Last updated: January 6, 2025
I was watching the Don’t Die documentary about Bryan Johnson when I saw Dr. Oliver Zolman’s longevity protocols.
The Longevity Level 1-2-3 Protocol by Zolman is broken down into three levels:
- Level 1: Essential Prevention
- Level 2: Non-age Related Factors
- Level 3: Ageing Cause Reversal
It gets more sophisticated with each layer that you go up,
I hadn’t seen this documented online before, so I’ve typed the information in this article.
Zolman Level 1
Basic Longevity Interventions. These protocols help to extend your lifespan up to 30 more years in age, or up to 94 years old for the average person.
- Smoking: Completely stop (+12 years)
- Mental Health: Good (+10 years)
- Exercise: >6 hours a week (+8 years)
- Calories (CRON): 10-20% < RDA (+5 years)
- AHEI-2010 Diet: See the checklist (+5 years)
- BMI: 18.5 to 22.5 (+5 years)
- Wine (Only): 40-125 mL/day (+2 years?)
- Sleep: Meet 5 criteria (+2 years)
Some additional notes are shown on the slide in the documentary:
- Benefits shown are compared to the worst 20% of the USA population
- Optimal start time for the Zolman Longevity Protocol is young adulthood
- There are still benefits if you start older, even at age 90
- Only those therapies which are relevant to many people are included
- The average lifespan gain is from 64 to 94, thus 30 years
Zolman Level 2
These are referred to as Non-Age Related Interventions.
1. Building Your Healthcare Team
- Professionals
- Friends & colleagues
- Family
2. Solving Non-Ageing Conditions
- Auto-immune
- Rare diseases
- Other
3. Sex & Sexual Health
- Theory
- Vaccines
- Drugs & Devices
4. MSK Injury Prevention & Recovery
- Office work
- Specific Sports
- Recovery Interventions
5. Avoiding Harm
- Clinicians
- Therapies
- People
- Natural Disasters
6. Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) Skills
- Testing
- Reading
- Making decisions
7. Genomics
- Tests
- Polygenic risk
- Monogenic results
- Drug responses
8. Cognitive Enhancement
- Hardware
- Software
- Prescriptions/Drugs
- Lifestyle
9. Testing Equipment Owned
- Devices
- Imaging systems
- Software & tracking results
10. Environmental Exposures
- Air
- Light
- Water
- Animals
- Occupation
11. Emergency Medicine
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Equipment Owned
- Cryopreservation
12. Biobanking
- Self banking
- Tissue banking
Zolman Level 3
This part of the protocol is about Ageing Cause Reversal. It aims to solve eight categories of ageing pathology in all 81 organ types:
1. Too Few Cells
- Stem cell exhaustion
- Cell loss
- Less mitochondria
2. Too Many Cells
- Cancer
- Zombie cells
- Fat cells etc
3. Damaged Cell Components
- Mitochondrial mutations
- Genomic instability
- Telomere shortening
4. Waste Inside Cells
- Lipofuscin
- Disabled macroautophagy
5. Waste Between Cells
- Amyloid build up
6. Damaged Scaffold Between Cells
- Cross-link stiffening
- AGEs
7. Epigenetic Changes
- Drift
- Noise
8. Inter-Cellular Communication
- Dysbiosis
- Chronic inflammation
- Deregulated nutrient sensing
More Information
There’s a Fortune article that quotes a little bit about what Zolman is working on with Bryan Johnson:
Zolman’s approach has three levels, the first being the least invasive and mainly consisting of changes in lifestyle factors aimed at extending people’s health span and life span. Level 2 consists of non-age-related modalities, while Level 3—where Johnson sits—contains organ rejuvenation protocols aimed at fully reversing aging (he has reportedly received blood from his 17-year-old son, although there were no benefits).
You can also watch this 2020 YouTube video about his protocols:
Conclusion
The Zolman Longevity Protocol that Bryan Johnson follows can help you add up to 30 years to your life. Or potentially even more, if some of the Level 3 things play out.
It is structured in three levels, with Level 1 being the most accessible and Levels 2 and 3 getting more complex and intense.
For Level 1, focus on these key lifestyle changes:
- Stop smoking completely
- Maintain good mental health
- Exercise more than 6 hours per week
- Reduce calories to 10-20% below recommended daily allowance
- Follow the AHEI-2010 diet guidelines
- Maintain BMI between 18.5 and 22.5
- If consuming alcohol, limit to wine only and 40-125 mL/day
- Sleep well
For Level 2, focus on building systems and prevention:
- Build a comprehensive healthcare team (professionals, friends, family)
- Address non-aging conditions like auto-immune and rare diseases
- Maintain sexual health through preventive care and appropriate interventions
- Implement MSK injury prevention for both office work and sports
- Avoid harm through careful selection of medical providers and therapies
- Develop evidence-based medicine skills for better decision-making
- Utilize genomics testing for personalized health insights
- Enhance cognitive function through various methods
- Invest in personal health monitoring equipment
- Monitor and optimize environmental exposures
- Prepare for medical emergencies
- Consider biobanking options for future needs
Finally, Level 3 addresses the fundamental causes of aging across all 81 organ types:
- Manage cellular populations (both insufficient and excess cells)
- Address damaged cellular components and waste accumulation
- Repair inter-cellular scaffolding and communication
- Target epigenetic changes
- Optimize cellular communication systems
I like it!
I’m going to start with the Level 1 things now.
Meeting Bryan Johnson
I want to add that I recently met Bryan Johnson and attended a Don’t Die dinner at his home in Los Angeles.
It was a cool experience and it went viral on my Twitter / X.
Here is a few pictures and the full story of how it went:
Bryan Johnson asks me to pull up my shirt.
“This might hurt a little.”
He places a big device on my stomach. When it starts to shock me I can barely feel it.
So I tell him to turn it up.
At 50% strength my abs start to tingle.
I tell him to push it harder.
At 70% strength my stomach burns.
And then at 80% strength I have to rip it off.
Bryan Johnson laughs.
He looks like a vampire.
I’m not hurt. It did not draw blood. But it did startle me.
I’m at Bryan Johnson‘s house in Venice, California to learn about his Don’t Die philosophy.
There’s a small group of us here. My friend Ben Wilson from the podcast How to Take Over the World invited me.
We go downstairs for dinner.
Bryan uses red lights in the evening throughout his home.
These red lights make the kitchen look like the prep room of an Amsterdam brothel.
But we’re here tonight for longevity and not for hookers.
We circle up and everyone takes a shot of olive oil.
It’s spicy and it sort of burns. But again I like it.
Bryan drinks three tablespoons of olive oil every day.
I only take two per day. I need to do better if I want to live forever.
I’m looking around the room now. People are playing with longevity tests. There’s a grip strength machine, a balance ball, and an expensive-looking computer box.
I decide that we need name tags.
Bryan likes this idea. Everyone famous likes name tags. Especially when there are middling folks like me around.
I always have emergency name tags and a good marker in my bag. I dig them out and make name tags for everyone.
First names only in big black letters that you can see from across the room.
Now we all grab a bowl of his famous nutty pudding. It’s a purple porridge.
This is our dinner I guess and it is more watery than you’d imagine.
But I like it. Even if it is vegan.
We sit down in the almost-darkness and begin what will be a disturbingly philosophical discussion.
Bryan asks us:
If you had access to an algorithm that would give you the best possible mental, physical, and spiritual health
but in return you had to do everything it told you to do
Would you say yes or no?
Take a second to think about it now.
What would you say?
I’ll finish this thread in a bit. And I’ll try to tell you what happens next in an evening with the world’s most measured man.
