Bryan Johnson

A model for lifestyle health?

Edit, March 19, 2025: since sharing this article I’ve found good reason to be a lot more skeptical and critical of Bryan Johnson. See the last section of my wrap #19 part 2 post to see why I no longer trust him.

I first drafted this essay a few months ago and nearly forgot about it until earlier this week. Please comment or reach out if you have feedback or notice mistakes. Happy New Year!

Bryan Johnson continues to break into the mainstream and receive increasing media attention and social media engagement. Johnson, the founder of Braintree (which acquired Venmo in 2012 before being bought by Paypal in 2014 for $800 million), became a mega-millionaire after the sale of that company and has since become a crusader for health and longevity. He’s spent enormous amounts of money, and time to advance anti-aging research and capabilities by experimenting on himself.

If you don’t know who I’m talking about, this is the guy who’s trying to live forever. Netflix just released a documentary about him called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.

The fascinating thing about Bryan is the variety of attention, support, and lack thereof that he’s received. Ignorant and mostly religious media consumers hear about what Bryan is doing and think: “Why is this guy trying to live forever? That’s against my beliefs. He shouldn’t be doing this.” Or they think, “I would rather live as long as possible than not. I don’t know much about what this guy is doing, but I’m glad he’s doing it.” I wager this second group is quite small, and is probably mostly atheists and people who don’t have enough time to look into what Bryan is up to. I think there are probably also plenty of atheists in the prior camp who don’t know much about what Bryan is doing but despite their shared desire to live long lives (or not if they are unfunctional atheists¹) think his pursuit of living forever–which I think is a mischaracterization and or at least an oversimplification of his goal²–is ridiculous and disregard him as a fool.

I hope both the ignorant and unsupportive and ignorant and supportive camps of people will at least try to give the Netflix documentary a watch, as it’s perhaps the easiest way to get a better understanding of the man at this point.

At the heart of the public debate about Johnson is something akin to the following question: is he a purveyor of snake oils³ or an honest, scientific-thinking man?⁴

Skeptics point to the lack of evidence to support some of the things Johnson is doing to try to extend his health span and claim that he’s just trying to build a brand and make some money off of health products without doing much new. Or they will say that the publicization of his experimental health operations and treatments makes him a purveyor of bunk medicine, or at least medicine that has not been proven effective.

Though I sympathize with their concerns and keep a healthy level of skepticism about what Bryan Johnson is doing, I don’t think the people who are informed and against his work have the right perspective or understand him well enough.

I’ve followed Bryan for over 5 years now. I discovered him at some point in 2018 or 2019 from learning about the neuroscience company he founded called Kernel. I was in my first year of college, planning to major in Neuroscience (which I did), and I found his rationale for starting Kernel to be very compelling. His desire to understand the brain and contribute to improvements in brain health resonated strongly with my own interests and aspirations to contribute to improvements in human well-being. I too also saw the brain as the most important frontier in that pursuit; for the most part, still do. I was excited by the fact that he was also a UChicago Alum, which meant I could quite easily discover his email and reach out, which I did. Somewhat to my surprise, he responded, briefly, but thoughtfully and kindly.⁵

I’ve listened to him on multiple podcasts and YouTube videos over the years, and with the increasing amount of virality and fame he’s gotten in the last couple of years, I don’t think his motives and intentions have changed. In fact, they’ve been quite consistent, which is clear if you listen to interviews he did after founding the OS Fund and Kernel but prior to founding Blueprint.

If we are to take for granted that he is an honest man, his motivations are quite clear: after amassing great wealth from selling Braintree and going through a transformation of worldview after leaving the Mormon church he wanted to put his money to use to the benefit of humanity. That motivation, which inspired him to start Kernel, is a clear throughline to his ongoing work with Blueprint.

Bryan Johnson

I think Bryan’s intensity and weirdness turn some people off, but it’s not too hard to tell that he’s an honest man who just so happens to be boldly pursuing an important moonshot for human health. Elon Musk pursued moonshots, with regard to SpaceX, quite literally, and was told he was crazy. People call him crazy for other reasons these days, but he defied the odds and the haters and was amazingly successful in his pursuit of making rockets cheaper and reusable and making electric cars mainstream. I think in the not-so-distant future most people will look back on the accomplishments of Bryan Johnson and think, “Wow, he was really way ahead of the pack.”

The reason why I consider myself a fan of Bryan Johnson is that it is clear to me that he’s a man of science, motivated by evidence, and obsessed with data. Sure, he is trying all these things on himself that don’t have much research to back them up, but isn’t that how you kind of have to start to make any progress in the first place?⁶ He’s not claiming that what works for him will work for everyone or even that all that he’s done or does works. Notably, for example, he started doing testosterone replacement therapy but stopped because he wasn’t benefiting from it.⁷

He’s doing a lot⁸ and he’s a smart enough man to understand confounding variables. He doesn’t pretend to know that everything he does is working or worthwhile, and he’s not recommending people do everything he does. But he does want to make his pursuit of longevity and good health accessible to others and data-driven. This is why he developed products for Blueprint and didn’t just sell them but also opened up data collection to Blueprint customers to see if others see benefits from his dietary and supplement interventions.⁹ This is obviously not rigorous science, but it’s better than nothing and he is clearly an advocate for rigorous science, just look into the work he’s done with Kernel and OS Fund. Through Kernel, he’s been a successful pioneer in the brain-imaging space, funding rapid improvements in the capabilities and functional ease of use of fNIRs.

For us to learn and progress, someone (or some minority of people) has to try new things and figure out what works. Not only does Bryan Johnson understand this, but he has a bold, optimistic vision of human capabilities. He doesn’t just talk the talk, but walks the walk: his health is phenomenal. He’s not made the fatal mistake of becoming a charlatan: he has not made unfounded or preposterous health claims. In this regard, he’s seemingly demonstrated that he’s a genuine, mission-driven guy who sincerely wants to play a role in making progress for human health, and for that, I admire him.

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I have certainly given Bryan the benefit of the doubt and after watching the Netflix documentary about him, I’ve resolved to dig into his work more thoroughly. I realize that this piece is not chock full of data and evidence in support of Blueprint’s work and in support of the opinions about Bryan that I hold. I also realize that I didn’t really answer the question in the subtitle of this post; I added it after writing the essay. I’ll attempt to answer it more directly in the future. I plan to write more about Blueprint and Bryan Johnson in the future, with more attention to the details, so stay tuned.

1. The type who are likely to re-join a religion because of the loss of meaning they’ve experienced due to hastily leaving their religion without taking the time to carefully reconstruct their core beliefs and understanding of reality. This category is likely to include many self-loathing and pessimistic individuals who are not so grateful to be alive at this point in their consciousness journey.

2. What he really harps on about is his pursuit of avoiding death, which is technically a different goal. Thus the slogan of his company Blueprint and title of the Netlix documentary: Don’t Die.

3. Bryan has ironically embraced this label by jokingly using it as the name of the Extra Virgin Olive Oil that his company sells.

4. I’m inclined to think the latter.

5. This was in September of 2019. If I remember correctly, he encouraged me to follow up with him after college or in the future or something to that effect, although quite tragically, I have no record as my university inbox was purged months after my college graduation. Nevertheless, I do intend to reach back out, soon.

6. The inability to disentangle the effects of all the different things he does is another problem

7. Similarly, he did a plasma transfusion with his son and his father in an attempt to share youth (the son being the only one not to benefit from this), but hasn’t done this again because of the lack of evidence supporting this practice.

8. He takes hundreds of supplements, sticks to strict diet, exercise, and sleep regimens, and has done dozens of experimental treatments.

9. I got emails about this early last year or perhaps late 2023 but I need to look into if that’s ongoing or if results have been released.