for our brains. We don't have good technology.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  And explain, explain what kernel is. People, listeners probably don't know what kernel is.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

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

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And so if you think about, uh, like, so wearables are a familiar concept. We put this thing on our fingers or our wrists. And it gives us data like, uh, 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.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  We currently can't do that for our brain. So if I have a question, um, am I in the early stages of cognitive decline? Uh, do I have anxiety? And so what kind of anxiety? Do I have depression or what kind of depression? Uh, 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.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Uh, so much happens in our brain that we are unaware of. And there's so much data in our brain that is informative for what we want to do. And so this, what we, Colonel, what we've done is we've built a neuroimaging helmet. Like you said, Sam, you just put it on your head. It takes one 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, uh, 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 and they can be like, hey, Sam, how was ketamine?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know, I'm like in a different dimension and I think I feel better, but I'm not sure. But it's kind of like, you know, how was your sleep for the past week? Uh, it's an extremely imprecise answer. And you're going on this subjective self-assessment. Your memories fade and 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 a big 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

• 30:15Speaker 01

  market fit of finding the first application for the technology.

• 30:18Sam Parr?

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

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Blueprint.brianjohnson.co. What, sorry, Sam. One final comment on this, just, or to make this maybe, an attempt to make this intuitive. When people begin experiencing cognitive decline, and this may be true, what happens with intoxication with alcohol too. We just did an alcohol study. When your brain is impaired, like we just saw this with alcohol, with moderate alcohol, your brain compensates for the deficiency. And so you can't pick up the impairment, but you can, you can record it and identify it. But at a certain level of intoxication, your brain can no longer make up for that impairment. And so then it reveals itself in impairment and behavior.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And so that is true with somebody who may be experiencing cognitive decline. You may be along the path of cognitive decline, and you may say, I feel great, I seem great, I'm moving great, everything's great, but you just can't pick it up. And so it's the value of like, 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? And wouldn't it be neat if everyone did it and it was just incorporated into standard of care across all things and how we dealt with our mental health and wellness? Yeah, all the above.

• 31:45Shaan 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. All right, you know, well, I don't, don't have a way to sober up.

• 31:55Sam Parr?

  Have you guys ever seen on 23andMe or something like that? They, they used to have like an all, so I guess Alzheimer's is genetic and like, there's a particular type of gene that you could have that increases the likelihood that you're going to have it. And 23andMe used to do this thing where they said, all right, 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 had it and like I did flip out and then they eventually removed that. I believe, I don't think they have it anymore because they said people were just flipping out too much. And one of the reasons they removed it is they tell you that they, you have this and they're like, good luck, like maybe put like frames, like they're like, there's all these, like, I don't know if they said this, but like, people were like, if you like, have frames of pictures upside down. And so you have to like, work harder to like, figure out who's in the picture.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  That's going to like, help you like, get a stronger brain. But in general, when I was researching, I was like, oh shit, I have this gene, what I have to do? People were like, uh, good luck, you know, just like, I guess, hopefully you'll be all right. But there, there wasn't like that many things. So yeah, what, can you actually fix any of these things?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  We think about it. So we are accustomed to the idea of society having engineering standards. So we know that when we buy an appliance, it's going to fit through our front door. We don't have to go measure our front door, look at the dimensions of the website and be like, is this going to fit or not? Because we know that the door size is standard, the appliance size is standard, it can be moved into my house. That's true for everything we, you know, so many things we do in life, we just know these standards. When we agree, we build societies, we have millions of invisible standards.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  We have very few standards about our brains because we can't measure it. We know that the timing that's appropriate for green light, red, a yellow light and red light on lights, because we know the reaction time of humans to lights, we know braking power, we know people's stop times. So we do have data, we can actually determine that. We do not have engineering standards around the brain.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Depression, anxiety, cognitive decline because we have no measurement. And so fundamentally, the way to, how could we actually create a step change function change in the world and how we deal with our minds? You begin with measurement. And once you have numbers, science begins with numbers and counting. And then ecosystems form around that. So genetics, I think, is kind of like that. It's not as numerical as what the brain measurement could be. But that was a fundamental thing is if you give everyone the numbers, you give them the opportunity to build

• 34:29Speaker 01

  solutions around those problems.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  This data is wrong every freaking time.

• 34:36Speaker 04

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

• 34:42Speaker 03

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

• 34:50Speaker 04

  HubSpot, grow better.

• 34:54Sam Parr?

  So this blueprint, your blog, I don't know what you're calling it, your experiment, it's pretty wild because, you know, I saw what you used to look like. You weren't bad looking, but you definitely were thicker than you are now. Like your jawline is like crazy cut right now. And like, you just look way different than you used to do. I mean, it's pretty fascinating and, you know, Braintree is amazing. You've built something amazing. This blueprint thing is like way crazier and unique and odd. And it's awesome. And like, I've read it and you're basically, if I remember correctly, like I've been following it for a bunch of months and you do regular updates. And at first you were, I think you got down to like 6% body fat. And you're like, okay, I think 6% is a little bit too low. Let's go to seven and a half percent.

• 35:38Sam Parr?

  And then you're also like eating this like nutty pudding, I think you called it. So you have a vegan diet and you're like just eating like nuts and like tons of vitamins and like what appears to be not tasty, boring food. Like you've gone all in and the premise behind this is I think you had this blog post that said like, late night Brian no longer gets to make decisions or something like that. Like, you know, you're, you're, you're at home at night and you're hungry and you would go and snack and eat bad food. And you're like, I don't know, 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. What, why are you doing this? And what have you found to be actually meaningful versus not meaningful?

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  And by the way, you're doing, you're doing the knees over toes guy thing. I noticed you're like walking backwards. You're doing the tibialis raises. This guy was on to something. You're doing it, it looked like.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  I am. Yeah, I mean, 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 pay, if you pose the 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 up with and the 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 anti-aging and whatnot.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  That's all true, but really it's a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence. And so 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 7:00 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

• 37:52Speaker 01

  the Brian who wakes up in the morning, he exercises, he does really well eating, same with lunch Brian. But this 5:00 PM, 10:00 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 played with this blog post of like, all Bryans got together. We had discussion. We're like, Brian, Evening Brian, you're making this thing awful. And so I just, I revoked his authority from 5:00 PM to 10:00 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

• 38:37Speaker 01

  is I now only eat.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  What my body asks for according to data and science.

• 38:47Sam 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?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  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 be clear, the starting point, 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, ah, 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.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And it's a combination of how you feel, what you want, like, you know, 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 zero authority. My body has a hundred percent authority. So it, the measurement of my heart and liver and lungs and DNA and vasodilation patterns. It directly asks for what it wants via data. And I can never override it. And so in this idea, so the thought experiment is if you could achieve perfect health and maintain perfect health, but it, but it required you to accept

• 40:21Speaker 01

  basically what an algorithm was doing to deliver what you eat and when you eat. Would you do it?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And then in that thought experiment, Sam, and I've had this conversation hundreds of times now. The reaction people have is almost this fear response. And their conscious mind panics. And it's like, I see it like a computer screen scrolling of like infinite number of questions. But like, what if Cheetos, pizza, party, seventy 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 possible?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  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 going to lead to a predictable 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

• 41:45Speaker 01

  force creating all things on earth? I think this one could be on that scale of a societal understanding that our unquestioned

• 41:57Speaker 01

  granting of authority to our conscious minds. Is it the root of all of our problems in society? And so the contemplation here is 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 in the world. The same thing is going on 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 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.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  That I think the more interesting starting point is 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. Let me look at myself and say, what is my own internal chaos in war? And can I even try to resolve conflict within myself?

• 42:55Shaan Puri?

  There's a, there's a part of me that's like, wow, this is, this is incredible. I'm going to the blueprint site. I'm looking at the, the routine. I'm looking at the photo. I mean, you're completely shredded. This is amazing. So there's part of me that's like, wow, this is incredible. And then there's a 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, where it's like, oh, wow, this is not only just great for your health, this is transcendence for the race and the society. And I'm like, okay, maybe I could see how that's true. But it, I mean, it does seem like you're not actually, it's not that your body's deciding, your brain has just decided I'm going to use data about what my body wants instead of impulse, you know, whatever my impulse driven, you know, brain was trying to do before. But like, I guess regardless, when I look at this, I'm like, this is amazing.

• 43:40Shaan Puri?

  But man, you know, this looks like a full-time PhD, a full-time effort plus PhD level intelligence, plus a bunch of money to be able to do this.

• 43:52Sam Parr?

  I think he says his cost, by the way, his cost, I think, say like three grand a month. Like, it's not like crazy.

• 43:56Shaan Puri?

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

• 44:23Speaker 01

  The first shot on this, maybe just a reflection. Why is it in society, do we?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Accept this ferocious system to invite everyone to commit self harm. Like when you walk into the grocery store, I mean, it is violence, 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 outmatched. And the same thing when we're sized up against algorithms. It's a totally unfair match in society. We just gleefully allow this 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.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  And I think it's a, uh, it's just bad for everyone to be in this game. But then in terms of like, uh, the basics for people, um, it's really understanding that, um,

• 45:33Speaker 01

  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 the 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 inaccessible and then 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.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  The, um, 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.

• 46:26Sam Parr?

  But, but what about the, the, like the specific true, are there any like truths or any like hypotheses that you believe to be true? Like for, uh, you know, you're like, well, I, even though you said, you did a great analogy with the door frame, how it's standard and how bodies aren't necessarily like that. But like, has going vegan like made a huge difference to you? Is there anything about like, for example, a lot of us sit at chairs, you know, 80 hours a week, uh, staring at screens and we work really hard. Is there any like, where you're like, oh, you know, actually 30 hours.

• 46:55Shaan Puri?

  He's in a piston squat right now doing this whole interview.

• 47:00Sam Parr?

  Are you like, well, you know, like 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, like hunter and gatherers worked only 30 hours a week. And that kind of seems like an ideal number. Is there anything like?

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  Just sapiens, no homo, okay?

• 47:15Sam Parr?

  My bad, my bad.

• 47:18Sam Parr?

  I'm inclusive. So, yeah, is there any like, is there any truths that you've discovered for you that, you know, it maybe is not right for everyone else?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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 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 type rated 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.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  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. You know, I study it, I get typed in it, my error rate's just gonna be very high. And so, and then three is that

• 48:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And it's also the value here is not debating is a vegan diet better than a carnivore diet? To me, 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 everyone else talking about this is, one, is there a engineered solution that actually solves this from a system perspective? And two, 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, I mean, I'm vegan for ethical and moral reasons.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  But I'm not vegan because I think it's, it's, um, you know, I didn't add labor 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, a 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. Cause then people immediately say, first they say eggs are bad for you. Then they say they're good for you. No one knows. And they just stop at that point. When in reality, there are more right answers than wrong in terms of doing this in a methodical way.

• 50:14Sam Parr?

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

• 50:43Speaker 01

  I, I think Sam, I would say the,

• 50:48Speaker 01

  the person most happiest is me. You know, like I, I had terribly complicated emotions looking at myself in my worst years. It just was so, I felt so much shame and guilt and lack of respect. Because I just felt out of control and powerless.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And now, when I look at myself, I have such positive emotions that I'm stable, that things are reliable, that I trust myself, you know, I trust the systems that are built. It has transformed my relationship with myself. It transforms what I think about, what I can become as a person, the relationships I have. So it's just, it's hard to articulate how significant of a psychological shift has been for me in my own understanding, my own identity.

• 51:44Shaan 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, you said something like, it was a bit of a cliffhanger. You were like, you know, willpower is not the answer. You said, you know, the, the good thing that could come of this is not, oh, you listen to this podcast and you're motivated to go, you know, go eat two pounds of veggies tomorrow because, you know, you'll revert and you're up against this, you know, the grocery stores, this sugar casino, basically. And then, you know, you're, you're, all your social media is just this like algorithm designed to, to hook you. And, you know, you are sort of

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  David vs. Goliath here, or I guess bad analogy, David won. But like, you know, you were powerless compared to the onslaught that's coming at you, trying, trying to get you to make a certain decision. And, you know, do you, but you didn't quite say, you're like, you know, there's a system. But okay, if I take that, I'm like, tomorrow I wake up, Brian's gone. I'm like, all right, today's about a system. And I'm going to be like, wait, what the fuck 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, 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, is it, I got to fire evening, evening Sean? Because I had the same problem. I have

• 53:10Shaan Puri?

  the same problem now that you, you describe you had then. What do you, what would you say is the actionable way forward that, that sort of is the sustainable, successful path?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yep. I'd say three things. One, fire the worst version of yourself. So whatever you do, whatever it is, like whatever time, however the circumstances are, identify that person and fire him.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  So be successful at that one act. Uh, step number two is make a firm commitment on a one step towards a system. So for example, for me, that's calories. I eat 1,977 calories per day. That's it.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Not anymore. And that is my absolute budget and I cannot go over it. And so set a firm boundary. Uh, that that's what you're going to do and you're going to stick with it. And then three is you can start refining the details of what those calories are and when you eat it. You know, you want to pack more nutrition in over time, but just acknowledge that you yourself are powerless to win in a, in a moment by a moment willpower game. And structurally set up the path to win. Fire the worst version of yourself to get that uh muscle to build. Set very clear boundaries and then you can, you can refine. Don't worry about taking on the whole thing all at once.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  But just this baby step and then you'll build this muscle like my 17 year old is he, he does the identical things I do. And you know, Sam, you came back, you're like, how many times have you made infractions? And like, you know, so he went through this whole thing of how many times did he have to make the error? Of eating too much or making an exception or breaking the protocol or whatever. And it was something like, I don't know, I, I forget what we talked about. It was like something in the 30s range, you know, where like in the morning he'd be like, dad, I failed. Like, fine, fine, right? Like, but he finally got to the same point where I did, where you can get to that moment and you're tempted to do something and you can model out exactly what how it's going to feel to do that thing.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And 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. And pretty soon the simulation becomes so clear in your mind. You're like, yeah, no, like there's nothing in that series of events where I win. Like literally nowhere. Why am I going to do it? And then it just becomes a point where it, you know, people ask me like, do you have cheat days? And like, no, like I, a cheat day sounds awful to me. It sounds like the worst feeling in the world to be full and to be regretful. Like, no, that's the last thing in the world I want to do. These baby steps and then you build up your, your muscles and then it like soon just becomes a way of being.

• 56:05Sam Parr?

  You are, you're, you're clearly incredibly unique. You have, you're very insightful, you're very wise. You're a person who like, you talk to me and I'm like, oh man, this guy has a lot of things figured out. But you're also, you're like very precise and you're like, I followed the data. Were you a good manager, you think? Did people, did people like working with you and for you? Or did they find you to be just like too challenging because you're so, you, you, you're just so very unique? Yeah.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  I mean, 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. Because it's very hard to get someone's real opinion of you. Because it's difficult for someone to be honest. But what we all know, when we go home from work and we're talking to our significant others, like that's the truth serum in action, you know, like where we really say something. And so 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.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  But I certainly, I care deeply about being a high value person in these people's lives. And so not only, you know, a good steward of the business, but a

• 57:32Speaker 01

  creating an environment where they become their best selves.

• 57:36Sam Parr?

  Was that a learned behavior? But was that like a learned behavior? Like, were you like, well, if I treat people right, I'm going to get my outcome. And, or was it just like you, was this like, is this how you were raised? Like what motivated that?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just feels like the right way to do things. I mean, like, if you think about like more structurally in society, we accept this exchange.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  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

• 58:10Speaker 01

  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 to the grave. And the things that may live on may include our reputation or like our contributions 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,

• 58:54Speaker 01

  which is barely imaginable? You would say

• 59:02Speaker 01

  basically,

• 59:05Speaker 01

  don't spend your life points recklessly. If you can live long enough, there may be a new wave here. So like blueprint, I'm trying to do two things. I'm trying to maximally slow my rate of aging because entropy is very strong. You're not going to beat it. So I'm currently aging at point seven six. So I, for every 365 days a year, I age 277. So I basically get like October, November, December for free.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  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 aging bank account, then society could shift. Instead of us saying, we're going to be a martyr for wealth or status or whatever.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Would it change in that balance? And would it more be about humans? So we become obsessed about what we can become as species, not what our technology can become.

• 1:00:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. And let me ask you, you, like, a lot of people who listen to this are entrepreneurs. And I think one of the cool things when we have somebody like you come on versus like, you know, our buddy who's doing like a vending machine arbitrage and like, you know, is he tells a different story, which 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, right? That's one sort of inspiring story. This is a different one, which is like, you know, spend your creative and entrepreneurial energies on things that really matter, both to you and your lifespan, as well as like, you know, just the 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

• 1:00:45Shaan Puri?

  solve X or this breakthrough just happened and really nobody's doing Y? Or if I had more time, I'd be doing, you know, this other thing. I'll give you an example. We had Palmer Lucky on and we're like, cool, you did Oculus, now you're doing Android. And he was like, yeah, but before that I was playing with this idea of like reforming the prison system this way, or creating this like oil-based food that's like zero calorie food that would just run straight through you. Like, he had these like crazy ideas. He's like, I think somebody could go do these things. Do you have any ideas like that, that are like, you know, I think somebody could go do X?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I do a lot of them, but I would say I'm really obsessed with one. That's goal alignment or cooperation. At the basis of everything that exists on planet Earth, there's a singular question at play. Can I cooperate? And 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 a whole other thing, right? The negative self-talk, like all the stuff that goes on in my brain, that's an entirely different project. But blueprint is applicable to climate change. It's the same thing. If we were to measure the world with millions of data points and

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  let the earth speak.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  And then we work within those constraints.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  That's the solution for how we can coexist with a healthy planet versus 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. So just like we're committing self harm to ourselves, we're committing harm to the earth collectively. It's the same problem. And 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. And so the idea like this AI alignment problem we have, we've talked about now, like between AI and humans, like what? Like, we don't have goal alignment within ourselves, let alone between humans and then humans and AI, it's

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  a, it's kind of a crazy notion. Then, you know, like, if you look at the number of disconnects on that entire stream, and the starting point in most people's assumptions is, let me start with what I can see and how I can change the people's behavior versus looking in. And 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?

• 1:03:19Shaan Puri?

  So what's an example of that? So like you, you talked about basically like goal alignment first with your body, right? And 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? And what would be like a more specific like point of attack or like product or service or whatever that would be created along those lines?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the brain, like, so I would love to tackle my brain next. And that's what Kernel is. If I have this device and I can measure my brain, if you think about it in like what we eat today as a dietary input to our bodies, like think about what is my diet for my brain, like the news sources, the social media sources, my friends, my environment, we have no idea what's happening. We don't, we haven't, we don't have it measured. And so is it possible that we basically eat 90% junk food in a given day to our brains? Because that's just the way society is structured. And so I'd love to address that of getting the baseline of where my brain. And then more broadly, I've been talking to several people who

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Specialists in math and computational methodologies to try to figure out, are there 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, between humans, AI and the planet? And so, you know, I can do this with my body. It's a, it's a pretty straightforward thing to do now, but it's just going to get more complicated than more agents you have in the game.

• 1:04:53Sam Parr?

  So I've like worked with Tim Ferriss in the past and like, I remember I would ask like, we would just, an example is we'd be walking our dogs together and I'd be like, oh, Tim, that's a cool dog leash. And he'd be like, oh, this dog leash, you know, the reason it's interesting is made of horse's hair, which is good for the dog for this reason and that reason. And I found it in Japan. And then we had like biology on the podcast, you know, and he was like, he would go through these like, we were just asking like, what do you have for breakfast? And he would just give us this like complex answer. And it was actually pretty profound. Palmer Lucky was kind of like that too. And you are 100% in that same ballpark where I make a stupid joke and I ask a dumb question, or we ask something that seems straightforward and simple, and you give like a pretty profound answer. And what's interesting is you actually do this thing that Elon does where you ask him a question and most people don't do this.

• 1:05:39Sam Parr?

  They pause. They don't, they'll actually not talk for like 10 seconds and they just think. And I actually, I try not to interrupt because most people are uncomfortable with that. One time I interrupted you where you got silent. By the way, the key to good interviews, you don't interrupt that. So I kind of screwed that up. But you, you like are really thoughtful and like, in one way it's exhausting because like everything you say is like profound and I'm like thinking about it. And I'm like, well, I want to ask you all these questions about that too now and this and this. On the other hand, it's, it's refreshing. I mean, it's just enlightening. You're just, you're, you're just an interesting human and you, your, your intensity is, I can see it being off putting for some people, but for me, like I'm, I'm, I'm into it. You're, you're just a very unique person.

• 1:06:22Sam Parr?

  I think it's like really interesting to hear your perspective, even I don't think you've said anything that I agree or that I disagree with, but maybe you have. And it's like, well, that's okay, but you're just like an original thinker. I dig it.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam. Appreciate that.

• 1:06:35Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:06:41Sam Parr?

  That's just a Turing machine, isn't it?

• 1:06:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, one of them looks like a SodaStream or something.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  That'd be funny. Like, got me. Like, you know, Coke and Pepsi and.

• 1:06:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Is that a Red Bull buy?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, I, last week, a couple of weeks ago, I, we bought a medical grade, hospital grade ultrasound machine. And so it, part of this has just been buying the kind of equipment that allows us to do the stuff we're trying to do. And so, for example, ultrasound, so if you look at the, the pyramid of measurement,

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  wearables are like part of the first category. And then you get to biofluids like blood draws and, and, you know, urine and whatever else. Imaging is an entirely different quality class. And so if you want to get really good data on, on yourself, it's ultrasound and MRI and, you know, like stuff we're doing at Kernel. And so we really had to build up this infrastructure. So one of the reasons why it's so expensive is we've basically built out like a mini clinic hospital here with all the stuff we have. And that's where a lot of the

• 1:07:49Shaan Puri?

  Is that just in your house?

• 1:07:52Shaan Puri?

  And are there like four dudes just kind of like that are your physicians that are monitoring you at all times? Or what's going to, what's your team? What's your stack for, for people with?

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Shaan Puri?

  The body stuff?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  For the ultrasound, we have five sonographers. So one sonographer specializes in the heart. One does lungs, pancreas, liver, kidney. Another one does muscle skeletal. Another one does Doppler for the brain. And so, for example, I, we just did, one of the ways to quantify working out is we're using ultrasound to measure tendons, ligaments, like all the component parts of my joints, ankles, knees, hips, elbows, shoulders. And then we implement this, these exercise regimes and then we look at the changes. So like, are they working? If so, what degree? But everything we do is quantified. And so it's not like, oh, this thing makes me feel

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  better. Feelings rarely matter with anything we do. And so, yeah, this, the hardware and the, the specific team. And so just like we have five sonographers to run the ultrasound machine, we have specialists in lungs, specialists in the heart, specialists in other areas. So the team is like 25 or so maybe now, all together that have different specialties.

• 1:09:08Sam Parr?

  Man, this is crazy. Sean's answer to that question is like, I just got like 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 machine?

• 1:09:22Shaan Puri?

  See, I don't need all this measurement. Like, if you just export my DoorDash history, it'll tell you how I'm aging. And I'm aging like a Greyhound right now.

• 1:09:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, does Chick-fil-A make you older or younger?

• 1:09:35Shaan Puri?

  What are your thoughts on ranch?

• 1:09:40Shaan Puri?

  Dude, Brian, this has been awesome. Thanks for, thanks for coming on. We've been, we talked about you way back as like this awesome guy, and it's amazing to get to meet you and hear some of the stories and ask, ask our questions firsthand. So appreciate you coming on.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.