Bryan Johnson explains why longevity is here, why super-intelligence is right around the corner, and why when it comes to Blueprint, he is happiest in the trenches.
Bryan Johnson is the man behind Blueprint, a project that aims to measure all of his 70 organs – and then maximally reverse the quantified biological age of each. Described as the “most measured man in human history”, Johnson publicly documents his self-experimental protocols and results, allowing us to be passengers on his longevity journey. Two years and millions of dollars into that journey, Johnson has data demonstrating he has slowed his pace of aging by an equivalent 31 years, and now he is working on rolling out his algorithm to enable his followers to move from passenger to driver, taking up the Blueprint for themselves.
Longevity.Technology: The term ‘biohacking’ could have been invented for Bryan Johnson. The multimillionaire tech entrepreneur makes no secret of the fact that he is spending $2 million a year, not only trying to keep the ravages of aging at bay, but to actively reverse his biological age. It’s no surprise then that Johnson is a featured speaker at this year’s RAADfest, the conference that puts super-longevity at the top of its agenda.
Bryan Johnson on…
This thing called life
So the earth is middle-aged and we happen to be at the moment when we’re baby steps away from super intelligence. It’s the most exciting time on Planet Earth and potentially in this part of the galaxy, and we happen to be the ones occupying intelligence space right now. And so to me, this is the ultimate situation – longevity has been viewed as a field adjacent to AI and other things, but I actually think they’re one and the same.
They’re both about the continuation of life and what the expansion of life can be. So to me, this is all interlaced and is the essence of what it means to be alive right now.
Being a very public longevity experiment
There’s few things more helpful than being the product. I’ve built companies where you build product, and my experience as a founder or CEO is those who are deeply in the trenches of product – no matter how large the company gets – they’re always in the trenches, talking to customers, understanding what’s going on with everyone in the entire company. That’s how I built my previous companies, and to be the actual product is next level. And so certainly going through Blueprint has given me a level of understanding and empathy for other people that I just couldn’t achieve if I’m at arm’s length or in the bleachers trying to talk about this stuff.
Poking at the concept of death
I have really valued, in the past few weeks, poking at the concept of death on social media and in private conversation. And it’s been educational for me to learn how deeply embedded death is in society. This makes sense – death has always been inevitable. People believe it to be inevitable, and society has built itself around this inevitability. And so, if you begin to call into question that death may not be inevitable, it’s not because we have the answers right now, but because we’re baby steps away from creating super intelligence – and once you have super intelligence, nobody can map the future.
And so, given that there’s now this question mark before us, which no one has ever had, and death has become a maybe, you can begin to peel back all the layers and see how deeply death is embedded in all things. And to me, this has a powerful psychological play in how we build AI, how we take care of the planet, how we take care of ourselves, how we take care of each other. I’ve found the understanding of it to be delicious – it just feels like the most powerful thing we could do as a species would be to have the teeniest doubt about the inevitability of death. I think it might snowball into something that would create a new way of being for us.
What’s on the cards for RAADfest
The only thing on our to-do list as a species is don’t die. We’ve built all the technology we need, we’re overflowing in abundance of technological thriving, and AI is on its way, and it’s not going to be stopped by anyone or anything. And therefore it’s don’t die individually, don’t destroy our biosphere, don’t kill each other, and don’t underestimate the need to align with AI.
When I look at why AI alignment is a difficult problem, I basically see a mirror of myself. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Blueprint – can I take the alignment problem and apply it to myself? Technically AI alignment is a different domain, but there are some principles that are interesting. And so I really wanted to take action in the ways I could – me as a 35 trillion cell+ individual. Can I align my 35 trillion cells for one objective outcome – in this case, slowing my speed of aging? So at RAADfest I’ll be looking at societal scale cooperation on the singular principle of don’t die.
Longevity investing
Investment in personal longevity may produce the highest return of any investment anyone could ever make. If you extend your lifespan right now, long enough to step into this escape velocity, you may make 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, a million times your own investment on lifespan. So there’s no better place to invest your own money than your own life, especially if you can make it to this next bridge of longevity.
In addition, I believe there’s going to be a zeitgeist shift, and I think it’s going to be swift. There will be this realization that death is maybe, and we can meaningfully do something to slow our speed of aging and potentially reverse it with various therapeutics. And when that happens, we know how the market responds to that kind of thing, and what could happen for investors who have properly identified the companies that are going to build up this new ecosystem – there are a few big winners in every new shift. And that’s what’s happening now – you want to find the big companies that are right there at the foundation, building the blocks that will lift all boats when the zeitgeist shifts.
Check out the full RAADfest agenda and speaker line-up HERE. Don’t forget, Longevity.Technology readers can bag a 10% discount on any type of RAADfest registration! Simply use the code “technology” when booking.
