His dating profile might say something like: “Proceed with caution.”
A billionaire whose interests once included using his teenage son as a plasma-donating “blood boy” in a bid to stay young forever hasn’t had the easiest time finding love.
Bryan Johnson, 45, spends $2 million a year in an attempt to slow down his biological clock.
His commitment to his routine — which includes an 8:30 p.m. bedtime, eating 2,250 calories once a day between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m., and four to five hours of “concentrated thought” — hasn’t made him the most available romantic partner.
“I’m single,” the tech guru said on Seven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” podcast.
“In circumstances where I’ve tried to date, the first thing I do is give them a list of 10 things, like, ‘Here’s all the things you’re going to hate about me, and [all the things that are] going to make me an impossible partner for you.’ It’s a big deal,” confessed Johnson, a native of Provo, Utah, who now lives in Venice, California.
One thing his potential dates can be sure of is that he isn’t trying to sleep with them — he prioritizes shut-eye over a night of snuggling.
“Wake events are very costly — once you get woken up, going back to sleep is very hard — so it’s just extremely challenging when you’ve got to coordinate with another human,” said Johnson, who also claims that he keeps track of how many erections he has throughout the night.
Since sleep is so important to him, he’d prefer his potential mate sleep in a different room than him.
“I’ve built my life around sleep. That’s the opposite of cultural norms; most people will blow their bedtime if they want to go out with friends,” he said.
While Johnson was once willing to sit down for a relaxing bit of wine, he later cut out drinking because he didn’t want the calories.
He also drank it in the morning with breakfast and isn’t much of a conversationalist.
“My son and I have a protocol in the house where there’s no exchange of like, ‘Good morning. How are you?’ ” Johnson said.
He doesn’t really do “small talk” and would prefer not to talk at all during a several-hour time slot allotted for “concentrated thought,” he said.
“I go to bed early, I wake up early, and I have these four or five hours of concentrated thought where I can think about these really big pictures and try to pull myself out of my situation and just be as sober as possible,” he continued.
“I probe myself to deep levels, but you can get knocked off so fast. Someone saying, ‘How are you? How was your sleep?’ can knock me off,” he added.
And while his lifestyle might be a tough pill to swallow for his romantic partner, he has no trouble swallowing pills himself — a whopping 111 a day.
His dating life before his new regimen wasn’t easy, either.
His former girlfriend, TV actress Taryn Southern, alleged in a lawsuit in 2021 that Johnson forced her to accept his philandering lifestyle and kicked her out of his house when she was diagnosed with cancer.
Their relationship ended in 2019; Johnson alleged Southern was trying to extort him.
The tech exec made his fortune in his 30s when he sold his online payment processing company Braintree Payment Solutions to PayPal for $800 million.
Johnson, who wasn’t always a health fanatic, suffered from depression, had a divorce and left Mormonism. It wasn’t until he experienced suicidal thoughts in 2020 that he decided to change his lifestyle, which he suspected contributed to his poor mental state.
That’s when he started his strict anti-aging regimen, Project Blueprint.
One of his hacks included swapping blood with his then-17-year-old son Talmage and with his 70-year-old father Richard. However, he stopped the treatment after seeing no benefit from it.
Johnson thinks his current biological age is 36, he has the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity and fitness of an 18-year-old.
He also predicts he’ll live to 200 — which could bring a new perspective to the phrase “‘Til death do us part.”
