Forty-six-year-old Bryan Johnson has already spent more than $4 million to make his body work like an 18-year-old's. He claims it is working. He puts everything into it, going as far as infusing himself with blood plasma from his own son. He believes he is the most measured human being who has ever lived, and that his experiment will change the life of everyone who wants to live long.
In other words, everyone.
Dream or utopia? An obscene waste of money or an idea that could change our evolution? Genius or sheer madness?
“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury asked in song, before he was taken by AIDS—a disease we understand and treat far more successfully today than we did back then.
And who doesn't? The real question, though, is what we do about it, and Bryan Johnson is an impressive example. A multimillionaire and successful entrepreneur, he has devoted himself to a fascinating experiment whose goal is to drastically extend human life. And his guinea pig is himself.
Don't Die!
That is Bryan's motto. Fine, but the task is far from easy, as anyone born more than 130 years ago can confirm, if you ask them. Here he is in front of us, and you certainly wouldn't put him at 46—at most 45.5. I'm joking; he is undeniably youthful.
As the journalist Charlotte Alter aptly noted in her piece for Time, his body looks 18, while his face looks… like that of someone who paid $4 million to look 18. According to his own data, by almost every physiological marker he matches that age, and by some others he is in the healthiest 1 percent of 18-year-olds.
Isn't time the most precious thing, the only resource we can never get back? It isn't a social construct like money, but pure objectivity. Who is the crazy one: the man who uses his millions to pile up more millions… or the other one, who tries to buy himself time?!
And so methodically and deliberately, too. Yes, perhaps beyond common sense, but “the end justifies the means.” That bit of wisdom is attributed to good old Ignatius of Loyola, whose fanaticism is rather reminiscent of Bryan's. Except that you probably don't know the full version: “If the end is the salvation of the soul, then the end justifies the means.”
Bryan's Life
The salvation of the soul? Bryan has no time for that; his obsession is the body. Every second of it is tracked in every possible way. At the risk of horrifying fans of homeopathy: he takes an average of 111 pills a day.
Some of his solutions sound extremely exotic. He wears a baseball cap that beams healthy red light at his scalp, sleeps every night with a small device strapped to his penis, and every day hands in stool samples for analysis…
But really, what good are all the money and all the next technological leaps if we are still shackled to that maximum lifespan, which falls so far short even of the figures in the Bible? Or take average life expectancy—the COVID pandemic crushed it even here in Bulgaria, where it was appallingly low to begin with.
According to Bryan, every action that speeds up aging—from sleeping less than 8 hours to nibbling cookies late at night—is “an act of violence.”
Oh, Wretched Youth
Blueprint is the name of the project organized by the millionaire, in which he himself plays the lead. His condition is monitored at all times by expensive doctors. Every important vital sign is watched with extreme precision. Meanwhile, another team of scientists has the job of following the latest publications, so as not to miss some tiny discovery that might add a minute or two.
It would be convenient if life were an equation and you could just do the math. Decide to add smoking: minus 3 years; drinking: minus 2; following Bulgarian politics: minus 12… Yes, years ago we in the media fell for such convenient explanations, but they don't work, at least not that directly. And still, every day we face decisions like these, which, alas, not even ChatGPT can turn into exact mathematics.
Many other billionaires—from Bezos to Sam Altman—are putting serious money into this field. And Bulgarian scientists have turned their attention to longevity research, too. So why is Bryan's attempt treated by both the media and the public as something eccentric?
The goal is simple. To make the organs of the body work as they do in an 18-year-old—for now in Bryan, and eventually in everyone. Indefinitely. At the moment, Blueprint rates its boss's skeletal system as that of a 30-year-old and his heart as that of a 37-year-old. According to Johnson, this is already a major breakthrough—a clear system that helps you make the right decisions far better than you could intuitively. It tells you how long to sleep, and you comply. It tells you which lunch dish is the healthiest, and that's that… a fitness coach, only for life itself.
The Early Bird Bleats
He usually gets up before 5 a.m.… which makes you wonder why he wants to live so long.
His bedroom is like that of a monk on Mount Athos—no photos, no books, no TV, no phone charger while he's in there, not even the phone itself! Here he only sleeps, and in his view this is a key factor in turning back the clock. The only things inside are the laser generator that rejuvenates his skin and the aforementioned device that tracks his nocturnal erections. Because, according to his team of scientists, their duration is an accurate indicator of one's current state of health. At the moment Bryan enjoys an average of 2 hours and 12 minutes; his target is the average for an 18-year-old—3.5 hours. Things would get a little awkward in Bulgaria's state outpatient clinics if they introduced this particular diagnostic method.
Once up, the millionaire measures his weight, body mass index, hydration level and body fat. Exactly when he provides the other sample we mentioned, he doesn't say. Then he stands in front of a special lamp that imitates sunlight, to set his body's rhythm. He quickly takes the temperature of his inner ear, and then comes the moment for several dozen dietary supplement pills. Anti-wrinkle cream, a face mask… and he is ready in just an hour, which for many ladies getting ready for a formal dinner would even count as quick.
46 Years Aren't Enough
By 6 he is fresh as a cucumber (only with smoother skin) and ready for work. That is—for the next round of measurements and pills. His freshness is surely helped along by the sinister greenish smoothie called “Green Giant,” with secret, proprietary ingredients—coffee, naturally, is out of the question.
Every day he does an hour-long workout at the gym, with more strenuous exercises three times a week. I don't think there's any point in bothering you with the rest of his daily rituals—they go on in the same spirit, and he shares them copiously on Instagram, as well as in the detailed protocols of all his tests, which he publishes on his website. In the first 5 months alone, 180,000 people signed up for his weekly updates.
When You Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil
Blueprint launched on October 13, 2021, which means that in just 2 years he has already worked wonders. “Blueprint is STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for health,” Bryan says. “My team and I set out to do what no one had done before: to let the body run itself. I carry out hundreds of measurements of biological processes, allowing my heart, liver, lungs and kidneys to tell me for themselves what they need to be in ideal condition.
My mind—a storytelling creature—is not authorized to go shopping, to browse the pantry, to order pizza on a whim, to eat dessert… in practice, to make decisions. My practical and immediate goal is for the 35 trillion cells that make me who I am to work together in the best possible way for optimal health and youth.”
I Am Young, Yet I Remember No Youth
“Most people believe that death is inevitable,” Bryan says. “We just try to extend the time we have left before we die… But that's how it has been until now. I don't think there has ever been a moment in history when Homo sapiens could say with conviction that death might not be inevitable.”
I mentioned that he had infused himself with plasma prepared from the blood of his own 18-year-old son. This scandalized quite a few of his followers, but he quickly stopped the procedure—because, he says, it turned out to be ineffective.
Bryan has three children, now fairly grown up. Their birth and childhood coincided with the rise of the business that made him rich. In 2007 he founded Braintree, an online payments startup that later became part of PayPal, and Bryan walked away $300 million richer. He says, however, that he was unhappy at the time and fell into a depression that lasted 10 years.
My Old Friend
He put on 50 kilograms of excess weight and was unhappy with life. A devout Mormon in his youth, at some point he left the church and divorced. Today his elder son is a Mormon missionary, his young daughter lives with her mother, and his second son lives with him—it is Talmage who became the donor for his father's cause. The two get along great; the 18-year-old even follows part of the Blueprint diet, sparing himself only the anti-aging therapies for now.
Officially, Bryan has no girlfriend (perhaps so as not to skew the nighttime measurements), but recently his marketing assistant, Kate Tolo, joined the experiment. She is 27, comes from Australia, has experience as a fashion expert, and for a few weeks now has been the first “test subject” meant to check how Blueprint works on a female body.
Bryan believes he is single because he is completely upfront on a first date. “Dinner at 11 a.m., bed at 8:30 p.m. No pillow talk, no small talk, everyone sleeps alone. Sex is scheduled. No vacations in the sun, no meat. You have to donate plasma and, no, you are not my top priority.”
Young and Crazy
Every year he makes important resolutions, he says. “My resolution for 2013: invest in technology companies that make the physical world programmable. 2016: found a mental health company. 2020: create Blueprint to explore the defining question of our time: is death inevitable? To create, and make free for everyone, potentially the most powerful health protocol in history.”
There is a resolution for '23 as well: “Don't die. Let's not die. Let's not kill one another, let's not destroy our biosphere, let's not underestimate the importance of aligning with artificial intelligence.”
Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, met Bryan at one of the annual conferences on the subject. “He looked sick. He was pale. I don't know what he's done to his face,” says Dr. Barzilai, adding that he is worried by the idea of having no fat in the body. He adds that combining more than 100 dietary supplements may not be the best idea. If you ask me, he's jealous.
Highlander
How does Bryan himself deal with the haters? “The troll in my head is far nastier than the ones I meet. When I was depressed, my brain kept telling me, ‘Life is hopeless,’ and I had to learn not to listen to it. While people troll me, I play with them. Frankly, it isn't even interesting anymore.”
Bryan has 30 doctors on his team, led by 29-year-old Oliver Zolman. The rest remain in the shadows; so far none of them has appeared in the media. But it is no secret that once Blueprint is perfected, the first eternal youth plans to turn it into a product, a system that will bestow the same eternal youth on mere mortals. It is a fact that not everyone can set aside $4 million for a system of their own. In fact, on the average Bulgarian salary, you would need about 342 years. Assuming, of course, that you don't retire in the meantime.
How much it will actually cost us to secure those years through the system is not yet known.
He promises us that the next version will be free and cheap to follow. Yes, he already sells olive oil with his face on it, but he says profit has never been the goal.
Besides, it isn't clear whether we should trust him before he reaches at least 100 or 200 years. But here we enter questions too philosophical, where artificial intelligence is still better than we are.
122 Years of Solitude
Before we part, let's bring one more character into the plot. You have probably heard of Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person on the planet (at least until Bryan “beats” her). Born in 1875, she died at 122 years and 164 days. She smoked from the age of 21 to 117 and said she owed her longevity to a diet rich in olive oil, port and lots of chocolate, nearly a kilogram a week. But above all, she pointed to serenity as the main reason for her long life.
She never lost her sense of humor, right up to the last day—when she was already past 120, a journalist told her he hoped to see her again the next year, and she replied: “Why not? You don't look so bad.” “I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it,” Jeanne also used to say.
Well, Bryan is like that too, at least when it comes to wrinkles. And which of the two will prove more successful at stopping the clock… I'll be glad to discuss together after Bryan's 123rd birthday. Until then, as a popular Bulgarian media personality likes to say: “Stay healthy!”
