Longevity-Obsessed Tech Millionaire Discontinues De-Aging Drug Out of Concerns That It Aged Him

Bryan Johnson has long been obsessed with “de-aging” himself. The 46-year-old multimillionaire, who made his money by founding various tech companies, has spent years of his life and millions of dollars trying to get his body to resemble that of a teenager. His wellness regimen includes taking 54 different supplements every day for breakfast. Those pills are ostensibly helping him to extend his lifespan and, as he has put it, “break the world record in age reversal.” In recent months, however, Johnson quit taking at least one of those supplements for fear that, instead of de-aging him, it was actually “accelerating” his aging.

In November, Johnson tweeted that he had stopped taking a supplement known as rapamycin. “Despite the immense potential from pre-clinical trials, my team and I came to the conclusion that the benefits of lifelong dosing of Rapamycin do not justify the hefty side-effects (intermittent skin/soft tissue infections, lipid abnormalities, glucose elevations, and increased resting heart rate),” he said. “With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected Rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it entirely.”

He added: “Additionally, on October 27th, a new pre-print indicated that Rapamycin was one of a handful of supposed longevity interventions to cause an increase/acceleration of aging in humans across 16 epigenetic aging clocks.”

In other words, after taking this experimental drug for half a decade, a new study came out that suggested it might be doing the exact opposite of what Johnson wanted it to do and could, additionally, be giving him skin infections.

Johnson, whose obsession with living longer led him to start a new health and wellness startup called Blueprint, is also the subject of a recent Netflix documentary. The doc quotes Johnson as saying that he has “the most aggressive rapamycin” intake of “anyone in the industry,” the New York Post reports. “I take this because there’s potentially some longevity benefits,” he adds, noting that it’s “the kind of thing in the longevity community that people are excited about,” whereas “outside the longevity community, it’s still kind of crazy.”

Many of Johnson’s suggestions for longevity aren’t exactly groundbreaking. His basic rules for living longer, as prescribed by his Blueprint website, include things like not drinking or smoking, eating a healthy diet and exercising a few hours a week. Blueprint sells subscriptions to bags of various protein powders, which the company calls “longevity mixes.” A recent review of the subscription service called it “just another supplement product, albeit one with a very interesting individual and story behind its creation.” The review also noted that while the powder regimen included “some good things,” it was ultimately very expensive and might not be a good fit for different kinds of people.

While Blueprint may be somewhat mundane, Johnson’s experiments on himself are not. In the past, he has used his own teenage son’s blood to test whether transfusions from a younger person had any direct health benefit on someone his age (he has since discovered that they do not) and, more recently, used “shock treatments” on his genitals in an apparent effort to reverse age his penis and, thus, conjure the erections of an 18-year-old. There’s no real telling what the result of Johnson’s bizarre self-experimentation will be. At this point, we really only have the physical results which aren’t great so far. Johnson, who once just looked like a normal dude, now self-admittedly resembles a vampire.