How Did 45 Year Old Tech Tycoon, Bryan Johnson, Spend $2 Million To Look Like An 18 Year Old?

 

Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old tech mogul and former software developer, is spending around $2 million each year to bio-hack his body and regain his youth. Johnson's routine includes a strict vegan diet, daily exercise, high-intensity exercise three times a week, and wearing glasses to block blue light before bed. The goal is to reduce the medical age of Johnson's organs by 25%, according to his team of 30 doctors and regenerative health experts. Johnson has also founded a startup that manufactures helmets that measure brain signals and the impact of meditation and pharmaceutical interventions on chronic pain.

Who is Bryan Johnson?

According to a Bloomberg News report, Johnson founded Braintree Payment Solutions more than a decade ago. This left him feeling stressed out, overweight, and mentally depleted. He sold the company to eBay for $800 million in 2013 and set out on a journey to give himself a total physical makeover.

In 2016, one of his first steps was founding a new company called Kernel. The company manufactures helmets that analyze brain activity--for example, trying to study the effects of meditation and hallucinogens on the body's physical state.

What is Johnson's goal when it comes to anti-aging?

Oliver Zolman, a 29-year-old doctor, is leading Johnson in many experiments. After constructing a medical wing in Johnson's Venice, California, home, the team started working to give Johnson the "brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old," according to the report.

The team is a year into what they’ve dubbed Project Blueprint. The project includes consuming 1,977 vegan calories daily, working out for an hour at a high intensity three times per week, and going to bed at the same time each night after wearing glasses that block blue light for two hours. According to the report, Johnson "also endures dozens of medical procedures each month, some quite extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds, and colonoscopies."

It would take an extreme change to be 18 again.

To be like Johnson, you need discipline in addition to money. Vance goes into detail about Johnson's routine, which is not meant for people who are casual fitness enthusiasts.

Johnson wakes up at 5 a.m. and takes 24 supplements and medications, such as "lycopene for artery and skin health (and) metformin to prevent bowel polyps." After eating a meal he's crafted himself, he "brushes, Waterpiks and flosses his teeth before rinsing with tea-tree oil and applying an antioxidant gel."

To emphasize how far Johnson is willing to go, Vance reveals that Johnson has taken "33,537 images of his bowels, discovered that his eyelashes are shorter than average, and probed the thickness of his carotid artery. He blasts his pelvic floor with electromagnetic pulses to improve muscle tone in hard-to-reach places and has a device that counts the number of his nighttime erections."

What is Project Blueprint? Johnson encourages others to do the same.

Johnson created a website where he posts details of his past two years on Project Blueprint in an attempt to get others interested in his experiment. Among Johnson's messages for readers: "Entropy = aging and deterioration. Goal Alignment via your Autonomous Self aims to combat entropy by maintaining perpetual youth. Maximally slowing your pace of aging and reversing the aging that occurs."

He's recently created a new website that encourages others to find their own way to slow the aging process, called Rejuvenation Olympics. The site allows those interested in the competition to upload "your epigenetic data to the platform and your results will be analyzed and included on the leaderboard."