Modern Meditations: Bryan Johnson
Modern Meditations: Bryan Johnson
Inside the mind of the former tech executive working to become immortal.
“The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever,” the humorist Herb Caen wrote. For most of our history, humans have mostly agreed with Caen’s sentiments. Immortality is to be coveted after death, but not before it. Even if it were possible, it might be a bit of a drag.
Bryan Johnson disagrees.
The former founder of payment processor Braintree (acquired by PayPal for $800 million) and brain-computer interface startup Kernel has spent the past few years embarking on a public and pricey campaign to reverse his aging and attempt to live forever.
In doing so, Johnson joins a rich lineage of fringe dabblers that have tried to outsprint the Grim Reaper. The emperor Qin Shi Huang, who united China in 221 BCE, drank wine laced with mercury, believing it would stave off death. Instead, it hastened his decline. Others have sipped gold, bathed in virgin blood, injected guinea pig seminal fluid, and surgically grafted monkey gonads onto themselves, all in pursuit of everlasting life.
While such pursuits sound ludicrous (and painful) in hindsight, they were not without merit. The same surgeon who dabbled with guinea pig’s organs galvanized the study of endocrinology, which is essential to understanding our bodies.
In recent years, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Yuri Milner have all poured millions into longevity research in the belief that our decline is more bug than feature. If the turritopsis dohrnii – a jellyfish that resembles a raspberry jailed by a dandelion clock – can live forever, why not us? Even if the field’s moneyed backers don’t succeed in fulfilling the dream of every Medieval alchemist, their efforts will almost certainly push the frontier of biology forward.
Johnson is content to act as the field’s foremost lab rat. Since 2021, he has invested more than $2 million a year into reversing his “biological age” through a meticulously calibrated diet, exercise routine, and panoply of treatments. It is called his “Blueprint.”
According to Johnson, his strategy is showing signs of working, with his aging slowed down to a speed lower than “99% of 20-year-olds.” He has been dubbed the “most measured person in the world,” a title it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously contesting in the near future, given how much data he has and continues to gather. In search of nirvana, Johnson argues for quantification more than meditation.
At the same time, Johnson has pushed to make his experience the foundation for a species-wide movement, undergirded by a new doctrine he calls “Zeroism.” A collection of essays, novels, and philosophical tracts evangelize “zeroth-principles thinking.” Johnson has formed a community around these ideas, dubbed memorably: “DON’T DIE.”
Johnson’s impressive tech bona fides, extreme commitment to his cause, and obvious desire to scale his immortality credenda make him a particularly interesting subject for a Modern Meditations, our series that asks some of the world’s most interesting people unusual questions. He is an intelligent, creative person attempting a goal most would consider entirely impossible and building a movement around it.
In today’s interview, we will delve into the interests and eccentricities of a tech radical. We’ll explore why Johnson believes we should “demote” the mind, the wisdom of our organs, the lessons biographies offer, how we should “co-evolve” with AI, and the need for a new “Generation Zero.”
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Lessons from Bryan
The mind is an unreliable actor. Our bodies are servants to the desires of our minds. They make our decisions, both good and bad. Bryan believes that the amount of power we give to our grey matter is not merely unwise but brutally destructive. Humans repeatedly pursue damaging behaviors—drinking, eating unhealthy food, propagating violent acts—in service to the whims of this capricious master.
Let your organs speak. At a philosophical level, Bryan’s solution to the supremacy of the mind is simple: listen to your body. Much of Bryan’s complicated “Blueprint” program can be boiled down to this idea. Bryan has found that giving your organs decision-making power results in healthier choices oriented toward the long term.
The wisdom in unknowing. If we can trust Plato’s written recollections, it was Socrates who said, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know that I know nothing.” Bryan seems to spend much of his life reminding himself of this fundamental truth. More than anything else, he considers questioning the nature of reality to be the life-long craft he is honing.
A time beset by existential threats. Bryan believes we live in an especially fraught era. Artificial general intelligence looms, our planet is imperiled, and humans continue to commit atrocities against one another. The former founder believes the answer rests in escaping the prison of the mind, listening to our bodies, co-evolving with AI, and looking toward the far future.
Which current or historical figure has most impacted your thinking?
It’s more of a collection of people than a single one. I don’t know how many biographies I’ve read, but over 100. It’s one of my favorite activities.
I enjoy reading about people in their time and place and learning what they were able to do that was invisible to the rest of their generation. When we look back at those people, we offer praise and gratitude for what they accomplished because we are the benefactors of their achievements.
This is consistent with an idea that is important to me: “Talent is the ability to hit a target no one else can. Genius hits the target no one else can see.”
Genius is what pushes the species forward the fastest. I enjoy reading biographies because they’re often chock full of “zeroth principle thinking.”
Reading Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea was important to my thinking. To us, zero is intuitive. It’s in our code – binary is 0 or 1. It’s in our mathematics. Modern society is built around zero.
That wasn’t always the case. It took humanity hundreds of years to actually understand zero, and not just mathematically but philosophically. How do you grasp the concepts of zero and infinity?
Math was largely blocked without an understanding of zero. Humanity grappled with that concept for generations and generations. It broke humanity for a long period of time, but we were given it for free when we were born.
What is the most significant thing you’ve changed your mind about over the past decade?
I previously understood my reality through the framework of my mind.
My mind was the ultimate problem-solving tool. If I encountered something I needed to solve—whether it was finding a partner, choosing a school, studying for a test, deciding what to eat, or any of the thousands of other decisions we all make on a daily basis—I looked to my mind to make that decision.
And I realized that my mind was the source of most of my problems. It could help me solve things, but it was also a self-destructive machine.
The most significant thing I’ve changed my mind about is empowering my body, specifically my organs, to make decisions about what I do and what I eat. It’s been a life-changing decision for me.
When future humans in the 23rd and 24th centuries look back and ask, “What happened in the early 21st century that produced such radical change in society?” I think it could be because we humans stopped delegating unquestioned authority to our minds and started empowering other parts of ourselves, especially our bodies, to make decisions on our behalf.
Blueprint allows my organs to speak directly about what they want in an ideal self.
What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?
Leaving Plato’s cave.
Plato had this allegory where people are stuck in a cave. They don’t realize that they’re stuck in a limited reality, just watching shadows on the wall. When someone leaves the cave, they find a different reality and try to tell the people about it excitedly, but no one believes them because they’re so consumed by the game of the shadows on the wall.
It’s a similar story in the book Flatland, where a three-dimensional structure visits a two-dimensional structure and tries to convince it that 3D reality exists. The two-dimensional structure resists endlessly and then finally comes around. The irony is that then a four-dimensional structure shows up to convince the three-dimensional structure that it exists, and it puts up the same resistance.
So, I’d say that the skill I’m trying to hone is the continual escape from the constraints my current reality imposed upon me.
What piece of art can you not stop thinking about?
I love absurdism. I love it for how it pairs unrelated things.
When I look at “Sense Of the Night II” by the painter Michael Cheval, for example, I see the future of existence that I’m so excited about. It stretches the imagination of what pairs with what, what the parameters are, and where the boundaries are.
This is a more recent interest for me that I discovered as I was trying to find places to play in my mind. I find art to be joyful; it’s like a recess of the mind for me. It allows me to explore combinations, representations, and concepts that are entirely original to me.
What trait do you value most highly in others?
Eagerness to acknowledge not knowing.
Wisdom to me is, “I know I’m in a cave. Or I know I’m a two-dimensional structure, and there are three-dimensional structures trying to talk to me right now, but I just can’t see them. Can you please help me see them? Can you please help me figure it out? I know it’s there.”
The act of perceived knowing crushes curiosity and exploration.
What do you consider your greatest achievement so far?
Understanding that I exist within realities.
I’ll never actually arrive; I’ll just peel back one layer at a time. I’ve never achieved wisdom or nirvana or anything of the sort. I’m just one step further. That’s the ultimate game of experience: how many layers to reality are there? You should never be deceived that the place you’re at is the ultimate destination.
Why have I chosen this path to peel back reality? Let’s imagine you and I travel outside Earth. We say to ourselves, “Let’s try to quiet ourselves, close our eyes, and take a few deep breaths. What is really happening on planet Earth that matters?”
We sit there for a minute, we think it through. And in the most sober terms we can muster, we would say, “Ok, number one: artificial intelligence is moving forward at an unimaginable pace. It’s the most important thing happening on the planet. Number two, the biosphere of Earth is in question. Will this be a suitable home for us? Because we humans are playing a dangerous game. Number three, it’s really kind of scary that humans are at each other’s necks so violently and that we possess these weapons that can do a lot of harm, from viruses to nukes. We’re a violent species.”
Those would be my three observations. Then we would ask, “How can we possibly go about trying to solve the really big problems that threaten the future of existence? We don’t want existence to end. We’re all still alive; we haven’t committed suicide. We have a will for life.”
I believe there’s a singular solution to all of it: our minds.
What is the primary cause of planet Earth being potentially unsustainable? Our minds. What is the primary cause of us being dangerously at each other’s throats? Our minds. What is the potential biggest stumbling block with AI and our ability to achieve goal alignment with it and build it in a way that we are what we want it to become? Our minds.
The Blueprint is basically a baby step to say, “Our minds are our principal cause of suffering and self-destruction. However, redeemingly, we have parts of ourselves – our organs and bodily systems – that are genuinely good actors. What if we empowered them and demoted the mind?”
It’s the practicable, understandable, doable entry point into the future of being human. Nothing else is. Brain interfaces aren’t there yet, we’re not at the Matrix-level yet, you can’t control someone yet. What you can do is let your organs speak.
My heart has never said, “I want to go get drunk and stay out all night.” Neither has my liver; neither have my kidneys. It’s my mind that is engaged in these self-destructive behaviors.
What are you obsessed with that others rarely talk about?
I’m obsessed with the future of existence. I really only think about that. My mind is not on the here and now. I do things in the present with Blueprint to keep my body in an optimal state, but my mind is entirely a future traveler. Whereas I think the majority of people’s minds are focused on the immediate here and now.
That’s a common trait in the biographies I read. Most of these people were forward-thinking. For example, I’ve read the biographies of all the American founding fathers. This country is not like the discovery of penicillin. It’s not a happenstance thing where they left something in a petri dish and came back from vacation and were like, “Oh damn, we just discovered an antibiotic.”
It was something that they thought deeply about and fought for for decades. They knew they were creating a new country. They knew they were ushering in new forms of human governance. They knew they were ushering in a different society. There’s a difference between stumbling upon something and constructing something from scratch.
I view my contemplation of being human in the same way as the founding fathers thought about the United States of America. It’s the founding of a new way of being.
What is your most contrarian, high-conviction opinion?
The human mind should be demoted from nearly every area of authority.
When I talk about the demotion of the mind, it’s about identifying areas where computational intelligence exceeds our capacity to do a given thing. We see this already. Algorithms fly planes safer than humans can. My navigation system navigates more efficiently than I can. We all know examples of where computational intelligence exceeds human abilities.
When that happens, we humans say, “Great, let the better thing do the task.” Sometimes, it’s scary for us, and sometimes, it causes life changes, but we typically do it.
With Blueprint, I demonstrated for the first time in history that an algorithm takes better care of me than I can myself. An algorithm exceeded my performance as a human. In doing that, it basically showed it was a better manager of entropy than I am. Even though it’s just n-of-1 and we don’t have 20 years of data, it proves the inevitability of adoption. Everyone will have algorithms that maintain their health and wellness.
It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. It doesn’t matter if you want to fight for it and say, “It’s your goddamn right to do it.” It’s inevitable. People always go kicking and screaming into the future.
The goal with Blueprint is twofold. One is giving people permission to empower themselves. For example, I published my sleep data. It showed that I had 100% sleep performance over the course of a week. I go to bed at the same time every day, and I say no to social gatherings—I say no to a whole bunch of things.
People don’t feel they have the power to say no. They feel like they’re missing out. They feel like they’re going to be ostracized. If they can have a reference point in their mind of, “Well, Bryan Johnson is doing it, so I can too,” it starts to shift the cultural norms. Instead of being ostracized, they’re respected.
Very few things are as powerful. People love norms. People still play within them, even if they’re hard. It doesn’t matter what the norm is. It can be absolutely bonkers. But people love keeping boundary conditions and calling out those who break norms. It’s a human thing that always goes on. By following Blueprint, I can give people power to shift the norms.
The second thing is that there’s no overstating the stakes we’re playing with right now on planet Earth. It is as high stakes as it has ever been in the history of intelligent existence. When you combine climate change, AI, and us being at each other’s throats – it is the highest-stakes game. So I want people to join, sober up, and say, “We need to do something serious here.” Because we are not in a good situation.
What contemporary practice will our descendants judge us for most?
I pose this same thought exercise to people I host for a Blueprint brunch. My best guess is that future humans will look back aghast that our minds were the authorities we allowed to run society and ourselves. We wholeheartedly embrace and protect with our lives this form of intelligence that is empirically proven to engage in self-destructive behavior. I think they will find foolishness in that endeavor.
What will the next generation do, or use, that is unimaginable to us today?
I think there’s the possibility for Gen Zero to rise up and say, “We are the next generation of humans. We are going to co-evolve with artificial intelligence, make this planet a sustainable biosphere, and put an end to the violence between humans. And to do this, we are willing to sever any human tradition or norm that has ever transpired. We’re willing to go off into this new expanse because the drag of these traditions could be lethal to us.”
Now, there are certain boundary conditions this generation would still want in place, like non-violence. The goal should not be a free-for-all. However, Gen Zero would acknowledge that we are the recipients of generations and generations of inherited ideas that hold no value as a starting point.
To be clear, Gen Zero is not the same thing as Gen Z. I want Gen Zero to emerge right now. I don’t want it to be defined by dates of birth but to span ethnicity, gender, nation-state, and age. Anyone who wants to step into the future of being human can be a part of it.
What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?
We are aware of the inherent self-destructive nature of the mind. But I think we feel helpless to stop it. Therefore, we ignore it with all the power we have.
I think we overestimate the ability of our technology to save us. So, we work on technology because it’s easier to work on something you can improve dramatically than working on yourself when you feel helpless to improve yourself.
Humans are currently martyrs for the progression of technology. We build things that live on past us, but we do so going to our grave. Then, the technology we invent is used to hasten our decline by getting us addicted to everything.
It’s a really weird relationship where humans are sacrificing themselves for the continuation of technology when it should be the exact opposite.
These things are glaringly opposite if you think about them, but our minds are incredibly skilled at hiding these truths because we find them unpleasant and distasteful.
If you had the power to assign a book for everyone on Earth to read and understand, which book would you choose?
I would say my pamphlet, Zeroism. It’s a call for revolution that emphasizes that there’s a window of time for us to act, and outside that window, our future realities are an open question.
How will future historians describe our current era?
I think we’ll be viewed as primitive. We willfully engage in self-destructive behavior. We do things that accelerate aging, decay, and decline. We are violent to each other.
We treated the planet like we treat ourselves. We are self-destruction machines. It’s fatal to us individually and it’s fatal to us collectively. That behavior is representative of our level of intelligence, and it’s embarrassing.
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Fascinating. I had never heard of Bryan of his approach. Will listen to his audio book and dig in.
So important to listen to the "outliers" in any society.
How did you approach this meditation. Was it the same formula for each meditation or very led by the subject. Is a set of questions to which they give a set of answers or something different each time.