Bryan Johnson explains why he's spending heavily on health optimization: reading biographies of people who did impossible things made him ask what we could do now that would matter centuries later. His answer is mastering aging. He sees it as the pivotal human achievement of our time.
Not many people spend millions of dollars to try to optimize their health. How did you even decide that this was something you wanted to focus on?
It was a convergence of a few different ideas. I love reading biographies, and particularly of people in different eras that did things that were impossibly hard to see or do in their time. And so in the early 21st century, when you pose the question, what would be the thing we could do right now which would change the future of being human? What would people talk about if, let's say, there's a dinner party going on in the 23rd, 24th century, and you look back at the early 21st century and they say, amazing that humans did. And if you ask that question, I think one of the more interesting responses would be, we figured out how to neutralize aging.
