Anti-Ageing Guru Bryan Johnson Preaches To Stockholm VIPs

NDTV

a day ago

American tech billionaire Bryan Johnson has set himself the lofty aim of eternal life, devoting his body and fortune to his goal despite criticism from some in the scientific community.
Johnson visited Stockholm this past weekend to speak about his beliefs on longevity and human evolution in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), addressing specially invited guests at the "Super Human Summit".
"What I'm trying to do is to be the first human in history to demonstrate what it means to 'Don't Die'," he told AFP, referring to the name of his movement, book and a Netflix documentary about him.
"What does a person do? How do they think? What do they believe?" the 47-year-old said, the skin on his face glowing as soft and smooth as a baby's.
At a posh hotel in central Stockholm, conference delegates were able to undergo ultra-modern health tests, including body scanners that calculate muscle mass, blood tests analysing stem cells to determine stress levels, and a camera analysis of the eyes to predict the risk of future illnesses.
The conference rooms were full of devices aimed at promoting "the next phase of human evolution", said conference organiser Ash Pournouri.
Ascetic routine, vegan diet
Johnson is convinced he's found the secret to immortality.
He follows a strictly ascetic routine that includes more than 100 steps.
Every day starts the same: he wakes at 5:00 am, meditates for five minutes, does light therapy for three to four minutes, applies a prescription hair serum followed by a scalp massage, downs a protein drink, and does a 60- to 90-minute workout.
His vegan diet is meticulously calibrated, made up almost entirely of nutritional supplements and vegetables.
On his website, promotional links direct visitors to products sold by his company Blueprint, where he has published his biomarkers.
"I've said yes to an algorithm to take care of my health, because pairing my data with the algorithm does a much better job taking care of me than I could myself," he said.
A former Mormon, Johnson made his fortune in online payment services. He sold his platform Venmo to eBay in 2013 for $800 million and started a biotech company called Kernel in 2016.
He spends almost two million dollars a year on his health but some of his procedures are considered risky.
In Honduras, he goes to a private clinic to get two injections of a follistatin gene, a form of DNA gene modification therapy to slow down the ageing process.
According to Andrew Steele, an anti-ageing expert at the University of Oxford interviewed in the Netflix documentary about Johnson, it is too early to experiment with these kinds of therapies given the risks involved, notably cancer.
'No scientific conclusions'
Johnson has also undergone six monthly blood plasma transfusions of a litre each, with his son donating the blood for one of them.
He stopped the practice after failing to see any significant results.
Karin Modig, a longevity researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, underlined the limits of Johnson's very personal experiments.
"We'll never be able to draw any scientific conclusions from his case," she told AFP.
"It's actually the opposite: he chooses what he considers to be a science and tests it on himself."
"For something to be a scientific process, you would need a very large number of people doing the exact same thing, and a control group that doesn't do it, in order to compare the results," she said.
Johnson has built his own small ecosystem composed of scientists and followers of his 'Don't Die' movement.
In the end, he says his body is ageing at varying rates.
"Chronologically I'm 47 years old," he said.
But "my left ear is 64 years old, and that's because I have hearing loss from as a child, I listened to loud music and I also shot guns, and so I exposed this left ear to a lot of loud noises."
His right ear is "about 42, 43. But for example, my heart is in the 30s, my DNA, the end caps of my telomeres, is age 10, my cardiovascular ability is in the 85th percentile of 18-year-olds, (and) my fertility health is that of an early 20-year-old."