Anti-aging billionaire Brian Johnson is about to commit his life to crypto.

Multimillionaire tech guru Brian Johnson If he hadn't sold his payments company Braintree to PayPal in 2013 and become obsessed with anti-aging, he says he might have devoted his life to crypto.

“If I hadn't sold Braintree, I would have gone all in on crypto,” he says.

Magazine caught up with Johnson at the speakers' lounge at Token2049 in Singapore, where the youthful-looking 47-year-old was met by an assistant with a supermodel look and a million-watt smile.

Best known today for pursuing long-term therapies, Johnson made his name in 2007 by founding the mobile and internet payments company Braintree. At one point, the company was growing 4,000% a year. In the year In 2012, it acquired Venmo, and in turn, Paypal acquired Braintree for $800 million. Johnson pocketed $300 million from the sale and is reported to have a net worth of about $400 million.

Around that time, he became very interested in cryptocurrency and was working on an agreement between Braintree and Coinbase to process Bitcoin payments and accept cryptocurrency for merchants.

“In 2013, we were the very first in the industry to embrace crypto by partnering with Coinbase.

“I was very good at crypto and we sold it soon. But, yes, there is a fact that my whole life is crypto.

Brian Johnson co-founded the Network School

Part of the reason Johnson is in Singapore is to help launch the networking school he co-founded with former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan. In the year “We had never crossed paths at that point,” he said, referring to 2013.

The school is a three-month learning program for 150 technically oriented libertarian capitalists in a Chinese-built forest city abandoned on an artificial island in Malaysia. It's the most concrete step yet toward Srinivasan's decades-old dream of establishing a networked empire, a real-world open-source internet and libertarian values ​​underpinned by a Bitcoin-based financial system.

It brings together two of the key interests of crypto's mega-wealthy – establishing independent states or micronations without the control of existing authorities (see also Liberland, Crypto Utopia, Satoshi Island and others) and defeating obsolescence.

Also Read: Thailand's Crypto Utopia – ‘90% Cult, Without All The Weird Stuff'

Johnson declined to speak on behalf of Srinivas' vision, but said he likes the idea of ​​bringing together free thinkers who want to innovate.

“You look at the history of civilization, innovation rarely comes from established institutions. It comes from the outside edge,” Johnson says. “If you're trying to find opportunities for innovation in society, it's usually from a small group of people in the right structured environment.”

Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Angelist co-founder Naval Ravikant, and venture capitalist Fred Wilson all support the network empire concept.

To reverse his own physical age and don't die, Johnson designed his Project Informed Health Optimization and a new project based on his Blueprint system of exercise, nutrition and health education about longevity to help others extend their lives through diet and lifestyle. Treatments. One of Srinivisan's goals is to help the biotech founders attending the school to help humanity transcend its biological limits.

“A lot of the Don't Die community is drawn to this because I think there's a very natural overlap between his ideas and my ideas, so we have a lot of overlapping communities,” Johnson explains.

The Don't Die meeting was held that same week. One journalist who attended – who Johnson posted on X – described the “extreme biohacking lifestyle” phenomenon as “cult-like”.

Brian Johnson on crypto folk and longevity

Crypto billionaires enjoy longevity. “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver told the magazine that he would consider freezing himself to avoid going to jail, but Buterin believes that death can be saved.

“Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people every two years as WW2, and even before it kills, weakens people and strains social systems and families. Let's end it,” Buterin wrote.

Johnson isn't sure why the correlation exists, but he agrees with Pop Psychology magazine's theory that super-rich crypto and tech people who have solved many difficult engineering problems may see aging as another solvable problem.

“I'm not sure I fully understand either,” he said. “I mean, the relationship is like parallel tracks, if you get into one, you're kind to the other.

“Bitcoin basically rejects inflation, and I basically reject obsolescence. We basically accept these slow boiling deaths and we both reject slow boiling deaths.”

Johnson and Srinivasan brought up the theme on stage at Network Empire a few days later.

“Bitcoin is about keeping the state from slowly eroding your wealth,” Srinivasan said. “And ‘don't die' means accepting the inevitability of aging and death and stopping the state from slowly eroding your health.”

“…and we are against that. We are against this.

@Balajis: Bitcoin State is about slowly draining your wealth.

And “don't die” means keeping the state from slowly draining your health.

They are actually very parallel, because in the legacy system, the base assumes a 2% inflation rate.

Yes,… pic.twitter.com/epMGgiM5ue

— Arjun Khemani (@arjunkhemani) September 22, 2024

Brian Johnson believes that biological immortality is ‘solvable'

Biological immortality has long been considered the stuff of fantasy and science fiction, but two years ago, so were AI systems that could slip through the Turing test.

One important reason why we age and die is that most of our cells can only divide 40-60 times. But some cells in the body can divide forever, and scientists have successfully turned adult skin cells into stem cells and reprogrammed cells in the retina to rejuvenate age-related vision loss. In nature, the “immortal jellyfish” (Turritopsis dohrnii) can return to the form of a polyp and start again, repeating the cycle forever.

“Biology solved the problem, didn't it? So the jellyfish is important,” Johnson says. “Biology has already shown us that immortal things can exist, so it just needs [to be] applied to [human] Species. Yes, it is completely solvable.

Also Read: Longevity Expert — AI Will Help Us Become ‘Biologically Immortal' By 2030

Johnson spends $2 million a year on his longevity project and is said to have a team of 30 people, from nutritionists to MRI specialists, to help with his anti-aging services.

It includes a proper diet, includes 35 different exercises and emphasizes the importance of sleep, since the last meal is eaten at 11:00, the resting heart rate is chosen for bedtime. That might sound like a tall call, but Johnson was encouraged by the 179-minute Night Tower build — which is associated with a surprisingly long life.

Longevity miracle drugs: diet, exercise and sleep

While he's famous for receiving experimental plasma from his 17-year-old son (which he claims has no benefits), among other quirks, Johnson says most of the benefits come from good nutrition, exercise and sleep — meaning anyone can do it. them, but most don't.

“I think a lot of people don't want that to be true, because they face the uncomfortable reality of not doing these things,” he said. But there is unequivocal proof that he is now in the process of becoming “the most measured person in history.”

“For example, my aging speed is now 0.64, which means that I celebrate my birthday every 19 months. So this is a meaningful difference in how fast a person ages.

Healthy living and exercise is great and all, but most people seem to be more interested in miracle cures. And there are some possible candidates.

Johnson has been taking 1,500 mg of metformin daily for the past four years, and early studies in monkeys show the drug can reverse brain aging by six years. He also speaks highly of Ozempic (semaglutide), which research shows significantly reduces the risk of dying from all causes.

“Ozympic is one of the greatest advances in medicine to date. Side effects aside, it can fundamentally change a person's relationship with food and is ushering in a new era of transformation for ourselves,” he said. “It's really a powerful demonstration of our technological capabilities and why I worry about aging.”

It also takes other supplements and sells them online as Blueprint stacks:

Johnson says he's not afraid to die — he wants to live long enough to see and participate in how human society is transformed by artificial intelligence.

“A lot of people think I only do health and wellness. It's trying to answer this big question: What will we do as a species when we give birth to a supermind?

“So in that sense, yes, I think it's the most important thing we can do as a species.”

Brian Johnson's views on AI

Johnson has spoken on podcasts about his belief in AI's potential to make better and wiser decisions than humans, and Blueprint will oversee an algo for lifestyle improvement recommendations based on the results of health metrics.

As longevity expert Jose Luis Cordero believes AI systems can speed up the process of finding long-term care, although he says they are “not medicine,” thanks to systems like Google's Alphafold.

But Johnson isn't focused on the AI ​​systems we have now, he's thinking about what they might become. The ideas about superintelligence and alignment are understood through thought experiments: What if we look back after five centuries of history and look at events today from a broader perspective?

For example, when the printing press was invented in the 15th century, there was great opposition from copyists and scribes who feared losing their jobs. As seen today, it led to an explosion of scientific knowledge and was one of the most transformative developments in human history.

“It's a thought process that invites the idea that much of what we currently believe is temporary and will be replaced by new things. And it invites humility about what could be and what we do and don't know.”

The creation of superintelligence leads to many existential questions, whether humanity is creating its own successor species, bringing about eternal life, or not giving birth to God.

Some observers also believe that there are religious aspects to Johnson's print movement.

Crypto AI label Mgoes recently spent a week with Johnson and said, “Don't die is more than just eating healthy. Brian is building a religion.

The principles are: Don't die as an individual. Don't hurt each other. Don't die as a species (AI threat).

“Athmut thinks that it is a great ideology equal to capitalism, Marxism, Christianity. He thinks he will answer the questions raised by technology in a different way.

A former Mormon who lost his faith, Johnson responded to the post:

“You're right on purpose and perspective. It's been my experience that DD takes some time to digest. It challenges everything we understand about existence, and it's intuitively correct.”

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Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton