Novak Djokovic, age 35, sometimes hangs out in a pressurised egg to enrich his blood with oxygen and gives pep talks to glasses of water, hoping to purify them with positive thinking before he drinks them. Tom Brady, 45, evangelises supposedly age-defying supplements, hydration powders and pliability spheres. LeBron James, 38, is said to spend $1.5m a year on his body to keep Father Time at bay. While most of their contemporaries have retired, all three of these elite athletes remain marvels of fitness. But in the field of modern health science, they’re amateurs compared to Bryan Johnson.
Johnson, 45, is an ultrawealthy software entrepreneur who has more than 30 doctors and health experts monitoring his every bodily function. The team, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, has committed to help reverse the ageing process in every one of Johnson’s organs.
Zolman and Johnson obsessively read the scientific literature on ageing and longevity and use Johnson as a guinea pig for the most promising treatments, tracking the results every way they know how. Getting the programme up and running required an investment of several million dollars, including the costs of a medical suite at Johnson’s home in Venice, California. In 2023, he is on track to spend at least $2m on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.
“The body delivers a certain configuration at age 18,” he says. “This really is an impassioned approach to achieve age 18 everywhere.”
Johnson is well aware that this can sound like derangement and that his methods might strike some as biotech-infused snake oil, but he does not much care. “This is expected and fine,” he says of the criticism he has received.
Johnson, Zolman and the team are more than a year into their experiments, which they collectively call Project Blueprint. This includes strict guidelines for Johnson’s diet (1,977 vegan calories a day), exercise (an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week) and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light). In the interest of fine-tuning this programme, Johnson constantly monitors his vital signs. Each month, he also endures dozens of medical procedures, some extreme and painful, then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies.
“I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no-one is pushing the envelope as much as Bryan,” says Jeff Toll, an internist on the team. All the work, the doctors say, has started to pay off: Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger.
Results suggest he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the fitness of an 18-year-old.
There are obvious signs that at the least Johnson is healthier than most 45-year-olds. The dude is way beyond ripped. His body fat hovers between 5% and 6%, which leaves his muscles and veins on full display. But it is what has happened inside his body that most excites his doctors. They say his tests show that he has reduced his overall biological age by at least five years. Their results suggest he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity and fitness of an 18-year-old. “All of the markers we are tracking have been improving remarkably,” says Toll.
Zolman, who got his medical degree from King’s College London, is more measured. He stresses that his work with Johnson is just beginning and that they have hundreds of procedures left to explore, including a range of experimental gene therapies. “We have not achieved any remarkable results,” he says. “In Bryan, we have achieved small, reasonable results, and it’s to be expected.”
In Johnson’s mind, however, success is already at hand. While he is not the first software developer to grow fixated on living a healthier life, he is chasing something close to the ultimate version of what tech-industry types call the quantified-self movement. Over the past decade or so, Silicon Valley’s idea of optimising your innards has mostly taken the form of the occasional exercise or diet fad, from intermittent fasting to Soylent. Johnson’s pitch is that you have to count a lot more than your steps to get a clear picture of what’s best for your body. “What I do may sound extreme, but I’m trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable,” he says.
In his 30s Johnson created a payment processing company called Braintree Payment Solutions. It was a huge success, but the long hours and stress left him overweight and deeply depressed, bordering on suicidal. He sold the business to EBay in 2013 for $800m in cash, then began a long journey to sort himself out.
This included learning more about his biology, an obsession that made its way into his work. He founded a biotech-focused venture firm called OS Fund and then, in 2016, a company called Kernel, which makes helmets that analyse brain activity to learn more about the mind’s inner workings. Researchers are using the helmets to try to quantify the effects of meditation and hallucinogens and find ways to lessen chronic pain. By this time, Johnson had begun tinkering with his body: altering his diet, taking loads of supplements, snorting the occasional vial of stem cells.
He insists that people do not have the most important information they need to live healthy lives — that seeing the data in black and white can help people break destructive habits. “You can look at your body and your situation and turn it over to willpower,” he says. “And, like, good luck.” Forcing himself to abide by Blueprint has taken late-night binges (of pizza, booze, whatever) off the table, and all the testing and tweaking have given him confidence that he is doing right by his body as much as he can.
Zolman, a generation younger than Johnson, has experienced his own kind of medical wake-up call. In 2012 he hurt his back playing basketball. The injury proved bad enough for him to struggle for about a year to walk properly and sometimes having to use a wheelchair after visits to the hospital. The doctors he met could not seem to fix things, so he started doing his own research and developing his own physical therapy programme, including deep-tissue massages across his legs, glutes, lower back, abs and pelvis. “As soon as I did that,” he says, “boom, I could walk.”
This could sound like the start of any TikToking quack’s sales pitch for enlightenment juice or liver bedazzlers, but Zolman, who is not shy about listing his academic achievements, finished his medical degree with honours in 2019. Soon after, he began studying any and all clinical research he thought might help him live healthier for longer.
Zolman is convinced that progress in the field of longevity requires a more concerted pursuit of medicines and therapies that seem in any way promising. Out on the edges of medical science, he argues, there must be better outcomes than the ones we grudgingly accept. In 2021 he opened a firm, 20one Consulting, in Cambridge, England.
“My goal is to prove through biostatistics a reduction of ageing of 25% across all 78 organs by 2030,” he says. “It’s an extremely hard and crazy idea.”
For beginners, his treatment, offered on a sliding scale, focuses on the basics of improving diet and exercise. More expensive programmes, which top out at $1,000 an hour for people in Johnson’s bracket, include lots of testing, therapies and health-aid devices.
“There is no person in the world who is 45 chronologically but 35 in every organ,” Zolman says. “If we can eventually prove clinically and statistically that Bryan has made that change, then it will be such a large effect size that it will have to be causative of the intervention and beyond what’s genetically possible.”
To determine that kind of progress, Zolman says, he keeps track of 10 or more different measurements for each of a patient’s organs. With the brain, for example, he uses a range of MRIs and ultrasounds to track blood flow, tissue volume, scarring, swelling, and plaque growth in the cerebrum, ventricles, midbrain, cerebellum, pituitary and brainstem, and supplements those measurements with cognitive ability tests and blood draws. Configuring the tests, let alone performing them, can be an arduous exercise, because much of the required hardware is usually found at research institutions.
While he is effusive and optimistic about his programme, Zolman also tries to strike the tone of a realist. He concedes that it will take years to know if he is chasing the right things and just how well any of this works.
Each morning starting at 5am Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medicines. There is lycopene for artery and skin health; metformin to prevent bowel polyps; turmeric, black pepper and ginger root for liver enzymes and to reduce inflammation; zinc to supplement his vegan diet; and a microdose of lithium for, he says, brain health. Then there is an hourlong workout, consisting of 25 different exercises, and a green juice packed with creatine, cocoa flavonols, collagen peptides and other goodies. Throughout the day, he eats solid-ish health food (we’ll get there), with the recipes tweaked based on the results of his latest tests. After eating, Johnson brushes, Waterpiks and flosses before rinsing with tea-tree oil and applying an antioxidant gel. His doctors say he has the gum inflammation of a 17-year-old.
He blasts his pelvic floor with electromagnetic pulses and has a device that counts the number of his night-time erections. Of late, he has been presenting as a teenager in that regard, as well.
There is a regimen and series of measurements for every last part of Johnson’s body. He 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 night-time erections. Of late, he has been presenting as a teenager in that regard, as well.
Daily, he measures his weight, body mass index and body fat, and he monitors his waking body temperature, blood glucose, heart-rate variations and oxygen levels while sleeping. He is also undergoing a constant stream of blood, stool and urine tests as well as whole-body MRIs and ultrasounds, plus regular tests aimed more specifically at his kidneys, prostate, thyroid and nervous system.
To repair sun damage to his skin, Johnson applies seven daily creams and gets weekly acid peels and laser therapy, and he has begun staying out of the sun. To improve hearing in his left ear (which suffered from childhood hunting trips in Utah), he does sound therapy, which tests the limits of the frequencies he can hear and then produces inaudible sounds that stimulate the cells in his ear and brain. (Clinical studies performed at Stanford University and elsewhere have concluded that this can help the average person improve their hearing by at least 10 decibels, a significant margin.) He has, however, rejected many of the internet’s favourite health fads, including resveratrol, ice baths and high doses of testosterone.
Doctors on his team help with the scans and tests, read the results and offer advice on what is safe and what might be dangerous. At one point, Johnson’s body fat had fallen to 3%, which threatened the healthy functioning of his heart. His team recommended tweaks to his diet, including eating more throughout the day instead of consuming all of his calories at breakfast.
Johnson’s lifestyle is not for me. In September, shortly before I walked up to his door in Venice for dinner, he texted to warn me that he had just had some fat injected into his face and seemed to be suffering from an allergic reaction to the excruciating procedure. As a result, he said, he might look a little weird.
He was not wrong.
When he opened the door, I could barely recognise him. His face was so puffed up it looked like he had spent the afternoon chugging bee venom. Stranger still, his pale skin was glowing, absent of most of the flaws that accompany middle age. He could have been mistaken for a big, swollen porcelain doll.
The procedure, he said, was not the usual Hollywood look-younger filler. It was the first in a series of injections to build a “fat scaffolding” in his face that would produce genuine, young-person fat cells. “Filler is just patching over something,” Johnson said. “It will take a few months for the fat scaffold to build, but then, as I regenerate, it will actually create fat on its own. If I do an MRI or multispectral imaging, then hopefully it will show that I’m identical to an 18-year-old again.”
This treatment struck me as largely cosmetic. (Johnson also dyes his hair.) And, Zolman notes, there is little to no evidence that having a fatter, more youthful face or luscious red hair offers clinical benefits on its own. “But, if you do this at the whole-body level, it becomes clinically relevant,” Zolman says. “If you restore young fat-level distribution throughout the whole body, you’re going to have less toxic compounds being secreted and affecting the rest of the body and you’re going to have things like better heat control. If you had no fat, you’d be f---ing dead. If you had no skin, you’d be f---ing dead. These are not aesthetic organs.”
As we talked about Blueprint, Johnson prepared dinner for me, a sample of his typical fare. On the yum side, I was given something called nutty pudding, which consisted of almond milk, macadamia nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, half a Brazil nut, sunflower lecithin, cinnamon, cherries, blueberries, raspberries and pomegranate juice. Delicious. On the yuck side, I also had to eat a mound of vegetables that had been puréed into a grey-brown goop. Once upon a time, it consisted of black lentils, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic, ginger root, lime, cumin, apple cider vinegar, hemp seeds and olive oil, all of which sound fine on their own. But when put together and blended, it felt and tasted like dirt paste.
Not just any chocolate
For dessert, we had chocolate, but not just any chocolate. “With Blueprint, there are layers,” Johnson said. “You can say, ‘Chocolate is good for you.’ Then the next layer is ‘Dark chocolate is better for you.’ And then there is this Dutching process that people sometimes do to chocolate where they alkalise it to take away the bitterness, but it ruins much of the value. So, you want non-Dutched dark chocolate, and you want some that has been tested for heavy metals. And then you want chocolate from the regions of the world that have the highest concentration of polyphenols, which is what you’re trying to get. Unless you’re looking at that fifth layer of polyphenol concentration, you’re really getting very little benefit.”
Johnson has had his share of criticism from people who have accused him of having an eating or psychological disorder or of being a delusional health zealot going about life in the most boring, restrictive way possible. The handful of doctors I have interviewed on Johnson’s team all say he is breaking ground in the field of longevity and probably extending his life, but even they have questions whether their conclusions will apply to the rest of us. “I think what he’s doing is impressive, and he has personally challenged me to be better,” says Kristin Dittmar, an interventional oncologist. “What he does is also essentially a full-time job.” She also stresses that cancer, her speciality, has genetic components that no cutting-edge science, let alone juices or creams, can yet beat.
One way to pass his gains along to others, Johnson says, might be radical transparency. He has a website where he posts his entire course of treatment and all his test results. And, now, he is launching another site, Rejuvenation Olympics, that encourages fellow travellers to do the same. The idea is to move away from the latest fads in favour of more rigorous medical science and a dash of competition. The more popular this type of lifestyle becomes, the cheaper and more readily available some of the procedures Johnson tries might be.
“If you say that you want to live forever or defeat ageing, that’s bad — it’s a rich person thing,” Johnson says. “If it’s more akin to a professional sport, it’s entertainment. It has the virtues of establishing standards and protocols. It benefits everyone in a systemic way.”
It is easy to imagine how a coterie of Johnson wannabes experimenting with ever-riskier procedures could go horribly wrong. More likely, most people will find Johnson’s lifestyle impossible or absurd. Some researchers and health aficionados who have run across Johnson’s programme take particular exception to his promotion of supplements and vitamins that they view as largely useless.
Still, some of the most respected experts who study longevity and ageing say the underlying idea of an open forum for the science of life extension is inevitable. “The whole longevity field is transitioning into a much more rigorous, clinical place,” says George Church, the famed Harvard University geneticist, who has stakes in a number of biotech companies. “I think what Bryan is doing is very well-intentioned and probably very important.” He adds: “I also don’t think a lot of this stuff will be all that expensive when the dust settles.”
While Johnson will not discuss it yet, he is about to undergo some far more experimental procedures, including gene therapies, according to several of his doctors and advisers. For better or worse, he’s very much dedicating his body to science in the hopes of proving what’s possible for the rest of us. “That’s the beauty of this,” he says. “It’s a new frontier.”
Bloomberg
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