Bryan Johnson

Awkward in real life, funny in print

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I just watched a short, very awkward clip of Silicon valley multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, being interviewed by comedian Andrew Schulz.

Johnson has made a lot of headlines over the past year. He’s spending a couple million of his own money on his anti-aging regimen. He has done a great job publicizing that on his social media, and so people have taken notice.

Schulz, on the other hand, is a white dude whose shtick is talking about race in a way that white people aren’t supposed to. He opens the interview like this:

“First question. Do black people age better?”

Johnson lets out a little gasp that he modulates into a nervous chuckle. He looks around for help. And then he retreats to the saferoom deep inside his mind, and he replies,

“There’s data showing that different people, in different circumstances, in different environments, have different clocks.”

Andrew Schulz nods in understanding. “The one time black people are slower,” he explains to the audience. To which Johnson nervously guffaws again.

Here’s why I thought this was notable.

I follow Bryan Johnson on Twitter. He gets a lot of hate and mockery there for his rejuvenation quest.

And yet, his tweets are uniformly funny and crisp. He agrees-and-amplifies like a master. He diffuses attacks. And he works trolls to his own advantage, all with a smirk that you can somehow feel in those 180 characters.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve listened to Johnson speak, he sounds exactly like he did while talking to Andrew Schulz. Abstract. Humorless. Pedantic.

I don’t know whether Bryan Johnson manages his own social media. Maybe he has somebody else write for him. It would explain a lot.

But whether or not he writes his propaganda himself, the following point still stands:

You can be an entirely different person in your writing. You can be smarter, better, funnier than you ever could be in real life.

And like Bryan Johnson’s case shows, you can build up a large audience this way, and create a lot of influence, and have your ideas and your offers reach millions of people, who you could never reach otherwise.

And on that note:

Until this Monday, I’m promoting something to help you get there yourself. It’s Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

High Impact Writing is a course that takes you by the hand from what you are now — no judgment — and turns you into an inspiring, funny, influential presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kieran, by the way, has some authority when he teaches this. He has succeeded in building up his own presence on social media to an audience of over 200,000. He’s built a million dollar-personal brand as a result, with course launches that bring in $100k-$200k over a few days (like right now).

Also, if you buy Kieran’s High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below, I’ll give you a free bonus. It’s the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I actually gave this training live.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful way, even if you’re not very insightful and you have nothing particularly insightful to say.

I, by the way, have some authority when I teach this. People regularly tell me my emails sound insightful. And yet, in all honesty, I think of myself as rather shallow-minded in real life, very pedantic and very formulaic. Again, you can be somebody entirely different in print.

The cart for High Impact Writing closes this Monday at midnight 12 PST. The next time Kieran offers HIW, the price will explode to never-before-seen levels.

If you’d like to get it before then, and grab my Age of Insight training as a free bonus, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

A book that changed how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me

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At the start of this year, a friend turned me on to the BLUEPRINT.

To me, anything with the word BLUEPRINT in it sounds like an outdated 2011 info product. But no, that’s not what that is.

The BLUEPRINT is a project by Bryan Johnson.

Once upon a time, Johnson was a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He founded Braintree, a mobile payment startup which later acquired Venmo. In 2013, Johnson sold Braintree/Venmo to PayPal for $800 million.

And then, two years ago, reclining on his piles of gold coins and sacks filled with $100 bills, Johnson decided on a whim to become immortal.

So he assembled a team of longevity scientists who devised an optimal daily protocol for him — the BLUEPRINT — including diet, 101 pills every day, training, sleep, blood testing, gadgets and widgets and non-stop optimization.

The cost? $2 million so far. The result?

Johnson says he has slowed down his pace of aging to that of an average 10-year-old. He has managed to reverse 5 years off his biological age (he is 45) and many of his organs now test as functioning at the level of 20-year-old. He says he feels better than he ever has, he’s more positive, has zero anxiety, sleeps perfectly every night, overflows with energy, and the quality of his ideas is better.

Of course, not everybody is sold. Johnson gets a lot of hate and mockery online.

It doesn’t help that Johnson vaguely resembles the T-1000 android from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, just with longer hair.

But I guess the real reason for the hate is that people see Johnson as a rich kook, a kind of modern-day Howard Hughes, on an eccentric, selfish, and self-absorbed chase.

And so I thought also. But I heard Johnson speak a while back. It turned out he’s very normal, very reasonable, and very altruistic-sounding.

His goal, he says, is to prove that it’s possible, so others believe and do it too. And while figuring out the BLUEPRINT cost Johnson $2m, it won’t take others nearly as much to implement it themselves, or to implement the 20% that gets the 80% of the value.

Whatever. I’m not here to sell Bryan Johnson to you. I just want to share something that struck me from that interview. Johnson said:

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We are accustomed to our technology improving systematically. With ourselves, we do not improve systematically. We improve a little bit, but we commit a self-destructive behavior here, we have a rise, we have a fall, we decay.

We accept that we humans decay and are eventually going to die and we become martyrs for our technology to move forward. We basically are trying to give birth to immortality through our work because we are demising. We are going to demise. And that technology is then used against us to make us addicted to all the things in the world to make us even worse.

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One thing that struck me from the above is the idea that we are trading one kind of longevity — our personal bodies — for another kind of longevity — our work.

It reminded me of a book I’d read a long time ago. This book changed how I look at the world and how I think about life, death, and pretty much everything around me.

As you might know if you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, I make a habit of re-reading books that I found worthwhile.

And even though I read this book 10+ years ago, and even though I already had it change my mind once, I decided to make it the next book for the Insights & More Book Club.

For one thing, this book is a great illustration of insight techniques in action. For another, the core ideas in this book are genuinely novel and mind-changing. What more can I ask for in a book club focused on insightful writing and ideas?

If you’re interested in finding out what this book is, in reading it, and in participating in the Insights & More Book Club, then you’ll have to be on my email list first.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months at the start of a new book. The doors are open now. But they will close again tomorrow, Sunday night, at 12 midnight PST. If you’re interested in getting in before then, sign up to my email list today, and watch out for my email tomorrow.