Bryan Johnson Wants You to Have Better Boners

“Let’s talk about your boners,” exclaimed our editor-in-chief Mel Ottenberg when he arrived at the uber-minimalist $5.8 million Los Angeles mansion of tech tycoon Bryan Johnson earlier this month. Johnson, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist best known for his extensive and much-maligned efforts to reverse his biological age, had no qualms about the subject. In fact, he’ll discuss just about anything, from erections and biohacking to plasma transfusions and chronic depression. “People have been chasing the fountain of youth since time began,” he says, “but this is the first time in human history where you can legitimately imagine arresting aging.” Earlier this month, he was the subject of a Netflix documentary called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, a behind-the-scenes look at the extreme lengths Johnson goes to dedicating his life to the pursuit of eternal youth (with the help, of course, of state-of-the-art technology). But we wanted to meet the man face to face. So, over shots of olive oil and bowls of nutty pudding, we asked the cult figure how—and why—he stays forever young.

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MEL OTTENBERG: Hey Bryan, how are you?

BRYAN JOHNSON: Good. How are you doing?

OTTENBERG: I’m so good. Thanks for seeing me.

JOHNSON: Yeah, of course.

OTTENBERG: Oh, and I brought you a magazine.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

OTTENBERG: Check it out sometime.

JOHNSON: I love that.

OTTENBERG: This is a very exciting first conversation to have in 2025. This couch is really comfortable and I’m happy to be here.

JOHNSON: I designed it that way so that you have proper depth and can do exactly that.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

JOHNSON: If it’s too short, you hang. The back needs to be propped at 90, so you have a proper posture. If it’s like this, then your neck comes forward. It obstructs blood flow from your brain.

OTTENBERG: Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?

JOHNSON: I do. It’s to lower my speed of aging. So I’m currently at 0.57, which means that for every 12 months in the past, I aged 0.68 months. Or my birthday happens—

OTTENBERG: Every 12 months passes, you age 0.68.

JOHNSON: Yes. 6.8. Or in other words, my birthday happens every 21 months.

OTTENBERG: Okay.

JOHNSON: So [my resolution] is to further slow down that speed of aging, because you have a clock inside your body. You intuitively know this when you have some friends who age quickly, some friends that age slowly. There’s a clock with which you can measure that. So one, it’s to lower my speed of aging, and I’m doing that because I’m trying to get to “age escape velocity,” which means that when one year of time passes, I remain the same age. I think the lowest we could probably get would be probably 0.5, a clean six months or 24 months.

OTTENBERG: Does your team think you’re crazy for believing you can do that? Or are you guys on the same page about what you can get to?

JOHNSON: We’re on the same page. People have been chasing the fountain of youth since time began, but this is the first time in human history where you can legitimately imagine arresting aging. You can measure it. We can actually apply a number to it. Speed of aging is a big one for us.

OTTENBERG: I’m 48. You’re 48?

JOHNSON: 47, yeah.

OTTENBERG: 47 was the year that I really bugged out about aging. I had never really bugged out. I always looked good. I always got laid. You know what I’m saying? Then I felt my mortality and stuff and it really bummed me out big time. When did your mortality start to really bum you out?

JOHNSON: It was when I was 34. I sold my company, I got a divorce, I left my religion, and I emerged from a decade of chronic depression and all those things collided to pose a question of, “What is existence?”

OTTENBERG: Do you think that sugar and diet was the cause of a lot of your depression? Because I’m also such a sugar addict and—

JOHNSON: How much sugar do you consume?

OTTENBERG: Well, I went from August 4th to November 28th without eating sugar. Also, I don’t drink. I’m sober. So I got to almost four months and I relapsed on Thanksgiving.

JOHNSON: What happened?

OTTENBERG: I don’t know, I would say work and being at Thanksgiving and being in my childhood home and not drinking and all this stuff. I was like, “I’m eating these desserts.” And I really ate so much dessert and now it’s been hard to get off of it. So on New Year’s Day, I ate all the sugar in the mini bar of my hotel and now I’ve been off it ever since. Do you have cheat days?

JOHNSON: No.

OTTENBERG: Fuck yeah. I don’t think cheat days work.

JOHNSON: They don’t work. And once you make it to the other side, you actually don’t want to do it anymore. The idea of some sugar-based thing, or whatever your indulgence is, there’s so much pain associated with it. I know I’m going to feel remorse. I will feel sad, I’ll feel lethargic, I won’t sleep that well. I’ll wake up the next morning grumpy. The cascade of effects are so significant that it’s not worth it.

OTTENBERG: It’s really not worth it. And yet, we do it. But is it because they, whoever they are, are putting ingredients in this stuff to make us addicted to all this?

JOHNSON: Yes!

OTTENBERG: They are, right?

JOHNSON: There are scientists that have their PhD theses in designing food that is addictive. It is entirely a science and they can scale your addiction patterns. So yes, we are being puppeted.

OTTENBERG: What were you addicted to, food-wise?

JOHNSON: Typical American stuff: ice cream, pizza, brownies, cookies, packaged foods, junk foods, potato chips, all the stuff that’s so commonly available here.

OTTENBERG: And now you just feel better all the time?

JOHNSON: Yeah. I have never felt better in my entire life. It’s very hard to convey how good I feel.

OTTENBERG: Yeah?

JOHNSON: I’m well-rested. I mean, I have the best comprehensive biomarkers of anybody in the world.

OTTENBERG: So let’s talk about this because I hear you say it in your documentary and on these podcasts and I still am not getting it.

JOHNSON: So if we start at the most basic layer, we can say, “Being obese is bad.” Because when you’re obese it shortens your lifespan, you have increased risk of cardiovascular disease, all that stuff. And then you can say things like, “Having muscle is good. Too little muscle is bad.” So you say, “Okay, that’s a good marker.” Then you take all these markers and apply them and say, “What is the absolute optimal level of blank muscle and inflammation?” And you create these clinical standards that scientists agree upon. Inflammation is a big one. I have the best biomarkers across 44 categories of anybody in the entire world. So if you look at my body, my biological age, it’s better than anyone else. People would see what I’m doing and they’d say, “Rich billionaire, biohacker, Patrick Bateman, fuck head.” Just vomit. Whatever words come to their mind, they just try to string these things together like, “I don’t know what it is, but I hate you.”

OTTENBERG: Yeah.

JOHNSON: So then I had to say, “Okay, you don’t understand this, but actually I’m an Olympic gold medalist in health.” It’s a sport. And so there’s a way to measure. We have a hundred-meter dash, there’s a starting line, a finish line, you race, you time it. So I made this a sport. I actually created a leaderboard where people from all over the world compete on the leaderboard for health.

OTTENBERG: And you’ve given your body to science.

JOHNSON: Yeah. I mean, I’m the number one in the world. There’s no one better than I am. We are giving birth to super intelligence right now, in the form of AI.

OTTENBERG: Right.

JOHNSON: AI is developing at a speed which is faster than we can comprehend. So we can tease out basic things like, “If AI can do blank and it takes my job, what do I do?” That’s the very first order of thinking, right? The next order of thinking is, what if it actually starts running governmental things better than us humans? Then what? Does AI run the government? And if AI runs the government, how does it run the government? So the biggest question in existence is, “What do you do when, as a species, you give birth to super intelligence?” Nothing else matters right now. So I think the basic idea is that there’s no existing philosophy in society that answers that question. You can’t just go to capitalism and say, “Hey, capitalism, can you help us solve this problem?” It doesn’t know. We just don’t have an ideological framework that informs us on what to do. So I came up with this contract called “Don’t Die,” which is the most robust ideology ever created because it’s a story which appeals to humans. It’s a practical operating system, which means it actually tells you what to do on a day-to-day basis and how to manage society. It’s mathematical and it’s rooted in physics with entropy. And the way to convey that is to go to bed on time, eat healthy foods, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat sugar. You want to say yes to all the things that extend life and no to all the things that destroy life—that is the ideology. And then you just take it to the full scale of humanity. If you look on planet earth, what is the primary game that all humans play? The most commonly played game by every human on the planet is, “don’t die.” It’s the most played game in the world. So I’m trying to say, we’re about to become the new era of human. Things are changing beyond our ability to acknowledge and we need a new way to understand ourselves and a new way to manage reality that is actually suitable for AI and humans and earth to all cooperate.

OTTENBERG: How much of that are we going to see in our lifetime as men of middle age?

JOHNSON: I mean, 2030 will make 2025 look like the third century. 2025 will be unrecognizable from the vantage point of 2030. I’ll give you a really simple example, very basic. I set out to create an algorithm that could take better care of me than I could myself. Let’s just imagine I say, “I want an algorithm to help me navigate from here to Berkeley, California better than I can myself.” So I have a map in my hand. I’m mapping out the roads. Otherwise, I just put an address into an algorithm and it says, “Follow these roads. This is your path. Here’s your traffic time,” et cetera. It’s going to navigate around all the things. So the algorithm is far superior to me using a paper map because it has all the data on the roads, construction, traffic patterns. So I said with my health, it’s going to be far superior for me to say, “I’m going to measure all these data points for my body, put it into an algorithm, and the algorithm’s going to decide what I eat, what I do for exercise, when I go to bed.” It’s going to be far superior to me being like, “I feel like eating beef stew.” So that’s just a small example of how, when intelligence gets into society, everything starts shifting. And then we’ll be looking back at 2025 like, “Man, can you believe we just randomly went to the store and picked stuff out from the shelf?” And the stuff on the shelf had poison in it, microplastics and heavy metals, and we just ate the poison.

OTTENBERG: And yet we all want to hold onto that because we want freedom of choice.

JOHNSON: If we open up Netflix right now, do we have freedom of choice? There’s a set of options that are shown to us. Take TikTok or take X or take YouTube or whatever system, when you go to consume content in whatever platform you’re on, there’s some influence the algorithm is having on your consumption of information.

OTTENBERG: Of course.

JOHNSON: So do you have free will in that situation? So I guess what I’m saying is—

OTTENBERG: Well, I want it. You’re saying, “It’s not there, so just give up on the idea of it,” right?

JOHNSON: Purists are like, “I actually am an independent agent. I navigate my world with total autonomy.” But it’s not that clean.

OTTENBERG: I am not saying that. I’m aware that I’m addicted to shit that they’re putting in my food. There’s a pretzel scientist out there who’s getting Mel Ottenberg’s money because the pretzel addiction works on me.

JOHNSON: Exactly. When you think about what we eat, we’re caught up in the algorithm as it is now.

OTTENBERG: So attraction to this idea is going to happen through vanity, right? The vanity of looking better for the wellness of living forever.

JOHNSON: I mean, some people are drawn to the vanity. Some people, like me, are legit drawn to the future. Some people are drawn towards cognitive performance. There’s a lot of paths to get there.

OTTENBERG: It seems like you’ve been able to figure something out that’s so complicated and expensive and costs $2 million-a-year or whatever. But if we’re just talking about vanity, how can I be a part of that without being the creator of Venmo?

JOHNSON: The majority of the things I do are free. The reason why my stuff was expensive is because we had to go through all the scientific literature. If you just go out in the world and you’re like, “I want to be healthy,” there’s thousands of responses. How do you know what to do? We try to solve that problem by saying, “Okay, we’re going to review all the scientific literature ever published. We’re going to prioritize the things that are most efficacious with the best evidence. We’ll do exactly that.” That was expensive. We then said, “We’re going to measure every organ in my body,” because you have to have a baseline measurement. I’m 47, but my heart is 37. We had to get a biological age for every organ in my body. Nobody had ever done that before. Then we said, “What are the therapies I can do to slow down my speed of aging and reverse aging damage?” Right now, people are confused about health, and we said, “Actually, there’s a very clear path, looking at scientific evidence and measurement, to actually be number one in the world at health.” We tried to show a scientific process through the entire thing. So what I’ve done is I’ve shared all those things for free. So you can take all my expensive stuff and I can distill it into something that’s very cheap.

OTTENBERG: Yesterday I drank a vitamin drink of yours.

JOHNSON: Actually, you don’t need to even buy anything from me. I’m just going to give you life habits, like sleep. I’ll give you five habits for sleep.

OTTENBERG: Can you tell us right now what they are?

JOHNSON: Yep. On this, my credentials are that I achieved the best sleep score in human history.

OTTENBERG: The perfect sleep.

JOHNSON: Eight months of perfect sleep. I learned these habits from achieving that. Number one, you need to think of sleep as if you are a professional sleeper. Because right now, you think you will sleep when you have time, you’ll sleep when it’s convenient, you’ll sleep when you’re done watching a movie, you’ll sleep when you feel like it. But sleep actually needs to be dealt with like a meeting. You show up on time, within five minutes. Number two is, your last meal of the day really matters a lot. Eat at least two hours before bed and then try to push it back from there—three, four, five, six hours before bed.

OTTENBERG: Why can’t I do that? I don’t look at you and scoff at what you’re doing at all. I look at you and think, “What a tall order.” Even though I really am trying, how do I break that?

JOHNSON: You definitely can. What’s your bedtime right now?

OTTENBERG: Last night I went to bed at 10, but that is totally irregular. I would say I want to go to bed at 11:30.

JOHNSON: Okay, let’s just say 11:30. Let’s say tonight you make a goal that your final meal is finished by 9:30. Between 9:30 and 11:30, you’re going to feel cravings for snacks, right? Your goal is to just not eat in that two-hour window. Almost like when Ulysses tied himself to the mast. Your mind’s going to be like, “You’re probably going to sleep better, because who could sleep on a hungry stomach?”

OTTENBERG: And it’s a lie.

JOHNSON: It’s all a lie. You do not need food in that two-hour window. You’re absolutely okay. You’re not going to die. And once you get there, you’ve mastered stage one. I’m nine hours before bed, so right when we finish today, I’ll have my final meal of the day. And when I do that, my resting heart rate is 44 beats-per-minute when I go to bed.

OTTENBERG: What’s your meal going to be?

JOHNSON: It’s protein. I’ve had all my food for the day except for some more protein.

OTTENBERG: Do you do Botox? How do you work with cosmetic science to get where you’re going?

JOHNSON: We’ve tried to be genuinely rejuvenative. So I’ve not done filler and I’ve not done Botox. We’ve done Sculptra, which does natural collagen production. I’ve done PRP— take my blood out, spin it up and get the plasma, re-inject the plasma—and I do a few face skin treatments like Sofwave, which uses ultrasound, and Tixel, which is a heat treatment. Those are all to build collagen and elastin. And then we measure my skin age with this device upstairs using multispectral imaging.

OTTENBERG: Looking at your face, you do have what I want.

JOHNSON: I think your skin looks great.

OTTENBERG: People always tell me my skin looks great. I just see splotches. And you, Bryan, have no splotches.

JOHNSON: Thanks. I was in the sun all the time as a kid, and the sun causes a lot of damage. For the past couple years we’ve been trying to work out that damage, but as you age, that damage manifests into discoloration, wrinkles, sagginess, et cetera.

OTTENBERG: What’s the best or most accessible thing to reverse that?

JOHNSON: One is to be mindful of the sun. The sun is great because it gives you energy, but it’s not free. Your skin will be damaged in the sun. So I get sun exposure in the mornings and in the evenings when the UV index is low, and these windows you see here are all tinted with 99% filtering for UVA and UVB. Those two treatments I mentioned, you could use those kinds of therapies. Some people use lasers. But it’s good sun hygiene, good skin hygiene, cleanser and moisturizer. Most creams don’t do much of anything.

OTTENBERG: Let’s talk about your boners.

JOHNSON: Yeah. People blush on this topic.

OTTENBERG: Let’s not blush.

JOHNSON: Exactly.

OTTENBERG: Cialis is great, but having a real, hard boner is better.

JOHNSON: Exactly. Boners are one of the most important indicators of your health. If a man is not having boners, he’s 70% more likely to die prematurely.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

JOHNSON: It is a representation of your cardiovascular health, physical health, and psychological health. Doctors, when you get a checkup, should be looking at that data.

OTTENBERG: No one is talking about that.

JOHNSON: No one talks about it.

OTTENBERG: Are you dating anyone?

JOHNSON: No.

OTTENBERG: Okay.

JOHNSON: So the stats on boners: 18 years old, you should be having around two-and-a-half to three hours of boners per night. When you’re 70, that lowers to 50 minutes per night. It declines with age, as most things do. 

OTTENBERG: So when you’re asleep, you have boners all the time.

JOHNSON: Exactly. Actually, I’ll show you on a graph.

OTTENBERG: I thought we were going to see a boner. I got excited.

JOHNSON: They happen mostly in REM sleep. In the beginning of the night you have deep sleep and then you move towards REM toward the latter parts of the night. So here’s my results—you can see here that the first one happened two-and-a-half hours into the night. It was pretty short in duration. Then a longer one happened four hours into the night. And then the most happened at the latter stage of the night in REM.

OTTENBERG: Can I take a picture of this?

JOHNSON: Yep.

OTTENBERG: Okay. And this is saying that you are an 18-year-old?

JOHNSON: This score is age 22. But I’m at 18 at night. The reason why I posted this is because there was a betting market on my boners. On Polymarket people said, “Will Bryan Johnson’s nighttime boners be longer than two hours and 12 minutes?” And there was a $75,000 bet— 

OTTENBERG: Fuck yeah.

JOHNSON: I had to do the measurement, and I exceeded the time. So people who bet on it made money. And my son, who’s over there, he just measured his for the first time last night. He’s 19, and his [boners] were five minutes longer than mine.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

JOHNSON: He’s in the 90th percentile for 19-year-olds, so he’s doing very well. How can you be a good dad and not know your son’s nighttime boners?

OTTENBERG: I don’t know how anyone’s doing it, Bryan.

JOHNSON: If you’re average, in the 50th percentile, then you would be around two hours. If you’re below that, then there’s room to improve. You could do things like improve your diet, get better sleep, exercise,  and that will improve it.

OTTENBERG: So good sex equals good sleep, no sugar, and exercise.

JOHNSON: Exactly. You want to avoid bad stuff. Sugar, alcohol, smoking, junk food, fried foods. If you do a lot more good stuff and a lot less bad stuff, you’re off to a good start.

OTTENBERG: If there’s one supplement that you should be taking, what is it, Bryan Johnson?

JOHNSON: Sleep. Sleep is the most powerful drug available to humans.

OTTENBERG: And you take melatonin?

JOHNSON: Yeah, 300 mcg. A lot of people take five milligrams. I take a third of a milligram, just a teeny, tiny amount.

OTTENBERG: Did you ever try magnesium?

JOHNSON: I like magnesium. The evidence points at melatonin being really good. Do your thing. Just measure it. Never trust humans, always trust data.

OTTENBERG: We are pro-algorithm, anti-human thought.

JOHNSON: We’re pro-data.

OTTENBERG: Rise of the machines, Bryan Johnson. Shall we walk?

JOHNSON: Yeah. Do you want to see the gym or the clinic?

OTTENBERG: Now that you’re so zeitgeisty, channeling this full aesthetic of Bryan Johnson, did you ever abstractly think this would happen, or that this was the thing for you?

JOHNSON: No. It was unplanned and a surprise.

OTTENBERG: I mean, don’t you think that’s the beauty of aging, Bryan?

JOHNSON: “When I grow younger” is my mantra. Typically, we do have a one-directional thought process of age being a trajectory. We imagine life stages, but I want to imagine that I’m going to become like my son. So at 47, I’m going to reimagine my entire life as I would from the vantage point of age 18.

OTTENBERG: But with the knowledge and experience of a 47-year-old.

JOHNSON: Exactly. I mean, it’s common in society for us to say, “I’m 47, and therefore I have 18 years until retirement. I probably can’t do the things I used to do. I’m going to choose different activities.” You just accept the decline. What I’m saying, though, is there’s going to be a big shift because we’re going to have the technology to actually start reversing these things.

OTTENBERG: What did you think of the doc?

JOHNSON: I thought he did a really nice job. It was, of course, arm’s length. We had no creative control. We gave him access to all of our footage and we just said, “Do your thing.”

OTTENBERG: Right.

JOHNSON: It’s a really hard topic to convey. Biohacking is a very cold, uninteresting topic generally, but he made it into something that, I think, bridged the gap.

OTTENBERG: Totally. You’re really good on podcasts, too. You’re warm and funny. And you’re a troll, which is part of your charm. I also don’t feel like you need everyone to like you, which is cool.

JOHNSON: Yeah.

OTTENBERG: Do you care?

JOHNSON: No. In many ways, the game of wanting people to like you makes you bend to the status quo.

OTTENBERG: Do you have anything to say to your haters?

JOHNSON: “I love you. Get your shit together, because it sucks right now.” They were pretty good in the beginning, but now they just don’t even bring any good heat anymore. All the arguments are tired.

OTTENBERG: Step it up.

JOHNSON: If you’re going to be a hater, step it up.

OTTENBERG: All right. Thanks, Bryan.

JOHNSON: Before you leave, we have some Nutty Pudding for you and a shot of olive oil, if you’d like.

OTTENBERG: I love that.