Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah.
My question is, you know, if the goal is not just to elongate your own life and not die, but through the experiment of your life, working with this very strict discipline protocol to produce... actionable behavior, really, that are accessible to other people that don't have, you know, an MRI in their bathroom?
Like, what are those things that are already takeaways after four years that you would advise people? I mean, there are some obvious ones, of course, like consistent sleep. But are there any other things that you've sort of already learned from this experiment that are usable for other people listening?
I assume that the idea of even having a smartphone in your bedroom is, like, disgusting to you.
Okay, you turn it off.
Well, I think for most people just encountering you, they're probably going and Googling you right now and finding some incredible photos and lots of pieces that have been written about you, including by the wonderful journalist Ashley Vance. And they'll discover when they do that that, A, you didn't always look like this, and B— This was not the life at all that you were born into.
And I want to ask you a little bit about sort of the journey that led you to this point. You know, before you started Blueprint, you were a startup bro, right? You were a tech bro. You probably hate the word bro, but that's what you did. You founded a payments processing company called Braintree, which was very successful. It ultimately acquired Venmo. Tell me about that time in your life.
You know, I'm doing a startup now. I find that it is extraordinarily stressful. I've basically turned gray over the past two years. Tell me about how that period sort of affected your health and ultimately led you to want to change the way, not just that you live, but I think also the way that you think about the nature of your brain and your mind and your body. So let's go back there a
The Brian Before Blueprint.
Well, not to get too galaxy brain here, but isn't it just that human beings are incredibly memetic and imitative creatures and we – the thing that makes us compete is our sameness and wanting to – I mean, Elon obviously is the embodiment of what you're talking about. I think the thing that struck me is your description of grinding 80 or 100 hours a week as debaucherous.
I don't think most people that are running startups think of that kind of behavior as debaucherous. I think they think of it as, you know, self-sacrificial and necessary. And you're just saying it's not.
The internet.
I think most people are going to be with you on the former, but I think a lot of people, frankly, me included, will say, Brian, it's awesome that your organs are the age of an 18-year-old, but the idea that not dying is within our grasp in the way that AI is seems totally implausible to me. What evidence is there of that other than what you are doing?
I don't see that as a movement in the way that I see superintelligence.
I'm with you on all of that. But I see rockets from SpaceX going to space and getting caught by chopstick arms. And I think, hey, maybe this thing of getting to Mars, which 10 years ago seemed like, you know, as crazy as believing that aliens were going to march through New Jersey, maybe that's within reach. I could be convinced of the, if not dying, incredibly elongated lifespans.
But where is the either social movement or other than... You and a number of other people that are, frankly, like people in Silicon Valley that have resources that are at the bleeding edge of this. Like, am I missing some broader sort of cultural shift or some broader, huge scientific breakthrough that I should be made aware of?
I think it's really interesting that don't die is the promise, if not explicitly, but implicitly. It's the subtext of kind of every meaningful movement that people are a part of. How do you achieve immortality in some way?
You grew up Mormon, and I've been thinking about that because I don't want to be stereotypical here, but I think Mormons are just like highly, highly productive, disciplined people in a way that I really admire. And I wonder how much do you attribute growing up in that kind of structure to your ability to be so disciplined with something like Blueprint?
One thing that you say sort of in many different ways is that the mind is the enemy and we can stop aging by giving control to our bodies and not our mind. I have to tell you, I don't fully understand that. And I want you to explain it a little bit more to me because I see those things as so integrated.
Tell us what you mean by giving control to the body.
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