Does this man look 18 to you? How about 30?

I would have guessed he was in his 40s, and would have won a kewpie doll. He’s 45. His name is Bryan Johnson. He has, however, set himself the goal of reversing aging and getting his ‘epigenetic age’ down to something absurd, by making his body the subject of an “experiment” — although it is an experiment with no controls, no comparisons of the effectiveness of various treatments, and a subjective criterion of “perfection,” which he alone defines.

As of now, Johnson claims that the experiment, which he’s dubbed Project Blueprint, is more concerned with understanding the possibilities of one body—his own—than in creating a replicable system. The journey has led to improved physical health, but the most inarguable effect thus far has been on his physical appearance. He has dropped 60 pounds, and a recent MRI scan found that Johnson was in the 99th percentile for both body fat and muscle concentration—proof, he said, of his achieving “the perfect body ratio.” The muscles everywhere from his shins up to his neck appear to almost protrude out of him, and his skin wraps tightly around his face, which is the point: Johnson puts his skin through regular and painful skin rejuvenation processes, on top of the obligatory application of numerous daily creams. After two years, he claims, his skin is that of a twenty-something and his fitness level is that of an 18-year-old; his body also now runs three degrees cooler than it used to. More than 50 of his biomarkers are also now “perfect,” he has said. He even claims he has been able to stop dying his hair as of three months ago, after making “significant progress reversing gray hair.”

Do twenty-somethings look that shiny and moist? I see a lot of them running around here, and they really don’t look like middle-aged somethings who just got back from the spa with a miracle gel filling their pores. Is running 3 degrees cooler actually a good thing, or has he just decided that it must be?

Let’s assume, charitably, that he has improved his personal health, since he does look fit. How does he do it? By throwing ridiculous amounts of money at it, of course. He’s a silicon valley dudebro!

Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.

Oooh, precisely 1977 calories a day…sounds specific and sciencey. Until you learn that he picked that number because that’s the year he was born, not because there’s some evidence that that’s an optimal number. It’s simply another example of the whims of the privileged rich nincompoops who infest tech culture.

Extreme as the specifics of his approach might be—this is a man who has a device that tracks his nightly erections—Johnson falls squarely in line with many of his Silicon Valley peers. In recent years, people throughout the technology sector have taken increasingly innovative—and often eccentric—approaches to their personal health and wellness in a pursuit of a longer, happier life. The industry is chock-full of people who, for example, eat five cans of sardines a day or consume nothing but coffee, water, and tea for over a week straight. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made headlines in 2019, when he announced that he fasted for 22 hours a day and often went days with nothing but water, sparking concerns that the tech sector was “rebranding eating disorders” as wellness. But it was not entirely outside of the norms of an industry that has become taken with “biohacking,” in which one approaches the body as a computer program, to be forever tweaked and optimized.

He doesn’t really care about the science. None of them do.

Existing in a state of perpetual and extreme caloric restriction makes it difficult to fit all the nutrients he needs into his diet. He believes a constant caloric deficit to be “the number one evidence-based health protocol,” though when I later asked specifically what research convinced Johnson to remain in a state of extreme caloric restriction, the only answer I got was “scientific evidence.” Levine, the Altos researcher, said that studies on caloric restriction have led to mixed results and mostly focused on animals. Experiments on mice, for example, have found that while some benefit from restriction, others do not or even experience negative effects. A new study on flatworms out just this month found “no benefits to lifespan” outside of “perfect” environments, as Levine put it.

This is an exercise in supernatural thinking. They want to live forever in youthful vigor — I don’t blame them for that, I would kinda like that myself — but in the absence of real evidence, and with the fact that they’re asking to defy the physical nature of their existence, they just have to make stuff up, or clutch at feeble signs of improvement and imagine that they can amplify that indefinitely. Here goes Bryan Johnson, dreaming that all of his obsessive hypochondria will help him reach his goal of immortality. It won’t.

He claims to have the altruistic goal of helping humanity live decades longer, of increasing the time they have to accomplish great things, which is noble of him. I wonder, though, if people would be able to achieve great things if they have to focus so intensely and with such effort and expense on their personal vanity. Is extending life span (which Johnson has not done) really worth it?

Consider the male spider. He’s small relative to the female, who is a ruthless predator with no qualms against cannibalism. Should he expend most of his effort in growth, bulking up and building his strength, trying to match the physical advantages of the female? Or should he be content with being small, fast, and agile, quickly scampering to females at the earliest possible age to take his shot?

I can tell you that my spiders have chosen the scamper strategy. If they tried to focus on body building before daring to mate, they’d find that a scamperer had been there before them. And that the female might eat them anyway.

If you prefer human analogies, imagine that Alexander the Great had stayed home in Pella, abstaining from wine, living on a spare diet of pulses, slathering his face with the richest cosmetics. He’d probably have lived to be as old as Bryan Johnson! He wouldn’t have had “the Great” slapped on his name, though.

Maybe Alexander the Vain?