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Multimillionaire tech guru Bryan Johnson says that if he hadn’t sold his payments company Braintree to PayPal in 2013 and became obsessed with anti-aging, he may well have ended up devoting his life to crypto.
“Had I not sold Braintree, I just would have been entirely all in on crypto,” he says.
Magazine catches up with Johnson in the speakers’ lounge at Token2049 in Singapore, ushered over to meet the youthful-looking 47-year-old by an assistant who looks like a supermodel and has a million-watt smile.
Best known today for his pursuit of longevity treatments, Johnson made his name by founding the mobile and internet payments firm Braintree in 2007. At one point, the company was growing at 4,000% a year. In 2012, it acquired Venmo, and in turn, Paypal acquired Braintree for $800 million. Johnson pocketed $300 million from the sale and has a reported net worth of around $400 million.
Around that time, he became super interested in cryptocurrency and was working on a deal between Braintree and Coinbase to process Bitcoin payments and enable merchants to accept the cryptocurrency.
“We were among the very first in the industry to adopt crypto, like famously, we partnered with Coinbase in 2013,” he says.
“I was very bullish on crypto, and then we sold shortly after. But, yeah, there’s a reality where my entire life is crypto.”
Bryan Johnson co-founded The Network School
Part of the reason Johnson is in Singapore is to help launch The Network School, which he co-founded with former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan. He notes “we never crossed paths at that point,” referring to 2013.
The school is a three-month learning program for 150 tech-focused libertarian capitalists held in the abandoned, Chinese-built Forest City on an artificial island in Malaysia. It’s the most concrete step so far toward Srinivisan’s decade-long dream to establish a Network State, a real-world embodiment of open-source internet and libertarian values underpinned by a financial system based on Bitcoin.
It brings together two of the key interests of crypto’s mega-wealthy — setting up independent states or micronations outside the control of existing authorities (see also Liberland, Crypto Utopia, Satoshi Island and others), and defeating aging.
Also read: Thailand’s Crypto Utopia — ‘90% of a cult, without all the weird stuff’
Johnson is reluctant to speak on behalf of Srinivisan’s vision but says he likes the idea of bringing together free thinkers who want to create something new.
“You look through the history of civilization, innovation rarely comes from established institutions. It comes from the outer edges,” Johnson says. “If you’re trying to find opportunities for innovations in society, it’s typically from small groups of people that are in the right structured environments.”
Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and venture capitalist Fred Wilson all support the Network State concept.
Johnson has designed workouts, meals and health lessons about longevity based on his Blueprint regimen to reverse his own physical age and Don’t Die, his project to help other people extend their lives via diet and lifestyle regimes, data-driven health optimization and new treatments. One of Srinivisan’s aims is for biotech founders who attend the school to help humanity surpass its biological limits.
“A lot of the Don’t Die community is attracted to this because I think we have a very natural overlap between his ideas and my ideas, so we just have a lot of overlapping community,” Johnson explains.
The Don’t Die summit was held that same week. One report from a journalist who attended — which Johnson posts about on X — describes the “extreme biohacking lifestyle” event as “cult-like.”
Bryan Johnson on crypto folk and longevity
Crypto billionaires are fascinated with longevity, of course. “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver told Magazine he’d considered cryogenically freezing himself to avoid going to jail, while Buterin believes death can be cured.
“Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years and even before killing debilitates people and burdens social systems and families. Let’s end it,” Buterin wrote.
Johnson isn’t sure why the link exists but agrees with Magazine’s pop psychology theory that very wealthy crypto and tech guys who’ve already solved a bunch of difficult engineering problems may see aging as just another problem that can be solved.
“I’m not sure I entirely understand either,” he says. “I mean, the connection seems like they’re parallel tracks that if you’re into one, you’re kind of into the other.
“Bitcoin fundamentally rejects inflation, and I fundamentally reject aging. We basically accept these slow boil deaths, and we both reject the slow boil death.”
Johnson and Srinivisan pick up on the theme on stage at Network State a few days later.
“Bitcoin is about stopping the state from slowly draining your wealth” through inflation, Srinivisan said. “And ‘Don’t Die’ is about stopping the state from slowly draining your health” by accepting the inevitability of aging and death.
“… And so we resist that. We stand against that.”
.@balajis: Bitcoin is about stopping the state from slowly draining your wealth.
And “Don’t Die” is about stopping the state from slowly draining your health.
They’re actually very parallel, because in the legacy system, it assumes a basic rate of 2% inflation.
Yeah,… pic.twitter.com/epMGgiM5ue
— Arjun Khemani (@arjunkhemani) September 22, 2024
Bryan Johnson believes biological immortality is ‘solvable’
Biological immortality has long been viewed as the stuff of fantasy and science fiction, but so were AI systems that could breeze through a Turing Test until two years ago.
One of the important reasons we age and die is because most of our cells can only divide between 40-60 times. But some cells in the body can divide forever and scientists have successfully transformed adult skin cells into stem cells, and reversed age-related vision loss by reprogramming cells in the retina to make them young again. In nature, the “immortal jellyfish” (Turritopsis dohrnii) can revert to its polyps form and begin again, repeating the cycle forever.
“Biology solved the problem, right? So the jellyfish is important,” Johnson says. “Biology has already shown us there can be immortal things, so it just needs it (to be) applied to the (human) species. Yeah, it’s entirely solvable.”
Also read: Longevity expert — AI will help us become ‘biologically immortal’ from 2030
Johnson famously spends a couple of million each year on his longevity project and reportedly has a team of about 30 people, from nutritionists to MRI specialists, help with his anti-aging routine.
It involves precise nutrition, 35 different exercises and he places so much emphasis on the importance of sleep, he has his last meal at 11 a.m. so his resting heart rate is primed for bedtime. That might seem like a big call, but Johnson is incentivised by his nightime erections lasting 179 minutes — which surprisingly enough is tied to longevity.
Longevity miracle drugs: Diet, exercise and sleep
While he’s famous for receiving experimental plasma transfusions from his 17-year-old son (he reported no benefits) along with some other wacky stuff, Johnson says the vast majority of the benefits come from good nutrition, exercise and sleep — meaning anyone can do them, but most don’t.
“I think a lot of people don’t want this to be true, because then it confronts an inconvenient reality that they’re not doing these things,” he says. But he says that in the “process of becoming the most measured person in history” there’s now incontrovertible proof that it works.
“For example, my speed of aging is now 0.64, which to oversimplify, means I celebrate my birthday every 19 months. So that’s a meaningful difference in how fast one ages.”
Healthy living and exercise is great and all, but most people seem more interested in miracle drugs. And there are some possible candidates.
Johnson has been taking 1,500 mg of metformin daily for the past four years, and early research on monkeys shows the drug can reverse brain aging by six years. He also speaks highly of Ozempic (semaglutide), which research suggests cuts the risk of dying from all causes significantly.
“Ozempic is one of the biggest advancements ever to occur in medicine, side effects aside, the fact that it can fundamentally alter somebody and their relationship with food, is opening a new era of modification to ourselves,” he says. “It really is a very powerful demonstration of our technological abilities and why I’m so bullish on longevity.”
He also takes a ton of other supplements and sells them online as the Blueprint Stack:
Johnson claims he’s not afraid of dying — he just wants to be around long to watch and participate as human society is transformed by artificial intelligence.
“A lot of people think that what I’m doing is solely about health and wellness. It’s really trying to answer this bigger question: What do we do as a species when we give birth to super intelligence?
“So in that sense, yes, I think it’s the most important thing we could be doing as a species.”
Bryan Johnson‘s views on AI
Johnson has spoken on podcasts of his faith in the potential of AI to make better and wiser decisions than humans do, and Blueprint hands control of lifestyle modification recommendations to the algo, based on results of health metrics.
Like longevity expert Jose Luis Cordeiro he believes AI systems will help speed up the process of finding longevity treatments, thanks to systems like Google’s Alpha Fold, even if he adds they are “not a panacea.”
But Johnson is not really focused on the AI systems we have now, he’s thinking about what they’ll become. His views on superintelligence and alignment are informed by his thought experiments: What if we could consider events today from a wider perspective as if looking back on them after five centuries of history?
For example, when the printing press was invented in the 15th century there was a big backlash from copyists and scribes worried they’d lose their jobs. Viewed from today, it led to an explosion of scientific knowledge and was one of the transformative developments in human history.
“It is a thought process that invites the reflection that most of what we believe in this moment is ephemeral and it will be replaced with new things. And so it invites a humility of what could be and what we do and don’t know.”
The possible creation of superintelligence leads to a lot of existential questions, not least whether humanity is creating its own successor species, bringing about eternal life, or giving birth to a God.
And some observers believe there are religious style aspects to Johnson’s Don’t Die movement.
Crypto AI account Mgoes spent a week hanging out with Johnson recently and posted that, “Don’t Die is way more than eating healthy; Bryan’s building a religion.”
The tenets are: Don’t Die as an individual. Don’t harm each other. Don’t Die as a species (AI risk).
“He thinks Don’t Die is a grand ideology on par with capitalism, Marxism, Christianity. He thinks it uniquely answers questions posed by emerging technology.”
A former Mormon, who lost his faith, Johnson responded to the post by saying:
“You’re correct on the objective and vision. It’s been my experience that it takes some time to digest DD. It challenges everything we understand of existence while also being intuitively correct.”
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Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.