Bryan Johnson: meet the man who is ageing backwards

Ordinarily I do not like to so immediately trumpet the message of my interview subject, but… well, when I come face to face with Bryan Johnson at his home in Venice, California, he does, undeniably, look significantly younger than he appears in all the recent photographs. This will of course be largely down to his $2 million-a-year anti-ageing programme — known as Project Blueprint — that the 46-year-old says has reversed his biological age, giving him the heart of a 37-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old.

But, at least aesthetically, the hair cut also helps. His somewhat vampiric, swept back, Nick Cave style having very recently been shorn to a close crop. Somewhat taken aback by this new look, I begin by asking, somewhat flippantly, whether hair and other more aesthetic aspects are given as much thought and attention by him and his team of round-the-clock doctors as the more vital organs of the human body.

“Yes,” he says, immediately and seriously. “Rejuvenation is everything. So we worked very hard on oral health, on hair, on skin. It definitely is a top priority. We are trying to do every organ in the body. And we try not to leave out anything.”

That the many, many articles written about Johnson tend to contain a large dose of scepticism and focus on the more ludicrous-seeming processes he partakes in — for example, while sleeping he wears a device on his penis to track his erections — is something that he understands, gets and is fine with. “The fact that my stuff is not normal according to today’s standards creates a story of this, like, eccentric rich person,” he says. “And people like reading about eccentric rich people. It’s good gossip. It makes for good jokes. And so it makes sense that a lot of people gravitate towards writing about those kind of things. And in the end it’s useful that it does introduce the concept.”

Said concept, Johnson is keen to stress, is based around far more lofty goals than mere Hollywood-style vanity. Becoming “the most measured person in human history” is, he says, about preparing as best as possible for the ways in which AI will affect our lives.

“It’s entirely about that,” he says. “We are in this moment where we’re giving birth to super-intelligence, and it’s about to change reality as we know it. I’m proposing a practical solution so that we don’t die in this transition.”

How worried does he think we should be? “Nothing has ever happened on this kind of scale before in 200,000 years of homo sapiens. And it’s going to happen in a time frame that is unimaginable to us. So I’m pretty sober about the moment. And doing my best to try to contribute to our readiness.”

Being confronted with such a statement does rather make questions along the lines of “but what about fun or happiness?” seem trivial. That said, Johnson is not without a sense of humour. When I ask him why he has named one of his company’s latest products “Snake Oil” — a kind of super olive oil — I detect the trace of a smirk when he pauses for a long time and then says “because it’s the local language”.

Born in Provo, Utah, Johnson was just 20 when he founded his first company Braintree — specialising in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies  — in 2007. By 2013, Braintree had been acquired by PayPal for $800 million, leaving him a very rich man. He got married, had three children and got divorced. He climbed mountains (Kilimanjaro). Ultimately, though, he spent much of the last decade overeating, drinking too much and dealing with a dark depression. He was determined to do something about it, so used his expertise to develop algorithms that would do a better job of defining how he would live. After much tweaking — tweaking that still continues — he arrived at a routine that involves getting up at 4.30am, eating all his meals before 11am and going to bed at 8.30pm. During the day he takes more than 100 pills, exercises and is constantly monitored by the team of doctors. His mantra, the slogan of his company, is, simply, “Don’t die”.

“If the slogan for this were to be something like ‘live long’ then people are going to hear it and be like ‘yep, already doing it!’” he laughs. “But if it’s ‘don’t die’ then the person must reconcile everything they understand about existence. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”

It is a pursuit to which he has entirely dedicated his life to. Mid-question, he simply says, politely but firmly: “I’m up against time. I’ve got to go. Hopefully this was useful to you.”

And then he is gone.

To hear Bryan Johnson speaking to Evgeny Lebedev on the Standard’s Brave New World podcast visit podcasts.apple.com