Bryan Johnson raises $60M for Blueprint, betting longevity becomes a multi-trillion dollar market

Uh, while he hops on, let me tell you about AI. Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt [music] to production with Gemini, chat with models, vibe code, and monitor usage. Thank you. Uh, classic LA story. Good to see you again. People in LA arrive on time 15 minutes after you normally arrive. Oh, yeah.

At least I do normally. Yeah, that's the nature. Uh, hopefully you didn't have too much traffic. It's great to have you here. Uh, big week for you. It's been a great week for us. Yeah, congratulations. Uh 60 million, but break down exactly what happened. What what was the impetus for the deal?

Uh take us through the recent history of Blueprint. I mean, I started this this is the idea that we are the first generation who won't die. It's kind of a crazy idea.

We started this a couple years ago and I think a lot of people thought this was kind of an insane pro thought process and so we've been hammered away and I think it's gone from weird to interesting to yesterday was kind of like now it's accepted and maybe even cool. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I think we've it's a it's a thing now. It's a part of the zeitgeist and I think it formalizes that we're really going to take a a shot at this. Yeah.

So I mean there's like the philosophical underpinning where you're I imagine you know in in the vein of Kerszswall like looking at long-term trends artificial intelligence uh compounding just the value of compounding little gains all over the the health system potentially could at least in your belief get us to infinite life and not die don't die.

So you get to that, but then you, you know, at some point need to instantiate that in a company, in a business, in a suite of products. And so that's what blueprint is today. Is that the idea of of the the fund raise, is that what people are investing in? Yeah.

The idea is um when somebody says, "Yes, I want to be healthy. " It's pretty hard. You have to go out and you have to navigate a thousand things, you know, like is this good for me or is it bad for me? You have people who have conflicting opinions. And so our target customer is somebody who says, "I want to be healthy.

and we just say, "We've got you. " Yeah. We will give you like the protein amounts. We'll give you tested and certified foods. We'll give you the exact dose. We'll help you with your prescriptions. We'll give you protocols. Like your autonomous self, like it's not go navigate the world by yourself. It's we've got you.

Yeah. And we'll do an evidence-based biomarker approach.

One of the uh I feel like anybody that really gets into health goes through a period where they realize I I at least at one point I was like 19 at the time realized that it felt like I was spending like 50% of all my cognitive power on just like trying to be as healthy as possible.

And at a certain point I realized like this is such an inefficient use of time.

Unfortunately, you build up some habits and kind of like understanding of what's good and what's bad and what you want to uh leverage more and and kind of avoid and all that stuff, but uh I think like make you know removing that uh step from the process of being able to just kind of like default into a system.

Um, walk can you can you get into a little bit more of like I I I remember reading a post at this point from you maybe it was like a couple months ago kind of like talking through the decision-m around um you know where you wanted to take blueprint uh why kind of raise capital all that kind of thing. Yeah.

I mean it was this um I mean I guess I my sole objective is try to be sober in this moment and I really enjoy the perspective of thinking a few hundred years into the future. You look back at this moment and we are giving birth to some kind of super intelligence. We don't know what it is.

We don't know what kind of scale, but it's big. It's important. I have neither an opinion that it's positive or negative. It's just significant.

And I was really trying to think through does it even matter if I build anything in the world right now or should I work on building the philosophy and the moral framework on like what does it mean to be intelligent on planet Earth in this part of the galaxy?

M and I was kind of in the middle of like as an entrepreneur do you build or like which way do you build and so I was just reflecting that am I misallocating my time and I thought you know really blueprint is the practical implementation of this philosophy like when you say yes to don't die you're saying I value existence I respect existence and so it's it's less about living forever it's more about a philosophy of yes this moment is big and so what a lot of people don't realize is this endeavor is entirely about AI alignment.

Yeah. I mean that's the sole thing happening on the planet right now. And so when you take care of yourself, you take care of your body, when you take care of the body, you take care of intelligence, like it's just it's this holistic system of we acknowledge existence. So it's that was it.

It was like I was trying to figure out as a human, what do I do on planet Earth right now? And how do I spend my time? I'm an entrepreneur. My intuitions are to become an entrepreneur, but I wondered is that really the the right way to do it? Yeah. Yeah. What is what does Blueprint look like in a decade?

It feels like you're it's such a unique consumer package goods business because you can't even call it that.

It's like I mean I I understand that there's like the philosophy and I I love that as the brand, but even just in terms of like the business of like what people pay for, there's a lot and that's just that just such a contrarian approach to this this category because so many people are like, I have an idea.

I'm going to make coffee better. I'm going to make a greens powder better or I have an opinion about the the burger or the meat or the food or one particular thing and then they grow and grow and grow and then 5 years in they're like let's do a line extension. Let's do Yeah.

CPG trend of the last 10 years was go walk into the gas station, find a product that's popular and make a a version of it that's like 50% healthier and then you probably have like a nine figure revenue business or make nothing like Thrive Market, Arowan.

There's a bunch of companies that have been like we'll just be the the seller of everything. How did you land on like I want to kind of make everything that feels like an immense challenge. I want to walk through all that. I mean that's what you know Kaparthi was talking about the autonomous systems with door cache.

Yeah. Like that then and he and I think very similar in this way is that if you model out what AI systems will do they'll probably take on more autonomous responsibility in our lives. We see beginnings where you plug an address in to a car and it helps you navigate to the place. You don't think about it much.

Y we're going to build our autonomous self. Our health will be run on our behalf. So right now we have to chase down all our food. We have to chase down protocols. We have to chase down evidence. But it's not going to be that in the future.

it will be that it will just be run for us and as we get measurement that's more high fidelity.

So blueprint is basically we're saying we are going to build your autonomous system of health and we're going to ride the breakthroughs of science so that as we make better progress in lowering the speed of aging and reversing aging damage you can just say I'm in and I'm going to ride with you.

So we're going to try to be on the very very forefront to help people have you know the best possible health. So we're just building out autonomous health systems. Yeah, that feels like super valuable just from the consumer experience of like I I'm I'm delegating all of that hassle.

I know basically if I buy one from one brand, it it's all aligned with one philosophy, which is great. Um, what does that mean on the logistics side? What does that mean on the capex side? What does that mean on the operational cost side? Do you have like 25 different product managers for each niche?

Like what's the shape of the company? This feels like a big challenge. A very big challenge. or standing up like 10 different businesses at the same time. Exactly. Exactly.

Like there's plenty of people that could have done what you did where they like become famous or they become content creators in one way or another and then they're like now I have one product and you're like now I have how many products do you actually have? Over 20. Over 20. Yeah.

Uh and it's clear that like you probably a lot of that comes from the fact that you've been a successful entrepreneur before. You're like yeah I can probably do more than just one. But uh but what what what actually does the what does the does the business look like? Does the system look like?

Are there cross-selling benefits in retail on day one or is this just an e-commerce play on day one? Like, how do you think about the the costs and benefits of going multi-product so soon? Yeah. I mean, the thing is that when people want to be healthy, you can't just address one thing.

They're still left with 99 things to deal with. I totally get the consumer value makes a ton of sense. So, internally, we're basically building out the infrastructure to deliver every single channel. So digital food uh prescriptions testing so we can say like it's so much stuff.

It is so much stuff you know like this is what so I've done this myself the last you know like 5 years we've mastered the system for me and you know I've been fighting to achieve the best biomarkers in the world like kind of in some sense a like a ridiculous idea but also like it's a new sport like you can imagine it becoming a thing um so yeah I mean basically we've mastered it we've built it now it's productizing so yeah do so where the images of the What is how do you think about so so every every consumer out there has at probably at some point or another gone through the frustration of of finding a product they love and then watching the company behind it or sometimes an acquire just like steadily just like try to maintain or increase their margins to the point where it's no longer that it might have similar looking packaging but it's no longer the same product like like I imagine like you want blueprint to be the thing that you are relying on for the majority of your calories, the majority of the supplements you take, the majority of the drugs that you are going to, uh, leverage.

And so, uh, I can imagine like, you know, holding the company to that standard so that you're not having to go anywhere else or realize like, oh, this product would actually be better for me. But like, do you have any kind of like ethos around that?

because that just feels like every, you know, I try to be cognizant of like when a company goes from founder to uh they've exited and the new acquirer is just going to say like, hey, you know, we could actually source this salt from over here and we're going to save like 80%.

And nobody's really going to notice cuz it's going to taste similar, but then the tests start showing up and it's actually like got lead in it now or whatever. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, I'm Blueprint's number one customer.

I appreciate it so much, you know, because like we when we first started doing this project, I was testing everything I put into my body. Air, water, food, like everything. And I learned first of all, food is guilty until proven innocent. Like it is so toxic. It's no matter where you get it. Yeah.

People were freaking out last week when there was that uh protein powder report came out that a bunch of them had lead in it. And I was like I my immediate reaction was like obviously a lot of this stuff has lead in it.

I mean like look at the average chocolate bar has like a ton of lead in it and that's it's not even so you can to isolate that one toxin but there's so many other toxins. So people they they grab onto one concept that they understand it's like oh that's bad. There's trace levels of heavy metals in all of our foods.

Yeah. So like the fact that it's there is not an alarming it's just it's out of context but it's at a level people understand. But you know the goal is I'm going to blueprint is my way to try to achieve you know this don't die and so people will be just riding along. We build on population level data.

So this is not about Brian Johnson's body. This is about everybody's body. So all ages, both genders. But no, I think we're being meticulous about what we do. And so it will be the quality will be the best in the world. And so I care about it. I'm consuming all about myself. Yeah.

what what uh what's the plans on the kind of tele medicine front for uh for uh kind of interventions or therapies that require uh doctor's kind of involvement. Is there anything on that front?

We will build an infrastructure to basically when you want a prescription if you want to go on a GLP1 we can help you get started whether you want a large dose or micro dose.

You're just like, "Yeah, and also I'll do the lab testing and I'll also like build the, you know, the I'll I'll I'll be mining the metal that gets turned into the needle that injects you with the G. " It's like you want to hold up the entire global economy. I love it. It's good ambition. I I I I strongly support this.

Uh yeah, I I was interested in like like where are the edges of like what you like? Yeah, actually I'm not going to go into that market. But it feels like you'll just continue to work on it until you get to some status where you're like, "Yeah, actually it's Would you would you go into hospitality?

Would you create like physical kind of like if you want if you want to get European these European kind of uh health retreats that are very like evidence-driven, they're testing focus.

I could imagine a blueprint retreat center that that people can visit once a year to Yeah, we have about a dozen groups around the world that want to stand this up and some of the biggest hotel chains around the world. They because the thing is they just want credibility. They want to say like come here.

We have this thing structured. When I meet with some of the most powerful people in the world, they're just as clueless as everyone else. It is not a like people imagine rich and powerful people just have it solved. Yeah. That is not the case. And so yeah, we are going to stand this up.

We probably will not do physical clinics. It's just too much on the real estate and so we'll probably license it out. Sure. We probably do the digital model if we have a model almost. We have trust like we want to have like we could do a model across food and clinics where we have this evidence-based approach.

So yeah, I mean we're we're kind of in it to just blanket the entire industry with a framework on how to do things in a credible way that's biomarkerled, evidence-based. Yeah. Uh what was the thesis behind the round? $60 million, tons of faces, not the traditional CPG VCs, private equity folks.

Like, what was the thesis? Yeah. I mean, so I I've been funding the company myself up until this point. Yeah. And, you know, I guess I just wanted my friends to come along with me. The So, these are people I talk to in private. They enjoy it. They're into it.

And I think a lot of people, they have not known how to think about me, like, am I legit? Am I not? Is this a thing? Is this weird? And then they see that list of investors are like, "Oh shit. " Yeah. And so like yesterday, I think was the first day it was like, "Oh, it's safe to say this is cool.

" That flipped like a long time ago. Really? Yeah. I I I feel like the I feel like that the first like business I What was the first piece that you did that was like I spent $2 million on my health and that went super viral. Yeah. Two or three years ago. That was like two or three years ago.

I feel like that was the moment where people looked at it. My personal view pretty quickly people dug into your backtory and were like, "Oh yeah, you sold a leg. " My personal view is is America has has over the last few years had so little trust in health institutions.

Like if you just went and followed the American Heart Association's guidance, I'd probably die at like [laughter] 60, right?

And so, so to me, I was always like, you know, knowing how much I I you can read about health and you can listen to podcasts and you can listen to what some influencer said in a short form video, but to deeply understand your health, you have to do self-experimentation. Everybody is different.

And so I always looked at it, you know, you you always tried to be controversial enough to like generate attention, attract some people that were going to become super fans and lose some people. And you were kind of okay with that.

But my my sense was always like, thank you that somebody is going to invest more money than basically anyone else and just self-experimentation and then open source all of that and now people can buy your olive oil if they want or they can decide no I'm actually going to go on my own journey and try to find some uh some product that can fit this requirement.

Um, but it felt like such a public benefit that I always wish there was like a thousand Brian Johnson's that were just all running the same experimentation open sourcing process versus the biggest thing we we talked about this the other day is health influencers quickly get into put themselves in a niche and they're like I'm the I'm the the fasting guy.

I'm the HRV guy. And then every single thing becomes about that. Yeah. And it's cool because you can like tap into a world and like kind of accelerate and understand a lot about a category, but then in reality it's not like fasting is the only thing that matters. It's just like one tool.

So I have another take on on that that maybe I'd like your reaction to. Uh there's also this this trend in health influence where if I want to blow everyone's brain, I'm going to come in and uh blow everyone's mind. I'll be like, "Guess what? I boil it all down. It's uh sleep, diet, and exercise.

That's like 99% of what you need to do. And everyone's like, "Man, this John guy, he's not talking about the crazy supplements. He's just telling it like it is. Sleep, diet, exercise. I did it. I feel great. This is amazing.

" And then after I've made, you know, one hour of content every week for 5 years on sleep, diet, exercise. I'm like, "You know what? Let's actually talk about like the 17th piece of magnesium you should take or like that the thing that's Yeah, it is beneficial, but it's 0. 001%. " Yeah.

Do you feel like you have to go back to the basics sometimes or or do you think that there's there's actually maybe that's not even that's not even a reasonable critique? Yeah. I think that the the thing that most people struggle with is doing things they don't want to do. Like they don't want to overeat.

They don't want to eat a pint of ice cream. like they don't want to drink, you know, you know. So, yeah, those things are really the highest leverage interventions. It's like it's behavioral. Yeah.

And so, yes, you can say sleep that exercise, but you get deep and you then uncover that American like our American society is one of addiction. Sure. Like the American powers of capitalism have appointed at getting people to be addicted on food, right? Sugar, nicotine, porn, junk food, like all of it.

And so this is if you look at so like just from a broad perspective you begin on western thought with political Aristotle Christianity sure medieval times renaissance uh enlightenment and modern scientific era. Yeah like you look at these big frames we're due for a major shift and right now we're at the tail end.

This is like kind of a Dio kind of thought process of like these big macro trends. Yeah. We're at the end and right now you know capitalism was for solving scarcity. We're now compulsive. We're now compulsive. Yeah. And the idea was democracy was freedom of choice. We now have no longer choice because we're addicted.

So we're really playing on this very big macro frame of we're a different time as a species. And so yes, sleep that exercise, but in this larger frame, it's about what does it mean to actually be intelligent, make decisions, and you can't when you're addicted to everything. Yeah.

What do you think about some of the longer tale interventions like the the the like the third peptide that's not approved yet, but people are already taking it here? It feels like is this sort of like un pseudorulated unregulated biohacking becoming more prevalent?

Is that the correct world in a world where the FDA is broken or does the FDA need to change or h how how do how should we like map the you know accelerating advances in science with maybe stagnation in regulatory? What's your framework for that? Yeah, I mean peptides are very powerful. They're basically drugs, right?

So you get access to drug-like effect sizes. problem is peptides are oftentimes not manufactured to spec and so you have risks of like putting stuff in your body that you shouldn't be putting in your body like they could have lead in them just like your chocolate bar and a bunch of other stuff. Same with stem cells.

So like there's there's a real quality problem. The other problem is peptides a lot of peptides are not fully well characterized. So typically drugs you say like you can do this thing but also here's a long list of side effects and that's nice because like okay at least I know what the trade-off space is.

With these peptides you don't have the characterization. Okay. And so it's a bigger risk that people experiment. You see a lot of this in bodybuilding now. You have biomarker biohackers doing it. So it's fine. It's just you have to understand it's the wild wild west. Sure. That may be your game. It may not.

But like it's definitely you want to be cautious. It's not like it's a safe path. But then there's other things like you start with the highest level of evidence. You know, sauna is great. Yeah. But you know, like if you I've talked about this a lot. If you don't ice the boys in the sauna, you crush.

Can you make a ice pack? I used to I used to I think we maybe talked about this last time. I used there used to be this ice pack on Amazon that was for this use case and they stopped selling it and now I don't I I like I lost I lost my So we should they don't want you icing your boys. I don't think they want that. Yeah.

And then a lot of men will say like I'm not trying to have you know babies so it doesn't matter but has negative feedback hormone hormone health. Interesting. So yeah there so yes sleep that exercise is great but then you dive into the details. This is what I'm saying.

Like you you start down this path and you inevitably will spend 50% of your time chasing down everything some sort of weird root cause on whatever it is. It's never easy. So you have infinite chase. And that's what I'm saying is that's the problem trying to solve is nobody has 50% of their time to do this.

How uh how how are you thinking about wearables? Because there's a world in the future where you have a camera that's effectively a sensor that's able to experience life in your in your view.

And that as like a health co-pilot would be pretty wild because you' be like, "Hey, hey, you you've already eaten like, you know, well beyond you assume that like cameras get better at like calorie tracking. " It's like, "Hey, you're well over like uh your daily caloric needs. Like you're now going into a surplus.

Maybe ease off and maybe that's enough. " Meta Ray-B band displays like need a killer app. That sounds like something you should build. What do you think? Yeah.

I mean the if you think about it GLP1s are kind of that I mean a little bit right it's like it's like modulating your hunger like your satiety and it's like so how do you how do you think uh we'll view GLP1s and the the explosion of their use in 50 years. It's probably the most successful anti-aging drug ever built.

It's incredible. It's like you the benefits keep on accumulating. Yes, there's drawbacks. They're getting better all the time. But do you feel the same way about statins? Uh those are they're complicated. I mean, statins do have benefits, but they're complicated.

Um, do you feel like there's any value to reading into the uh the the conspiracy uh like weird vibes around the fact that like ompic came from a demon like this monster? Isn't that [laughter] monster? Is it the heal monster? Komodo dragon venom or something like that. Like it just feels like wrong, right?

If you're just like, you know, just humanity 101, he'd be like, "Yeah, don't drink. Don't become the reptile. Don't drink the reptile venom. " I mean, you're you're he Brian might be trying to become the reptile. Are you into it? The Senorian Toad gave us 5 MO DMT. And I would say that that's bad, too.

That that throwed off all sorts of red flags for me. It just got FDA approval. It did. It did. Break status for treat uh depression treat uh resistant depression. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Treatment resistant. Yeah. Got it. Yeah.

Uh, so yeah, I mean I guess if you're sad, you need the ch you need the toad to [laughter] cheer you up, I suppose. Happy I'm I'm happy if it's helping people. I'm happy. Uh, it is it is just funny when we were we we we were looking at the story of ampic like a year ago.

What's your what's your view on uh I think everybody's hoping maybe maybe GLP1s are this and people haven't sort of fully realized it yet but everybody is kind of I feel like for a while just hoping that like oh by the time that I'm I'm a I'm really aging like I'm really feeling it uh there will just be a pill that I can take and you know I'll just be able to halt or maybe even reverse.

Are you like how open to to you how open are you to the idea that like there could be something that is like an order of magnitude more effective than GLP1s in terms of anti-aging like are you you know where where do you put the probability there I mean that study that came out in from China in June they showed that they took this form of a fox3 protein they use crisper we they put it in a melencomal stem cell and delivered it via introvenous treatment it had a biological equivalent for human anti.

So this was in monkeys it had a 3 to 5 year age reversal in over 50% of the tissues which is unseen and for human equivalent that' be like 9 to 15 years roughly. So these demonstrations are being done. I think we'll probably I was going to actually figure this out. You know the the hype cycle where you you um Yeah.

Gartner hype cycle. Exactly. Yeah. Of disillusionment plateau of productivity.

I was going to model this out this week trying to figure out like because I think we're probably going to hit peak in something like GOP ones or something 2032 you like is like okay like okay we got some time a few things will hit people be like it's here and then oh and people will think that they're going to live forever and then there will be a crash and be like oh actually there's still more problems to solve.

Exactly.

2035 237 people were like oh man like it's not solving this or that or we have these complications and like maybe early 2040s people were like actually we got this like something like that I saw some post crazy like inbound from from mad scientists all over the world that were like [laughter] hey I made this thing I was talking with chat GBT for 50 hours over the last week and I figured out like let me let me come inject you when I was when I was building kernel with this brain interface I would get all these emails that people are like I've been implant answered by the government.

Oh, so that would come in. But now, yes, like I do I get I don't know maybe like seven to 10 a day. Wa people offering you experimental feel like I've I've discovered the quantum realm and how the how sick. Yes. [laughter] It's it's wild. People are excited about this topic. Maybe some toads involved in that one.

That's funny. Yeah. I remember seeing this post a while back. I I don't know if you remember it better than I do, but it was basically looking at like the the distribution of lifespans is not there's not just a single power law where everyone falls off at like 90.

Like you would expect if it was just a normal power law that we would get a couple 150 and like one 200y old person, but in fact there are like this double exponential effect. Yeah. But then we still are at this like you know exponential fall off in longevity but even unlocking like one person at 200 would be amazing.

Yeah. There was this interesting paper that came out of Levven uh so he said um his theory after running this model was that basically after we reproduce our cells lose purpose like we our cells don't have a unifying objective. Yeah. Yeah. So they just like aging just like we just don't know what to do. Interesting.

And so if his model is correct like biology needs don't die like they actually need an objective at a macro scale like at our level of cognition but also at a cellular level. But I think like these are the kinds of experiments people are being are doing of like what what is the underlying incentive structure of biology?

Why do we age? Why do we not age in certain parts of our life? Why do we have protective mechanisms? You know why do some species regenerate? So, I think it's this really exciting frontier where our ideas now of aging are beginning to crack open a little bit and expanding our horizons of like how do we think about time?

Yeah. And I mean, we talked about this last time you were on about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, uh not particularly famous for their biohacking, but uh incredibly resilient uh well like a life well-lived. Uh so many stories about them like you know staying up drinking Coca-Cola and wine long into the night.

And I I want to believe that there's some level of just if you have a purpose, if you have drive, your body just pulls it together a little bit more. I I know people want this to be like the answer.

Like, you [laughter] know, it's such I think it's really such a bad idea because people in their mind, they make that shortcut and they're like, you know what, I've got I just got to work harder. I got to work harder. Yeah. Uh did we did we cure uh balding? There was that study was last week.

Uh they're all such they're weak effects. Okay. Yeah. You we really have not made I guess so long turkey. It's a little bit embarrassing as a human race that we haven't been able to make really good strides on hair loss. That one seems very simple. I I don't know. It just seems like very mechanical.

You know, it it doesn't seem as complicated as like, you know, your brain degenerating. We don't even know how the brain works. It's like it's hair. It just grows. Like it's should be easy. We're working on it. We just put out our best attempt. We're going to see if it works.

Like uh we're going to try to beat every everything that's out there on market. Yeah. We'll see. How important is uh this like cosmetic intervention to the blueprint plan?

Like because you could imagine a world where people will say, "Yeah, make me live forever, but I don't care about wrinkles and hair because unless it's going to help me actually live longer. " Yeah. Why bother? I mean, the thing is this don't die is really be hot. Like what? Like what?

Every every every every supplement company, every every every company in health, you're ultimately selling at the end of the day. And I I think this is brilliant from a business perspective, but does it make sense in terms of the science? Like does it take something out of Yeah.

No, like being hot is good science, you know, like if you look youthful and vibrant, your skin is nice and like you you're you have a lot of energy. So I think be hot is legit the path for this. Okay. Yeah. Be hot, don't die. How do you think about longevity in the business?

you know, uh, if you look at, uh, the DTOC bubble, there was a lot of companies that raised similar amount of money and and, you know, are are no longer with us.

I imagine you care about a lot about just making sure that don't die and blueprint survive decades and I'm sure that's informing the way you're building the I mean, this is like you, you know, the internet comes about, Google sets up shop and rides that tailwind. Amazon sets up shop on on commerce, right?

Basically, somebody's going to set up shop in longevity and ride a multi-t trillion dollar ride. Sure. So, that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to just be home base, win the early innings of longevity, and then ride for the multi-t trillion dollar market. Yeah.

Do you think there's a lot of like I imagine M&A will be pretty important to your strategy. a lot of companies.

I mean, I just view there's a lot of companies that are important that are like single product or for specific use cases that don't really necessarily need or shouldn't be because like if you're a blueprint customer, maybe you need it once every 3 years, but that means it could be harder to actually build a business around, but it would slot in.

You nailed it. So, basically, if you look at the landscape in health right now, nothing is proprietary. You basic you got wearables from all these different providers. You have food from different providers.

you have biomarkers like nothing's proprietary and so the winner is going to have to out compete everybody and bringing a an experience to the customer that is sensible and practical and make you know so I think that's that's where the competition is going to be because this is like the days when I was building Brainree Venmo is it was commoditized like you're all in the Visa Mastercard MX discover uh stack and you have to build something unique and then uh Brainree and Stripe just collapse the market yeah uh how do you think about Wait I now I want to hear the story of uh of the Venmo acquisition.

How did that happen? Yeah, they so they built up a f so people in payments it was very clear PayPal was the only company making money. Okay. Because they had both sides of the market. Sure.

They got lucky because they got into eBay they built the consumer side but then they had the merchant side too because otherwise if you just offer it to merchants your margins are pretty low, right? You're making whatever 20 50 basis points like that.

And so everybody was going after PayPal, trying to build a two-sided marketplace. And that took a lot of capital. It's very hard to build from scratch. And so I said, "Okay, I'm going to build uh the merchant side of the business uh first and then I'm going to acquire the consumer side.

" I said this when I started the company. So we got customers like Airbnb, Uber, GitHub. Uh we got all the Gen Z people and then Venmo had done a fantastic job building out consumer side and we could then marry those two demographics and it's like perfect.

And so yeah, so they had built a great business, but they hadn't solved making money. Okay. When they plugged into our world, we bought them for 26. 2 million. Yeah. Yeah. How much of that was uh like not making money because of fraud.

I hear that like a lot of fintech companies like they actually have something where the unit economic should work, but it's always crazy in the early days. So you hear the story about PayPal where PayPal was losing tons of money, but it was only because of fraud. actual business when it wasn't fraudulent made sense.

But then once you get to scale, you can do the anti- fraud properly. Is that something that you were problem solving around? It's very hard again because you're doing peerto-peer and typically you have like like illicit purposes primarily as your driver and so it's a very hard problem.

So as a standalone it's hard for them to make sense because you if you have if you stack on a fee when you're paying your buddy it's hard friction in the adoption. So you have to kind of speedrun adoption and then make money later. Yep. But there was no good make money later problem.

Do you think do you uh I I was running uh I think it was a shower thought. I was like, "Okay, there's so much cap capital slloshing around the private markets. It's been interesting that we haven't seen more people like try to take on Stripe.

" I don't know if it's I don't I'd be curious uh from your point of view at what point will people even try to climb that mountain? Very unlikely. They've done such a great job executing. I I sold uh Brainree in 2013. So they've been building 12 years since. They've done such a good job making that airtight.

They're just great. That's this is the thing is like Yeah. You can't come in and make a 10x better product. A Amazon locked commerce. So you of course can build your e-commerce business on Shopify, but at a scale I mean Amazon has just kind of owned that entire thing. It's very hard to replicate that.

So that's that's our goal too is we're basically trying to do that for longevity is once you collapse the entire space, it's just it's very hard to get in. Okay, we got a lightning round. Favorite book. Um or just a book recommendation, something you read recently that you like.

Um I just finished uh The History of the Western Mind going through all of Western thought. Oh, cool. Uh favorite music? What's in your You know, I have such a soft spot for Eminem. When I was when I was depressed, he was the only artist that I could fill. Okay. Love it. Uh, when will humanity develop AGI?

[laughter] We ask hard. You don't want to sound like a D cell. You don't want to be Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Um, just call it right now.

Well, we Well, I want to be able to clip this the day [laughter] and be like, I want to say I want to say that uh I want to say that we'll be nice to you and we won't clip this, but I know our clipping infrastructure and we absolutely will clip this. It's such a sucker question.

[laughter] Uh well well maybe let's flip it around uh OpenAI and Microsoft this deal where where the the the definition of AGI will be convened by a group of experts. What is your definition of AGI? Um I I approach this question as a more through psychology of when will humans feel useless feel useless. Yes.

Like our entire identity is based upon like we do things we contribute we build. Yes. And now AI is a tool like we feel more productive with it. Yes. At what point will it do everything so well you feel this deep hole in your stomach of like what do I do?

So what if Yeah, the weird thing is like computers are incredible at chess yet people play chess for fun and at the professional level because humans I guess they're anti-clanker and they like watching humans play chess and if we can solve that for everyone so that everyone has some sort of even like in this agi world where there's no more real jobs there's no more actual okay you need to produce something for food or you know uh livability everything is just for fun for games and for status and it's all about wasn't Andre Karpathy saying you go to the gym and you'll learn in the future and it's and I wonder like if your definition is once that breaks down that is feels really far I like that I like people look forward to retirement like retirement is a goal it's an ideal it's like we're going to get an RV we got to cruise the country then they retire they're like this sucks like there there's not the tension so if we imagine we're going to like learn and we're going to like do yoga all day and paint and but like if there's not the tension of the stress and the of real life like do we really want to be on vacation all the time?

Do we want to be at leisure? Like so that's my like what I think about is when that happens that's a pretty unnerving situation because humans don't do well with that uncertainty and then our systems have to respond. So like that's what I really think about all day every day.

That's everyone in the end is just going to be competing on biomarkers. It's going to be the final [laughter] it's going to be the final status game. that aligns with Carpathy's take. Uh, last lightning round question and then I want you to ring the gong. Um, favorite vacation spot. Where would you go? Redwood Forest.

Redwood. I love Redwood. Staying in California. Yeah, I would love I love Redwoods. Let's go. Right. Like there. This is John. There's John. I love California. You don't need to go to Europe. I love America. I don't You don't need to get all the radiation on the plane. Just stay here.

They're like such beautiful, majestic creatures and they live a long time. They live a long time. It's very on brand for you. I love it. Uh, congratulations on the round. $60 million. Fantastic progress.

I'd love for you to ring that gong and I'd love for you to ring it at a at a decel level that you feel is appropriate for uh hearing, you know, actually. Let me Yeah, let me teach us. Yeah, let me pull out my decel meter. Do we have my phone? Let's make sure we get this. Yes, let's bring over.

We don't want to be over 80 dB. Okay. Yes. because we uh we do have IM so it is a little bit of hearing protection but I would love to know uh you can you feel free to take as many swings as you as you need but I'd [laughter] love to know uh what an 80 del uh ring sounds like.

So yeah I recently I measured my ears my left ear 64 so I have moderate mild to moderate hearing loss really which substantially increases your risk of dementia. Oh wa so yeah so because you're going crazy because you don't you don't perceive reality properly. Your brain's missing all these things.

Oh, that's crazy built for for hearing loss like concerts, social gatherings, restaurants. So, yeah, I would suggest everyone get a hearing test. I just got hearing aids. Okay, so all right. Okay, cool. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Hit the hit that gong at at a at a longevity approved level. Let's hear it. All right. Okay.

What are we at? How we doing? 90. 90. Okay. So, about that level. Well, if we go any higher, we're going to need just just a tad. Yeah. Yeah, just a tad. There we go. That is the Brian Johnson approve approved hit. You heard it here. I bet I bet everyone in the chat is like, "Oh, finally.

" Because we we smacked that thing so loud. Fortunately, you know, we Dude, do you have tonitis? No, I don't. Okay. Fortunately, but I I do. Oh, you do? I've had it since I was uh my my Coachella era. This is the thing. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah. Now, I I don't I don't go to concerts at all.

I don't pay to stand in crowds and lines. Um but uh but I do I I I specifically recall uh or I believe I know the exact weekend that that uh that that uh it started. Man, is it a pretty significant thing in your life? Uh no. I I zone it out, but but if I take a if I like I've adapted to not hearing it.

But if I every probably few times a week I'll be in a really quiet space and realize that I have constant ringing. Have you looked into hearing aids? No. Yeah, maybe I should. Yeah. So, I just got the Ottoon Intense. Yeah. Okay. That that that increases your not wearing them right now. Not right now. Yeah.

But you you've been testing them out. Yeah. Exactly. I actually I I'm so sad. I I was running out the door and I forgot them. I just finished my morning routine. So, I'm still sad. But yeah, but they actually they I've only had them for a week. They have substantially improved my life. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Cool.

Well, this conversation has substantially improved my life on the show. This is fantastic. Congratulations and we will talk again soon. We have our next guest in the reream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand