Bryan Johnson has long been obsessed with “de-aging” itself.. The 46-year-old multimillionaire, who made his money by founding various technology companies, has spent years of his life and millions of dollars trying to get his body to look like a teenager. His wellness regimen includes taking 54 different plugins every day for breakfast. These pills supposedly help him extend his life and, as he said, “break the world record for reversing old age.” In recent months, however, Johnson has stopped taking at least one of those supplements out of fear that, instead of slowing him down, it was actually “accelerating” his aging.
In November Johnson tweeted that he stopped taking a supplement known as rapamycin. “Despite the enormous potential of preclinical trials, my team and I have concluded that the benefits of lifelong dosing with Rapamycin do not justify the severe side effects (occasional skin/soft tissue infections, lipid abnormalities, elevated glucose, and increased resting heart rate),” he said. “Since no other underlying causes were identified, we suspected Rapamycin, and since dose adjustments had no effect, we decided to stop it altogether.”
He added: “Additionally, on October 27, a new preprint showed that Rapamycin is one of several putative longevity interventions that cause an increase/acceleration of aging in humans through the 16 epigenetic clocks of aging.”
In other words, after taking this experimental drug for half a decade, a new study came out that suggested it might be doing the exact opposite of what Johnson wanted, and that it might also be causing him skin infections.
Johnson, whose obsession with living longer led him to launch a new health and wellness startup called Draft, is also the subject of a recent Netflix documentary. The document quotes Johnson as saying he has “the most aggressive uptake of rapamycin” of “anyone in the industry,” The New York Post reports. “I’m taking this because there are potential longevity benefits,” he adds, noting that it’s “something in the longevity community that people are excited about,” while “outside the longevity community, it’s still kind of crazy.”
Many of Johnson’s proposals for longevity are not exactly revolutionary. His basic rules for a longer lifeas prescribed on his Blueprint website, they include things like not drinking or smoking, eating healthy and exercising a few hours a week. Blueprint sells subscriptions to bags of various protein powders, which the company calls “longevity blends.” AND recent review of the subscription service called it “just another add-on product, albeit one with a very interesting individual and story behind its creation.” The review also noted that while the powder regimen included “some good stuff,” it was ultimately very expensive and may not be good for different types of people.
While Blueprint may be a bit mundane, Johnson’s experiments on himself are not. He used in the past the blood of his own teenage son to examine whether transfusions from a younger person had a direct health benefit for someone his age (he he has since discovered that they don’t) and recently used “shock treatments” on his genitals in an an obvious attempt to get his penis back and thus evoke the erection of an 18-year-old girl. There is no telling what the result of Johnson’s bizarre self-experimentation will be. At the moment we really only have physical results which are not great so far. Johnson, who used to just look like a normal guy, now self-admittedly resembles a vampire.