Bryan Johnson has built his entire protocol around a single, unwavering principle: slow the speed of aging. But beneath the biomarkers and algorithms lies a more uncomfortable truth about human behavior that he’s willing to confront head-on.
“We’ve normalized self-destructive behavior so much so that you can do it out in the open with friends and everyone’s cool with it,” Johnson explains in a recent podcast. “No one calls it out and it’s all expected. And if you don’t participate in self-destructive behavior, you get called out and ostracized from the group. You’re the one who’s meant to feel like you don’t belong.”
This reversal fascinates him. When people observe his disciplined lifestyle, they assume he’s miserable. “It’s funny because people when they observe my behaviors their assumption is that I’m sad, which is weird, which is ironic,” he notes. “Meanwhile they’re drowning in their own sad behaviors and I’m the one that should be ostracized. So it’s a really funny self-defense mechanism to try to soothe oneself from what they’re doing.”
Johnson has experienced both sides of this divide. For a decade, he was chronically depressed, building his company Braintree Venmo while raising three young children in a difficult relationship.
“If I look at that time and I look at the Avalanche of negativity that buried me every second of every day, it absolutely pinned me to the ground and I was suffocating,” he recalls.
His framework for change is deceptively simple: anything that increases his speed of aging is self-destructive; anything that slows it is rejuvenative. But implementing this required brutal honesty about his own behavior patterns.
The breakthrough came from separating himself into multiple personas. “I’m not one person, I am many,” he explains. He identified his most problematic self as “evening Brian,” who appeared at 7 PM every night with a litany of persuasion tactics: “It’s been a long day, you deserve it. You did really well at this. You worked out really hard, you probably already burned the calories off. Tomorrow we start.”
By treating these impulses as external rather than intrinsic, Johnson created psychological distance. “When he shows up, I treat him as other. Hi evening Brian, I see you’re here. I see what you’re trying to do with your persuasion techniques and you have been unauthorized to make decisions on food. You can’t eat food. You have no authorization.”
This approach challenges a fundamental assumption about human nature. “It’s hard to be human,” Johnson acknowledges. “If we can all be honest just for a minute and confess that we are helplessly and hopelessly engaged in self-destruction all the time as a starting point. And not try to spin up these pretty little stories about ‘that’s what it means to live’ or ‘this is what brings me happiness.’ They’re lies, but we’ve done such a phenomenal job of making them pretty stories and protecting them because we don’t want to face this uncomfortable reality.”
His solution involves creating what he calls a “self-aided destruction score” that would track obvious behaviors: overeating, consuming junk food, skipping exercise, missing bedtime. The goal isn’t perfection in every area of life but eliminating the most blatant forms of self-harm.
What troubles Johnson most is society’s complicity in this normalized destruction. He describes his 17-year-old son attending orientation at a prestigious university, surrounded by some of the planet’s most talented young people who were “downing sugar, junk food, drinking, not sleeping.”
“I thought what a disconnect between what we’re trying to birth intellectually and what they’re doing physically,” he says. “We’ve socially engineered a society where it’s not adjusted to call out bad behavior.”
The result, in his view, is a species “addicted to self-destructive behavior” at precisely the moment when humanity faces its greatest challenges around climate, artificial intelligence, and cooperation. His blueprint protocol represents an attempt to demonstrate that algorithms can manage entropy in our bodies better than our own minds, freeing us to focus on larger problems.
