Thursday, September 28, 2023

The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever

Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson made hundreds of millions when he sold his company. His current venture is Blueprint, a life-extension system he’s developing that’s meant to reduce biological age. The idea of insanely rich people experimenting with peculiar longevity treatments is nothing new. But Johnson, who views himself as an explorer in an unprecedented era of humanity and AI rather than some kind of biohacker, believes he can achieve immortality with an algorithm. Charlotte Alter observes Johnson in his home—which feels like “an Apple Store in a jungle”—to see what an algorithmically ruled life looks like, and manages to make us both laugh and ponder our own mortality in the process.

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”

He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice.



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