Ask anyone, and they'll probably tell you that they'd love to live forever. Who wouldn't want not just eternal life but eternal youth? For Bryan Johnson, that's not a fantasy but his life goal – and he's putting himself, his health, and his money at stake to reach it.
We can file this under "rich people do rich things," because that’s how it comes across to the regular person, the kind that has to work daily to pay the bills and put food on the table, take care of the kids, run errands, run a business, and live life, more or less happily. But to Bryan Johnson, who recently made headlines around the world for turning "biohacker" with his stated mission of defeating death, it's everyday reality.
Johnson is a centimillionaire who started off as a tech guy. When PayPal bought his Venmo/Braintree company, he became $300 million richer and decided it was time to turn over a leaf in life, with the intention that, by the end of the book, he'd be a completely different man. He's since put together an AI algorithm that takes into account the data his own body provides to churn out the very special regimen he swears by, which will ultimately make him young again.
Johnson is 46 years old, and right now, he says his 30+ team of doctors has informed him he has the bones of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 37-year-old. He plans to get both to 18, and he'll stop at nothing to get there. His daily routine includes meals exclusively of pureed vegetables and seeds (and the last meal of the day is always at 11 in the morning), taking more than 100 supplements a day, no exposure to sunshine, no junk food or treats of any kind, no small talk, no TV watching, and nothing that could undermine his efforts to not die.
He's convinced that he can not just reverse the aging process but cancel death altogether, something that other doctors were quick to tell him can't be done. In the process, he will take humanity to the next stage of evolution, one where man and machine (artificial intelligence, in this case) become immortal.
Such a future also involves partly ditching one of man's not-so-old but still huge passions: driving. Johnson's recent profile in Time Magazine reads like satire and could probably pass for it easily if it weren't in earnest. "Driving is the most dangerous thing we do" is his personal mantra, which he utters every time he gets behind the wheel of his car to take the 20-minute drive to work.
Photo: Audi
To ensure that the odds of something happening are as low as possible, Johnson drives "very slowly," sometimes as slow as 16 mph (26 kph), as he makes his way through Los Angeles in his electric Audi. Forget about the insane acceleration of EVs, this guy's not interested.
Johnson doesn't explain why he just doesn't abandon driving altogether, and presumably, his desire to have control over the quality of the ride to and from his office plays a part.
For a man who's sold T-shirts with "Don’t die" and who spends as much as $2 million a year on his very special regimen called Blueprint, Johnson is painfully aware of the irony of him getting in a car accident. "What would be more beautiful irony than me getting hit by a bus and dying?" he says.
When you're on a mission to prove that death is avoidable, dying the most inevitable death in an accident would be quite a spot on your record.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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