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In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, comparable houses, full of mortals spending their finite days on the planet consuming pizza with pals, blowing out candles on birthday desserts, and binging late-night tv. Midway down the road, there’s a cavernous black fashionable field. That is the place Bryan Johnson is engaged on what he calls “probably the most important revolution within the historical past of Homo sapiens.”
Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent a lot of the final three years in pursuit of a singular aim: don’t die. Throughout that point, he’s spent greater than $4 million creating a life-extension system known as Blueprint, by which he outsources each choice involving his physique to a workforce of docs, who use knowledge to develop a strict well being routine to scale back what Johnson calls his “organic age.” That system consists of downing 111 tablets on daily basis, carrying a baseball cap that shoots crimson gentle into his scalp, gathering his personal stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack hooked up to his penis to watch his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates growing older—like consuming a cookie, or getting lower than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”
Johnson just isn’t the one ultra-rich middle-aged man attempting to conquer the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel had been each early buyers in Unity Biotechnology, an organization dedicated to creating therapeutics to sluggish or reverse ailments related to growing older. Elite athletes make use of therapies to maintain their our bodies younger, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to “restoration sleepwear.” However Johnson’s quest isn’t just about staying rested or sustaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his entire physique over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes demise is non-obligatory. He plans by no means to do it.
Outsourcing the administration of his physique means defeating what Johnson calls his “rascal thoughts”—the a part of us that desires to eat ice cream after dinner, or have intercourse at 1 a.m., or drink beer with pals. The aim is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs. Johnson says the information compiled by his docs means that Blueprint has up to now given him the bones of a 30-year-old, and the guts of a 37-year-old. The experiment has “confirmed a reliable system is healthier at managing me than a human can,” Johnson says, a breakthrough that he says is “reframing what it means to be human.” He describes his intense food plan and train regime as falling someplace between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus within the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his particular inexperienced juice.
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However after I confirmed up at Johnson’s home one Monday in August, I wasn’t actually there to determine if his elaborate age-defying methods really labored. I assumed that given my household historical past of most cancers and private fondness for pepperoni pizza, I most likely gained’t dwell lengthy sufficient to seek out out. As an alternative, I spent three days observing Johnson to study what a life run by an algorithm would appear like, and whether or not the “subsequent evolution of being human” would have any actual humanity in any respect. If residing like Johnson meant you may dwell without end—a giant if!—would it not even be value it?
Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson follows a strict food plan and life-style routine in an try to scale back his organic age.
Johnson wears a lightweight laser masks each morning as a part of his morning routine.
Kate Tolo opens the door to Johnson’s home and welcomes me inside. Tolo, a 27-year-old former trend strategist who’s initially from Australia, is Johnson’s chief advertising officer and most loyal disciple. Two months in the past, she turned the primary individual apart from Johnson to decide to Blueprint, making her the primary check of how Blueprint works on a feminine physique. Tolo is named “Blueprint XX.”
The house is gorgeous and devoid of muddle, with floor-to-ceiling home windows looking on the pool and plush greenery outdoors. It jogs my memory of an Apple Retailer in a jungle. Tolo affords me a little bit bowl of particular chocolate, which had been “un-dutched,” stripped of heavy metals, and sourced solely from areas with excessive polyphenol density. It tastes like a foot. She additionally makes me a juice-like concoction that comprises chlorella powder with spermidine, amino advanced, creatine, collagen peptides, cocoa flavanols, and ceylon cinnamon. Tolo and Johnson name it the Inexperienced Large, however it appears to be like nearly black, just like the stuff that washes off a duck after an oil spill. She manages to combine it with out getting any of the darkish sludge on her immaculate white jumpsuit. “It strikes by way of some individuals’s digestive system sooner than others,” she chirps, gesturing to the close by lavatory. I take a tentative sip. It tastes like Gatorade, however sandy.
Johnson walks into the room, carrying a inexperienced T-shirt and tiny white shorts. He has the physique of an 18-year-old and the face of somebody who had spent thousands and thousands trying to appear like an 18-year-old. His pores and skin is pale and glowing, which is partly due to the a number of laser remedies he’s performed, and partly as a result of he had no hair on his whole physique. The hair on his head is “not dyed,” Johnson says, however he does use a “gray-hair-reversal concoction” which incorporates “an natural extract” that colours the hair a darkish brown. He gestures to my Inexperienced Large, after which towards the toilet. “Did you warn her?” he asks Tolo. I faux to take one other sip.
The following day, Johnson walks me by way of his morning routine, step-by-step. He wakened at 4:53 a.m, however delayed most of his routine till I arrive at 7 a.m. to look at him. His bed room has nearly nothing in it: no pictures, no books, no tv, no glass of water, no telephone charger, no chair with piled-up garments he tried on as soon as, no dry cleansing he meant to place away, no towels, no mirror, no nothing. “I solely sleep in right here,” he says. “No work, no studying.” The one two objects within the room apart from his mattress are a laser face-shield he makes use of for collagen progress and wrinkle discount, and the system he wears on his penis whereas he sleeps to measure his nighttime erections. “I’ve, on common, two hours and 12 minutes every night time of erection of a sure high quality,” he says. “To be age 18, it might be three hours and half-hour.” Nighttime erections, he says, are “a organic age marker on your sexual perform,” one which additionally has implications for cardiovascular health. The erection tracker appears to be like like a little bit AirPods case with a turquoise strap, like a handbag worn by a penis. (No penises had been considered within the reporting of this text.)
When Johnson wakes up and removes the system, he weighs himself on a scale that makes use of “electrical impedance” to measure his weight, body-mass index, hydration degree, physique fats, and one thing known as “pulse wave velocity,” which he defined however I didn’t fairly grasp. “I’m within the prime 1% of preferrred muscle fats,” he says. Then he activates his light-therapy lamp (which mimics solar publicity) for 2 to a few minutes to reset his circadian rhythm. He takes his inner-ear temperature to watch adjustments in his physique, and begins off with two tablets of ferritin to spice up his iron, together with some vitamin C. He washes his face, makes use of a cream to stop wrinkles, and places on a laser gentle masks for 5 minutes, with crimson and blue lights designed to stimulate collagen progress and management blemishes. By this time, it’s usually about 6 a.m., and Johnson walks downstairs to begin his day.
Johnson’s aim is to get his 46-year outdated organs to look and act like 18-year outdated organs.
The Blueprint complement routine is organized on Johnson’s kitchen counter, organized from left to proper. He begins with eye drops for his pre-cataracts, then makes use of a little bit vibrating system in opposition to the aspect of his nostril to stimulate a nerve that apparently helps his eyes create tears. Johnson makes his Inexperienced Large, then begins taking extra tablets in between sips of dark-green sludge. “It’s what my physique has requested for,” he says. Does he ever miss espresso, even a little bit? “I really like espresso, it’s so enjoyable,” he says. “It’s an addictive escalation drug for me.”
At this level, he begins doing particular workout routines to extend his grip power. Then he heads to his residence health club—embellished with a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper {photograph} of a forest—and begins an hour-long routine. Johnson can leg-press 800 lbs., however his each day exercise isn’t way more superior than one thing you’d see from a really enthusiastic man on the health club: a collection of weights, planks, and stretches. He does this seven days every week; he provides on a high-intensity exercise three days every week. Sometimes, throughout these high-intensity exercises, he’ll put on a plastic masks to measure his VO2 max, or the utmost charge of oxygen consumption throughout bodily train. Johnson’s VO2 Max is within the prime 1.5% of 18-year-olds, he says.
After his exercise, Johnson eats a meal of steamed greens and lentils which have been blended till they resemble a mush the colour of a sea lion. He and Tolo don’t title their meals “breakfast,” “lunch,” or “dinner.” They name them “first meal,” “second meal,” and so forth. That is first meal. He affords me some “nutty pudding,” which is constituted of macadamia-nut milk, floor macadamia and walnuts, chia seed, flaxseed, Brazil nuts, sunflower lecithin, ceylon cinnamon, and pomegranate juice. It’s the colour of a pencil eraser and tastes a little bit dusty, however it’s not too totally different from a vegan yogurt, in case you like that form of factor.
Johnson insists all that is about one thing a lot larger than getting ripped and sustaining a youthful glow. “Most individuals assume demise is inevitable. We’re simply mainly attempting to delay the time we’ve earlier than we die,” he says. Till now, he provides, “I do not suppose there’s been any time in historical past the place Homo sapiens might say with a straight face that demise might not be inevitable.”
Consultants strongly disagree. “Dying just isn’t non-obligatory; it’s written into our genes,” says Dr. Pinchas Cohen, dean of the Leonard Davis College of Gerontology on the College of Southern California. Cohen emphasizes that residing longer sooner or later is actually potential: over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy rose from round 50 to greater than 80. However residing without end just isn’t. “There’s completely no proof that it’s potential,” Cohen says, “and there’s completely no know-how proper now that even means that we’re heading that means.”
“If you would like immortality, you must go to a church,” provides Dr. Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Analysis on Growing older. “If I believed even a little bit bit that it might be potential, I might be excited. It’s a pipe dream.” Verdin isn’t simply skeptical of Johnson’s claims that he can obtain immortality; he’s skeptical of his claims of age-reversal altogether. “He professes to make the whole lot clear, however as a scientist it’s actually unimaginable to grasp the instruments he’s utilizing to evaluate his age,” Verdin says, including that the Buck Institute reached out to Johnson to collaborate on some analysis, however by no means heard again. Johnson’s lack of curiosity in collaboration with impartial scientists made Dr. Verdin much more skeptical. “I believe if he needs to persuade all of us that what he’s doing is legitimate, then he’s going to have to simply accept being challenged by colleagues,” he says. (Johnson doesn’t keep in mind ignoring Verdin’s invitation, and says that he and Verdin have not too long ago exchanged pleasant emails.)
Kate Tolo, Blueprint’s Chief Advertising and marketing Officer, not too long ago turned the primary girl to try to scale back her organic age utilizing the algorithm.
Johnson stands in entrance of an infrared and crimson gentle remedy system, which he makes use of 3 times every week.
Some scientists do imagine that restricted age-reversal is feasible. In nonetheless controversial and contested work, researchers at Harvard Medical College have claimed they’ve rejuvenated older mice, and are at present testing whether or not the growing older clock might be turned again in human pores and skin and eye cells. However these experiments are being performed based on established scientific conventions. Johnson, in distinction, has made himself a human guinea pig, adopting almost each age-related remedy directly and seeing what works.
It’s not simply that medical professionals are skeptical of Blueprint’s skill to attain immortality. They’re not even satisfied Johnson’s routine is especially wholesome. Dr. Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Growing older Analysis on the Albert Einstein School of Drugs in New York Metropolis, met Johnson in Might, on the annual retreat for the Academy for Well being & Lifespan Analysis. Barzilai recollects that when Johnson confirmed up, the docs current had been involved. “He seemed sick. He was pale. I don’t know what he did together with his face,” Dr. Barzilai says, including that he was alarmed by Johnson’s lack of fats, which performs an essential function within the physique. “All these MDs, all of us sort of agreed that he didn’t look so nice.”
Barzilai additionally has critical reservations about Johnson taking so many dietary supplements and coverings directly, warning that every one the totally different tablets might work together with each other in harmful methods. “What he’s doing hasn’t confirmed to be protected, as a result of among the remedies he’s taking are literally antagonizing to one another,” he says, including that docs usually analysis the consequences of 1 drug at a time, quite than the cumulative results of greater than 100 tablets directly. “Even when it really works for him, how have you learnt it really works for you?” Barzilai says. Blueprint, he provides, is “not an experiment that we settle for as scientists or docs.”
Johnson didn’t make his personal docs accessible for an interview, nor did he present particulars about his workforce. However he intends to carry Blueprint to the lots. Johnson places all of his organic measurements on-line—from his resting coronary heart charge to his plaque index to photographs of his intestines taken with a “small bowel digicam”—and his YouTube movies about his train routine and therapeutic experiments have been considered by thousands and thousands of individuals. Roughly 180,000 individuals signed up for his e-newsletter within the first 5 months, Tolo says. Blueprint’s first industrial product, bought on his web site, is an allegedly cholesterol-reducing olive oil, bought in a black field emblazoned with a red-lit picture of Johnson and the slogan “Construct your autonomous self.” Fifteen % of Johnson’s each day food plan consists of this olive oil. Two 25 oz. bottles price $75. Tolo says they’ve bought out.
As Johnson, Tolo and I settle in to eat our “first meal” on his huge rust-colored sofa, Johnson gestures to a bookshelf filled with biographies: Ben Franklin, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Napoleon. “I’ve a relationship with the twenty fifth century greater than I’ve a relationship with the twenty first century,” he says. “I do not actually care what individuals in our time and place consider me. I actually care about what the twenty fifth century thinks.”
Synthetic intelligence “is clearly probably the most important occasion on this a part of the galaxy,” he says. “What’s the equal response for people to should AI?” Given the looming AI revolution, Johnson argues that outsourcing the administration of the physique to an algorithm is the final word type of human-AI “alignment.” If the whole lot from advertising to authorized analysis to retail will quickly be optimized by algorithms, why shouldn’t algorithms run our our bodies as effectively? Johnson argues that automating the bodily physique is a type of evolutionary adaptation to what he believes is an inevitable, AI-dominated future.
However all this speak concerning the scope of historical past, and the march of know-how, and the advantages of un-dutched chocolate appeared to be lacking one thing, I say. Aren’t people extra than simply brains and meat? Isn’t there another ineffable ingredient that makes us human: the sensation of watching your toddler play in a lake, the enjoyment of popcorn with girlfriends on the movie show, the grief of shedding a member of the family, the frustration at a misplaced earring? Certainly, there should be extra to residing than merely sustaining sufficient oxygen in your spleen.
Tolo and Johnson outdoors Johnson’s residence.
He doesn’t see it that means. “Whether or not we’re speaking about falling in love, or having intercourse, or going to the baseball recreation, you are speaking about biochemical states within the physique,” Johnson says. “You may take away the whole lot and simply say, ‘I am experiencing this sort of electrical exercise in my physique and these sorts of hormones.’ We now have an entire bunch of concepts about what it means to exist, we’ve all these concepts about what’s happiness, and different issues. We’re strolling right into a future the place we not have management,” he continues. Which implies “we’re keen to divorce ourselves from all human customized. Every part: all philosophy, all ethics, all morals, all happiness.”
I strive one other strategy. Let’s say you’re proper, I ask Johnson. What in case you do dwell without end? Meaning you’d outlive all people you’d ever recognized on the planet. You’d watch your youngsters and grandchildren and all your folks die earlier than you. What would that be like? Is a life with out the individuals you like value residing?
Johnson says that query reminds him of “senior night time” earlier than graduating from highschool. “We are saying goodbye, we’ve been collectively all these years, and we’re most likely not going to see one another once more,” he says. “At each stage in life, we transfer by way of these transition states of relationships and new experiences,” he continues. “And at each stage, you may actually pose that query, as a result of the circumstances are going to vary. Is it value it to hold on?”
It strikes me as a bizarre option to reply a query about watching his personal youngsters die, however I flip to Tolo, who was silently consuming her nutty pudding in a distinct nook of the sofa. I ask her what she considered the opportunity of watching everybody she loves die earlier than she does. It doesn’t look like she’s thought-about this. “Hopefully they wouldn’t,” she says. “I actually hope that as many individuals as potential can come alongside that journey.”
Johnson chimes in once more. “I believe your query displays Homo sapiens for the twenty first century,” he says. “The underlying assumption is, they’ve roughly 70 years of life. That is their beginning body: I’ll die quickly, and I can not do something about it. So I am optimizing on this window of time… In the event you change the body, and demise just isn’t inevitable, not one of the earlier practiced thought patterns work.”
My twenty first century Homo sapien mind was not satisfied. Johnson appeared to recommend that for people to outlive in an AI-aligned future, they could must sacrifice a part of what makes them human within the first place. I considered Tuck Eternal, the 1975 youngsters’s novel about an immortal household whose incapability to age units them aside from the world, adrift from the lifetime of everybody they meet, without end alone.
I left Johnson’s home and drove to the DoubleTree lodge in Marina Del Rey. The lady on the entrance desk handed me a chocolate chip cookie, as they often do at DoubleTrees (which is why I keep there). My rascal mind needed it. But it surely was an act of violence that will speed up my inevitable demise. I deserted it on the counter and took my Blueprint-approved dinner—steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and lentils, with $75 greenback olive oil and completely no taste—as much as my room.
Johnson wasn’t all the time like this. He grew up in a small Mormon group in Utah. His grandfather owned a farm with horses, and Johnson and his 4 siblings spent most of their time outdoors, serving to to reap alfalfa and corn. Johnson served his Mormon mission in Ecuador, then went to Brigham Younger College, adopted by enterprise college on the College of Chicago. He bought married, had three youngsters, and in 2007 he based Braintree, a payment-processing firm. Braintree acquired Venmo 5 years later. In 2013, the mixed entity was bought to PayPal for roughly $800 million. Johnson walked away with greater than $300 million.
Regardless of his monetary success, Johnson recollects this as a painful time. He says he fell right into a deep despair in 2004 and stayed there for 10 years. He was overwhelmed by constructing his firm whereas elevating three younger youngsters. Remedy and remedy didn’t assist. He was 50 kilos chubby and depressing, he says.
Inside a 12 months of promoting his firm, Johnson ended his marriage and left the Mormon church. In 2014, he plowed $100 million into the creation of the OS Fund, which invests in firms working in what Johnson calls the “programmable bodily world”—his time period for firms that use AI and machine studying to develop new applied sciences for therapeutics, diagnostics, and artificial biology. In 2016, Johnson based Kernel, a neurotechnology firm that makes use of a specifically designed helmet to measure mind exercise. Its aim is to detect cognitive impairment on the earliest phases; for now, the corporate is searching for biomarkers for psychiatric situations. It can be used, as a enjoyable aspect passion, to measure the age of his mind.
In the future throughout my go to, we drive to the corporate’s workplaces, that are about 20 minutes from Johnson’s residence. Though his mission in life is to “not die,” he nonetheless drives himself round LA in an electrical Audi. (Extraordinarily slowly.) Earlier than he pulls out of his driveway, he utters his pre-driving mantra to himself: “Driving is probably the most harmful factor we do.” Johnson is conscious that his singular deal with residing without end may make an unintended demise considerably embarrassing. “What can be extra lovely irony than me getting hit by a bus and dying?” he says.
Johnson calls his strict well being routine “probably the most important revolution within the historical past of Homo sapiens.”
In Kernel’s open-plan workplace, I’m introduced right into a small room, the place a technician matches my head with what appears to be like like a ski helmet with dozens of round probes inside. I’m instructed to sit down and watch a screensaver-type video of sentimental crystalline shapes morphing into one another. Later that day, my outcomes seem in my e-mail. It tells me that though I’m 34, my mind age is 30.5.
On the best way residence, Johnson utters his pre-driving mantra once more earlier than inching by way of the streets of LA at about 16 m.p.h. As he’s explaining once more why Blueprint is “probably the most important revolution within the historical past of Homo sapiens,” a black Chevy truck pulls out of a Dealer Joe’s parking zone. He swerves to keep away from it, barely taking a breath earlier than returning to evaluating himself to Magellan and Lewis and Clark. “I am not a biohacker. I am not an optimization individual,” he tells me. “I am an explorer, about the way forward for being human.”
Even futuristic people had been mere mortals as soon as. Tolo first reached out to Johnson in 2016, when she was working in trend in New York Metropolis. The AI revolution was starting to become visible. “I felt so strongly that the one means we might proceed as species can be to sort of latch ourselves onto AI,” she says. She noticed a quote from Johnson in a tech e-newsletter, advocating for people to “merge with AI,” and determined she needed to work for him. After years of entreaties, a job lastly opened up, and Tolo took a title and pay reduce to turn into Johnson’s assistant at Kernel. “We would spend hours in his workplace, simply chatting about the way forward for humanity,” she says.
When she first began working for Johnson, Tolo was a typical twentysomething. She drank alcohol and milky lattes, ate quick meals, and stayed up too late dancing along with her pals. However early this 12 months, she and Johnson started discussing whether or not she ought to strive Blueprint as effectively, to see how the routine would have an effect on a feminine physique. Earlier than committing, Tolo requested a 30-day trial interval. That trial included committing to a rigorous sleep routine, adopting Johnson’s actual food plan protocol, taking greater than 60 tablets a day, and doing 13 minutes of intense train and 39 minutes of reasonable train on daily basis. She additionally measured her ovulation and her menstrual cycle.
“Once I was in my trial interval, I might exit to brunch with pals, and I might carry my Blueprint meals, and there’s a little bit of unhappiness,” Tolo says. “As a result of everybody else on the desk is like, ‘Oh my God, this breakfast burrito is so good.’” Finally Tolo determined to decide to Blueprint for good. She concluded the well being advantages outweighed the life-style prices. Tolo says her pals have adjusted to her Blueprint life-style. She’s moved her social life earlier within the day to guard her sleep schedule, and so they’ve gotten used to her behavior of bringing her personal vegetable mush to eating places. The choice, as soon as made, was everlasting. “It will even be the ultimate choice in a means,” she says. “It is like, I am deciding to not resolve once more.”
Now, as Blueprint XX, she has given up “all of the issues that I’ve come to cherish in small methods about my life,” she says. She and Johnson consider themselves as a form of futuristic Adam and Eve. That they had even deliberate an Adam-and-Eve themed photoshoot to assist individuals perceive that they’re “speaking a few revolution on the size of the entire human race,” Johnson says. Though Tolo is outwardly as essential to the way forward for humanity as Eve herself, she plated and served all of the meals I ate on my go to, and, at the least whereas I used to be there, appeared to do a lot of the dishes.
Johnson is at present single. His older son is serving a mission for the Mormon church, and his youthful daughter is 13 and lives along with her mom. So Johnson spends a lot of his time together with his 18-year-old center son, Talmage, who commits to the Blueprint food plan, relaxation, and train routines, however skips the anti-aging therapies. He briefly donated blood plasma to Johnson with a view to check whether or not it had a measurable impression on his father’s growing older, however stopped as soon as Johnson determined it didn’t work. Talmage, who’s about to begin his freshman 12 months of faculty, says that he’s adopted lots of his dad’s attitudes in the direction of life-style and life extension. “The thought of getting pizza is extra painful than pleasurable for me,” he says.
Johnson says his life-style makes it very troublesome for him thus far, rattling off what he calls the “10 the reason why [women] will actually hate me.” The explanations embody: consuming dinner at 11:30 a.m., no sunny holidays, mattress at 8:30pm, no small speak, all the time sleeping alone, and, in fact, “they’re not my primary precedence.”
All through my go to with Johnson, I might really feel my rascal mind buzzing to life. Johnson venerates what he calls “the emergent self,” which is pushed “extra by computational steerage and fewer by human need.” And but wanting, I believed, is what people do. There may be nearly no expertise extra human than the expertise of need. As I watched Johnson drink his immortality gruel and clarify his spiritual dedication to bedtime, I used to be questioning: What did he need? Did he miss consuming birthday cake? Staying up late dancing? Baseball video games that stretch into lengthy nights full of scorching canine and beer? Johnson needed an everlasting life. However what’s life with out wanting?
There have been so many issues I needed to do, even when I knew that every indulgence might carry me nearer to demise. I needed to satisfy a pal for cocktails in Santa Monica. I needed to snuggle into my lodge mattress and watch And Simply Like That, and I needed to remain up too late texting my pals about it. I needed to FaceTime my daughter, the one who had precipitated me to realize 30 pleased kilos after I ate solely butter pasta and cheese pizza for many of my being pregnant. I needed to take the primary aircraft residence, even when it meant touchdown at 1 a.m. and getting 4 hours of sleep, in order that I may very well be there when she wakes up and says “Up!” with the power of a commanding officer. I needed eggs and bacon for breakfast. I didn’t need to cease wanting. Life’s too quick.
With reporting by Leslie Dickstein
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