If given the chance, would you select to reside endlessly? The principle caveat is that a big portion of your prolonged life could be spent in a windowless room in a medical spa about 20 miles exterior of Fort Value, Texas, getting your son’s blood pumped into your veins. If that’s a non-issue, then I’d wish to introduce you to Bryan Johnson.
Johnson is a brand new age-y enterprise capitalist and founding father of the corporate Braintree. Legally he’s 45. Biologically he’s additionally 45. However he’s spending $2 million a yr to swap blood plasma together with his 17-year-old son (and in addition together with his 70-year-old dad!) in order that he can pump the brakes on and possibly even reverse his automobile again alongside the freeway of life—Rascal Flatts be damned!
He kind of appears like if one of many older Weasley brothers obtained into trendy dance and have become a Miu Miu mannequin: a person in prime bodily situation with a penchant for posting Instagram pictures of his muscled, dewy pores and skin swimsuit whereas slyly smiling. Together with the tri-generational plasma trade, a phrase that can hang-out me in my sleep, Johnson follows a strict sleep, weight loss plan, and train routine and is documenting and accumulating information on his anti-aging pursuit by way of his firm Project Blueprint, in hopes it would assist the bigger anti-aging medical analysis neighborhood. Johnson additionally refers to his son as his “blood boy,” in case anybody needed a enjoyable character element for his or her physique horror movie script.
“To me, it’s gross, evidence-free and comparatively harmful,” biochemist Charles Brenner told Bloomberg about Johnson’s plasma-swapping passion.
I fully perceive the fascination with Johnson’s vampiric bio-medical enterprise. It’s fucking bizarre! However there’s additionally…nothing new about it. Tech dudes have lengthy been obsessive about both escaping dying or prolonging life—suppose Peter Thiel’s plan to be cryogenically frozen or Jeff Bezos’ investment in Altos Labs, an organization researching the right way to reverse getting older in cells.
What does really feel noteworthy is that when males with a bajillion {dollars} and a few laptop abilities wish to feel and look youthful, it’s mentioned by way of a lens of medical tech innovation, and as a part of a grander dialog about immortality and life and dying. When ladies do the identical factor—by way of beauty surgical procedure and upkeep—it’s usually written off as frivolous vainness.
Even the media protection of Johnson’s pursuit is telling: Extra severe and business-minded publications like Bloomberg and Fortune are on the story. These shops didn’t, nonetheless, write concerning the enterprise being Kim Kardashian’s infamous vampire facial—a really comparable process wherein your individual plasma is injected into your face to rejuvenate your pores and skin.
Each different one in every of Johnson’s Instagram posts is riddled with a prolonged caption stuffed with complicated statistics about his liver performance or glucose levels—all issues I presume you possibly can observe with Mission Blueprint. It’s extremely just like Kardashian partnering with Bodyspec final summer time and sharing her physique fats proportion and bone density. However her broadcasting her bio-info didn’t get picked up in tech commerce pubs.
I’m not saying Johnson’s seek for the fountain of youth isn’t being mentioned with loads of skepticism—it completely is. I’m additionally not suggesting we aggrandize Kim Kardashian’s bone density report; I don’t suppose anybody needs or wants that. Nevertheless it’s definitely conspicuous whose pursuit of youth is learn as useless and whose is framed as a push ahead for mankind.
