'Biohacking expert' Bryan Johnson is known for grabbing headlines, and now he's back. One doctor is putting Johnson's 'don't die' ethos under the microscope and challenging the 47-year-old's mission to cheat the aging process.
Johnson's one-man crusade includes waking up at 4.30am, only celebrating his birthday every 19 months, consuming 100 pills a day, and spending around $2 million a year to look the way he does.
Over on his YouTube channel, Dr. Mike Varshavski sat down with Johnson and explained how he thinks chasing this 'don't die' mantra can create a negative impact on the human body. Johnson said that while he could answer that in terms of 2024, he's looking hundreds of years into the future at the 25th Century.
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Comparing it to how he needed precision for his Braintree/Venmo payment software, Johnson said: "We humans are, we're not built to be perfect. We're kind of messy creatures. Now that may not be true for the future.
"We may be able to build ourselves with precision that is unimaginable to us right now."
As for the future, Johnson predicts: “We'll have all this help from all these tools of biological engineering, molecular engineering, artificial intelligence, they're gonna converge on us."
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Although Johnson says that the human race is becoming a 'new species,' Varshavski points out how the biohacking expert himself admits that we're so bad at predicting, how can he predict the 25th Century?
Observing how society is evolving in terms of technology, Johnson uses these trends to map his personal life in terms of systems and structures.
It's all about numbers for Johnson, saying: “I'm trying to say what is the total compute power on planet Earth? What is our ability to engineer biology to perform the functions that we design it for? I'm trying to say system laws as a species because, within humans and human systems, we have the element of chaos that is just very hard."
Even if they might disagree on a number of things, Varshavski says he hopes his audience takes some invaluable lessons away from Johnson's teachings like wearing sunblock, as well as limiting or completely cutting out bad habits like drinking and smoking.
In the end, he concludes by saying: "The fact that you've developed a passion for it is truly, truly admirable. It's really cool to see someone who's genuinely passionate about it and also recognizes the weaknesses of it."
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Johnson reiterated his 'protocol' doesn't need to be right for his message to be: "We have built a society around die. If you look at the die economy, so fast food, junk food, cigarettes, environmental toxins, grind culture, lack of sleep, there's a huge amount of money spent in die.
"If you look at the don't die economy, seat belts, medical care, smoke alarms, it's equally as big. My prediction is the amount of money we're going to spend on don't die is an exponential right up to the right, and the amount we spend on die is gonna go down."
Earlier in 2024, Johnson unveiled Project Blueprint, which asks its participants to pay $333 per month to take part in a 90-day self-experimentation nutrition program that supposedly extends their longevity and metabolic health. However, with people shocked at Johnson's before and after pictures, it's clear he's doing something right.
While not all of us are willing to have our bodies frozen in hopes of waking up in the future, at least Johnson is committed to the cause.