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45-year-old tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson is paying more than 30 doctors at least $2 million a year to reverse and/or halt the aging process.
He says his goal is 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,” Johnson tells Bloomberg. “This really is an impassioned approach to achieve age 18 everywhere.”
How are the centimillionaire and his massive team of doctors, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, doing this?
Here’s a very small portion of the tasks and procedures Bryan Johnson follows on what they are calling Project Blueprint…
• 1,977 vegan calories a day
• exercise an hour a day, high-intensity three times a week
• sleep at the same time every night, after two hours wearing glasses that block blue light
• blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies
• take two dozen supplements and medicines
There’s a regimen and series of measurements for every last part of Johnson’s body. He’s 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. Of late, he’s 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’s also undergoing a fairly 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’s 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 favorite health fads, including resveratrol, ice baths and high doses of testosterone.
“What I do may sound extreme, but I’m trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable,” says the centimillionaire.
Jeff Toll, an internist on the team, claims all of this is working.
“I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no one is pushing the envelope as much as Bryan,” Toll says.
Tests show that the 45-year-old centimillionaire, who created Braintree Payment Solutions LLC and sold it to eBay for $800 million, has reduced his overall biological age by at least five years. 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.
Zolman says they are just scratching the surface of what they plan to do, however. They still have hundreds of procedures they want to try, including experimental gene therapies.
“My goal is to prove through biostatistics a reduction of aging of 25% across all 78 organs by 2030,” says Zolman.
George Church, a well-respected Harvard University geneticist, says about what Johnson is doing, “I think what Bryan is doing is very well-intentioned and probably very important,” adding, “I also don’t think a lot of this stuff will be all that expensive when the dust settles.”
Follow Bryan Johnson, as he puts it, on “an infinite game” here.