Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson founded Braintree, the payments company that acquired Venmo, and sold it to PayPal for $800 million in 2013 [1]. In 2021 he started Project Blueprint, an attempt to measure and slow his own aging using data from roughly 100 lab tests, imaging studies, and daily biomarkers. Blueprint later became a company that also sells supplements, food, and skincare under the Blueprint brand [2].

The current protocol, published on protocol.bryanjohnson.com, centers on sleep (bed by 8:30 pm, final meal four hours before bed), a five to six day training week mixing strength, Zone 2 cardio, and HIIT, and a roughly 2,250-calorie diet that is about 10% below his estimated maintenance intake [2].

His five prescription drugs as of the 2026 protocol page are acarbose 400 mg, tadalafil 5 mg, candesartan 8 mg, Jardiance (empagliflozin) 10 mg, and Repatha (evolocumab) 140 mg every two weeks. He also takes thyroid replacement (Armour Thyroid and levothyroxine) for hypothyroidism diagnosed at 21, and oral minoxidil for hair [2].

What he has dropped is as informative as what remains.

He discontinued rapamycin in September 2024 after roughly five years of testing multiple dosing schedules (weekly 5-10 mg, biweekly 13 mg), citing recurring skin and soft-tissue infections, elevated blood lipids, higher fasting glucose, and a higher resting heart rate, with no other cause identified [3][8]. He wrote on X that "the benefits of lifelong dosing of rapamycin do not justify the hefty side-effects" [3].

He also discontinued growth hormone after a roughly 100-day trial modeled on the small TRIIM thymus-regeneration study, stopping after side effects including elevated intracranial pressure symptoms, headaches, and higher blood glucose [4].

Plasma exchange with his son and father, tested for roughly six months in 2023, was also dropped. Johnson said he detected "no benefits" and could not separate any effect of his own plasma from the effect of simply removing his father's older plasma [5].

Independent reporting in 2026 also describes him cutting his NMN/NR cycle from daily to six days a week and adding microdose lithium orotate and NDGA aimed at brain protection, alongside the rapamycin discontinuation. This specific 2026 stack change is documented mainly in secondary longevity-industry coverage rather than a Blueprint primary-source page, and should be read with that caveat [6].

Johnson publishes specific tracked biomarkers rather than vague claims.

He reports his DunedinPACE, an epigenetic pace-of-aging clock trained on the Dunedin, New Zealand birth cohort, at roughly 0.66 to 0.69. That means his tissues show roughly two-thirds of a year of epigenetic aging per calendar year [7][9].

He also tracks resting heart rate, VO2max, grip strength, bone mineral density, and self-reports night-time erection (NTE) tracking via a wearable ring, placing himself, by his own report, in the 99th percentile among men on several of these measures [2].

After 60 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy he reported hsCRP dropping below the detectable threshold and telomere length increasing 2.6% (10.3 to 11.4 kb) [2].

These are single-subject, self-reported values from an instrumented n=1, not results from a controlled trial, and should be read as such.

His biggest public number, a claimed 31-year reduction in "pace of aging," has drawn direct correction from the scientist most responsible for developing pace-of-aging clocks.

Morgan Levine, PhD, stated publicly that DunedinPACE is a rate, not a duration, and cannot be multiplied by chronological age to produce a number of years reversed. She called the resulting 31-year figure a misuse of what the clock actually measures, while noting his lower pace of aging is still likely to reflect real health benefit [7].

Peter Attia and others in the clinical longevity space have pointed out that no randomized trial has tested Johnson's full stack, so it is impossible to attribute his outcomes to any specific component versus the combination of sleep, diet, and training that most physicians would already recommend.

Charles Brenner, who discovered the vitamin activity of nicotinamide riboside, has separately argued that NMN, an ingredient long featured in the Blueprint stack, must be broken down to NR before it can enter cells, making direct NMN supplementation biochemically redundant with cheaper NR at best [10][11].

A 2025 critique in a science-literacy outlet described Blueprint's public materials as blending genuinely well-supported habits (exercise, sleep, not smoking) with commercial promotion of an extensive paid supplement stack that has not itself been tested as a unit [4].

Johnson's commercial interest in his own protocol is direct.

Blueprint sells supplements, a longevity-branded protein powder, olive oil, and skincare, and he has said the company costs him roughly $2 million a year to run and has had break-even and loss months [5].

In 2025 he told Wired he considered shutting down or selling the company, then reversed course days later, saying "the world needs Blueprint" [5].

Readers evaluating any specific claim on the Blueprint site should treat it as marketing for a product line he owns unless the underlying biomarker data or a third-party citation is also provided.

Johnson is a single, extremely well-instrumented data point, not a clinical trial. Several of his own past interventions (rapamycin, growth hormone, plasma exchange) were dropped after he judged the side effects outweighed the unproven benefit. That decision path is itself useful information for anyone considering the same drugs.

What is well supported for anyone reading Blueprint: sleep, structured training, not smoking, blood pressure and lipid control if indicated. What is not established from Blueprint's public record: that any specific supplement or drug in his stack, taken by someone else, will move biomarkers the way his do.