- Joined
- Sep 5, 2023
A weirdly homoerotic photo of Bryan, his son Talmage, and his dad Richard
For time immemorial, people have tried their hardest to stave off death's cold embrace for as long as they can. In the past, the things people did to extend their lives were clearly just ritualistic and bore no strong connection to the physical realities of aging. These were often infamous for their ghoulishness, like 16th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory bathing in and consuming human blood, believing it would extend her own life. Today, with a better understanding of medical science, we now have methods which are, at the very least, more likely to extend a human life. Eating healthy, exercising, and going to the doctor's office regularly are all pretty reasonable things to do and will make you live longer. But how far can you push it?
Enter Bryan Johnson, a man who has made it his life's mission to live forever. Advised by teams of doctors, coaches, and scientists, Bryan now experiments on himself (and sometimes his family), pursuing whatever treatments he can find that he thinks are likely to extend his life. While some of them are undoubtedly working, they're often similarly ghoulish to Elizabeth Bathory's methods, and sometimes of similarly questionable efficacy.
The Blueprint Protocol
The main outlet where Bryan writes about the experimentation he does on himself is on his website, "DON'T DIE". This is where Bryan posts updates about the state of his health, measured in as many ways as he can possibly do so.
To give credit where it's due, Bryan does an incredible job of documenting everything he does to take care of his health, and it does seem to be working for the most part. The Blueprint Protocol is a comprehensive plan for living a healthy life to the absolute extreme, and I do think it's good that he publishes this because, for the most part, it's good advice. It covers everything from diet and exercise to how to sleep, how to handle a pregnancy with minimal physical damage, and more.
Origins
Born August 22nd, 1977 in Provo, Utah, Bryan grew up in a middle-class Mormon family. His parents divorced when he was young and he grew up with his mother and stepfather, with his father not being a part of his life as far as I can tell. He grew up doing farm, helping to harvest alfalfa and corn. In his teen years he became more involved in the church, becoming a Mormon missionary in Ecuador at 19. After returning from Ecuador, he went on to earn a BA in international studies from Brigham Young University in 2003, and then an MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2007.
While finishing his schooling, he started 3 startups - a cell phone sales business, a Skype competitor, and a real estate business - which all failed, leaving him in significant debt. His fourth business, Braintree, ended up being his big break. Braintree was a payment processing startup that Bryan founded in 2007. It grew quickly and was acquired by Venmo in 2012 for $26.2 million, and then in 2013 by PayPal for $800 million. Brian walked away with roughly $300 million.
After selling Braintree and making a fortune, Brian battled with a decade-long depression. With the stress of his highly demanding work life and health issues compounding, it led him into a serious rut where he expressed feeling suicidal. This seems to have been a sort of breaking point for Bryan, and this is around where his obsession with living forever started. Again, to his credit, he made an incredible comeback. He lost the weight, got back into good shape, and started following a lot of healthy habits.
So far, this story isn't really worthy of a KF post. Up til this point, it's an inspiring story of American success, a man who started from modest means and became wealthy through his hard work and determination. However, unsatisfied with just being healthy, Bryan kept going. With his seemingly newfound intense fear of death, he started to push harder towards health and wellness than ever before. Let's get into the freakish shit Bryan now does in search of an ever-longer lifespan.
Multi-generational plasma swap
In probably Bryan's best-known stunt in pursuit of a longer life, Bryan and his family decided to trade blood plasma. In 2023, Bryan, his father Richard, and his son Talmage flew out to Dallas to have their blood drawn, separated into plasma, and then passed up a generation. Bryan's blood plasma was injected into Richard, and Talmage's blood plasma was injected into Bryan. The hope was that the effects of this would mimic some research that had been done on mice, indicating that blood plasma transfusions may help reverse the effects of aging if done in this manner. While this sounds sort of nice, like Bryan is doing this to help his elderly father live longer, it's somewhat overshadowed by the fact that Bryan's son was asked to sacrifice some of his vitality to help his father pursue this obsession. Apparently, Bryan is content with donating some of his plasma to his father, but without some even younger plasma to replace it, this deal is not worthwhile to him.
Sometimes I find myself wondering whether it's all just goofy conspiracy theories, the stuff people say about the elites being obsessed with young blood, but here Bryan is, proudly displaying his literal vampirism.
Rapamycin
Between 2019 and 2024, Bryan was doing self-experimentation with the drug rapamycin. Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant drug which questionable research indicated may help reverse aging in lab tests. Unapproved for anti-aging use, its typical application is to help organ transplant patients avoid organ rejection. It is, as far as I can tell, pretty serious stuff to be injecting into yourself, even under a doctor's supervision. Bryan stopped because this was causing rashes, infections, elevated blood sugar, and heart problems.
Depending on how you look at it, you can take this either as Bryan being extremely foolish and endangering his own health for no clear benefit, or you can look at it as Bryan being willing to experiment on himself for the benefit of others who may find his self-experimentation logs in the future. I tend towards the former but advocates of Johnson's project tend towards the latter and I think it's fair to at least mention their view on him.
Experimental gene therapy
In September of 2023, Johnson traveled to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras, to undergo an experimental gene therapy treatment. Roatan is in a special economic area of Honduras where medical experiments that generally wouldn't be allowed to occur are tolerated as they stimulate the local economy. The treatment, meant to boost follistatin, has caused recorded instances of up to 30% increase in the lifespan of mice, along with other effects such as muscle growth.
It seems that, while likely very dangerous, this treatment worked out better than the previously discussed one. Bryan recorded a 7% increase in his muscle mass over the next 6 months and his follistatin levels increased by 160%. He claims that, after receiving this treatment, his aging speed is now at only 64% of a regular person's aging speed, though how he calculated this exactly isn't clear to me.
Bryan made a video about this one which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bax8to_s07Q
Project Baby Face
Not content with only slowing his aging internally, Bryan has also pursued some treatments to make himself appear more youthful. For "Project Baby Face", Bryan had the fat of several donors injected into his own face. The hope, as I understand it, was that this would somehow stimulate his body's production of its own fat in these areas or something like that. Again, it's not really clear to me why he did this rather than just getting a more traditional form of plastic surgery like fillers. He claims that this project was due, in part, to how his self-imposed caloric restrictions had made his face appear gaunt, with friends describing him as looking "on the brink of death". Given that he specifically cited that comment, and his obvious extreme fear of death, I think it was comments from friends that made him so self-conscious that he felt this was necessary.
The project was a complete disaster. His face became swollen so badly that he was unable to see, apparently as the result of a severe allergic reaction to something in the donor fat. After seven days of discomfort, he recovered.
Penis electrocution
Bryan claims that one of the best biomarkers for a person's health generally is how much of their sleep they spend erect. While I'm not sure if this is accurate - is this a cause, or an effect of good health? - Bryan has decided to pursue this as a goal for his treatments. He decided to undergo acoustic shockwave therapy on his dick six days per week, at a cost of $1000-$2000 per session. How the treatment works is that he has some underpaid nurse use a wand-like device to electrocute his penis, causing micro-injuries that stimulate tissue repair and blood flow. The goal is to mimic the effects of exercise, though I'm still not sure why he thought this was necessary, being that he is already in incredibly good shape. When asked to rate the pain caused by this treatment, he describes it as a 7/10 pain, with the pain increasing to a 9/10 pain when the tip of his penis is being electrocuted due to the heightened sensitivity there. Bryan now claims he has "the erections of an 18-year old" as a result of this treatment.
However, again, he was not content with doing just this. Measuring his health only by self-reporting was insufficient, and so he decided that both he and his son ought to track their nighttime erections together using an electronic monitoring device. Initially, his nighttime erections lasted an average of 2 hours and 12 minutes, but have now increased to a record of 2 hours and 59 minutes per night. His goal is to increase it to 3.5 hours per night, matching the performance of a typical 18 year old.
I really don't get why he needed to track his son's erections for this. This is probably the most freakish thing he's done with his son, even more than the blood transfusion, but he's made a lot of weird comments about his son. He claims that he sees his son as "his future self", describes his relationship with his son as "talking to myself", and generally seem to want to become just like him. It's unnerving, to say the least.
The eternal troon
Among other hormones that you might expect, like TRT and DHEA, Johnson is also dosing himself with estrogen. He's not doing it to become a woman, but to extend his lifespan. Specifically, he doses himself with 17α-estradiol, a synthetic variant of estrogen that is supposed to have non-feminizing effects.
As you can see in the before and after photo, it would be a stretch to call 17α-estradiol non-feminizing. However, at the very least, it doesn't trigger breast growth. 17α-estradiol has been shown in clinical trials to increase the lifespan of mice by around 12%, though its effects on male humans aren't well-documented. Even less documented are the effects of taking 17α-estradiol while also dosing yourself with testosterone and DHEA. I'm not an endocrinologist but this seems, uh, kinda risky.
It doesn't seem, aside from his face looking even more uncanny than before, that there have been any significant negative effects from him doing this. We'll see if that changes later though.
Personal life
As you can imagine with the stuff mentioned about his son, his personal relationships are questionable.
In 2019, he evicted his then-fiancee Taryn Southern from their shared home while she was undergoing chemotherapy for stage 3 breast cancer. According to her, he described their relationship as a "bad deal" and called her a "net negative" in his life. She claims that he reneged on his promise to give her lifelong financial and medical support.
She has also made some other allegations, such as him having affairs with over a dozen women, including prostitutes and women he had just met. In spite of demanding her acceptance of his "radical transparency" about these affairs, he demanded to know her entire sexual history, including all previous sex partners and a list of specific sex acts performed with each, under the guise of "reputational management." He reportedly forced her to use encrypted messaging apps with disappearing messages on burner phones, and sometimes communicated with her through a PO box that he had monitored.
During their breakup, he tried to offer her $149,000 to sign an NDA that indicated their breakup was mutual and that she would not disparage him publicly. He also offered to invest in her company and some other less liquid financial support. She refused and tried to get more money from him.
After refusing, Bryan terminated her employment at Kernel (his company), thus cutting off her health insurance during the course of her chemotherapy treatments. He then sued her for back rent and leveraged arbitration clauses in her employment agreement, leaving her with legal fees of about $584,000.
Bryan strongly denies all of her claims about him, and it's hard to know exactly where the truth lies. Given everything else about him, I don't doubt that he's a complete control freak with the people he's close with, but I find some of her claims dubious, like his offer for lifelong financial support.
He is also apparently divorced and estranged from his 2 other children, but I couldn't find a whole lot about that online. It seems that they'd like to live quietly and away from Bryan. I can't blame them and I won't pursue too much more info about them out of respect for their privacy.
Sources
I didn't keep my sources all in very good order for this thread. I think this covers most of it though.
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