California entrepreneur spends $2 million a year to have the body of an 45-year-old at 18: rejuvenation works

Johnson, 45, is a super-rich software entrepreneur who has over 30 doctors and health experts monitoring every function of his body. The team, led by 29-year-old regenerative medicine physician Oliver Zolman, is committed to helping reverse the aging process in all of Johnson's organs. How everything goes and what results have been achieved, the publication said. Bloomberg.

Photo: IStock

Zollman and Johnson obsessively read the scientific literature on aging and longevity and use Johnson as a guinea pig for the most promising treatments, tracking results in every way possible. Launching the program required an investment of several million dollars, including the cost of a medical office at Johnson's home in California. This year, he is going to spend at least $2 ml on his body to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old boy.

“The body forms a certain configuration at 18,” he says.

Johnson is well aware that this sounds crazy and that his methods may seem strange to some, but the millionaire does not care much.

"It's expected and normal," he says of the criticism he's received.

Johnson, Zolman and their team have been running their experiments, which they call Project Blueprint, for more than a year. These include strict recommendations on the Johnson diet (1977 vegan calories per day), exercise (an hour a day, high intensity three times a week), and sleep (at the same time every night, after two hours of wearing blue-blocking glasses). light).

Johnson constantly monitors his vital signs. Every month, he undergoes dozens of medical procedures, some of them quite extreme and painful, and then evaluates their results with additional blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopy.

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“I treat athletes and Hollywood celebrities, and no one goes as far out of the box as Brian,” says Jeff Toll, the team’s therapist. All the work, according to doctors, began to pay off: Johnson's body, according to them, is becoming younger from a medical point of view.

"What I do may seem extreme"

There are some clear signs that Johnson is at least healthier than most 45-year-olds. His body fat ranges between 5% and 6%, which fully showcases his muscles and veins. But most doctors care about what is happening inside his body. They say his tests show he has reduced his overall biological age by at least five years. Their results show that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the lung capacity and fitness of an 18-year-old.

“Every metric we track has improved a lot,” Toll said.

Zolman, who received his medical degree from King's College London, is more reserved. He emphasizes that his work with Johnson is just beginning and that they have hundreds of procedures to study, including a number of experimental gene therapies.

“We haven't achieved any outstanding results,” he says. “We made small, reasonable gains in Bryan, and that’s to be expected.”

Over the past decade or so, the idea of ​​optimizing internal organs has mostly taken the form of periodic exercise or dietary fads. Johnson's point is that you need to count a lot more than just steps to get a clear idea of ​​what's best for your body.

"What I'm doing may seem extreme, but I'm trying to prove that self-mutilation and decay are not inevitable," he says.

In his 30s, Johnson created a payment processing company called Braintree Payment Solutions LLC. It was a huge success, but long hours and stress left him overweight and led to a deep depression that bordered on suicide. He sold the business to EBay Inc. in 2013 for $800 million, and then began the long journey to sort himself out.

Johnson founded biotech-focused venture capital firm OS Fund and then, in 2016, Kernel, which makes helmets that analyze brain activity to learn more about the inner workings of the mind. Researchers are currently using the helmets to try to quantify the effects of meditation and hallucinogens and find ways to reduce chronic pain. By this time, Johnson began to mess with his body: he changed his diet, took many nutritional supplements.

Zolman is convinced that progress in the field of longevity requires a more focused search for drugs and treatments that seem promising. In 2021, he opened 20one Consulting Ltd. in Cambridge.

“My goal is to use biostatistics to prove a 25% reduction in aging in all 78 organs by 2030,” he explained. “This is an extremely difficult and crazy idea.”

For beginners, his treatment focuses on the basics of improving diet and exercise. The more expensive programs, which top out at $1000 an hour for people in Johnson's group, include many tests, treatments, and medical devices. He does not charge if the patient does not see results. However, Johnson is the only client who works that hard.

At Cambridge, Zolman spends most of his time reading research papers and synthesizing the results into something that Johnson can try.

“There is no person in the world who is 45 years old chronologically, but 35 years old in every organ,” Zolman says.

To determine such progress, he says, he tracks 10 or more different measurements for each organ in a patient. For example, in the brain, it uses a range of MRIs and ultrasounds to track blood flow, tissue volume, scarring, edema, and plaque growth in the brain, ventricles, midbrain, cerebellum, pituitary, and brainstem, and complements these measurements with cognitive ability tests and analysis. blood.

While he is expansive and upbeat about his program, Zolman tries to create a realist tone. He admits it will take years to figure out if he's after the right things and how well it all works.

The best version of yourself

Every morning, starting at 05:00, Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medications. Has lycopene for arterial and skin health; metformin for the prevention of intestinal polyps; turmeric, black pepper, and ginger root for liver enzymes and reduced inflammation; zinc to supplement his vegan diet; a microdose of lithium, he says, for brain health. This is followed by an hour-long workout consisting of 25 different exercises and green juice loaded with creatine, cocoa flavanols, collagen peptides and other goodies. During the day, he eats solid healthy foods, the recipes of which have been modified based on the results of his latest tests. After eating, Johnson cleans his teeth with brushes, irrigators and floss, then rinses with tea tree oil and applies an antioxidant gel. His doctors say he has gum disease like a 17-year-old.

There is a mode and series of measurements for each part of Johnson's body. He took 33 x-rays of his intestines, found that his eyelashes were shorter than average, and examined the thickness of the carotid artery. He treats his pelvic floor with electromagnetic pulses to improve muscle tone in hard-to-reach places, and he has a device that counts the number of his nocturnal erections.

He measures his weight, body mass index, and body fat daily, and monitors his waking body temperature, blood glucose, heart rate fluctuations, and sleep oxygen levels. He goes through a fairly constant stream of blood, stool, and urine tests, as well as MRIs and full-body ultrasounds, regular tests aimed more specifically at his kidneys, prostate, thyroid, and nervous system.

To repair sun-damaged skin, Johnson applies seven daily creams, undergoes weekly acid peels and laser therapy, and has begun avoiding sun exposure. To improve hearing in his left ear (which was damaged by childhood hunting trips in Utah), he does sound therapy, which tests the limits of the frequencies he can hear, and then plays inaudible sounds that stimulate the cells in his ear and brain.

Clinical studies done at Stanford University and elsewhere have concluded that it can help the average person improve their hearing by at least 10 decibels, which is a significant amount.

Doctors on his team help with scans and tests, read results and give advice on what is safe and what could be dangerous. At one point, Johnson's body fat dropped to 3%, threatening the healthy functioning of his heart. His team recommended changing his diet, including eating more throughout the day instead of consuming all of his calories at breakfast.

Johnson's lifestyle is not for everyone. He said that when they made an injection of fat in the face, he had an allergic reaction to the painful procedure. His face became so puffy, as if he had been sniffing bee venom all day. Even stranger, his pale skin was radiant and free of most of the imperfections of middle age. He could be mistaken for a large swollen china doll.

The procedure, he said, was no ordinary Hollywood filler for youth. It was the first of a series of injections that created "fat forests" on his face that would produce real fat cells.

“The filler is just patching something up,” Johnson explained. “It will take a few months to build the fat framework, but then as I regenerate it will actually create the fat itself.”

Usually, fat is collected from other parts of the patient's body for such a procedure, but Johnson, who does not have excess fat, received it from an unknown donor.

As Zolman points out, there is little to no evidence that a fuller, younger face or luscious red hair is clinically beneficial on its own.

“But if you do it at the whole body level, it becomes clinically significant,” Zolman said. “If you restore the distribution of youthful fat levels throughout your body, then you will have fewer toxic compounds released and affecting the rest of your body, and you will have things like better heat control.” If you didn't have fat, you would die. If you didn't have skin, you'd be dead. These are not aesthetic organs.”

This lifestyle seems exhausting, but Johnson enjoys it, as does his 17-year-old son Talmage.

Johnson has heard his fair share of criticism from people who have accused him of having an eating disorder or a psychological disorder, or of being a fanatic leading life in the most boring and restrictive way.

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Physicians on Johnson's team say he breaks new ground in longevity and likely prolongs life, but even they have doubts about whether their findings apply to the rest of us.

“In my opinion, what he does is impressive, and he personally encouraged me to become better,” says Christine Dietmar, an interventional oncologist. She emphasizes that cancer, her specialty, has genetic components that no cutting-edge science can yet defeat, let alone juices or creams.

One way to pass on your achievements to others, Johnson said, could be radical transparency. He has a website where he publishes his entire course of treatment and all test results. And now he's launching another site, Rejuvenation Olympics, encouraging fellow travelers to do the same. The idea is to move away from the latest fashion trends in favor of more rigorous medical science. The more popular this lifestyle becomes, the cheaper and more accessible the treatments Johnson tries can be.

Most likely, Johnson's lifestyle will seem impossible or absurd to most people. Some researchers and health aficionados who have come across Johnson's program are particularly opposed to his promotion of nutritional supplements and vitamins, which they see as largely worthless.

However, some of the most respected experts in the study of longevity and aging say the core idea of ​​an open forum for the science of life extension is inevitable.

“The whole field of longevity is moving into a much more rigorous, clinical direction,” says George Church, a renowned geneticist at Harvard University who owns stakes in a number of biotech companies. “I think what Brian is doing is very well-intentioned and probably very important.” I don't think a lot of these things will be that expensive when the dust settles."

While Johnson won't discuss it yet, several of his doctors and consultants say he's going to go much further than experimental procedures, including gene therapy. For better or worse, he devotes his body to science in the hope of proving that anything is possible for all of us.

“That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “This is a new frontier.”

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