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To me, anything with the word BLUEPRINT in it sounds like an outdated 2011 info product.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.