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

you said earlier you said i wanted to make a certain amount of money by age thirty what was your number what was your target on the lower end it was seven million dollars 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 i just if it's time like i'm writing or something then if i do something in the world i had mapped out something like a hundred and fifty three hundred million as a a basis that would get me started on that path 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 and you can kinda like tell a little bit more because i and inevitably i'll i'll miss something but you've started a bunch of stuff the most probably the the biggest thing is brain tree i think you bootstrap that right i did it so you bootstrap that sold it for like something like eight hundred million dollars to paypal you guys also bought v which i think is like the greatest acquisition one of the best acquisitions of all time because you bought it for kinda nothing compared to what it is now and then you're you've done a bunch of other things you'd done on kernel which is interesting but you and you have this a fund that's kind of interesting but the thing that i started reading was is your new thing called blueprint which the 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 your and then you have your biological which is it measures bunch of different things like your organs your blood and you're basically 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 and you're blogging and like sharing everything along the is that right great job so there brian what is your chronological age and what is your current biological age i left my mother's womb forty five years ago 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 a few dozen markers you can do the same thing with other parts of the body 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 so i wanna ask you all about this blueprint thing because i think it's amazing but can i ask you a few questions about brain tree first please so brain tree i mean like you know you guys are owned by paypal now another con or another competitor yours i think is 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 kinda you guys kinda took off so i understand like how you're able to bootstrap it bootstrap it once you got to maybe ten million in revenue but how on earth you make something like that from scratch i was i guess i started when i was twenty one 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 that time of 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 twenty one 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 that i might as well i'll be become an entrepreneur i'll make a whole bunch of money by the eight thirty 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've grown up in the small talent basically you know with my grandpa on a farm i didn't meet my i didn't meet an engineer until i was twenty one or twenty two years old so was very much a a farm boy like raising deep really a deeply really a 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 sixty jobs nobody even contemplate hiring me and so i found this job to sell credit card processing services door to door and so i agreed to do it and it was a hundred percent commission and i became the company's number one salesperson in a in a matter of months doing a part time while building my startup and so i just accidentally stumbled the payments and learned there was this big opportunity paypal had grown up during the internet but they had stopped really innovating for a couple years and so developers didn't have the tools they liked and so i started brain tree and we landed a big deal early on with open table they were accepting credit cards as a a form of to increase the elective of the person would show up for the reservation they didn't wanna store the credit card data because they had compliance issues and so we built out a custom solution for them that allowed us to store credit data on our side instead of them so they didn't have the compliance to still accept credit cards and so from scratch we built this payment system first for them that we expanded out to more general merchants and we got a few customers like airbnb github uber we helped uber do their no like the payment experience where you get in the car you arrive your destination you leave the car no exchange of payment information no signing of receipts no printing out receipts if we start doing a few things like that and we really made our headway into high tech companies going very quickly they prefer to use our software you just said up a bunch of things that were all super interesting first of all you're kinda like elon musk without the fame yeah like you had your kind of payments he he had x dot com and paypal you you had your payments thing now you're doing like a brain interface and stuff like that you you you do these moonshot projects trying to live forever that sort of stuff so i think you're you're fasting dude you said something about door 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 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 cut c 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 daughter of sales i would bet on you with any role in my company if you're successful daughter 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 it i guess how do you think about door sales and how did you become the number one when you don't seem like the most you know charismatic you know same guy yeah 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 what you wanna for you i mean it it's i guess the like the one thought on this you know my my kids are nineteen seventeen and thirteen and they're currently going through these important decisions on what they study in school and what they tried to do i'm doing everything i can to help them focus on cs math and physics like these are the tools that you these are the language you wanna be fluent in to be architects in the future and in many ways my choice of doing the door to door sales was just a it was my hacker attempt at paying the bills with a child while i buy time before i start something new and it was out of desperation it was like i was seeking it out and so it was just a and as also case just dealing with the reality of my skills i had grown up and this farm like community deep people that just didn't have any engineering background and so the the thing that i enjoyed the most about the sales was it's not doing a high pressure sales tactics and it's not trying to manipulate somebody it's not trying to perfect the skill it's about getting in and figured out the system like what is really going on and if you if you jump into the role of payments in the year two thousand seven when i started this it was defined by deep dis trust that it was a game where credit card payments is really expensive and when i when a business owner gets their credit card monthly invoice it's so complicated they have no idea what's going on and the providers make it even more complicated in how they report things and so it creates this opportunity for people to be extremely deceptive and create high commissions and so and look at that system opportunity number 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 back company when a reality most companies were mostly the same there was it's very hard to differentiate payments and so two is making that known so again the the customer has a very clear understanding and then three it's just being reliable and and competent like the you know that when the customer tracks with you and your team they say what an amazing experience and so it was once you figure out how the system worked it was very easy to solve and so i would just walk in and like the moment you walk in the store they can tell you're not a customer by the way you're dressed and maybe the way you're walking whatever and they immediately hate you and so you have to overcome this an from the get go and so i would take out a hundred dollar bill i'd say i would i will give you this for one minute of your time and if you say no to me you can keep it and i they like alright whatever this sounds fine what do you yacht and i would just walked them through these basic principles like here's what's going on here's what they're doing i'm really no different today anyone else you're just gonna find something clean and transparent and reliable with me and most people be like okay i just like i just want it to be done like i don't want to deal with any more deception i don't want have to change again i don't want these machine leases and so it was it was really just again it's system d construction and recon and it was the skill stat that i tried to build again and again through every business i built walking into a a new world and trying to figure out what is really going on and then had to d reconstruct it and then maneuver within 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 what was that early v one a brain tree because you said you're not an engineer what what what did that look like because this is pretty complicated stuff it seems the first product was for open table it was just allowing someone to make a reservation put in their credit card number and have a stored so to the user it appeared as if i was entering my credit card information in the open table system when in fact they're internet into our system behind the scenes and so who i had a team of engineers software engineers to it and how'd did you fund that i had made enough money from selling the stuff door to door that i could boost bootstrap it and hire them how 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 eleven months and i remember at of eleven month mark my my portfolio of customers were were generating i think it was like fifty nine thousand 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 five dollar family date budget on going through a car wash or you know going to going and get something into the restaurant like we grew up it's so in such a frugal environment and then seeing that it was like fifty nine thousand dollars a month now i'd i always been wanting to build i was i was not willing to trade my time for money you know if someone the way to say i'll pay you fifteen dollars an hour to be blank i didn't wanna make that exchange i wanted to say i am willing to take zero for an indefinite period of time in exchange the opportunity to make a whole lot more and that was true like i didn't make any money till i was really thirty four years old i with the entire time was working for basically a zero but that's what when i started seeing that what kind of money you could make in payments on this residual revenue basis the fifty nine thousand that was what you were getting as your residual so that's what the company was company was and they were giving me a cut yeah 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 wanna 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 thirty i'll have that figured out you're saying these things that as a twenty one year old most people don't know or have the perspective or wisdom wisdom to to think that way yeah it's pretty and you're also saying you grow up kind of like on a 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 re and even this like hundred dollar bill trick like you know did you read like how do you know think and grow rich or like what does you 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 know i could probably make up an answer it seems to me know right now i have no idea what what biographies you said you read a lot of biographies what were you reading that changed your life have i've probably read over a hundred maybe even two hundred 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 two and so one industry biography i read is of a gentleman d dietrich bon he was trying to assassinate hitler and so you understand world war two and he was deeply religious you understand world war two and germany and nazis through the frame of this individual and his plans to go out and his observations about what other the people are doing the community and so i found like these these biographies provided 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 like alright everybody's is 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 this the nature of of humans and the way people write history and so these biographies help me start to piece together an understanding of reality that much more nuanced and sometimes contrary to to primary narratives and so it it it invites me to always reject the first narrative that's offered and understand it not for a factual statement but for a wish attempt to be understood to be accepted you said earlier you said i wanted to make a certain amount of money by age thirty what was your number what was your target well on the on the lower end it was seven million dollars 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 and just if it's time i i'm writing or something then if i do something in the world i had mapped out something like a hundred and fifty three hundred million as a a basis that would get me started on that path when you sold when you're a thirty four right yes and what did you what were you able to walk away with were you able to hit your your your the north end of your target yeah i get three hundred million what is that you know you're you're religious farm kid who doesn't know much and and then in a matter of eleven or twelve years you're able to walk away with you know north of three hundred billion dollars what does that feel like and what do you do with that money once it hits your account you don't seem like a victory dance kinda of guy wait a second but true that's true that true that's true that is very true it's sobering because you know it's bigger than what you realized but you don't know what what ways and so it wasn't the case that i had a long list of things i wanted to buy that we're just waiting for this cash to come in i don't think i spent any money for a long time and i think you're now looking back now even my most aggressive expectations on how life would change weren't even close to how my reality would change over the years with that event well what you mean what changed i mean your your relationship with the world fundamentally changes i mean in any relationship there's power dynamics of wealth and power and status and you know 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 that when you engage with people at different powers of different levels it changes the dynamics of your relationship with them expectations interests rationale justification it just alters everything about i mean i remember one of the one of the first stories that i heard somebody shared with me is is larry bird i don't if this true was the second or third hand but larry had a group of good friends that he went back to off and he had just made money i think signed for the nba he sat down to have dinner with his friends and larry was like yeah i got it don't worry about it and it friends like great great larry it's amazing thank you so much second time happens and everyone's quiet assuming larry i think get the bill he does third time it's just like of course larry gonna pick this up and probably take us somewhere else as so larry from his perspective was just like it you know the fund was removed because now instead of medium able to do something be generous with someone i'm now in this expectation and so it deter him from wanting to interact with people because there was this expectation on him that anything he did there will be this expectation and so it just it is a i think anyone who's experienced fame or anything of the sort there are these underlying dynamics of human interactions which are just a reality for everybody and yeah it would've have been no help i think thinking back 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 it's taken me some time to learn well there's probably gonna be like a hundred fifty thousand people that listen to this you could be that mentor for them so would you say what are those five things but give us three at least one is transparency of intent you you know when when you're with somebody it's very important that you establish why you're doing what you're doing and the role you're gonna play with each other if it's ambiguous then it creates complications in your relationship and so it's it's un unpopular for anyone to be surprised in relationship of what somebody really wants in the relationship so just transparency like we're doing this on these conditions two i'd say that money is not a a resource that is valuable for necessarily for the things that allows you to require is most valuable for the time it creates that you can solve problems with money and so utilize it wisely not on acquiring frivolous things but on solving fundamental problem of time and and then three is there's a weird psychological relationship with it where 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 what did you so i know that i read that you invested a hundred million dollars 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 a company called colonel that we could talk about little a little bit what did you do at the rest did you this is a good question that sean always asked he goes what what do you it 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 having the crypto and having in cash what about you 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 anything that's gonna be a liquid so there's been times for the past couple years where i desperately needed cash and it was not i didn't don't have liquid levels but i planted and so the liquidity for entrepreneurs is really important number two is that like the the engine the movement into west fund was like i did range of primarily a software engineering objective within an established degree of payments i was moving into science and the question it i was trying to solve for for example could we build a global biological immune system so we all know that if a problem in the world arises and that problem can be addressed by software engineers coding of their computers to solve the problem we're pretty good at 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 notice and solve problems like is the coral reefs dying because the water is too acidic we need carbon capture like we need you know whatever the the problem is as i wanted to invest in companies that would basically serve as the foundation of building blocks for humanity of building this structure so we could actually engineer with the reliability atoms molecules and organisms so if i wrote this in this block those like if for example pandemic happened it would be amazing if we had these capabilities a to build up the biological infrastructure of detection vaccine creation you know remediation whatnot and that actually had actually was true gin bio one of my first investments i end up working on the mrna vaccine and but it was just this idea like if we've done very well on 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 their storing information on deep using dna so instead of a hard drive made of the material we're accustomed to they stored on dna because that's nature's is hard drive another company is doing nano tech building these structures adam by adam like literally assembling them like legos and so the companies and they've been successful like some of these are breakeven some of these are are are are profitable and so i wanted to do this because branch of was was really nice to teach about software engineering i wanted to understand science and engineering of science and so it was really a great educational experience for me of getting deep in the trenches a bunch of phd entrepreneurs across the range of all these different scientific disciplines how much do you think i wanna talk about the health stuff in a second but how much do you think v alone is worth right now you guys have bought that for twenty eight million i think like only five only like five or six or seven years into brain tree like pretty early to brain trees 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 keeps saying brain tree v as if like v is as powerful or as valuable as brain tree i don't know the current values that i mean i stole the company several years ago i know it's very valuable and so it's brain tree and so this was a decision i made when when i did sell break eight hundred million it was a decision of okay so i'm now thirty four years old i want to move on to this next stage of life accumulation of money was not my objective and i could've have stuck with the company and we could have made more you been more viable but it was like okay so if i do this it's three hundred 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 gonna be a long start process and so and looking at the you know prime of my ears i thought i'll take this i'll have a go at this and try do something meaningful there but it was just a calculation of time and and re and recon figuring my life towards that and so you've now let's say that's ten years ago ten eleven years ago were basically eleven 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 twenty twenty two 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 promise is now the venture fund has been remarkably successful especially a as a newbie into this to this world the number of good investments relative to the bad investments extremely high so as say we've done it remarkably well on the deep tech side with synthetic biology genomics nano tech on kernel i think we nailed the technology selection initially there was the the idea was could we make brain measurements ubiquitous society and we can pretty predict we can measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way except for our brains we don't have good technology explain explain what colonel list people listen probably don't know a occur current list i mean i've just seen 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 brain waves and so if you think about like so wearables are a familiar concept we put this thing on our fingers or our wrists and it gives us data like sleep stats respiration rate heart rate cardiovascular expenditure and exercise like we get these this set of data and it's pretty easy to acquire and then we can use this information to help us understand our health and wellness we currently can't do that for our brain so if i have a question am i in the early stages of cognitive decline do i have anxiety if so what kind of anxiety do i have depression or what kind of depression is is my lifestyle conducive to take to 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 had and fill when i a headache it basically is a robust enough sensor system to do it and that's not correct so much happens in our brain that we are unaware of and there's so much data in our brain that is informative to what we wanna do and so this what at kernel what we've done is we've built a neuro and gene helmet like you said sam you just put on your head it takes one minute to set up it uses light to measure the brain activity and these patterns are extremely informative so for example i did i was a pilot participant for ketamine study your ketamine has been used for the treatment depression we use 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 hey sam how was ketamine like i don't know like get a different dimension and i think i feel better but i'm not sure but it's kinda like you know how is your sleep for the past week it's an extremely emphasized answer and you're going on this subjective self assessment your memory space and you really know and then like it's a disaster and so this this measurement system is basically meant to standardize the measurement of the brain and so the part 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 then second is can we find applications for early markets and so we've built a tech we have a few papers coming out and now we're in the product market fit finding the first application for the technology when you so for the listeners i 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 blueprint dot brian johnson dot c what sorry sam one one final comment on this just or to make this maybe an attempt to make this intuitive when people began experiencing cognitive decline this may be true what happens with within docs case with alcohol too we just did alcohol study when your brain is impaired we just sell with alcohol with modern alcohol your brain compensate for the deficiency and so you you can't pick up the impairment but you can you can record it and identify it but at a certain level of of into authentication your brain can no longer make up for that impairment and so then it reveals itself an impairment and behavior and so that is true with somebody who may be experiencing cost decline you may be along the path of cognitive decline and you may say i feel great i seem great i'm am moving great everything great but you just can't pick it up and so it's the value of like oh wouldn't it be amazing if i had the ability to measure my brain on a routine basis that informs me of these things that i myself cannot identify 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 yep all the above is is there anything people can do if they're in cognitive decline or is it just sort of like well i've measured this sad news alright you know well i don't don't have a genre head sober up have you guys ever seen on twenty three and me or something like that they you they used to have like an alt so i guess alzheimer's is genetic and like there's like a particular type of gene that you could have that increases the likelihood you're gonna have it and twenty three in me used to do this thing where they said alright you have it but before we can even tell you if you have you have to sign this paperwork saying you're not gonna assume this is a diagnosis and you can't flip out well i have it and then like i did flip out and then they eventually remove that i believe i don't think they have it anymore because they said people were just flip it 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 based on 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 that's gonna like help you like get a stronger brain but in general when i was researching i was like shit i have the machine i have to do it people were like good luck you know just like i guess hopefully you'll be alright but there there wasn't like that many things so yeah what what can can you actually fix any of these things we think about it could alright so we are a accustomed 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 i'd be like this just gonna fit or not because we know that the door size standard the appliance side the 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 built society and we have millions of invisible standards 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 so we know the reactor reaction time of humans to lights we know breaking power we know people stop times so we do have data we can actually determine that we do not have engineering standards around the brain depression anxiety top decline because we have no measurement and so the fundamentally the way to how could we actually create a step change function change in the world and how we deal 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 is kind of like that it's not as numerical as what need the brain measurement could be but that was a fundamental thing is if you give everyone the numbers you give an opportunity to build solutions around those problems this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally miss hubspot grow hotspot so this blueprint your you're your blog i don't know what you're calling 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 jaw lines is like crazy cut right now and like you just look way different than you used to i mean it's pretty fascinating and you know brain brain trees is amazing you've built something amazing this blueprint thing is like way crazier it it 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 you do regular updates and at first you are i think you got down to like six percent body fat and you're like okay i think six percent is a little bit too low let's go to seven and a half percent and then you're also like eating this like a 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 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 just would go in snack and eat bad food and you're like i'm no i'm no longer letting that guy make any decisions you he no longer has us say we're letting experimental brian make the decisions from now on this thing's crazy man what snack why are you doing this and what have you found to be actually meaningful versus not meaningful and by the way yeah you're doing you're doing the knees over toes guy thing i noticed you're like walking backwards you're doing that ti be alice raises this guy was on to something you're doing it it looked like i am yeah i mean so so blueprint add for me this goes back to the age of twenty one and to me this is the best answer i've ever come up with my life if you if you pose a question how can we imagine the human race and intelligence generally surviving itself and thriving like what is our plan as a species to thrive blueprint to me is the best idea i've ever come come up with and most practical idea i've ever come up with to address that and so from the outside perspective it appears to be health and wellness and anti aging and whatnot that's all true but really it's a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence and so the the way this i would ab bridge this is this began in from a pro basically i had a problem of over eating every day every night at seven pm i would over eat i'd either have a second serving for dinner or third serving or have desserts or do something that i would consider to be self hard 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 playful said i'm going to fire evening brian because the brian who wakes up in the morning he exercises he does really well eating same with lunch brian but this five pm ten pm brian like boys is he at ras he's always making the wrong choice like i could absolutely lie on him to make the wrong choice and he always had an infinite number of reasons on why today was okay to do the thing and so i was like you know what i've had it like he's done he's absolutely out and so i play through with this blog of like all brian's got together we had discussion when brian even brian you're making the scene awful and so i just i rev revoked to authority from five pm to tempe pm to eat and so what started off is like this playful thing now turn into what i'm what i basically have done my my tire system is i now only eat what my body asks for according to data and science have you not done that at all have you had any splurge since you've started this and do you ever intend to do that i have had in fractions 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 un question authority in deciding what we eat so if you think about your daily life you go to the store and you walk down aisle you're like yeah maybe this maybe that you decide how much you pull your plate you decide if you go to a restaurant you presented the menu you decide if you're going to have a pizza party you decide if you're going into doritos like you're making these decisions all the time and it's a combination of how you feel what you want like you know that you're trying to be it whatever but you're basically giving your mind un question 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 investigation patterns it directly asks for what it wants via data and i can never overwrite it and so in this idea so the thought experiment is if you could achieve perfect health and maintain perfect health but but it required you to accept basically what an algorithm is doing to deliver what you eat and when you eat would you do it and then in that thought experiment sam and i've had this conversation hundreds of times now the reaction people have is almost this fear response and their conscious mind panic and it's like i i see it like a computer screen scrolling of like infinite number of questions but like what if cheetos pizza party seven blaming 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 mine says the only way i can be happy in existence is if i still get to choose what do when i do it and the mind cannot get over it they cannot say holt tight like is it poll let me just contemplate is it possible that i am a self harm machine i cannot stop myself from the community self harm i probably whenever go able to do it and if i keep on doing this it's probably gonna lead to at a pretty outcome and so it's such interesting interaction of rolling through this thing of and i think it's really on par if we say like what of the major things that have impacted humanity of is the earth the center of the universe or you know it did is there an evolutionary force creating all things on earth i think this one could be on that scale of a societal understanding that are un questioned granting of authority to our conscious minds is at the root of all of our problems in society and so the contemplation here is if if i imagine this could i stop self harm from happening inside of brian because just like there's wars going on and there's all these tribal factions in the world the same thing is going inside of me with my own body and my cravings than 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 is trying to think through how could i achieve goal alignment and we hear a lot about ai goal line with humans and not happiness an exponential threat 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 and war and can i even try to resolve comp within myself 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 looking at the the routine of looking at the photo i mean you're completely shredded this is amazing so there's part of me like wow this 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 at aioli it's like oh this is not only just great for your health this is transcend for the race and the society and of like okay maybe i could see how that's true but it i mean it does seem like you're not actually it's something that your body is deciding your brain has just decided i'm gonna 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 but man you know this looks like a full time ph full time effort plus phd level intelligence plus a bunch of money to be able to do this i think he says cost by the way his cost i think i i'd say like three grand a month like it's not like crazy think it's through hundred about but it's also like the mental energy that you would have to put towards doing this is like you know the the real cost so but but you did it in service of of other people too so like you know what is the eighty twenty what have you discovered or been the the highest leverage i you know changes i know it's in this but say it out loud because not everyone's gonna go read the whole thing so like what are the the highest leverage changes that you were able to make during this experiment the first shot on this maybe just a reflection why is it in society do we accept this ferocious system to invite everyone to commit self harm like when you walk into the grocery store i mean it is violence all outright violence through the representation of advertising and ingredients and sugar and you're in there and you're supposed beyond on equal footing with that like no way we're out matched and the same thing when we're sized up against algorithms it's a totally unfair match and in society we just gl allow the self harm and so the individual is pitted against algorithms and capitalism is in like good luck individual on trying to keep your shit together and so it's just it's an unfair thing and i think it's a it's just bad for everyone to be in this game but then in terms of like the basics for people it's really understanding that trying to win this game with willpower is a losing game if you put yourself in a situation where you have option a and option b you're probably going to lose fifty percent of time or more and that's the whole thing i've been trying through 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 in time it gets better and that's why i openly blog about all the things i'm doing is i'm trying to get this out so others can improve upon it the i think the most important thing that someone could do to win here would be to accept the basic principle that it's a system that drives what you eat it's not your decision you're making but but what about the the the like the specific true are there any like truths or any like hypotheses that you believe to be true like for 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 eighty hours a week staring at screens and we work really hard is there any like where you're like oh you know actually he's thirty hours he's in a piston squat right now doing this whole hour yeah are you like well you know like thirty hours is i i think in what's the 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 thirty hours a and that kinda seems like an ideal number is there anything like just sapiens no homo okay it's my bad my bad i'm inclusive so yeah is there like is there any truths that that you've discovered for you that you know it maybe is not right for everyone else 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 seventy percent of incidents in aviation were attributable to amateur pilots and so while i went through the certification of every plane i flew i was tight grading in every plane and you know whatnot i refused to fly alone because i knew the risk of error was just the map was there the stats were there the same is true with health and wellness i tried to do this on my own you know almost like going around this little bag listening to podcast podcasts reading books reading literature and trying to put little gems of insight into my bag and try to piece my own protocol it's the same as trying to fly an airplane by myself though i study it i get typed in it my error rate's just gonna be very high and so and then three is that the the value here in this conversation would not be somebody feeling motivated in this moment of doing something good because tomorrow they're going to fail and it's also the value here is not debating is a vegan diet better than a car diet to me that the real essence of this conversation the only way this comes you can be a value besides all the chatter win on the world of every everybody know 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 car 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 me i'm vegan for ef moral reasons but i'm not vegan because i think it's it's you know i didn't at yeah at layer of abstraction we just put the data we're agnostic to these inputs and so that's really what i'm trying to say this is not a health and wellness gig that's is not a diet the trend 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 structured our lives and it's also trying to say let's get past these silly tribal debates at the layers of abstraction which are meaningless and they just confuse everyone because if people immediately say first they say age are bad for you then they they're good for you no one knows and they just stop at that point when in a reality there are more right answers than wrong in terms of doing this in a methodical way you know before we started a recording sean was just like gus about how like jacked and ripped you are and how he thought you looked great is it mostly are you getting any more attention from women or is it all just guys are son or just like eyeball bald because whenever i whenever i get in shape i'm like oh yeah my wife's gonna love this and she's like i guess you look alright it's always dudes it's only men i i think sam i would say the 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 and now i look at myself i have such positive emotions that i'm stable that things are reliable that i trust myself you yeah i trust the systems that are built i is transformed my relationship with myself it transforms to what i think about what i can become as a person the relationships i have so it just it's hard to articulate how significant of a psychological shift has been for me and my understanding my own identity energy well you just gave a really great answer to a really dope question that was amazing i'm glad you did that because we set you up with sort of a goofy question and and i think you said something really profound there i wanted to ask you you said you said something like as there's a bit of a cliff you were like you know will powers is not the answer you said you know the the good thing that could come if this is not oh you listen to this podcast are 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 your social media is just this like algorithm designed to to hook you and you know you are sort of yeah david first goliath here yep or i guess about at algae david one but like you know you are powerless compared to the the onslaught that's coming out you try tried to get you to make a certain decision and you know do you but you didn't quite sit 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 on i'm like alright today is about a system and i'm gonna be like what what the fuck was he talking about what's the system i what am i supposed to do and that's where i would stop so i wanna 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 all i should just begin tracking certain markers and that's the step to take and then let my own intuition right is it is that i got a fire evening evening sean because i have the same problem i have the same problem now that you you described you had then what do you what would you say is the actionable way forward that that sort of is the sustainable successful path yep i'd 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 so be successful at that one act step number two is make a firm commitment on a one step towards the system so for example for me that's calories i eat one thousand nine hundred and seventy seven calories per day that's it not anymore and that is my absolute budget and i can over it and so set a firm boundary that that's what you're going to do you're gonna stick with it and then three is you can start refining the details of what those calories are and when you read it you know you wanna pack more attrition in over time but just acknowledge that you yourself are powered us to win in a in a moment by a moment power game and structurally set up the path to win by the worst version of yourself to get that muscle to build set very clear boundaries and then you you can refine don't worry about taking on the whole thing all at once but just this baby step and then you'll build the muscle like my seventeen 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 fractions and like you know so he went through this whole thing of how many times did he have to make the air 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 thirties range you know we're like in the morning you'd like dad i failed like fine fine right like but he finally answered the same point i did where you can get to that moment and you're tempted to do something and you can model out exactly how it's going to fill to do that thing and you can model exactly what it's gonna feel like after you've done that thing you can model out your sleep and you can model out your next morning and 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's you know people ask me that 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 regret like no like the last in the world i wanna do these baby steps and you build up your your muscles and then it soon just becomes the way of being you 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 filed the data were you a good manager you think did people were 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 you're just so you're very unique yeah may i i joke my team at brain treat but i didn't care what they thought i only care to learn what they're significant others thought because it's very hard to get someone who's real opinion interview because it's 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 nick and 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 i do certain things but i certainly i care deeply about being a high value person in these people's lives and so not only you know a a good steward of the business but a creating an environment where they become their best selves was that a learning behavior but was that like a learned behavior like were you like well if i treat people right i'm gonna get my outcome and or was it just like you was this like is this how you are raised like what what motivated that yeah it just feels like the right way to do things i mean like if if you think about like more structurally in society we accept this exchange of spending our life points for a system of rewards that includes status and wealth and something else and i suppose why i bring this up is i think we all know how much money 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 a 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 call our contribution contributions or whatever and i suggest that that may be the opportunity to press to flip it so if you say in the year twenty twenty two if you're looking at the horizon of possibilities for humanity like what is the thing you can barely see which is barely imaginable you would say basically don't spend your life points reckless if you can live long enough this there may be a new wave here so like blueprint i'm trying through do two things i'm trying to maximally slow my rate of aging because entropy is very strong you're not gonna beat it so i'm rate i'm currently aging at point seven six so i for every three hundred sixty five days a year i age two hundred and seventy seven so i basically get like october and november december for free and then for the for the for the month 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 agent bank account then society could shift instead of us saying we're gonna be in a marty for wealth or status or whatever would it change in that balance and what it more be about humans so we become an obsessed about what we becomes a species not what our technology can become right and let me ask you you like a lot of people 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 solve x or this breakthrough just happened and really nobody's doing why 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 like cool you did oc night and 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 are crazy ideas he's like i think somebody could go do these things do you have any ideas like that that or like you know i think somebody could go do x i do lot of them but i would say i'm really obsessed with one that's goal alignment or cooperation and at the basis of everything that exists on planet of earth there's a singular question at play can 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 is a whole another thing right the negative self talk like all the stuff that goes on on 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 let the earth speak and then we work within those constraints 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 and self harm to ourselves we're committing harm to the earth collectively it's the same problem and to be you could think about and go alignment within ourselves between each other with planet of 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 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 we can change to the people behavior person looking in and so i'd say yes i have idea but none of them matter because unless we can solve cooperation what is it that we have look forward to as a species 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 or or like product or service or whatever that would be created along those lines 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 i can measure my brain if you think about it in like what we eat today is a dietary input to our bodies like you think about what is my diet for my brain like the new sources of social media sources my friend my environment we have no idea what's happening we don't we haven't put have a measured and so is it possible that we basically eat ninety percent junk food in a given day to our brains because that's just waste society is structured and so i'd love to address that of getting a baseline of where my brain and then more broadly i've been talking to several people who specialists in math and computational methodologies to try to figure out it are there mathematical approaches in the same way that john nash came up with you know game theory are there mathematical approaches to think about how we might solve this between humans between humans and ai between human ai and the planet and so like you know again i can do this with my body it's a it's a pretty straightforward thing to do now but it's just gonna get more complicated the more you have in the game so i i've like worked with tim ferris in the past and like i remember i would ask like we were just an example is i he we'd be walking our dogs together and i'd be like oh tim that's a cool dog leash and he'd like oh this dog you know the reason it's interesting is made of horses hair which is good for the dog for this reason that reason and i founded it 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 when he i had for breakfast and he would just give us this like complex answer and it was actually pretty profound palmer lucky was kinda like that too and you are one hundred percent 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 el elon does where you ask them a question and most people don't do this they pause they don't they'll they'll actually not talk for like ten seconds and they just think and i actually i try not to interrupt because most people are uncomfortable with that one time i interrupted to do where i or you got silent the the by the way the keto get interviews you don't interrupt that so i kinda screw 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 i wanna i 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 enlighten just you're you're just an interesting human and you you're you're your intensity is i can see it being off putting for some people but for me like i'm i'm i'm i'm into it you're you're just a very unique person i i think it's like really interesting to hear your perspective even i don't think you've said anything that i agree or or that i disagree with but maybe you have and it's like well that's okay but you're just like a original thinker i dig it thank you sam appreciate that what's give us before we go what's one of these contraption behind you give us what is one of these interesting things that just a occurring machine isn't it yeah one of them looks like a soda stream or something looks machine that'd be funny like got me like you know coke pepsi and yeah is that a pretty rental by yeah yeah so he i last week couple weeks ago i we bought a medical grade hostile grade ultrasound machine and so it part of this has just been buying a kind of equipped that allows us to do this stuff we're trying to do and so for example ultrasound so if you look at the the pyramid of measurement the wearables are like part of the first category and then you get to bio fluids like blood draws and and you know urine and whatever else imaging is an entirely different quality class and so if you wanna get really good data on on yourself it's the ultrasound and mri and and you know like it's stuff doing kernel and so we really had to build up this infrastructure so one the reasons why i this so expensive is we basically built out like a a mini clinic hospital here with all the stuff we have and that's we're a lot of these else mh and are there like four dudes just kind of like get are your physicians that monitoring you at all times or what's gonna what's your team what's your stack for for people with yeah the body stuff for the ultrasound we have five son cinematographer so one son specializes in the heart one does lungs pancreas liver kidney another one does mu skeletal another one does doc 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 l like all the component parts of my joints ankles knees hips elbow 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 you so everything we do is quantified and so it's not like oh this thing makes me feel better feeling rarely matter with anything we do and so yeah this the hardware and the specific team and so just like we have five s photographers to run the ultrasound machine we have specialists in lung specialists in the heart specialists in other areas so the team is like twenty five or so maybe now altogether that had different specialties man this is crazy sean's answer that question and he's like i just got like a poster of dogs playing poker one two serena ear pods and a couple diet coke cans like we ask you it's just like oh that you mean that throw out i'm i see i don't need all this measurement like if you just export my door dash history it'll tell you how long yeah like a greyhound right now yeah just kick blaming y older are younger what are your thoughts on ranch brian this is has bit awesome thanks for thanks for coming on we we talked about your way back as like this awesome guy and it's amazing to to get to meet you and hear some of the stories and ask ask our questions firsthand so appreciate you coming on yeah they found me