47 going on 18: Encounter with influencer aiming to live forever
Bryan Johnson, a tech millionaire, aims to reverse aging and promote longevity through a rigorous regimen.
Bryan Johnson, the “man who is attempting to live forever,” is, naturally, an exceedingly cautious driver. Driving, he says, is statistically the most dangerous thing he does. On his six-day trip to India, which begins tomorrow, Johnson’s main concern is ensuring he is driven by the “very best of drivers”.
The millionaire tech entrepreneur and bio hacker who is 47-years-old but claims to have reversed his epigenetic age by 5.1 years with his various experiments said his eventual aim is to have the epigenetic age of an 18-year-old. Johnson sold his payment-gateway company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, and has been working, as a famous Indian influencer is known to say, “on himself.”
In addition, he has also worked on a book, “Don’t Die” and is in Mumbai and Bengaluru to promote it. “We will have 15 events across the two cities but I am also hoping to meet India’s health minister in New Delhi,” he said over an early morning call from his home in Los Angeles.
Johnson, who has even begun to resemble Peter Pan, is not the only wealthy individual to pursue the goal of radical life extension. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have poured billions into anti-ageing research.
But the 47-year-old’s quest for eternal life is the most mercurial and controversial. Some of his efforts to stall ageing have included a blood plasma transfusion from his 17-year-old son. In June, Johnson, who spends $2 million a year to reverse his ageing, posted about having undergone a DNA editing procedure at a remote island off Honduras. His personal ambition to keep death at bay has now catalyzed into a movement he calls ‘Don’t Die’, which is underpinned by his faith in AI.
It’s not clear whether he has thought through the implications on his health should he expose himself to Delhi’s air if he gets to meet the union health minister.
“I’ll be visiting India for the first time, and I’m very bullish on it. It will be a great place for the seed of my movement to grow,” he said instead.
The tech entrepreneur enjoys great popularity on social media for certain aspects of his exacting and seemingly joyless longevity regimen called Blueprint. Unlike the other famous tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, recently spotted eating a McDonald’s meal with Donald Trump, Johnson is far more fastidious. He wakes up every day at 4:30am, eats his last meal of the day before 11am and goes to bed at 8:30pm. He is the best example, he said, of what modern science can achieve. Four years ago, he recalled, he was a chronically depressed and obese victim of the hustle culture. “Today,’ he claimed to have “the best biomarkers of anyone in the world”. His cardiovascular ability is on par with an elite 18-year-old, and total bone mineral density, he rattled off, is in the top 0.2% of 30-year-olds. And all of this is the result of entrusting the responsibility of his health to an algorithm.
“It’s like when you plug your address in, and you trust the algorithm to take you to a given destination. My hypothesis was that an algorithm is going to be better at managing my health than me.” Johnson who is proud of being the most measured person in human history has had every organ of his body tested. That data was paired to an algorithm which has decided how he should live his life. “I’m willing to follow whatever the algorithm says.”
Johnson has considered the societal impacts of extreme longevity deeply, and said the problems each generation thinks it has, are not the problems it actually has. “Malthus was concerned about overpopulation because we didn’t have enough food, right? And where did that take us.” Just as the Malthusian theory was proved wrong eventually, Johnson is convinced so will be fears of extreme longevity.
In January, he started selling a $333 monthly subscription of his anti-ageing Blueprint basics and claimed to have found thousands of adopters. Does that mean that the revolution Johnson promises will leave out a large part of the world’s population? Is there a possibility that death will no longer be the greatest equaliser? Johnson clarified that the foundational tenets of his movement are open-source. “So, regarding sleep — I’ve explained the patterns and none of those require any money. Exercising every day, that too is free. But getting access to high-quality food costs money, yes, but you can also try and drop bad habits where possible.”
If death indeed turns out to be inevitable, what would he want his legacy to be? “That I am still alive!”
