🤷🏼♂️ What did Billy do this week?
Starting the newsletter with a quick recap of my week.
Best moment of the week: I was in Austin at the MilkRoad (my company) offsite.
First time in Austin. Cool city. Small-town vibes even though it’s the 11th biggest city in the United States. David Perell captures the city perfectly. “Austin is a mediocre city, but a great place to live.” The restaurants are meh, the city is kinda ugly, there’s not much to do, but the people are social and friendly. Plus, there is a sense of optimism you don’t get in a lot of American cities.
What I do this week:
Top Essay: Why I love airports
Top Tweet: Why capitalism doesn’t work
Top TikTok: The core belief of Karl Marx
❝ Quote of the Week
Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who can get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.
Michael (Jeff Goldblum) from Lawrence Kasdin’s Big Chill
Rationalization is the enemy of our dreams. Don’t let it win your thoughts.
💵 Company of the week: Kernel
Mission:
Kernel wants to revolutionize how we study the brain and provide the densest, largest, richest data sets ever taken. Bold, ay?
Right now, we just don’t know much about the brain.
Kernel is on a mission to make neuro (brain) measurement mainstream.
What is it?
Kernel’s main product is called the Kernel Flow. It’s a neuro-imaging helmet that takes 1 minute to set up and measures brain activity by recording local changes in blood oxygenation. Doctors currently measure neuro activity through invasive techniques. (aka opening your head or putting stuff in your head).
Kernel also has a product called, “Sound ID”, that can tell you what a person is listening to just from brain data.
How are they doing?
Still trying to find product-market fit.
They’ve raised $107m. Half of it is from venture firms like General Catalyst and Khosla ventures, and the other half from…
The Founder → Bryan Johnson. Crazy guy. I’ll get to him later.
Bryan says, “If we can quantify thoughts and emotions, conscious and subconscious, a new era of understanding, wellness, and human improvement will emerge.”
What does Billy think?
I’m starting to care less about the next viral social app or the killer use case for “B2B” software and more about startups like this. Even if Kernel doesn’t find product-market fit, they’re going for it. They’re trying to make the world a better place. SALUTE.
👨🏼💼 Person of the week: Bryan Johnson
Who is he?
Bryan Johnson founded Braintree, a payments company, he sold to Ebay for $800m in 2013 (he personally made ~$300m!). You may not know Braintree, but you probably know this little company they owned, called Venmo.
Bryan grew up in a small Mormon town called Springville, Utah. He didn’t know anything about business, engineering, payments, but he loved reading biographies. He read biographies about business people, politicians, and even a guy who almost killed Hitler.
At 21 years he had one goal → do something meaningful for humanity. But this is Bryan Johnson from Springville, Utah. He didn’t have money, a network, or engineering talent to build the future.
THEN
He started a family in his 20s and realized, umm, I need to put food on the table. So he did door-to-door sales for a credit card payments company while building his own startup on the side.
Bryan crushed it.
By his 11th month, he was generating $64k /mo in revenue. For a kid who grew up deciding whether or not to go to a $5 car wash or a $5 dinner, this was big.
Bryan used the lessons from his door-to-door sales gig to build Braintree. The rest is history.
WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT BRYAN?
We don’t care about Bryan because he’s rich. We care about Bryan because he’s insane.
After he made 9 figures from selling Braintree, he created a neuro-imaging startup to change the way we study brains and set out on a mission….
LIVE FOREVER
That’s right, Bryan is obsessed with living forever. He is laser-focused on lowering his metabolic age faster than his biological age rises. Biological age => the day you came out of your mother’s womb. Metabolic age => how old you actually are.
Bryan came out of the womb 45 years ago, but his metabolic age is 42 years old. He’s currently aging at a rate of .76. Which means for every 365 days, he ages 277 days.
To achieve these goals, he spends over $2m a year on his body.
He calls it, Project Blueprint and the point of Project Blueprint is to be the next evolution of human. Project Blueprint is more than just anti-aging techniques it’s a lifestyle focused on optimizing your best self.
Bryan thinks we should rebel against addictive algorithms, corporate profiteering, and social norms encouraging bad behavior. We should develop systems to overcome willpower and value data over opinion. So he automates his routines to avoid his worse self (drinking Bryan, late-night snacking Bryan, etc.).
Here are some of Johnson’s daily routines:
Johnson wakes every morning at 5 am, takes two dozen supplements, works out for an hour, drinks green juice laced with creatine and collagen peptides, and brushes and flosses his teeth while rinsing with tea-tree oil and antioxidant gel.
Strict Vegan diet of 1977 calories every day (never more, never less)
Goes to bed every night at the same time.
While sleeping, Johnson is hooked up to a machine that counts the number of nighttime erections. (God knows why)
He takes daily measurements of his weight, body mass index, body fat, blood glucose levels, and heart-rate variations.
Here are Bryan’s results so far:
5.1 yrs epigenetic age reversal (world record)
Slowed pace of aging by 28%
Body runs 3F°cooler
You can also follow the LITE version of Project Blueprint plan for just $1,684.50 a month.
🐤 BEST FROM MEDIA:
Stupidest but funniest thing I saw this week
Wasn’t a tweet, but this video blew my mind. Worth the watch if you have 2 minutes and 48 seconds.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser