At first, the two bowls of fruit on Bryan Johnson’s kitchen island look perfect. They’re brimming with plump kiwis, hardy avocados, and ripened bananas. These are the food of the gods, I figure, for a man who aspires to live like one. But then I look closer. A lone orange, its skin flecked with mold, sits adjacent to two lemons, both almost entirely consumed by a layer of white fuzz. Something, it seems, is rotten in the estate of Johnson.
That estate, it’s worth noting, is a predictable one. Johnson’s home in Venice, California, is the angular, concrete-floored template of a dwelling you’d assume is owned by a man. Specifically a man who worked in tech, made his millions, and subsequently embarked on a midlife, post-wealth search for purpose. All of which Johnson is, and did, and still appears to be doing: After selling his web payments company, Braintree, for $800 million in 2013, Johnson parted ways with both his wife and his lifelong Mormon religion. In 2021 he announced Project Blueprint, an effort designed to reverse his own body’s aging process. This involves an all-consuming, unproven regimen including but not limited to daily exercises, blood tests, a doctrinal sleep routine, MRIs, plasma transfers, scalp stimulants, urine tests, several dozen supplements, Dexa scans, light therapy, and caloric restriction.
If the rotting fruit didn’t give it away, then no, this is not a kitchen where household memories are made over milk and cookies—although a collage of candid photos taped above Johnson’s stove offers hints of familial warmth. (Johnson has three kids, one of whom is infamous for donating data on his youthful erections and his own plasma to his father’s anti-aging efforts.) This is a kitchen, after all, that shares a home with specimen cups of semen and coolers of Johnson’s blood; where pills and powders, which I find meticulously stocked in Johnson’s walk-in pantry, are mixed, optimized, and consumed; where food is not eaten so much as nutrition is performed.
Performance, of course, is Johnson’s specialty. There’s the performance of his body, which Johnson claims is now the single healthiest on Earth. And there’s how that body shows up to the viewing public, which it does quite often. Johnson has been the subject of dozens of profiles and interviews, as well as a Netflix documentary released earlier this year. He has amassed more than 4 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and X, and he posts an ongoing stream of content about his sleep habits (sublime), his diet (meticulous), and his erections (trigger warning). Johnson has also used his online reach to push back against recent controversies, including a legal battle with his former fiancée Taryn Southern, and a New York Times investigation into his extensive use of confidentiality agreements to prevent, among other things, Blueprint employees from publicly talking about Johnson as well as his business dealings.
Over a 90-minute conversation, Johnson spoke at length about his longevity protocol, his assessment of RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, and those agreements that he continues to enforce. He also took great pains to convince me—and all of you—that this wasn’t just about health and longevity. No, like most tech men living in boxy modernist homes and saddled with illusions of grandeur, Johnson has a new holy grail with which to galvanize his faithful following: artificial intelligence, baby.
PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
KATIE DRUMMOND: I’m going to ask you a very simple true-or-false question that you can answer however you want. Ready?
BRYAN JOHNSON: Yes.
True or false: You, Bryan Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day at some point in the future, will die.
