Bryan Johnson: How He Is Getting Biologically Younger, Selling His Company for $800 Million, and More

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
You said earlier, you said, I wanted to make a certain amount of money by age 30
What was your number? What was your target?

**Bryan Johnson** (0:06)
On the lower end, it was $7 million. I had built out my spreadsheet model and assumed a certain rate of interest and basically said, if I make a certain amount of money, this is an annuity that will be good enough for my entire life, assuming I don't need capital to do anything, just if it's time, I'm writing or something.
Then if I do something in the world, I had mapped out something like 150, 300 million as a basis that would get me started on that path.

**Sam Parr** (0:40)
We're officially live, so Bryan, I've been messaging you for like six or eight months now, but basically, I'll give like a very brief background and you can kind of like tell us a little bit more because inevitably I'll miss something. But you started a bunch of stuff. The most, probably the biggest thing is Braintree. I think you bootstrapped that, right?

**Bryan Johnson** (1:00)
I did.

**Sam Parr** (1:00)
So you bootstrapped that, sold it for like something like $800 million to PayPal. You guys also bought Venmo, which I think is like the greatest acquisition, one of the best acquisitions of all time because you bought it for kind of nothing compared to what it is now.
And then you've done a bunch of other things. You've done Kernel, which is interesting, and you had this, a fun that's kind of interesting. But the thing that I started reading was your new thing called Blueprint, which the kind of, I'm kind of an idiot. And so the stupid way of describing it is like, you have your biological age and then you have your chronological age. A chronological age is just how many years old you are.
And then you have your biological, which is it measures a bunch of different things like your organs, your blood. And you're basically trying to reverse your biological age faster than the chronological age goes up, which inevitably means you live forever. I mean, is that basically it? And you're blogging and like sharing everything along the way, is that right?

**Bryan Johnson** (1:56)
Great job.

**Sam Parr** (1:57)
So there I-

**Shaan Puri** (1:57)
Bryan, what is your chronological age and what is your current biological age?

**Bryan Johnson** (2:02)
I left my mother's womb 45 years ago.
And biologically, I'm a few hundred different ages. And so you, for example, if you're looking at the age of your heart, you can characterize the age of the heart through a few dozen markers. You can do the same thing with other parts of the body. And so you're actually a collection of some very large number of markers because different parts of the body age at different speeds. And then your life choices and environment also affects that.

**Sam Parr** (2:37)
So I want to ask you all about this blueprint thing because I think it's amazing. But can I ask you a few questions about Braintree first?
So Braintree, I mean, like, you know, you guys are owned by PayPal now.
Another competitor to yours, I think is Stripe, which is, you know, these are like high tech companies, you know, pretty complicated things. How on earth do you bootstrap a business like that? I mean, I think by like year three or year four, you're doing like eight or nine million in revenue. I mean, you kind of, you guys kind of took off. So I understand like how you were able to bootstrap it, bootstrap it once you got to maybe 10 million in revenue, but how on earth do you make something like that from scratch?

**Bryan Johnson** (3:14)
I was, I guess it started when I was 21 I decided that 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 that time and place. And I admired people who tried to identify the thing on the horizon that was barely reachable during their lifetimes and they went after it.
And at the age of 21, I didn't know what that was and I didn't know how I could do it. And so I thought, you know, given my options that I might as well, I'll become an entrepreneur, I'll make a whole bunch of money by the age of 30 And then at that point, I'll try to go after something. And so it was a naive contemplation of how to go about doing things. I'd grown up in a small town, basically, you know, with my grandpa on a farm.