Bryan Johnson devotes more than 6 hours a day to slow down or even reverse the aging of his body
Agaton Strom / Redux / Eyevine
Bryan Johnson finishes his 6.5 hour morning routine when I connect to Zoom for my allocated 15 -minute call with him (a constraint of what a member of his team describes as his “crazy” schedule).
The Millionaire Tech which has become Pioneer longevity stands in front of a cement wall in his California house, whose coldness is relieved by green flashes of tropical planks. Wearing a helmet-shaped helmet, a few wires lying down and descend in front of the screen, with a black t-shirt carrying the words “do not die”, the effect is somewhere between a luxury Balinese villa and a VR store designed by Apple.
This article is part of a special issue in which we explore how to make your last years as healthy and happy as possible. Read more here
Immortality has been a human concern for millennia, but it is difficult to imagine that whoever goes further to reach him than Johnson. Take your helmet. This is an experience to improve cognitive function by stimulating certain brain regions with infrared light. He has been using it for 10 minutes a day for two weeks “to see if the treatments have measurable effects on my cognition,” he said.
The other 6 hours and 20 minutes that Johnson devotes daily longevity work daily is spent, in a various way, measuring its awakened body temperature, using hair growth, working for an hour – cardio, strength, balance – taking a 20 -minute sauna, using red light and hypoxia therapy (the latter is a new addition, implying oxygen) before eating breakfast. It is a mixture of ground nuts, seeds and blueberries, extra virgin olive oil, extract of pomegranate juice, cocoa, collagen proteins, pea and hemp proteins, cinnamon powder, omega-3, omega-6, grape extract and macadamia nut milk, among other ingredients. All of this is “following data and science” to bring the clock back.
“Many people hear this and they think,” it’s crazy, “he says. “The way they can think about it is that I am a professional rejuvenation athlete. I am like an Olympian, but for longevity.”
Johnson, now 48 years old, started his quest for longevity after a series of finish in the forties: leaving the Mormone church in which he was raised; put an end to her marriage; and sell your mobile payment company. This sale is the way he made the millions that finance his efforts.
BluePrint of Project
In 2021, he announced the start of the BluePrint project, a mission to measure his organs and try to reverse the biological age of each. (He also directs a start-up named BluePrint, selling supplements, blood tests and other products, which is the subject of multiple controversies.) Johnson says that his bone mineral density is in the first 0.2% of all people, his cardiovascular health is also better than 85% of children 20 years old and also has the health of the fertility of a 20-year-old child.
Going to the extreme, and often without determination, durations in the pursuit of a longer life are not atypical for its cohort of technological millionaires. But with a strict routine that involves having his last meal at 11 a.m., Johnson is surely the most extreme player in the longevity game, and he had a team of 30 different specialists to help the quest. “We are trying to find people in all areas of expertise … the brain, the heart, the protein models,” he said. “This project really speaks to them because we are very fun, we are very experimental.”
Rapamycin trial
“Very experimental” is a fair assessment. Johnson’s protocols sometimes involve taking drugs based on limited trials in humans, such as raopamycin, a drug originally formulated to act as an immunosuppressor for people after an organ transplant, and which is studied for possible anti-aging effects. Promising results were observed in mouse studies, but Johnson stopped taking the medication last year after having experienced side effects. His team then found a study indicating that raascin can accelerate aging in humans.
So, is he already afraid of experimenting with interventions that are not supported by a solid science?
“I would go back that. Many people would look at this experience and say, “Bryan, but wait, you are at risk! And I say, “Friend, you are more at risk than me because you are experimenting with fast food and you stay in place late and drink alcohol and eat toxins,” explains Johnson. “Their life is at higher risks than mine. I take less risks overall because I eat well, I sleep well and I do the exercise all the time. I look at them and say:” Why do you head the experience to see what happens to you when you eat junk food? “”
If some scientists like Johnson’s experience, others question the semantics used. Richard Siow, director of aging research at King’s College in London, notes that certain “biomarkers” associated with aging are reversible. Things like the indicators of inflammation found in the blood, pulmonary capacity, lipid levels, cholesterol and epigenetics are all modifiable, he says. But that does not mean that attributing them “ages” – for example, that someone has the metabolism of a young person from 25 to 40 years old – is possible. Indeed, we do not have a database at the population level that form in the average biomarkers of people at specific ages. Longevity clinics offering such tests are likely to base them on limited data sets, explains Siow. “The figures are good for marketing, but clinically less significant.”
Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s research team does not agree. “Bryan Johnson knows the biological age of his organs thanks to extended scientific tests and surveillance … using a variety of methods, including MRI analyzes, ultrasounds, blood tests, genetic screening (such as epigenetic clocks) and other clinical tests,” wrote one of them in an e-mail. These measures are shared via X, although they are not yet analyzed in studies evaluated by peers.
However, Siow is happy that Johnson is arranged in experimentation in a way that could not occur in a clinical trial, due to ethical problems, even if it is not possible to extrapolate from a person to provide general results applicable to the wider population, he said.
Higher advice to live at 100
But despite all its high-tech experimentation, Johnson’s recommendation for everyone aimed at living at 100 is quite simple: “Lower your heart rate to rest before bedtime,” he said. “”[This] Determine how much you are going to sleep. And to what extent you sleep, determine if you do the exercise, and if you do the exercise, it determines if you eat well. SO [it starts] A positive waterfall.
To lower your heart rate to rest, he recommends stop eating 4 hours before going to bed; Take an hour to relax before sleeping while reading, walking or meditating and avoiding screens; And be aware of heart rate stimulants like caffeine. “And the biggest is rumination. Rumination can increase the heart rate between five and 25 beats per minute [by thinking about] Things that worry you, worried, obsessed. “”
Johnson takes his own advice to the nth degree. Surprisingly, however, the number of years he left on the clock is less a concern than his efforts do not suggest.
When I ask him how long he expects to live, on the basis of his current biomarkers, he is solemn. “I don’t think my life expectancy is counting,” he said, because of the progress of artificial intelligence. Part of his effort “don Die” consists in downloading his thoughts on a model of AI, which means that there can be in a form during a certain non -quantifiable form. “At the moment, this is the first time that we have seen real immortality being born, where you can in fact form a model on a human … The changes that we will see with AI will be so dramatic and will occur much faster than my duration of 40 to 50 years
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