November 28, 2022
Bryan Johnson: How He Is Getting Biologically Younger, Selling His Company for $800 Million, and More | My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri
- Check out My First Million’s Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- Figuring out the system within the world of payments in 2007—3 things businesses were looking for:
- Honesty—be honest, trustworthy, and transparent
- Education—give the customer a clear understanding of their options—help them choose the right company
- Reliable service—be reliable and competent; give an amazing experience
- 3 important things on what it means to have money and how to best navigate this:
- Transparency of intent— establish why you are doing what you are doing and the roles you are going to play with each other
- Utilize it wisely— not on acquiring frivolous things but on solving fundamental problems of your time
- Have an identity independent of your wealth
- Cash is King — liquidity is really important for entrepreneurs
- Moving into science; could we build a global biological immune system?
- We have a software immune system, but we do not have these same capabilities in biology, genetics, etc.
- The idea behind Kernel — make brain measurements mainstream
- “We have the technology to measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way except for our brains.” – Bryan Johnson
- Kernel Flow uses light to measure brain activity and the brain activity patterns are very informative
- How to make humanity thrive?
- Blueprint is the best answer he came up with and the best practical idea
- Blueprint is not about health, wellness, and anti-aging—like it can seem from the outside perspective. It’s a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence
- The thought experiment behind Blueprint—would you accept an algorithm telling you what you eat and when you eat to obtain perfect health?
- This is a big deviation from how society is structured right now—our minds have unquestioned authority in deciding what we eat
- When we walk into the grocery store, “… we’re sized up against algorithms. It’s a totally unfair match in a society where we just gleefully allow this self-harm and so the individual is pitted against algorithms and capitalism… like, good luck individual.”– Bryan Johnson
Intro
- Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) is the founder/CEO of Kernel & Blueprint, and founder of OSFund & Braintree
- Bryan Johnson joins Shaan Puri and Sam Parr to talk about bootstrapping Braintree, making brain data mainstream via Kernel and his Blueprint blog—where he’s trying to reverse his biological age
- Host: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP), Sam Parr (@TheSamParr)
What’s My Age Again?
- Bryan is trying to reverse his biological age (your organs, blood, etc.) faster than the chronological age (how old you are) goes up
- Could he live forever?
- He is blogging and sharing everything along the way (Blueprint blog)
- He is 45 years old (chronological age)
- Biologically, he is a few hundred different ages
- The age of your heart is represented by a few dozen markers. The same thing goes for other parts of the body
- We are actually a collection of a very large number of markers because different parts of the body age at different speeds
- Life choices and environment also affect that
Background Starting W/Braintree
- When Bryan was 21, he decided to do something meaningful for humanity
- He grew up reading a bunch of biographies (over 200 biographies), especially historical biographies
- The books helped him gain an understanding of reality that was much more nuanced and sometimes contrary to the mainstream narrative
- “Always reject the first narrative that’s offered and understand it not for a factual statement but as a wishful attempt to be accepted.” – Bryan Johnson
- Eventually, he found a job selling credit card processing services door-to-door and became their No.1 salesperson in a couple of months
- The big startup opportunity
- He had enough money from selling door-to-door to hire a team of software engineers to start Braintree (11 months of working)
- Paypal had grown up during the Internet but they kinda stopped innovating for a few years; developers didn’t have the tools they liked
- Braintree landed a big deal early on with OpenTable
- OpenTable started accepting credit cards to increase the likelihood that the person would show up for the reservation
- However, they didn’t want to store the credit card information because they had compliance issues
- Braintree built a custom solution that allowed them to store credit card data on their side
- They built the payment system from scratch. After OpenTable, they expanded it to more general merchants. They got clients like AirBnB and Uber
- They grew very quickly and got to the point where high-tech companies wanted to use their software
System Deconstruction and Reconfiguration (Door-To-Door Sales)
- Selling credit card processing services was out of financial necessity but it introduced Bryan to the world of payments
- The thing that he enjoyed the most about sales was getting in and figuring out the system
- It was never about doing the high-pressure sales tactics, trying to manipulate, perfect a skill, etc.
- The world of payments in 2007 was defined by distrust
- When a business owner got their monthly credit card invoice, it was so complicated that they had no idea what was going on
- The providers made it even more complicated in how they report
- The whole situation created an opportunity for people to be deceptive and create high commissions
- Figuring out the system within the world of payments in 2007—3 things businesses were looking for:
- Honesty—be honest, trustworthy, and transparent
- Education—give the customer a clear understanding of their options—help them choose the right company
- Reliable service—be reliable and competent; give an amazing experience
- Once you figure out the system, it was easy to solve
- The moment you walk in into a store, they know you are not a customer (how you walk, the way you dress, etc.), you are there to sell something and they immediately hate you
- How did Bryan overcome this animosity from the get-go?
- He offered them 100$ for one minute of their time—and if they say no to him, they could keep it
- How did he sell?
- Telling them the basic principles
- Honesty, transparency
- They don’t want to deal with deception, machine leases, changing everything again and again
- System deconstruction and reconfiguration – the same skillset he tried to build again and again via every business he built, walking into a new world, trying to figure out what is going on, trying to deconstruct the system and maneuver within it
Financial Plans and Life Changes
- He didn’t have a long list of things he wanted to buy
- Even his most aggressive expectations of how life would change weren’t even close
- Your relationship with the world fundamentally changes (power dynamics)
- 3 important things on what it means to have money and how to best navigate this:
- Transparency of intent— establish why you are doing what you are doing and the roles you are going to play with each other
- Utilize it wisely— not on acquiring frivolous things but on solving fundamental problems of your time
- Have an identity independent of your wealth
What Does Bryan Do With His Money?
- Cash is King — liquidity is really important for entrepreneurs
- Moving into science; could we build a global biological immune system?
- We have a software immune system, but we do not have these same capabilities in biology, genetics, etc.
- We can’t deploy millions of people who can engineer biology at a moment’s notice
- Bryan wants to invest in companies that would serve as the foundational building blocks for humanity — building an infrastructure to engineer atoms, molecules, and organisms
- It would be amazing if we had these capabilities in case of another pandemic— the biological infrastructure of detection, vaccine creation, remediation, etc.
- Key companies Bryan invested in:
- Ginkgo Bioworks —one of his first investments, the engineering of microorganisms (mRNA vaccine)
- NuMat — metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)
- Catalog — storing information in DNA— nature’s hard drive
- Bryan wanted to understand the engineering of science so it was a great educational experience for him to go deep into the trenches with many different Ph. D.s
Kernel—Brain Measurements for Everyone!
- The idea behind Kernel — make brain measurements mainstream
- “We have the technology to measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way except for our brains.” – Bryan Johnson
- Wearables are a familiar concept; we wear them on our bodies and they give us data like sleep stats, respiration rate, heart rate, cardiovascular expenditure, etc.
- These data are easy to acquire and we use this information to better understand our health
- Currently, we can’t do that for our brains— Are you in the early stages of cognitive decline? Do you have anxiety, what kind? Do you have depression? What is your emotional reaction to things?
- “Most people think that their self-awareness is basically the center system that captures their brain. Because I am conscious and because I can feel when I have a headache it is a robust enough sensor system to do it and that is not correct.” – Bryan Johnson
- So much happens in our brain that we are not aware of and there’s so much data in our brain that is informative
- Kernel built a neural imaging helmet called the Kernel Flow
- Kernel Flow uses light to measure brain activity and the brain activity patterns are very informative
- What does ketamine do to your brain? We can’t yet give a precise answer
- Subjective self-assessment, your memory state, you don’t really know
- This measurement system is basically meant to standardize the measurement of the brain
- A big part of the challenge was to identify the technology that can be built that makes brain measurement mainstream and find the applications for early markets
- We are accustomed to the idea of society having engineering standards
- We know that when we buy an appliance it’s going to fit through our front door— we know that the door size is standard and the appliance size is standard
- We have millions of invisible standards like these in our society but have very few for our brains because we can’t efficiently measure
- We know the appropriate timing for green, red, and yellow light because we know the reaction time of humans to lights, braking power, stop times
- This is because we have data, and we do not have engineering standards around the brain
- There is no measurement of cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, etc.
- We begin with measurement, and once you have numbers, ecosystems form around that
- With numbers, there is an opportunity to build solutions around those problems
Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint Blog
- How to make humanity thrive?
- Blueprint is the best answer he came up with and the best practical idea
- Blueprint is not about health, wellness, and anti-aging—like it can seem from the outside perspective. It’s a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence
- The thought experiment behind Blueprint—would you accept an algorithm telling you what you eat and when you eat to obtain perfect health?
- The measurements of our heart, liver, lungs, and DNA methylation patterns directly ask for what we need via data
- Bryan wonders why we accept this ferocious social system that asks everyone to commit self-harm
- Walking into the grocery store is violence via the representation of advertising and ingredients and sugar
- When we walk into the grocery store, “… we’re sized up against algorithms. It’s a totally unfair match in a society where we just gleefully allow this self-harm and so the individual is pitted against algorithms and capitalism… like, good luck individual.”– Bryan Johnson
- Trying to win this game with willpower is a losing game
- Bryan had a problem with overeating. Every day and every night at 7 PM he would overeat
- Now he only eats what his body asks for according to data and science
- This is a big deviation from how society is structured right now—our minds have unquestioned authority in deciding what we eat
- Blueprint changes that and gives all the incentives to the body. The mind has zero authority
