Who is Bryan Johnson?
Bryan Johnson is an American entrepreneur who founded Braintree, a payment platform designed to simplify the process of online transactions, which was later acquired in 2013 by PayPal for $800m. He is also the founder of Kernel, a company with a primary focus on the development of advanced neural interfaces, designed to facilitate a greater understanding of the human brain and its potential to transform the way we think about mental health, cognitive enhancement, and the human experience itself. Johnson was born in 1977 and grew up in Provo, Utah, the son of a construction worker father and a schoolteacher mother.
What is Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint protocol?
Johnson spent two years and millions of dollars developing Blueprint, an algorithm designed to take better care of him than he can himself. He has, in effect, outsourced every decision he used to make on a daily basis – when and what to eat, when to sleep, how to exercise and recover and so on – to a computer programme that collects and analyses real-time and logged data to make optimal lifestyle suggestions to improve every facet of Johnson’s life.
Why did Bryan Johnson create Blueprint?
Blueprint was born after Johnson felt helpless to stop himself from overeating to soothe the pains of life. In his words “Despite my successes: raising three kids and selling my business for $800 million; when 7pm rolled around, there was nothing I could do to stop myself from engaging in this self destructive behaviour”.
He says “Evening Bryan” – his personification of the evening unhealthy habits that were causing chaos with the rest of his life – was “disrupting sleep, and ruining life for all other Bryans.” One day, he “playfully” decided to revoke Evening Bryan’s decision making authority to eat food. And from that moment Blueprint was born.
What are the fundamental principles that underpin Blueprint?
Johnson explains Blueprint as a philosophy that embraces systems over willpower, data over human opinion, harmony over addiction, and is built on compounded rates of self improvement.
It’s also a belief system that rejects addictive algorithms, corporate profiteering at your detriment, social norms encouraging bad behaviour, and eliminating self-aided destruction (SAD) and destructive behaviour. In short, Blueprint may seem to be only concerned about health, wellness and aging. But, as Johnson explains, “it’s really a system to make tomorrow better for you, me, the planet and our shared future with AI.”
Does Blueprint work?
Yes, if the results of more than two years of on-going measurements of the health and performance of more than 70 of Johnson’s organs are to be believed. Each organ is monitored and measured through hundreds of measurements – blood, saliva, stool, fitness tests, and imaging – each one providing unique communication on exactly what they need to perform optimally.
But it’s more than just a physiological experiment: “Freeing myself from the moment to moment chaos of my mind – and opting into a superior system of data + science – has been the most liberating experience of my life,” Johnson says.
Why does Bryan Johnson believe Blueprint is so important?
Not only is Blueprint a personal roadmap to greater health and happiness, Johnson envisions an impact on a global scale.
“Now, I feel happier, more alive and fulfilled than any time before. I am nicer to those around me, no longer irritable and my mind is clear. It made me wonder: instead of pointing at others and demanding change, could the societal and planetary change we desire start by changing ourselves from within? Weirdly, could the future of being human start by eating our vegetables and stopping self-destructive behaviours?”
Johnson says we can all feel that things aren’t quite right in the world and he believes Blueprint is the first step on the long road to fix it. How? Through each and every one of us gradually eliminating the worst of our self-destructive behaviours by using AI, science and data to do the hard work for us.
If you aspire to look and feel your very best, he says, then why wouldn’t you opt into saying yes to the internet, computers and AI to improve your life in ways that far exceed our own natural abilities to do so.
Can I try Blueprint?
Not yet, but you can join the waiting list and find more information about the protocol here.
