Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree and Venmo, joins Sam and Shaan to walk through his journey from door-to-door credit card salesman to $800 million exit to PayPal. He then dives deep into his two post-exit projects: Kernel, a neural imaging helmet that makes brain measurement mainstream, and Blueprint, a radical protocol for letting body data replace willpower-based decisions about food and health. The conversation covers what it’s really like to have generational wealth, the philosophical underpinnings of Blueprint as a model for societal cooperation, and Bryan’s obsession with goal alignment — within the body, between humans, and between humans and AI.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Bryan Johnson (guest, founder of Braintree/Venmo, Kernel, Blueprint)
Cold Open: Target Number by Age 30 [00:00:00]
Sam: You said earlier you wanted to make a certain amount of money by age 30. What was your number? What was your target?
Bryan: On the lower end it was seven million dollars. I had built out my spreadsheet model, assumed a certain rate of interest, and basically said if I make a certain amount of money, this is an annuity that would be good enough for my entire life — assuming I don’t need capital to do anything. If it’s just time, like if I’m writing or something. Then if I do something in the world, I have mapped out something like 150 to 300 million as a basis that would get me started on that path.
Introduction: Bryan Johnson’s Background [00:00:30]
Sam: We’re officially live. Bryan, I’ve been messaging you for like six or eight months now. I’ll give a very brief background and you can fill in what I miss, because inevitably I’ll get something wrong.
You’ve started a bunch of stuff. The biggest thing is probably Braintree — you bootstrapped that, right?
Bryan: I did.
Sam: So you bootstrapped it, sold it for something like $800 million to PayPal. You guys also bought Venmo, which I think is one of the greatest acquisitions of all time — you bought it for kind of nothing compared to what it became. And then you’ve done a bunch of other things: Kernel, which is interesting, and this new thing called Blueprint.
The stupid way I’d describe Blueprint is: you have your chronological age, which is just how many years old you are, and then you have your biological age, which measures a bunch of different things — your organs, your blood. You’re basically trying to reverse your biological age faster than your chronological age goes up, which inevitably means you live forever. And you’re blogging and sharing everything along the way. Is that roughly right?
Bryan: Great job.
Sam: What is your chronological age and what is your current biological age?
Bryan: I left my mother’s womb 45 years ago. Biologically I’m a few hundred different ages — if you’re looking at the age of your heart, you can characterize that from a few dozen markers. You can do the same 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 your life choices and environment affect that too.
How Do You Bootstrap a Payments Company? [00:02:30]
Sam: I want to ask you all about Blueprint, because I think it’s amazing. But can I ask you a few questions about Braintree first?
Braintree — you guys are now owned by PayPal. Another competitor I think of is Stripe, and these are high-tech companies, pretty complicated things. How on Earth do you bootstrap a business like that? By year three or four you were doing like eight or nine million in revenue. I understand how you bootstrap it once you hit $10 million, but how do you make something like that from scratch?
Bryan: I guess it started when I was 21. I decided 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. I admired people who tried to identify the thing on the horizon that was barely reachable during their lifetimes and went after it. At 21 I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t know how I could do it. So I thought: given my options, I might as well become an entrepreneur, make a whole bunch of money by age 30, and then go after something.
It was a naive contemplation of how to go about things. I’d grown up in a small town — basically with my grandpa on a farm. I didn’t meet an engineer until I was 21 or 22. Very much a farm boy raised in a deeply religious community.
So I did a bunch of startups and just accidentally fell into payments, because I was building a startup, struggling to pay my bills, had a child at the time, and would do anything for money. I applied for 60 jobs, nobody even contemplated hiring me. So I found this job selling credit card processing services door-to-door. It was 100% commission. I became the company’s number one salesperson in a matter of months — doing it part-time while building my startup.
I just accidentally stumbled into payments and learned there was this big opportunity. PayPal had grown up doing the internet but had stopped really innovating for a couple years, so developers didn’t have the tools they liked. I started Braintree, and we landed a big deal early on with OpenTable. They were accepting credit cards as a way to increase the likelihood that a person would show up for a reservation, but they didn’t want to store the card data because of compliance issues. We built a custom solution that let us store the data on our side instead of theirs — so they didn’t have the compliance burden but could still accept credit cards.
From scratch we built this payment system for them, then expanded to more general merchants. We got customers like Airbnb, GitHub, Uber. We helped Uber do the payment experience where you get in the car, arrive at your destination, leave — no exchange of payment information, no signing receipts. You start doing a few things like that and you make real headway into high-tech companies. They preferred our software.
Door-to-Door Sales and What It Teaches You [00:06:30]
Sam: You just said a bunch of super interesting things. First of all, you’re kind of like Elon Musk without the fame — you had your payments thing, now you’re doing a brain interface, you’re doing these moonshot projects trying to live forever. I think you’re fascinating.
But you said something about door-to-door sales. On the pod we’ve talked about this before — our producer, who’s not here today because he’s having a baby, he’s Mormon and did his mission. We’ve talked about Cutco, door-to-door textbook companies — how they really breed this amazing entrepreneurial mindset. You have to learn sales, face rejection all the time. It’s like a rite of passage. If someone comes out the other side successful at door-to-door sales, I would bet on them in any role in my company.
Is that accurate from your experience? And how did you become the number one salesperson? Because you don’t seem like the most charismatic, you know, science guy.
Bryan: I have kids who are 17 and 13, and they’re currently going through these important life decisions about what to study and what to try to do. I’m doing everything I can to help them focus on CS, math, and physics — those are the languages you want to be fluent in to be architects of the future.
In many ways my choice to do door-to-door sales was just my hacker attempt at paying the bills while buying time before starting something new. It was desperation. It was also just dealing with the reality of my skills — I’d grown up in a disarmed, deeply religious community, didn’t have any engineering background.
The thing I enjoyed most about sales wasn’t high-pressure tactics or manipulation. It was getting in and figuring out the system. If you jump into the world of payments in 2007, it was defined by deep distrust. Credit card payments were really expensive, and when a business owner got their monthly invoice it was so complicated they had no idea what was going on — and the providers made it even more complicated on purpose, to create high commissions and enable deception.
So the opportunity was: number one, be honest and transparent. Number two, because there was so much skepticism, help the customer understand clearly why they should choose you. And number three, just be reliable and competent — when the customer interacts with you and your team, they say, “What an amazing experience.”
Once you figure out how the system worked, it was easy to solve. I would walk into a store and they could immediately tell I wasn’t a customer. They’d immediately hate me, so I had to overcome that animosity from the start. So I’d take out a hundred dollar bill and say, “I will give you this for one minute of your time. If you say no to me, you can keep it.” They’d be like, “Alright, this sounds fun.” And then I’d just walk them through the basics — here’s what’s going on, here’s what they’re doing to you, I’m really no different than anyone else, but you’re going to find something clean and transparent and reliable with me. Most people would say, “I just want it done. I don’t want any more deception, I don’t want to change again.”
It was really just system deconstruction and reconfiguration. And it was the skill set I tried to build again and again through every business I built — walking into a new world, figuring out what’s really going on, then deconstructing it and maneuvering within it.
Building Braintree from Scratch [00:11:30]
Sam: Was the early product just like an agency where you were getting engineers to help install these credit card processors? What did that early V1 look like? Because you said you weren’t an engineer.
Bryan: The first product was for OpenTable — just allowing someone to make a reservation, put in their credit card number, and have it stored. To the user it appeared as if they were entering their card info into the OpenTable system, when in fact they were entering it into ours behind the scenes.
Sam: Who built it?
Bryan: I had a team of software engineers do it.
Sam: How did you find them?
Bryan: I had made enough money from selling door-to-door that I could bootstrap it and hire them.
Sam: How much did you make? Did you do it for a year or something like that?
Bryan: Eleven months. At the eleven-month mark my portfolio of customers was generating — I think it was like $59,000 a month of revenue. I thought, that’s interesting. I came from a world where my family would decide whether to spend our five-dollar family date budget going through a car wash or getting something at a restaurant. We grew up in such a frugal environment. Then seeing $59,000 a month was something else.
I’d always been wanting to build. I was not willing to trade my time for money — if someone said I’ll pay you $15 an hour to do something, I didn’t want that exchange. I wanted to take zero for an indefinite period of time in exchange for the opportunity to make a whole lot more. That was true — I didn’t make any real money until I was 34. The entire time I was working for basically zero. But that’s when I started seeing what kind of money you could make in payments on a residual revenue basis.
Sam: The $59,000 was what you were getting as your residual, your cut of what the company was generating?
Bryan: Yeah.
Biographies and Self-Education [00:14:30]
Sam: You’re saying things like “I knew I didn’t want to trade time for money” or “I wanted to do the biggest technological breakthrough” as a 21-year-old. Most people don’t have that perspective or wisdom at that age. And you grew up on a small farm in a deeply religious community — it’s not like you were surrounded by technologists or business mentors. Where is this coming from? Did you read Think and Grow Rich, or biographies — how did a small-town farm boy develop this kind of thinking?
Bryan: I can probably make up an answer right now — I have no idea. What biographies were you reading that changed your life?
I’ve probably read over a hundred, maybe even 200 biographies at this point. I would go on deep dives trying to understand certain world history events. Like World War II — one entry point was a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was trying to assassinate Hitler. You understand World War II and Germany and Nazism through the frame of this individual, his plans, his observations about what other people in the community were doing. These biographies provided a back door for understanding events in a way that was very different from how they were told in school.
In school you have this highly compressed version of history — here are the big things that happened, get on the same page. But you miss all the nuance. And we all know how flawed historical accounts are, because of the nature of humans and how people write history. These biographies helped me start to piece together an understanding of reality that was much more nuanced, and sometimes contrary to primary narratives. It invites me to always reject the first narrative that’s offered — to understand it not as a factual statement but as a wishful attempt to be understood and accepted.
The $300 Million Exit [00:17:30]
Sam: You said you wanted to make a certain amount by age 30. When you sold, you were 34?
Bryan: Yes.
Sam: What were you able to walk away with? Did you hit the north end of your target?
Bryan: Yeah. I hit $300 million.
Sam: You’re a religious farm kid who doesn’t know much, and then in eleven or twelve years you walk away with north of $300 million. What does that feel like? What do you do with the money once it hits your account?
Bryan: It’s sobering. It’s bigger than what you realize, but you don’t know in what ways. It wasn’t the case that I had a long list of things I wanted to buy that were just waiting for the cash. I don’t think I’ve spent any money for a long time.
Even my most aggressive expectations on how life would change weren’t close to how significantly my reality would actually change with that event.
Sam: What changed?
Bryan: Your relationship with the world fundamentally changes. In any relationship there are power dynamics — of wealth, power, status, age. There’s all sorts of things that shape human interactions. Having money creates a different entry point for everything. We all know from experience that when you engage with people at different levels of power, it changes the dynamics. Expectations, interests, rationale, justifications — it alters everything.
I remember one of the first stories I heard — someone told me about Larry Bird. Larry had a group of good friends back home that he went to see after signing with the NBA. He sat down to have dinner and said, “I got it, don’t worry about it.” His friends were grateful. Second time it happens, everyone’s quiet — assuming Larry’s gonna pick up the bill. He does. Third time it’s just of course Larry’s going to pick this up.
From Larry’s perspective, the fun was removed. Instead of being able to do something generous, he was now in the expectation. It deterred him from wanting to interact with people because there was this assumption on him — anything he did came with an expectation attached.
So it is a thing. I think anyone who’s experienced fame or wealth, there are these underlying dynamics of human attraction that are just a reality. It would have been helpful, thinking back, if someone could have said, “Hey, let me share five really important things about what it means to have money and how to best navigate it.” It’s taken me some time to learn.
Advice on Navigating Sudden Wealth [00:21:00]
Sam: There are probably 150,000 people listening to this. You could be that mentor. What would you say? Give us three at least.
Bryan: One is transparency of intent. When you’re with somebody, it’s very important to establish why you’re doing what you’re doing and the roles you’re going to play with each other. If it’s ambiguous, it creates complications. It’s unpleasant for anyone to be surprised by what somebody really wants in a relationship. Just be transparent: we’re doing this on these conditions.
Two is that money is not the resource that’s most valuable for the things it lets you acquire. It’s most valuable for the time it creates — time you can use to solve problems. Utilize it on solving fundamental problems, not on acquiring frivolous things.
Three is that there’s a weird psychological relationship with money where you are not it, and it is not you. Maintain an identity independent of it, because it can get very confusing if you don’t keep those clear boundaries.
The Intel West Fund and Deep Tech Investing [00:23:00]
Sam: I know that you invested $100 million into your fund, which has been into all types of cool stuff with some really good outcomes. What did you do with the rest?
Bryan: It depends on what your objectives are. 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. Don’t put your money in anything that’s going to be illiquid. There have been times in the past couple years where I desperately needed cash and didn’t have the liquidity levels I wanted. Liquidity for entrepreneurs is really important.
The Intel West fund — the thinking was: I had done Braintree and Venmo, which was primarily a software engineering objective within an established industry. I was now moving into science. The question I was trying to solve: could we build a global biological immune system?
We know that if a problem arises in the world that can be addressed by software engineers coding in their computers, we’re pretty good at that as a species. But if a problem arises that requires the engineering of biology — of atoms, molecules, organisms — we’re not there yet. We don’t have the ability to deploy millions of people who can engineer biology at a moment’s notice. Is the coral reef dying because the water is too acidic? We need carbon capture? Whatever the problem is — I wanted to invest in companies that would serve as the foundational building blocks for humanity to actually engineer with reliability at the molecular level.
I wrote this in a blog post: if a pandemic happened, it would be amazing if we had the capabilities to build up the biological infrastructure of detection, vaccine creation, remediation. And that actually turned out to be true — Ginkgo Bioworks was one of my first investments, and they ended up working on the mRNA vaccine.
The idea was: we’ve done very well mastering programming bits. We are now powerfully emerging in the engineering of biology. Some of the companies I was invested in: one was doing synthetic biology engineering, one was storing information on DNA instead of hard drives, another was doing nanotech — building structures atom by atom, literally assembling them like Legos.
They’ve been successful — some are break-even, some are profitable. And for me it was also a great educational experience, getting deep in the trenches with PhD entrepreneurs across all these different scientific disciplines.
What Is Venmo Worth Now? [00:27:30]
Sam: How much do you think Venmo alone is worth right now? You guys bought that for $28 million, only five or six years into Braintree’s existence. What do you think that’s worth?
Bryan: I don’t know the current value. I sold the company several years ago. I know it’s very valuable, and so is Braintree.
The decision I made when I sold Braintree and Venmo for $800 million was: I’m now 34 years old, I want to move on to the next stage of life. Accumulation of money was not my objective. I could have stayed with the company and made it more valuable, but I thought: if I do this, it’s $300 million, and that’s a good enough starting base to go after these other things. Because they were going to be in the areas of deep tech, I knew they’d take a decade or so to start producing. It was just a calculation of time — reconfiguring my life toward that.
Lessons from the Fund: What Was Right, What Was Wrong [00:29:30]
Sam: It’s basically been ten years since then. We’re eleven years in and $100 million invested. Can you give us a summary — what were you right about, what were you wrong about, where’s the big promise now?
Bryan: The venture fund has been remarkably successful, especially as a newcomer to this world. The number of good investments relative to bad is extremely high. We’ve done remarkably well on the deep tech side — synthetic biology, genomics, nanotech.
On Kernel — I think we nailed the technology selection. The initial idea was: can we make brain measurement ubiquitous in society? We can measure almost everything about ourselves in a fairly routine way, except our brains. We don’t have good technology for that.
What Is Kernel? [00:31:00]
Sam: Can you explain what Kernel is? Listeners probably don’t know. I’ve just seen it as like a helmet that you put on, you think something, and you can control something on a computer because of your brain waves.
Bryan: Think about wearables — we put things on our fingers or wrists and get data like sleep stats, respiration rate, heart rate, exercise output. We can use that data to 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? Depression? What kind? Is my lifestyle conducive to focus? What is my emotional reaction to things? Most people think that because they’re conscious and can feel a headache, their self-awareness is a robust enough sensor to capture what’s happening in their brain. That’s not correct. So much happens in our brain that we’re unaware of.
What we’ve built at Kernel is a neural imaging helmet. You put it on your head, it takes one minute to set up, it uses light to measure brain activity. The patterns are extremely informative.
For example, I was a pilot participant in a ketamine study. Ketamine has been used for the treatment of depression. We used it as an off-label study with healthy people, but the question was: what does ketamine actually do to your brain? Someone can do ketamine and you ask, “How was it?” And they say, “I don’t know — I got a different dimension, I think I feel better but I’m not sure.” It’s like asking “How was your sleep this week?” — an extremely imprecise answer based on subjective self-assessment and memory. A disaster.
This measurement system is meant to standardize the measurement of the brain. Part of the challenge was: is there a technology in existence that can be built to make brain measurement mainstream? And can we find applications for early markets? We’ve built the tech, we have a few papers coming out, and now we’re in the product-market-fit phase — finding the first application.
Bryan: One more thing to make this intuitive: when people begin experiencing cognitive decline — and this may be true with alcohol intoxication too, we just did an alcohol study — when your brain is impaired, it compensates for the deficiency. You can’t pick up the impairment yourself. But you can record and identify it. At a certain level of impairment your brain can no longer make up for it, and then it reveals itself in behavior.
The same is true with somebody on the path of cognitive decline. You may say, “I feel great, I seem great, I’m moving great, everything’s great” — but you just can’t pick it up. So wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to measure your brain on a routine basis that informs you of things you yourself cannot identify?
23andMe, Alzheimer’s Genes, and Cognitive Decline [00:36:30]
Sam: Is there anything people can do if they’re in cognitive decline, or is it just — sad news?
Have you ever seen on 23andMe where they flag the Alzheimer’s gene? They used to make you sign paperwork saying you weren’t going to treat it as a diagnosis before they’d show you. I had it, and I did flip out. I think they eventually removed that feature because people were just flipping out too much. And when I was researching what to do about it, nobody really had an answer — “good luck, maybe put picture frames upside down so your brain works harder.” What can people actually do about these things?
Bryan: We think about it like this. Society has engineering standards. When you buy an appliance, you know it’s going to fit through your front door because door sizes and appliance sizes are standardized. We have millions of invisible standards that we’ve agreed on and built society around.
We have very few standards about our brains, because we can’t measure them. We know the timing appropriate for traffic lights, because we have data on human reaction times to lights, breaking power, stopping distances. We have real data there.
We do not have engineering standards around depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, because we have no measurement. The way to create a step-change in how we deal with our minds begins with measurement. Once you have numbers, science begins. Once science begins, ecosystems form around it. Genetics is kind of like that, though not as numerical as what brain measurement could be. The fundamental insight: give everyone the numbers, and you create the opportunity to build solutions around those problems.
Blueprint: The Philosophy and the Origin [00:40:00]
Sam: Let’s talk about Blueprint. Your jawline is crazy cut right now. You look way different than you used to. Braintree was amazing — this Blueprint thing is way crazier and more unique. You got down to like 6% body fat and said, okay, that’s too low, let’s go to 7.5%. You’re eating this nutty pudding, you’ve gone vegan, eating tons of vitamins, what appears to be not very tasty food. You’ve gone all in.
The premise is this — you had a blog post that said something like “late night Bryan no longer gets to make decisions.” You were going to snack and eat bad food at night, and you just revoked that version of yourself’s authority. Why are you doing this, and what have you found to be meaningful versus not?
Bryan: For me, this goes back to age 21. Blueprint to me is the best idea I’ve ever come up with in my life. If you pose the question “How can we imagine the human race and intelligence generally surviving itself and thriving?” — what is our plan as a species? Blueprint is the most practical idea I’ve ever come up with to address that.
From the outside it appears to be health and wellness, anti-aging. That’s all true. But really it’s a philosophical endeavor for the future of intelligence.
The way this started: I had a problem of overeating every night at 7 PM. I’d have a second or third serving of dinner, or dessert, or do something I’d consider self-harm — eating too much, the wrong food. It caused bad sleep, I was overweight, all of the above. I tried everything to fix it and couldn’t.
So I playfully said I’m going to fire evening Bryan. The Bryan who wakes up in the morning exercises, eats well. Same with lunch Bryan. But 5 to 10 PM Bryan? He’s a rascal. I could absolutely rely on him to make the wrong choice, and he always had an infinite number of reasons why today was okay to break the rules. So I said: he’s done. He’s absolutely out. I revoked his authority from 5 PM to 10 PM to eat.
What started as a playful blog post has turned into what I’ve basically done to my entire system. I now only eat what my body asks for, according to data and science.
Blueprint: Surrendering to the Algorithm [00:44:00]
Sam: Have you had any splurges since you started this? Do you ever intend to?
Bryan: I have had infractions, yes. But I think this is the most interesting part of the entire thing.
Right now our minds have unquestioned authority in deciding what we eat. You go to the store, walk down aisles, you decide. You go to a restaurant, you’re presented with a menu, you decide. You decide on the pizza party, the Doritos. You’re making these decisions all the time — a combination of how you feel, what you want, whether you’re trying to be “good.”
Blueprint flips that. It says my mind has zero authority. My body has 100% authority. The measurement of my heart, liver, lungs, and DNA methylation patterns directly asks for what it wants via data. I can never override it.
The thought experiment: if you could achieve perfect health and maintain it, but it required you to let an algorithm decide what you eat and when — would you do it?
The reaction people have to that thought experiment is almost a fear response. The conscious mind panics. It’s like a computer screen scrolling through infinite questions: but what about pizza, Cheetos, parties, vacations? The mind is panicking at the contemplation of losing control. It cannot simply ask itself: is it possible that I am a self-harm machine? That I cannot stop committing self-harm, probably will never be able to, and if I keep doing this it will lead to a predictable outcome?
I think this could be on par with major shifts in how humanity understands itself — like whether the Earth is the center of the universe, or whether evolution created all life. The contemplation here is whether our unquestioned granting of authority to our conscious minds is the root of all our problems.
What I’ve achieved through Blueprint is goal alignment within myself. That’s what this whole thing is about — trying to think through how to achieve internal alignment. We hear a lot about AI alignment with humans as an existential threat. But the more interesting starting point for me is not to look at everyone else and find their problem. It’s to look at myself and say: what is my own internal chaos, and can I try to resolve conflict within myself?
What the Blueprint Results Actually Look Like [00:49:00]
Sam: There’s a part of me that’s like, wow, this is incredible — the photos, you’re completely shredded. And then there’s a part of me that’s like, is this the thing where you’re calling it aioli when it’s mayo? Like, is this really transcendence for the race, or is it just that your brain decided to use data about what your body wants instead of impulse? Either way, it looks like a full-time effort, PhD-level intelligence, and a bunch of money. I think he says his costs are like $3,000 a month — but the mental energy alone is the real cost.
What’s the 80/20 here? What are the highest-leverage changes you’ve discovered? Say it out loud because not everyone’s going to read the whole thing.
Bryan: First, a reflection: why does society accept this system that ferociously invites everyone to commit self-harm? When you walk into a grocery store, it is outright violence — through advertising, ingredients, sugar. You’re supposed to be on equal footing with that? No way. We’re outmatched. The same is true when we’re sized up against algorithms. It’s a totally unfair match. Society gleefully allows this self-harm. The individual is pitted against algorithms and capitalism — good luck keeping your act together.
In terms of 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 with option A and option B, you’re probably going to lose 50% of the time or more.
That’s the whole thing I’ve been trying to do through Blueprint. Yes, it’s expensive right now. Yes, it’s difficult. That’s always how innovation starts — always expensive and inaccessible at first, then it gets better. That’s why I openly blog about everything I’m doing — I’m trying to get it out there so others can improve on it.
The most important thing someone could do is accept the basic principle: it’s a system that drives what you eat, not your decision-making in the moment.
Sam: But what about the specific truths? Are there any hypotheses you’ve found to be true? Going vegan — has that made a huge difference? Is there anything about sitting in chairs 80 hours a week staring at screens? You’re in a piston squat right now during this interview. What have you discovered that you believe to be true, even if it’s not right for everyone else?
Bryan: I got my pilot’s license several years ago, and in doing so I was assessing the risk of death. One stat that stood out: over 70% of incidents in aviation were attributable to amateur pilots. So while I went through the certification process for every plane I flew, type-rated in every one — I refused to fly alone because the math and stats were clear.
The same is true with health and wellness. I tried to do this on my own for a long time — listening to podcasts, reading books, putting little gems of insight into a bag and piecing together my own protocol. That’s the same as trying to fly an airplane by yourself. The error rates can be very high.
The value of this conversation is not somebody feeling motivated in this moment to go eat two pounds of vegetables tomorrow — because tomorrow they’re going to fail. And the value is not debating whether a vegan diet is better than a carnivore diet. That’s a meaningless conversation. Data is the only thing that matters. I’m vegan for ethical and moral reasons, but not because I think it’s universally superior. At the layer of abstraction we’re working at, we just put in the data and remain agnostic to the inputs.
This is not a health and wellness gig. This is not a diet trend. This is trying to address the structural formation of what it means to be human — our relationship with food, with happiness, how we structure our lives. It’s also trying to say: let’s get past these tribal debates at layers of abstraction that are meaningless and just confuse everyone.
Psychological Transformation Through Blueprint [00:55:30]
Sam: Before we started recording, Shaan was gushing about how jacked and ripped you are. Is it mostly attention from women, or is it all just guys like Shaan? Because 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.
Bryan: I think the person most happy is me.
I had terribly complicated emotions looking at myself in my work years. I felt so much shame and guilt and lack of self-respect because I just felt out of control and powerless. Now when I look at myself I have such positive emotions. I’m stable. Things are reliable. I trust myself. I trust the systems I’ve 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. It’s hard to articulate how significant a psychological shift it’s been in my own understanding of my own identity.
Willpower Is Not the Answer — Here’s What Is [00:57:00]
Shaan: You said something like a cliffhanger — willpower is not the answer. The good thing that could come from this conversation is not that someone listens and is motivated to go eat two pounds of veggies tomorrow, because they’ll revert. You’re up against grocery stores that are basically sugar casinos, social media algorithms designed to hook you — you’re basically David versus Goliath. But you didn’t quite finish the thought. What’s the system? What am I supposed to do?
Bryan: Three things.
One: fire the worst version of yourself. Whatever time it is, whatever the circumstances, identify that person and fire him. That’s step one.
Two: make a firm commitment to one step toward the system. For me that’s calories — I eat 1,977 calories per day. That’s my absolute budget, no more. Set a firm boundary that you’re going to stick with.
Three: start refining the details. What are those calories, and when do you eat them? You want to pack more nutrition in over time. But just acknowledge that you are powerless to win a moment-by-moment willpower game, and structurally set up the path to win.
Fire the worst version of yourself to build that muscle. Set very clear boundaries. Then you can refine. Don’t try to take on the whole thing at once.
My 17-year-old does the identical things I do. I don’t know exactly how many times he had to make the error — eating too much, breaking the protocol — but it was something in the thirties range. Eventually he got to the same point I did: you can model out exactly how it’s going to fail if you do that thing. You can model out exactly how you’ll feel after. You can model out your sleep, your next morning. The simulation becomes so clear in your mind that you think, there’s literally nowhere in that series of events where I win. Why am I going to do it?
People ask me, do you have cheat days? No. A cheat day sounds awful — the worst feeling in the world would be to be full and regretful. You build up these muscles and it just becomes a way of being.
Bryan as a Manager [01:02:30]
Sam: You’re clearly very insightful, very wise, very precise. Were you a good manager? Did people like working with you, or did they find you too challenging?
Bryan: I joke that at Braintree I didn’t care what my team thought — I only cared to learn what their significant others thought. It’s very hard to get someone’s real opinion of you. But when people go home and talk to their partners, that’s the truth serum. That’s where they really say what they think.
I do have some data where people said I’m the best boss they’ve ever had. I’m sure other people disliked certain things. But I care deeply about being a high-value person in these people’s lives — a good steward of the business, and creating an environment where they become their best selves.
Sam: Was that learned behavior? Were you thinking “if I treat people right I’ll get my outcome,” or is this just how you are?
Bryan: It just feels like the right way to do things.
More structurally: in society, we accept this exchange of spending our life points for a system of rewards — status, wealth, whatever else. We know how much money is in our bank account, how much we weigh, how many social media followers we have. But we don’t know, for example, our speed of aging — how fast are you aging right now? If you had aging points like a bank account, would you spend them differently?
What I’m saying is: we’ve fundamentally accepted that we’re on a decline, spending our life points toward the grave. The things that may live on include our reputation, our contributions. But now — and this is what Blueprint is trying to do — it may be the opportunity to flip that.
If you’re looking at the horizon of possibilities for humanity in 2022, you’d say: don’t spend your life points recklessly. If you can live long enough, there may be a new wave. I’m currently aging at 0.76 — for every 365 days, I age 277. I basically get October, November, December for free. And for the months I do age, the goal is to reverse that aging so I can maintain the same biological age.
If we have an aging bank account, then society could shift. Instead of being martyrs for wealth or status, would it change our focus to become obsessed with what we can become as a species, not just what our technology can become?
What Should Entrepreneurs Be Working On? [01:07:00]
Sam: A lot of people who listen to this are entrepreneurs. You could talk about this with a vending machine arbitrage guy — he’d say, I got this income stream, I quit my job. That’s one kind of inspiring story. This is a different one: spend your creative and entrepreneurial energies on things that really matter, both to your own lifespan and to human civilization. What do you wish people were working on? What opportunities are there where we need more talent and brains? If I had more time, I’d be doing X. What are yours?
We had Palmer Luckey on and he was like, before Oculus I was playing with this idea of reforming the prison system, or creating an oil-based food that would run straight through you with zero calories — crazy ideas that someone could go do. Do you have anything like that?
Bryan: I do a lot of them, but I’m really obsessed with one: goal alignment and cooperation.
At the basis of everything on planet Earth there’s a singular question — can we cooperate? Blueprint is asking: can I bring world peace to Bryan, in my own body? The answer is yes. I did that. Now my mind is a whole other project — the negative self-talk, everything that goes on up here, that’s an entirely different thing. But the Blueprint approach is applicable to climate change. It’s the same: if we measured the world with millions of data points and let the Earth speak, then worked within those constraints — that’s how we coexist with a healthy planet. Right now our minds overrun the planet. We do what we want, when we want, and it comes at the expense of the Earth. Just like we’re committing self-harm to ourselves, we’re collectively committing harm to the Earth. Same problem.
Goal alignment within ourselves, between each other, with planet Earth, and with AI — it’s a gigantic computational goal alignment problem. The AI alignment problem we talk about now: we don’t have goal alignment within ourselves, let alone between humans, let alone between humans and AI. The starting point in most people’s assumptions is: let me look at other people and change their behavior. The more interesting starting point is to look inward. What is my own internal chaos and war, and can I even try to resolve conflict within myself?
Brain Diet: Applying Blueprint Logic to Information [01:12:00]
Sam: What’s a more specific point of attack? A product or service that addresses this cooperation problem?
Bryan: The brain is one. I would love to tackle that. If I have this device and I can measure my brain, think about what we eat today as dietary input to our bodies. What is my diet for my brain? The news sources, social media, my friends, my environment — we have no idea what’s happening. We haven’t measured it.
Is it possible that we basically eat 90% junk food in a given day — for our brains — because that’s just how society is structured? I’d love to get a baseline of where my brain is.
More broadly, I’ve been talking to several people who specialize in math and computational methodology to figure out: are there mathematical approaches — in the same way John Nash came up with game theory — that could help us think about how to solve this? Between humans, between humans and AI, between humans, AI, and the planet. I can do it with my body — it’s pretty straightforward now. But it’s just going to get more complicated the more agents you have in the game.
Sam’s Closing Observations [01:15:30]
Sam: I’ve worked with Tim Ferriss in the past, and I’d ask him something like, “Tim, cool dog leash,” and he’d say, “This dog leash is made of horse hair which is good for the dog for these reasons, I found it in Japan” — and it’d be profound. Palmer Luckey was kind of like that too. You are 100% in that same ballpark.
You do this thing that Elon does — most people don’t do this. You pause. You don’t talk for like ten seconds. You just think. I try not to interrupt. One time I did interrupt you and you got silent, and a good interviewer doesn’t interrupt at that moment.
You’re really thoughtful. On one hand it’s exhausting because everything you say is profound and I want to ask you a hundred follow-up questions. On the other hand it’s refreshing and enlightening. You’re just an interesting human. Your intensity — I can see it being off-putting for some people, but for me I’m into it. You’re just an original thinker.
Bryan: Thank you, Sam. I appreciate that.
Bryan’s Home Lab Setup [01:17:30]
Sam: Before we go — what are those contraptions behind you?
Bryan: A couple weeks ago we bought a medical-grade, hospital-grade ultrasound machine.
Sam: I thought that was a Keurig.
Shaan: One of them looks like a SodaStream.
Bryan: Part of this has been building up the kind of equipment that allows us to do the work we’re trying to do. Ultrasound is a different quality class from wearables or biofluids like blood draws. If you want really good data on yourself, you need ultrasound, MRI, and all the stuff we’re doing at Kernel. We’ve basically built out a mini clinic-hospital here.
For the ultrasound, we have five sonographers: one specializes in the heart, one does lungs, pancreas, liver, kidneys, another does musculoskeletal, another does Doppler for the brain. For example, we just did an exercise quantification study — using ultrasound to measure tendons, ligaments, all the component parts of joints: ankles, knees, hips, elbows, shoulders. We implement exercise regimes and then look at the changes. Are they working? To what degree? Everything we do is quantified. Feeling rarely matters with anything we do.
The full team is like 25 or so, all together, with different specialties.
Shaan: That’s crazy. My setup by comparison: a poster of dogs playing poker, two AirPods, and a couple of empty Diet Coke cans.
Sam: If you just exported my DoorDash history it would tell you everything you need to know. Does Chick-fil-A make you older or younger? What are your thoughts on ranch?
Shaan: Bryan, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming on. We’ve been talking about you way back as this awesome guy, and it’s amazing to finally get to meet you and ask our questions firsthand.
Bryan: Thanks for having me.