Do you want to feel 18 again? This tech CEO spends $2 million on it

Do you want to be 18 forever?

Wealthy tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson does, and he’s spending millions to take his 45-year-old body back in time. While the notion seems crazy, it’s part of a growing trend of tech midases determined to turn back the clock.

In Johnson’s case, he has employed 30 doctors who monitor the myriad functions of his body on a daily basis, according to a Bloomberg report. Though Johnson told writer Ashlee Vance that he’s doing all of this to help humanity retreat, not everyone has the $2 million a year they’re currently spending on their fountain of youth dream.

Techies are obsessed with being forever young

Johnson’s search aligns with a growing trend fueled by Tech-Lucre:

• PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has pumped millions into the SENS Research Foundation, whose website indicates the organization is building a future “free of age-related diseases.”
• Altos Labs, founded in 2022 with $3 billion in funding from investors including Jeff Bezos and Breakthrough Prize founder Yuri Milner, is working on ways to rejuvenate cells.
• Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are pouring their wealth into Calico Labs, whose scientists are focused on understanding how our biological systems drive aging and lifespans.

Who is Bryan Johnson?

Johnson founded Braintree Payment Solutions more than a decade ago, a pursuit that has left him stressed, overweight and mentally exhausted, according to Bloomberg News. He sold the company to eBay for $800 million in 2013 and went in search of a complete physical makeover.

His first steps included starting a new company in 2016. Called Kernel, it makes helmets that analyzed brain activity, including trying to analyze the effects of meditation and hallucinogens on the body’s physical state.

What is Johnson’s Anti-Aging Mission?

Led by a 29-year-old doctor named Oliver Zolman, Johnson uses himself as a test subject for many experiments. After building a medical wing at Johnson’s home in Venice, California, the team went to work with the goal of giving Johnson “the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the tendons, the teeth, the skin “to give the hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old,” the report said.

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The team is now a year into what they call the Project Blueprint, which includes a daily intake of 1,977 vegan calories, an hour of high-intensity exercise three times a week, and falling asleep at the same time after two hours of wearing blue light-blocking glasses. “Each month,[Johnson]undergoes dozens of medical procedures, some quite extreme and painful, and then measures their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies,” the report reads.

To be 18 again, the regime is extreme

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If you want to be like Johnson, you need discipline as well as money. Vance details Johnson’s routine, and it’s not for the casual fitness fanatic.

Johnson gets up at 5 a.m. every day and takes two dozen supplements and medications, including “lycopene for artery and skin health (and) metformin for colon polyp prevention.” After a carefully prepared meal, “he brushes, washes, and brushes his teeth before rinsing them with tea tree oil and applying an antioxidant gel.”

To give a sense of the extremes Johnson goes to, Vance recounts that Johnson “took 33,537 pictures of his intestines, found that his eyelashes were shorter than average, and probed the thickness of his carotid artery. He blasts his pelvic floor with electromagnet pulses to improve muscle tone in hard-to-reach places and has a device that counts the number of his nocturnal erections.”

What is Project Blueprint? Johnson wants others to follow him

To get others interested in his experiment, Johnson created a website where he posts details of his last two years on Project Blueprint. Among Johnson’s messages to readers: “Entropy = aging and decay. Alignment via your autonomous self aims to combat entropy by preserving eternal youth.

More recently he has created a new website specifically aimed at encouraging others to join him, albeit perhaps in less extreme or costly ways. The website, dubbed Rejuvenation Olympics, asks people where they stand on slowing the aging process by “uploading your epigenetic data to the platform and your results will be analyzed and ranked.”