A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this Silicon Valley millionaire, Bryan Johnson, who calls himself the World's Most Analyzed Man, because he pays a literal team of medical specialists to monitor his health every single day.
His goal: To test and evaluate all methods of slowing or reversing aging that he can find in medical literature.
His motive: I believe that he believes that, as we approach the AI Singularity, medical science will discover a way to arrest/slow or even reverse aging within the foreseeable future. Therefore, he believes that among us will be some of the last unfortunate people to die of pure "old age." If we can just live to the day that breakthrough happens, we can have our lives extended another 40-60 years, and then, mostly likely, in the following 40-60 years, AI will figure out how to stop aging completely.
That's why his motto is "Don't Die." He wants everyone to cling to life to get to that aging-reversal singularity.
The New York Times wrote him up.
Is he an idiot? A visionary? A little from column A, a little from column B?
Probably the latter.
"Ready, on three," Jamie Love said to the group of hikers as they huddled for a photo. "One, two, three ..."
"Don't die!" they shouted in unison.
The dozen or so strangers were gathered at the foot of Temescal Canyon Trail along the Pacific coast in Los Angeles on a cool Saturday morning in mid-December. Several of them, including Ms. Love, 38, who had organized the outing, wore black T-shirts with the bold white text, "DON'T DIE."
The hikers had come together with a shared goal: to extend their life spans through diet, sleep, exercise and whatever technologies might come along.
Not present was the spiritual leader of the gathering, the internet celebrity and centimillionaire tech founder turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson. In the past year, Mr. Johnson has arguably taken the lead in the race among Silicon Valley rich guys going to extremes in a quest to live forever. (Move over, Messrs. Bezos, Zuckerberg and Thiel.) Now he's turning that longevity mission -- and the online infamy he has earned because of it -- into a lifestyle business, selling supplements and prepackaged meals to less-rich people who would also like to live for a very long time. The hike, one of more than 30 "Don't Die Meet-Ups" around the world that day, was a cross between community-building and a guerrilla marketing tactic.
Mr. Johnson's deal, in a nutshell: In 2021, he began spending $2 million a year, by his own account, to measure every aspect of his body, from lipid levels to urination speed to brain plaque, with the goal of reversing his aging process. He called it Project Blueprint.
Every day, between 7 and 11 a.m., he eats the same three vegan meals: "Nutty Pudding" (a blend of nuts, seeds, berries and pomegranate juice), "Super Veggie" (black lentils topped with broccoli and cauliflower) and a third, rotating dish consisting of vegetables, roots and nuts. He exercises for an hour every morning and takes up to 111 pills a day. (His pharyngeal muscles may be the strongest of all.)
In the video I link below, he says he's looked for every type of food reputed to have longevity benefits, and only eats the most nutrient-dense food in existence. "Every calorie on my plate has to fight for its right to go into my body," he pronounces. He's putting it archly but he's quite serious.
Mr. Johnson claims that his regimen (or "protocol," as he calls it) has already slowed his speed of aging, giving him, at 46, the maximum heart rate of a 37-year-old, the gum inflammation of a 17-year-old and the facial wrinkles of a 10-year-old, according to his website. He publicizes his test results so anyone can see images of his bowels or learn the duration of his nighttime erections. His "biological age," he claimed until recently, is 42.5, according to one measurement of changes in DNA over time known as an epigenetic clock. In other words, he has spent about three years shaving off -- maybe -- a little more than three years.
If the original goal of Project Blueprint was to perfect his health, Mr. Johnson now describes it as preparing humanity to thrive in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. Thus the new slogan: "Don't Die."
In an interview, Mr. Johnson said he didn't care what present-day people thought of him. "I'm more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me," he said. "The majority of opinions now represent the past."
Mr. Johnson is gifted at getting attention online and from the press.
Mr. Johnson has an almost Trumpian ability to stay in the news. Since 2020, he has been the subject of five articles on Bloomberg documenting his quixotic pursuits: the brain-reading helmet developed by his company Kernel; his bid to become, as he has put it elsewhere, the "most measured person in human history"; his decision to receive blood plasma from his 17-year-old son and pass his own along to his 70-year-old father; and a recent round of experimental gene therapy in Honduras. In September, Time photographed Mr. Johnson in his private gym, naked but for a carefully positioned kettlebell -- an instant meme. The New York Post has gleefully followed his every move, running more than a dozen articles on Mr. Johnson in the past year, including three about his penis.
Fani Willis' gigolo says "Hold muh beer."
On social media, where he has more than 700,000 combined followers on X and Instagram, he knows how to trawl for attention. He lists his stringent requirements for a romantic partner (8:30 p.m. bedtime, "no small talk," "must give plasma") and compares himself to religious figures ("Jesus fed bread and alcohol, impairing and aging/I will feed you nutrients that awake and create life"). His flat manner and uncanny looks have drawn comparisons to "American Psycho"'s Patrick Bateman, a "'Lord of the Rings' elf," a vampire and a "jacked cyborg." One podcaster called him "blood daddy." He likes to pose in crop tops.
Now, Mr. Johnson said, after three years of self-experimentation -- which he called "Phase 1" of Blueprint -- he's ready for "Phase 2": helping others replicate his process. Late last year, he began selling Blueprint-branded olive oil.
Of course. Just in terms of supplements -- his Blueprint plan calls for several thousand dollars worth of supplements per month (he takes something like 110 supplements per day). The guy in the below video avoids the priciest and most obscure of the recommended supplements, and he still spends a thousand bucks for a one month experiment.
I mean, sure, he's a flake. But who knows: his basic notion might be true.
The content out of the way, I thought people might want to talk about the resolutions they'd made, and how they're sticking to them, or not. And maybe talking about them would provide some of that social accountability they say helps people stick to plans.
Here were my resolutions, and how they're going:
- Stop wasting my time watching YouTube videos.
I gave up TV a while ago and was proud I did. In the past year I realized I have not actually gained anything, because I watch more repetitive, time-wasting YouTube videos and podcasts than I ever watched actual TV shows.
I started out pretty good, as one does... and then backslid. I'm not watching as many YouTube videos, but it's still way too many.
Which hurts my next resolution:
- Read more. Try for at least a book per week.
I started out well on this one and then really backslid. Part of the problem might be that I've picked some books that aren't grabbing me to start with. I guess it's time to put those aside and start other ones.
But the main problem is just: Reading is boring and I am stupid.
Gotta get cracking on that.
- Watch less pron.
I am actually nailing this one. 9 out of 10. I don't know how I did it, except I just stopped for a week and it "fell out of the schedule," if you know what I mean.
I mean, not completely. But enough that it's no longer a problem.
- Start exercising, starting with calisthenics and my set of dumbbells and then eventually shifting back to barbell training.
This one I'm also keeping to. So far, 8 out of 10.
I can offer some advice to anyone who wants to exercise and work out but who can't do it.
I have told myself -- and told people in this GAINZZZ thread -- that I would start working out again. That I would do the 100-pushup-a-day challenge.
And I kept failing. I failed because when I would do pushups, or try to do a pull up (just an assisted pull up, I'm nowhere near the level to do a real pull-up), I would be so disgusted and ashamed at how weak and feeble I had gotten over two or three years of zero exercise that I would just stop so I wouldn't be confronted with my disgusting frailty.
So this last time I knew that I was going to face that again, and I told myself the truth, which is:
Yes, you've gotten very weak.
But you also know that when someone is retraining, they can regain their old muscle at a fairly decent rate. It's faster to regain muscle than to gain it for the first time. (And if someone is completely untrained, they can make what are called "noobie gains," which are the most rapid gains known to anyone.)
Basically, the weaker one is, the easier it is to make improvements. People who are very well-trained and at, say, 96% of their maximum level of musculature, have to fight and strain for months just to add another pound to the bar. But untrained people -- or detrained people, like me -- can add strength pretty quickly, because we're so, so far below maximum level of musculature.
Anyway, that's all true, and not just a trick I played on myself, and once I accepted that yeah, I'm weak as shit now but can make significant GAINZZZ in weeks and months, I was able to motivate myself to start getting some damn GAINZZZ again.
I started before Christmas and now have actual visible GAINZZZ. So that's just three or four weeks. And seriously, I was in really, really bad shape. I still am, but it's improving.
They say you only need to do two workouts per week to add muscle (though doing three or four or five would add muscle faster).
Assuming that one of these workouts is on the weekend when time is more available, you'd just have to find one weekday where you could spend an 80 minutes working out. (You wouldn't want to do the workouts on back to back days, because you'd want to recover, though you could, if needed, do all Upper Body work on Saturday, and all lower body work on Sunday).
One interesting thing I found out, which I wish I knew three years ago when I stopped working out, is that just to maintain the muscle you have only requires five working sets per muscle group per week. That's less than an hour and a half per week.
Anyway, maybe that will help people who are thinking about getting started working out.
You're going to start out disgustingly weak. But unless you're already in shape, then, everyone starts out disgustingly weak. It's not a big deal. You will no longer be weak in a month, and you will begin getting decently strong in 3 months.
At least, that's my plan. I think that's right but I'll let you know.
5. Keep to some kind of healthy diet and stop snacking all the time.
On the "keep to a healthy diet," I'm doing pretty well, though I'm eating more than maybe I should for the GAINZZZ.
On the snacking: I started off strong, cutting out any snacks, but they have slowly crept back into the diet. And snacks are a big problem.
Nearly a quarter of the calories U.S. adults consume comes from snacks, according to a new study published in PLOS Global Public Health.
Americans consume an average of 400 to 500 calories in snacks every day, which generally are lacking in protein, vitamins and minerals, the study found.
That's more than the average breakfast -- which is 300 to 400 calories.
Snacks also comprise about one-third of daily added sugar consumed by most adults.
I have all these "low carb" snacks from Quest Nutrition. I eat them because I lie to myself and tell them they're healthy. They're not, not really. I really have to go back to avoiding those and just eating a hard-boiled egg if I'm hungry.
I've seen claims that more protein you eat, the less hungry you'll be, because the main point of hunger is to tell you to eat protein. So when you're low on protein, you'll just want to eat. I'm finding this to be pretty true -- eating high-protein does reduce my desire for snacks, sweets, and junk food.
But when I don't have protein: I go right to the Quest "low carb" cheese crackers.
On my "eating healthier:" I'm eating a ton of eggs, which is a diet plan I've wanted to do for years. They're cheap, they take fifteen minutes to cook and eat. For my other meal I'll have a hamburger or bratwurst or some other meat.
And I think I'm seeing some benefits. Cutting out at least some of the crap I was eating seems to have reduced the total amount of foods that were provoking inflammation. I've had a runny nose and filled-up sinuses my whole life -- but now that I'm eating mostly eggs and meat, my nose is almost always clear.
I'm not sure about this one. I may be making a connection in my head that isn't real.
Eating more carnivore and healthier: I'm about an 8 out of 10. As far as actual meals go, I'm avoiding trash food like McDonald's most of the time.
But as far as avoiding snacks: 5 out of 10. Okay, but needs improvement.
My last resolution:
- Write my damn book.
I have started and abandoned this so many times. This last go-round, I started out well again, and then... stopped.
1 out of 10. Another embarrassing failure. Such a failure I wanted to keep this one off the list to not admit it to anyone.
Anyway, those are my resolutions.
What are yours, and how are you sticking to them? And if you've let them fall by the wayside, will you be refocusing on them?
Or will you be a bitchmade pussy while the rest of us are getting SICK GAINZZZZ?
The gym is a dangerous place, man. Be careful out there.