That’s what Bryan Johnson is spending – per year.
Of course, since he’s a billionaire, that’s chump change to him – and worth every penny if it enables him to live forever.
Besides, he’s clearly creating a new business out of his own quest for superior health, greater longevity, and age reversal back to 18. So, not only can he afford that $2 million, he’s probably writing it all off on his taxes as business expenses. Sweet.
The History of Johnson’s Blueprint
He’s a successful tech entrepreneur. In 2013, he sold his company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for a net (to him) of $300 million.
However, he continued to live an unhealthy lifestyle, as most entrepreneurs do. In the evening, unable to control his cravings, he ate large amounts of junk food.
He wound up overweight, depressed, and nearly suicidal.
He decided to change his lifestyle to heal the damage, slow down the aging process, and then actually reverse it back to age 18.
He hired a staff of 30 doctors and other health experts.
He took nearly every kind of medical test available – and still monitors and tests himself on a regular basis.
He enjoys calling himself the “most measured man in human history.”
His team went through thousands of scientific articles, and put together a complete protocol for achieving his goals.
Now, several years later, he’s 45 and following a strict regimen of diet, exercise, sleep, supplements, other procedures (including red light exposure and prescription medicines), and testing.
He calls himself a “professional rejuvenation athlete.”
He’s willing to try out-there stuff. Scientists have studied giving blood from young mice to older mice, with some success. Johnson gave blood to his father – and his teenage son gave blood to him. He says this didn’t help, so they no longer share blood.
He started his company, Blueprint, and clearly plans to sell a product, service, app or all three at some point.
You can find his complete protocol on their website, along with his latest test results.
He also Brags
* He’s in optimal health for over 100 biomarkers.
* In many cases his test results are those of the very fittest 18-year-olds.
* He’s slowed down his rate of aging by 31 years.
* He set a world record in age reversal. That is, he lowered his biological age by 5.1 years in just seven months.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
The Current Blueprint Protocol
All the details are available online.
He structures his day around sleep – from 8:30 PM to around 5:00 AM.
He exercises one hour every day, which is high-moderate. He carries out a varied workout for both strength and cardiovascular fitness. I like how he says he’s training to reverse his age, not to run a marathon or enter bodybuilding contests.
He eats basically a whole food, plant-based vegan diet, consuming 70 pounds of veggies every month.
He follows a time-restricted feeding window – eating nothing after 12:00 noon. Also, he eats under 2000 calories per day.
He takes over 100 supplements. Plus, he takes testosterone, plus the prescription medicines Metformin, Rapamycin, and Acarbose.
That’s probably the most controversial part of his protocol.
Does anyone really need 100 supplements every day? I doubt it. Testosterone is a powerful hormone, but it seems unlikely such a healthy 45-year-old man would be deficient in it.
Metformin and Rapamycin are both well-known in the longevity field. Although Metformin helps diabetics live longer (it’s intended only for diabetics), it’s not effective for non-diabetics. Rapamycin shows a lot of longevity promise but is still not proven.
Therefore, you can’t follow the complete Blueprint unless you can find doctors willing to prescribe those medicines even though you don’t medically need them.
Most obviously – few of us can afford to take 100 supplements a day.
All This Raises a Lot of Questions
Johnson may be the “most measured” man, but he’s still just one man. Blueprint rests on one single (in statistic lingo, “N=1”) example. He’s not a complete “study” by himself.
Is what’s optimal for a healthy 45-year-old white dude also optimal for an 80-year-old Japanese woman?
I believe the answer’s probably 80% to 90% yes – but she’d require some adjustments.
That’s why scientific studies use as many subjects as the researchers can afford to pay. The more people involved, the more likely the results are to be both accurate – and useful for all people.
When Blueprint finally does release a product, bear that in mind.
If you can’t afford 100 supplements, you have to pick and choose.
What supplements out of those 100 do the most good? You can’t answer that from the Blueprint protocol. Johnson takes them all.
He probably gets 80% of the benefit from 20 of them, and the rest contribute little to nothing to his results.
It’s one thing for a healthy supplement to benefit ordinary people eating the Standard American Diet (SAD). When you’re eating great and taking 99 supplements, what is the marginal health benefit of the 100th supplement? Probably not much.
No doubt, some supplements complement each other, but which ones?
Despite how he emphasizes “data,” remember he is NOT carrying out a scientific experiment. That would require changing only one variable at a time, then waiting months if not years to verify the effect of that lifestyle component, medicine, or supplement.
He simply can’t validate the effectiveness of 100 supplements, along with everything else he’s doing, especially given the extremely large number of possible variations.
To obtain anything close to valid results, he ought to be paying a few thousand people, at least, to follow his program.
To choose supplements for yourself, you’ll still need to check out which supplements are most important to take. The Blueprint won’t help you with that.
Conclusion
We all can, and should, learn from scientific studies, plus the experiences of ourselves and others. So the Blueprint site is worth a close look.
Take away all the trappings, though, and you’ll find Johnson is primarily following the known fundamentals of good health:
* Sleeping 8 or so hours every night
* Exercising regularly and moderately
* Eating a healthy diet
* Working for a better world (he says he founded Blueprint to help humanity, and he expresses faith we are progressing, and especially with Artificial Intelligence)
You don’t need $2 million annually and your own personal staff of 30 doctors and health experts to follow that program.
But, if you’re a high-tech entrepreneur or a lottery winner, go for it.
It can’t hurt either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoSghB59swU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j8lVpS0RYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxUDmOntXO8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmE4GAgOHTk
https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.co/
https://elifesciences.org/articles/73420
