Bryan Johnson is well aware that you think he’s odd. It would be strange if you didn’t because so much of his life happens outside of what most people consider normal. He gets up at 4.30 a.m., eats all of his meals before 11 a.m., and goes to bed – alone – at 8.30 p.m. every night. In the hours that follow, he consumes over 100 tablets, bathes himself in LED light, and sits on a high-intensity electromagnetic gadget that he believes would strengthen his pelvic floor. All of this is done to reduce his rate of aging until, he hopes, one year of chronological time passes while his biological age remains constant. His ultimate goal: “Don’t die.”
Oh, and he’d like as many people as possible to join him.
Naturally, not everyone is on board. Many longevity specialists would tell you that the human body cannot be hacked in this way, while a slew of social media comments suggest Johnson appears older than his 45 years, or that they pray he gets struck by a bus. So yet, none of this has discouraged Johnson, who has spent the last two years perfecting Blueprint, a system of behaviors meant to take better care of him than his own mind can. He also publishes the (exhaustive and grueling) facts online so that anybody interested may follow the procedure for significantly less than his stated annual spend of $2 million (£1.6 million).
Johnson’s anti-death journey does not begin under ideal conditions. He sold his firm, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal in 2013 for $800 million — the kind of money that most people believe will heal everything in their life – but he spent most of the next decade overeating, drinking excessively, and struggling with depression. This is why, he claims, he now thinks in terms of algorithms. “What I said to myself was, ‘Do I really believe I can live my best life on my own?'” he says, speaking from his minimalist house in Los Angeles, where the air is filtered and the shelves are lined with plants. “And I decided no, I can’t.” I simply lack the necessary skills. “I desperately need this enhancement.”
Johnson describes himself as “the world’s most measured human” these days. His doctors and health experts are constantly monitoring everything his body does, from his cholesterol levels to the length of his telomeres – DNA “caps” that prevent our chromosomes from fraying, similar to the plastic tips on shoelaces, and are thought to play a role in cell death and aging. All of this information is sent into a system that advises him how to enhance those measures. “We’ve basically crawled every scientific publication on healthspan and lifespan – something like 2,000 publications,” he explains. “And we take each study, apply a number of criteria to it – some are animal models, so we make that distinction – and then we prioritise,” says the researcher.
This has led him to a lifestyle that many people, naturally, do not want to emulate. Two of his three daily meals are the same: “super greens” with cooked broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, and garlic, and “nutty pudding” with chia seeds, macadamia nuts, and berries. He takes 54 tablets in the morning and the rest during the day, in between skin treatments, red-light therapy, and more measures. He follows a calorie-restricted diet, does not use alcohol, and never goes out in the evening. More reassuringly, he abandons things that don’t work: he tried human growth hormone but quit since the possible side effects were too severe. He also tried collecting blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage and paying it forward by donating part of his own plasma to his 70-year-old father, but he gave up due to a lack of success.
It is also worth mentioning that most of Johnson’s work is based on well-accepted research. His fitness regimen, for example, consists of a combination of weight training and cardiovascular activity designed to raise his VO2 max (the greatest amount of oxygen his body can take in while exercising), both of which have been related to large decreases in mortality. There isn’t a lot of strong data concerning the influence of sleep quality and duration on mortality, but there is widespread consensus that they are likely significant. And, whatever of your feelings about steamed and pureed lentils and broccoli, they unquestionably contain more phytonutrients than pizza.
Is Johnson’s regime effective? It all depends on your definition of success. The metrics are heading in the right direction for him. His VO2 max of 58.7ml/kg/min is outstanding for a much younger guy, and several of his other biomarkers are above average for a 45-year-old. According to the trackers he uses, his “sleep performance” has been excellent for six months. He has less than 7% body fat and can bench press more than 100kg. One of the most serious accusations leveled at his routine is that, while he improves on the conventional indicators of age – strength, bone density, and hair thickness – he does not reduce ageing in any meaningful way.
“People have the gene set that we have, which limits our lifespan,” says Dr. Charles Brenner, a scientist who researches aging and longevity. “Nothing in Bryan Johnson’s protocol would alter his maximum lifespan.” There are persons who lived for 110 to 122 years and aged extremely well. None of those persons followed as strict procedures as Johnson. He can be said to have put himself on a healthier ageing trajectory, but he cannot be said to have reversed or eliminated ageing.”
What about the other complaints? The most popular are that his life must be awful, that life without pizza, beer, and late nights appears to be no life at all, and that he could do all of this for years before being struck by a bus. Johnson has that covered as well: “Whenever I get in my car, I tell myself, ‘This is the most dangerous thing I’ll do today,'” he says, and he doesn’t seem to worry about pizza or beer. As a divorcee, he recognizes that romance will be tough, with his stated “first-date expectations” including “u sleep alone” and “no small talk,” and he has no plans to change his strict sleep pattern if it interferes with his sex life.
He also appears to have a lot of fun: he has a table-tennis rivalry with Talmage, and he claims to have pals that admire his routine. This piques my interest since one quality shared by the world’s “blue zones” – areas where people live longer lives than the norm – is a highly sociable society. Is that something he thinks about? “We work on a lot of things we don’t talk about because I’m still building credibility,” he explains. “We do this by discussing agreed-upon topics.” When you get into areas where there isn’t that level of discipline and unanimity, it becomes more difficult.”
How about the inverse of social support? Johnson often – and amusingly – spars with his harshest detractors on X (previously known as Twitter), and as a frequent user of the network myself, I’m all too aware that it can take me from cheerful to outraged in seconds. Do the detractors disrupt his routine? “The troll inside my head is much more vicious than the trolls I get online,” he claims. “When I was sad and my brain was telling me, ‘Life is dismal,’ I had to basically tell it, ‘I don’t care what you’re going to say.’ It eventually lost its potency. And I’ve witnessed this when people troll me and I engage with them. Like, it’s honestly no longer interesting.” Is he concerned that it’s influencing his life, such as his stress levels, in ways he’s not aware of? “Absolutely. We do utilize proxies for that, such as looking at my stress levels, sleep quality, and a variety of other factors to see whether anything in my life is contributing to harmful circumstances. It’s a valid question.”
Johnson claims he is doing this for everyone, but there is another problem. He plans to make a “low-cost and easy” version of Blueprint accessible to anybody who is interested shortly, and he is already selling his own brand of olive oil – though he emphasizes that profit “was never the goal when we started.” However, a variety of relatively easier health practices, such as regular exercise, eating enough of greens, and getting enough sleep, have extensive data to back them up, yet far too few individuals bother with them. So, how can the general public be persuaded to invest in longevity?
This all stems from Johnson’s early entrepreneurial experience. “When I was building my payments company, Braintree, the online payment experience was awful,” he recalls. “So you’d get a cab, and the wifi wouldn’t work, and it was just terrible.” ‘OK, let’s make this a wonderful experience,’ we said. He intends to do the same with health, removing the friction and self-discipline and automating the process in accordance with his own algorithmic thinking. “Ultimately, I’m not telling people they need to be more disciplined,” he adds. “Right now, we’re insane because we’re addicted to addiction: food, porn, social media, alcohol, whatever.” Blueprint is about admitting that it’s unreasonable to expect a person to get their shittogether when there are a thousand things within two miles of them that produce heroin-like dopamine highs.”
Obviously, there is something very Silicon Valley tech-bro about Johnson’s existence – the fixation with measurement, the never-ending push for optimisation, the view of aging as an engineering problem to be addressed – but it also fits with a lot of things we already know and practice. For example, I know it would probably enhance my life if I could avoid eating a whole packet of custard creams at once, or if I could go to bed at a sensible hour every night. I exercise weights and run because I enjoy it, but I eat watercress even when I don’t want to because I want to be there to watch my son grow up. And, whatever you think of this one man’s (OK, perhaps obsessive) effort to defeat the reaper, he is correct about how the odds are stacked against us: all the bad stuff gets a lot of attention, while broccoli hardly gets a glance in.
Johnson asks me what I think about all of this at the conclusion of our conversation. Do I believe “don’t die” is a viable concept? After 15 years of writing about health and fitness, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, so I tell him what I think: if we can avoid the bullets of climate change, nuclear war, a much worse pandemic, or the other hundred things that could kill us, a world where we’re not limited by traditional human aging appears… at least possible. This may appear sacrilegious, but so was the thought that people might one day be able to travel faster than a horse or sail could take them, or communicate with someone on the other side of the planet. If human progress continues on its current path – or if we can figure out how to create a self-improving AI that doesn’t decide to turn us all into paperclips – it doesn’t seem improbable that we will one day unravel our telomeres and make aging a nuisance rather than an inevitability.
Where I disagree with Johnson is on timing. Ageing, it is definitely fair to say, comes with intricacies we hardly comprehend, so I’m not sure if this will take 30 existential-disaster-free years or 300. Johnson appears to be quite certain that it can happen in our lifetimes, which is why he is so eager to be there for it.
What happens if it doesn’t? What would have to happen to make him content to say goodbye if he couldn’t crack the whole thing and live past a typical human lifespan? He barely pauses to consider the question. “I’d like to get hit by a bus,” he adds, his teeth evidently scoring near-perfect on his dentist-approved plaque index. “I’d like for my death to be as entertaining as possible for everyone involved.”