Tech mogul Bryan Johnson speaks on his quest to slow the human aging process
Johnson spends millions every year in order to find a way to make his organs similar to that of an 18-year-old male.
A tech billionaire on a quest to reverse the aging process believes that it is unlikely humanity will survive without the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).
Bryan Johnson, a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur, spends millions yearly on a team of experts monitoring his health and conducting experiments. The goal: Get his organs to look and act like that of an 18-year-old.
Some of his regiments include a strict bedtime of 8:30 p.m., taking 111 pills daily, collecting his stool samples, and having a small device attached to his penis to monitor nighttime erections.
Until recently, Johnson was even paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each month to infuse his teenage son's plasma into his own blood stream.
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Bryan Johnson paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to infuse his teenage son's plasma into his own blood stream every month. (Bryan Johnson )
"Oftentimes, the headline of a billionaire spending 2 million a year in his body, it makes it seem like it's inaccessible and wacky and eccentric. It's really not. It's completing the things we all know that are good for us," Johnson told Fox News Digital.
Johnson admits that achieving his health goals requires a lot of nuance and detail. However, most of these measures can be boiled down to a few small achievable mantras: Going to bed on time, exercising every day and avoiding things that cause harm.
"I joke in that I am a rights activist where I liberated my organs from the tyranny in my mind," Johnson said with a grin. "I can say that with tongue in cheek. It's kind of funny, but you think about it, and it's like, for entire life, my mind got exactly what it wanted, and my heart never did, nor did my lungs and nor did my kidney."
According to Johnson, people pursuing healthier living often gravitate to things they can start doing, such as exercising, sleeping more and eating better. However, the mind doesn't often visit the things people have the capacity to stop doing. Society is "addicted to addiction," chowing down on junk food, slaving over porn and getting lost in the "infinite scroll" of social media.
"Corporations are winning when they get us addicted to their product or service, as oftentimes the most powerful thing is to stop doing the bad things," he said.
Despite the whopping price tag of his endeavors, Johnson revealed that his protocol is written down and free for anyone to peruse online. His recommendations include recipe books, exercise plans and vitamin guides.
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The details of Johnson's health protocol are online for free. (Dustin Giallanza)
Generally, his findings can be adopted by both men and women. For example, a diet focused on vegetables and small portion sizes can be equally applied to males and females based on population-level studies and various age groups.
He also concurred with the findings of "The Blue Zones," a book by Dan Buettner that provides nine lessons on living longer. The book was recently adapted into a Netflix documentary series titled "Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones."
The book and series focus on five regions where people claimed to live or have recently lived much longer than the worldwide average. The study regions comprise Okinawa, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, California.
Research into these areas found several commonalities attributed to a longer, healthier life. These commonalities include having a religious or spiritual life, sleeping enough, exercising, feeling beholden to a community, eating vegetables, reducing stress and moderate but regular consumption of wine with friends. Johnson said these findings all sound "spot on."
While it may sound counterintuitive, the tech entrepreneur said the most significant revelation in his health journey is that the capacity to stop something may be more powerful than the drive to start.
"My nemesis is my mind. My organs are my friends. And so, I've empowered them with authority, and I have lessened the authority of my mind," he said.
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A battle with chronic depression and familial health conditions led Johnson down his path to slow the human aging process. (Josh DeAngelis )
Johnson's health quest was spurned in part by his own health conditions and the deteriorating cognitive faculties of those close to him. His stepfather is currently in the early stages of cognitive decline and his father has reported that he frequently finds himself in less efficient states of mental acuity. Johnson also suffered personally from a decade of chronic depression.
"When you're healthy, you know, health is forgotten until it's the only thing that matters. It's very easy for people who are in good health to make an observation about this endeavor and make some kind of snide remark or dismiss it," he said. "When you're somebody who doesn't have their health, it means something entirely different to you."
Johnson initially founded a payment infrastructure company, Braintree, which he sold to PayPal for $800 million. Today, he is the founder and CEO of Blueprint, which focuses on optimizing health and longevity using algorithmic precision.
AI directs the program, an insight Johnson previously said helps him sift through his mind's tendency to spin hundreds of philosophical arguments and stories to betray his body.
"I've built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. It has exceeded my abilities," he said to Rolling Stone in September.
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Johnson said much of his plan includes daily workouts and significant sleep. (Magdalena Wosinska )
Johnson told Fox News Digital that he does not speak to the dangers of AI. Instead, he speaks to the dangers of humans and their capacity to cause harm.
"It's humans, I fear," Johnson said. "I think there's probably a very low probability that humans could survive themselves without artificial intelligence."
The rapid acceleration of AI, combined with other technological advancements and a greater emphasis on health, may one day lead to a world where people live much longer or may even see death as an improbability rather than an eventuality.
Johnson recalled a story from early 20th century New York when horses were the primary mode of transit. At the time, there was so much manure in the streets that workers could not shovel it out fast enough. People got sick and began looking for solutions. Then Henry Ford came along and the Model T rendered the issue obsolete.
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Johnson predicted that there is a "very low probability" that humans can survive without AI. (Magdalena Wosinska)
"Sometimes the problems we think are urgent and need to be solved are actually not the ones that need to be solved because something will come in and solve it just by default," he said. "And so it's very hard to know which problems we should really be worried about and which ones we shouldn't. So, is overpopulation a thing, or is it actually underpopulation? If we live too long, will we no longer have the desire to have children?"
Johnson said his summation of the modern world's problems should be siphoned into something actionable to him personally. With that in mind, he boiled down the essence of the 21st century into two words: Don't die.
"When you're baby steps away from having the powers of the gods, in this case, artificial intelligence, the only foe is death," he added. "There's no other foe. It's not a time to raise armies and conquer territory. That's a game for the previous centuries of Homo sapiens. It's not a game for us now. So, we're just at a different era of being human, and we need to update our gameplay as a species to understand where we're at."
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