Almost billionaire Bryan Johnson isn’t your typical top 1%, he’s spending his vast fortune trying to stop aging. The tech entrepreneur is sharing all of his data free, to the public, so he can live as an 18-year-old again.
When you think of the millionaires and billionaires of the world, your mind may picture Elon Musk. Or even Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder. But there’s someone else that’s under the radar. Bryan Johnson, who founded Project Blueprint to attempt a mammoth task, has been documenting his journey on YouTube. He’s been interviewed multiple times and even shared what he eats, how he works out and what time he gets up in the morning (spoiler, it’s super early). The 45-year-old’s journey has made him somewhat of a celebrity in the tech world because of his dream. But his ambition into the past seems to be working, in one way or another. He shares his routine free of charge, so anyone can follow it, but some aspects require you to be Bryan Johnson himself, a millionaire, or a really great sleep schedule – not all of us have Project Blueprint at our disposal.
Meet Bryan Johnson, the almost-billionaire behind Project Blueprint
Some of the headlines around Bryan Johnson are as crazy as they seem. Such as the tech guru injecting his 17-year-old son’s plasma into his own body as part of the quest.
He currently spends $2 million (£1.6 million) each year to try to reduce his biological aging process – a huge goal, even by Bryan Johnson’s standards.
The Utah native was raised in the Church of Latter Day Saints, and lived a life world’s away from where he is now. He was once a Mormon missionary, but later left the church. At the time, he was “partly estranged” from his three children, but has seemed to have made amends. He currently lives with his teenage son, Talmage, in California.
How did Bryan Johnson almost become a billionaire?
Bryan Johnson journey to becoming a millionaire began when he made his first huge sale. His current net worth is estimated to be between $400m and $800m, close to billionaire status. A lot of outlets refer to Bryan Johnson as an ‘almost billionaire’ because of his vast wealth. He admits he had a personal goal to become “independently wealthy” by the time he turned 30.
He may have been four years late to achieve this, but it’s no small feat.
The driving desire behind this came from his past. Bryan explained: “A blazing fire had ignited with me when, from ages 19 to 21, I lived among extreme poverty in Ecuador”.
He sold a tech company, a payment-processing company, to eBay in 2013. The firm, called Braintree, was taken up by the marketplace for $800m (£646m), a year after they acquired payment app Venmo.
Bryan then invested in several other ventures, such as Verge Genomics, Just Eggs and Elysium.
Three years later he set up Kernel, using $55m of his own cash, which builds hardware to measure brain activity. Bryan Johnson hopes the helmets they develop will eventually assist in studying brain aging, Alzheimer’s, strokes and other illnesses. It’s currently in clinical trials for depression and dementia.
2020 came around, and he wanted to explore whether death is inevitable. That’s how Project Blueprint was born.
Project Blueprint was created to ‘reverse Bryan Johnson’s organs aging’
Then in 2021 he announced Project Blueprint, attempting to reverse aging in a new health initiative. He claimed his biological age was measured at 36 – through a variety of factors – which is eight years younger than his real age at the time – 44.
After two years, we come to the current set up. The millionaire claims Blueprint has slowed down his aging process by 31 years.
This may sound confusing, because he doesn’t look like a child. But Bryan Johnson explains his body is now aging slower than the average 10-year-old. He explains on his website, his biomarkers reveal his inflammation levels are 85% below the average 18-year-olds. Whereas, his bone mineral density is in the top 0.2% of 30-year-olds. Through all of his experiments, his pace of aging is currently at 0.69. This means the average individual, without any ailments, diagnoses or conditions, will age at a rate of 1 each day – your body ages 1 day every 24 hours. But Bryan Johnson’s aging is now below that, so he doesn’t age 1 day every 24 hours.
Bryan writes: “Blueprint is STEM for health. My team and I had endeavored to do what no one had ever done: enable a body to run itself.
“Practically, I do this by routinely taking hundreds of measurements of my body’s biological processes, enabling my heart, liver, lungs and kidneys to speak for themselves what they need to be in their ideal state. My mind – a story telling creature – is unauthorized to grocery shop, peruse the pantry, spontaneously order pizza, eat a dessert – to basically make any food related decision. This is my Autonomous Self.”
Inside his strict daily schedule
Now, attempting to reverse aging, Bryan Johnson has a pretty strict schedule. He rarely strays from it, in fact.
Every day, he follows a strict diet – he eats less than 2,000 calories a day – and fasts for 16-18 hours. He eats all his meals, which are measured out and pre-made, within a short window. He also downs more than 100 vitamins and supplements every single day as well. Bryan will work out every morning for an hour, and this includes three HIIT sessions a week.
He dived into his fitness regime on his YouTube channel. A younger, fellow content creator attempted to work out with him, but it was clear he wasn’t a match for Bryan.
If you think he’d crave a day off and a Big Mac meal from McDonald’s, you’d be wrong.
He told GQ he loves his new life.
“It’s funny, because most people hear about this, and the instantaneous reaction is to assume that I must be miserable.
“It’d very hard to understand that I might derive more pleasure from doing this than I would anything else.”
Is it really as good as it seems?
Even though he undergoes routinely MRIs and measures his body fat, heart rate, blood and stool samples and laser therapy, it isn’t a quick fix.
He sees a team of 30 doctors for regular testing to monitor every intricate detail of his body.
Bloomberg reports, although Project Blueprint is still young, Bryan Johnson has the heart of a 37-year-old, lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a 28-year-old, according to the data. It adds his overall biological age is now at least five years younger – making him 40 when he is 45.
For anyone who wants to follow the regime, they can adapt different parts of their lives to his protocol through his website. However, not all of it will be cheap. The added cost of the 100+ vitamins, specific diet requirements, gym membership and expensive olive oil he likes to use, isn’t accessible to all.
But Bryan Johnson knows that, because the almost billionaire tells fans he knows not all viewers can do it. Instead, he says try different aspects out, if they wish, to see if it improves their quality of life.
Oliver Zolman, 29, who is the lead doctor on the project, charges up to $1,000 an hour for any patient who wants the vast testing the tech founder undergoes regularly.
Even Zolman admits the data is showing ‘minimal results’.
He said: “We have not achieved any remarkable results. In Bryan, we have achieved small, reasonable results, and it’s to be expected.”
But aging at a rate of 0.69 a day can’t be that bad, even at Bryan Johnson’s standards.
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