‘Inflation is aging’: Bryan Johnson’s war against systemic decay

For Bryan Johnson, the entrepreneur who sold Braintree (and Venmo) to PayPal for $800 million, the transition from fintech to ‘fountain of youth’ isn’t a pivot, it’s a logical progression.

While Johnson is now the public face of Project Blueprint, a rigorous longevity protocol, he views his interest in crypto as part of the same fundamental struggle. In Johnson’s framing, inflation and aging function as invisible taxes. Inflation quietly erodes purchasing power over time, just as aging steadily degrades the body’s biological capital.

“Aging has the same philosophical underpinnings as inflation,” Johnson said on CoinDesk’s Gen C podcast. “Both are the slow death of an intelligent system.”

Johnson’s ties to the crypto industry run deep. He was an early partner of Coinbase while running Braintree, experimenting with bitcoin payments when the user experience was still “clunky” and poorly understood. At the time, he said, the goal was not ideological, it was infrastructural. Braintree wanted to be “indifferent as to where the money came from” and simply provide the rails.

Johnson’s career in payments, which culminated in an acquisition by PayPal in 2013, was always a means to an end. Growing up in a blue-collar community in Utah, he recognized early on that trading time for money was not the life he wanted. Payments offered leverage, scale and speed. It created a pathway that later allowed him to pivot toward what he calls “species-level” problems.

Today, that problem is longevity.

Johnson’s worldview is rooted in physics, rather than biology. In his view, the primary objective of intelligent life is simple: Survival. “The most rational thing for an intelligent being to do is to not die,” he said.

This framework explains why the overlap between crypto, artificial intelligence (AI) and longevity is so high. Johnson noted that all three groups are focused on optimization, systems thinking and exponential change.

Central to Johnson’s Blueprint is the rejection of human willpower. He envisions health as an autonomous, algorithmic process similar to self-driving cars or automated trading systems. Data flows in, interventions flow out, and the loop runs continuously, outperforming human judgment.

The broader implications remain unclear. Johnson believes the future has become harder to predict as AI reshapes how systems evolve, a reality already evident in education and careers that no longer follow predictable paths.