#31 - The Don't Die Network State | Bryan Johnson

Balaji (0:00)

Bryan, thanks for speaking at the Network State Conference.

Bryan Johnson (0:02)

Balaji, it's my pleasure. I love being here.

Balaji (0:05)

Awesome. All right. So last year, you came by at the opening of Network School on the very first day. Thank you for coming to the ribbon cutting and grand opening. This year, we've moved very far. We've built a lot of stuff. We've had, you know, more than a thousand people have come and really on our way towards building Network School and startup societies. And you've also come a long way. Blueprint has come very far. It's become a global movement. Don't die and Blueprint. We actually have Blueprint bars, as you know, at NS and all the Blueprint kind of stuff. What's the summary of the last year, few years?

Give Bryan and Bryan, and then we'll talk about the Lungevity Network State.

Bryan Johnson (0:47)

It was initially an intrigue. When this went viral a couple of years ago, it was kind of like what is happening. There was the Tsunami of Hate, and then it went into this quasi-curiosity mode of what is this? Is this real? Is this sketch? And then there's been this gradual acceptance, like actually it's legitimate and it's interesting. The hate has tapered off substantially, and now it's really gone into a movement. I'd say then the Netflix documentary was out in January, that had a deep global impact. And so now over the past, I'd say maybe five to six months, I'm now with some of the most powerful and influential people in the entire world. It's just been this really remarkable trajectory towards credibility, where I mean yesterday, I was with, well, I won't say who I was with, but like some of the most powerful people in the world working on health and wellness protocols and whatnot. So it's just been interesting to go from, what is this to now like deeply engaged in the world order.

So it's been a fun trajectory, very unexpected.

Balaji (1:51)

That's amazing. So what I would say, and I will propose this to you and maybe you'd agree, maybe you won't, but let's discuss. I actually think the Don't Die Network State is actually the key to both. And the reason I say that is, I think the primary barrier to longevity and more generally transformative biomedicine is the American regulatory state and more generally the American health care apparatus and how it only treats people when sick, and it acknowledges that death is or thinks death is inevitable. And also, we get almost no news about the incredible developments that have happened in academic biomedicine in terms of reversing aging in mice or even in humans. And there's some amazing phenotypes like, you know, I can put this one on screen which shows two mice of the same age, and the first one is balding and older, and the second one is clearly younger. Or here is like a side effect, I could put on screen of a couple of men who had a cancer drug, and it caused, as a good side effect, their hair to reverse color and to go from gray to less gray. And you've probably seen, actually, are there other examples you've seen that are like that, that have these amazing visual undeniable effects within humans or animals?

Bryan Johnson (3:07)

Yeah, I mean, many. There was a study out in June from a bunch of Chinese researchers who put the overexpression of FOXL3 and they package it up in a mesenchymal stem cell, that people are doing interesting experiments that have measurable impacts. You can read them out or you can visually see them. And I agree with your framework that when you seeing is believing, that a lot of people, I mean, Balaji, I think your point is correct, that when I started doing this years ago, I tried to achieve the best biomarkers of anyone in the world. Like that was like a way to say there's a healthiest person in the world, there's a richest, a fastest, can there be a healthiest? And what I really learned is nobody cares about biomarkers. They just wanted to look at skin and face.

And so I had been on this deeply caloric restriction diet and I'd lost so much fat in my face. I hadn't really paid attention to aesthetics. And people could not see the project when my face was gaunt. And so it is remarkable that I agreed that people understand longevity basically through the face. And so what they see, they can believe or hair. But that really is, I think, the entry point for most people in understanding what is aging, do therapies work. If you can't see it there, they don't believe it.