Bryan Johnson

Is death inevitable? The American entrepreneur and author, Bryan Johnson – “the world’s most measured human” – doesn’t think so.

Johnson began his career as a tech entrepreneur, the founder of Braintree, a company that deals in mobile and web payment systems. It was acquired by Paypal in 2013 for $800 million. In 2016, he founded the company Kernel, which builds hardware that measures electrical signals produced by the brain. In 2020, the company demonstrated a pair of helmet-like devices that can see and record brain activity. The company said it plans to use the devices to help paralysed people communicate.

Meanwhile, Bryan Johnson has increasingly devoted himself to the question of death or, rather, whether it is possible to extend one’s life sufficiently to avoid its snares. In 2021, for instance, he announced the launch of an anti-aging project called Project Blueprint. It aimed to measure all Johnson’s organs and then begin reversing the quantified biological age of each. He also began openly sharing his protocols and data publicly for others to use. He is, he says, “the healthiest person alive”.

Bryan Johnson’s extremely intense and hyper-tech exercise and dietary regime, which costs $2 million a year – the Blueprint protocol – aims to reverse his biological age to 18. But his efforts are aimed not only at improving his own health, but the world’s. Johnson wishes to prove that human beings can have an opt-out clause for death.

In 2016, Bryan Johnson received the University of Chicago Booth’s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2020, meanwhile, he was the feature of the documentary I am Human, about brain-machine interfaces. In 2025, he was the subject of a Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.