Bryan Johnson

I love coffee, it's so fun.

The discovery that we can program our existence and author our own lives has radically altered my life - transforming my identity, aspirations, and reason for existence.

As the founder and CEO of Braintree, I'd always asked for honest and transparent feedback from everyone on the team. If the feedback was a direct criticism of me, even better.

Ultimately, climate change, infectious diseases and famine could meet their match with applied and synthetic biology.

Almost everything we use daily - from food to clothing to toys - relies on decades- to centuries-old ingredients and production processes.

We, our environment, our universe all share a common code base. In living things, this code comprises sequences of base pairs that repeat across organisms.

Using biology to pursue our best opportunities and solve our greatest challenges opens up an entirely untapped world of solution sets for humanity - an endeavor I couldn't be happier to support.

The mind-bending fact that a common shrub is more advanced than the latest MacBook Pro is overlooked by almost everyone. We fail to see it for a simple reason: the coolest parts of a plant can't be seen. Not with the naked eye, at least.

Humans need simplifications in order to understand almost anything complex. That's one of our basic biases!

I like to keep my life very fluid. I like serendipity and rolling through different ideas and possibilities.

I'm not a biohacker. I'm not an optimization person. I'm an explorer, about the future of being human.

We are accustomed to first-principle thinking, where you assume the fewest number of things in a particular time frame. Zeroth-principle thinking is thinking from another dimension. It's another way of saying talent hits the target no one else can. Genius hits the target no one else can see.

When humans can measure something, the first thing that always happens: an ecosystem of ideas and, eventually, industry springs up around it.

Building a successful future depends upon our ability to come up with new and unexpected ideas in governance, technology, social structures, cultural values and norms, among dozens of other things. These are some reasons why as an investor, I only invest in futures I cannot predict.

Fear engages a cortisol/hormonal/fight-or-flight-get-out-of-Dodge response that shuts down all but the essential functions.

Being ruthlessly honest is risky, awkward, and uncomfortable - for nearly all of us. There's really no getting around it.

The quicker we can make radically improving our brains the single highest priority of the human race, the more effective we will be to work on everything else we care about.

First-principles thinking sets goals in known terms and then pursues them, inventing and learning new things as necessary, but it rarely uncovers brand new conceptual primitives of the kind which the world needs.

Whenever I get in my car, I say to myself: 'This is the most dangerous thing I'll do today.'

Biologists are the engineers of the future.