BRyan Johnson, the biohacking centimillionaire who made his fortune selling payment apps, knows what his biggest online skeptics are saying about him since he went viral in January 2023. Critics have seized on how he spends his days eating mud and a mess of vitamins. and minerals (more than 50 per day) while connected to devices monitoring his heart rate, brain waves and erections (because they signal good health) and experimenting with far-flung treatments like his teenage son’s blood transfusions , all with the aim of slowing down the aging process, living longer and, as its motto-turned-brand campaign says, Don’t Die.
“When I first started, people looked at me as this ‘eccentric vampire billionaire tech bro drinking his son’s blood,’” Johnson said in a video call with the Guardian. “I was like, ‘Sure, yes. Additionally, I am a professional athlete when it comes to rejuvenation. I am creating a new sport and a new way of understanding reality. Death is always inevitable, but I ask this question: are we the first generation that will not die?
Johnson, the 47-year-old subject behind the new Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, explains that he won gold in the Olympics for health (if such a thing existed), saying that it maintains the best biomarkers (like VO2 max – maximum oxygen consumption – and inflammation) in the world. He even created a website, rejuvenationolympics.comwhere people can subscribe to test kits that measure their rate of aging and compete with other members of the “community”. By following an activist diet, exercise and sleep regime, Johnson claims to have reduced his aging rate to 0.64, meaning that each year he only ages seven and a half months. He is currently ahead of his own ranking by a handful of subscribers.
Johnson says he feels excited as he joins the video call from his home in Los Angeles. He had gotten off the elliptical just 10 minutes before, completing a one-hour 4×4 workout program (during which you train as hard as possible and rest every four minutes), hitting a new personal best. “Look at these spikes,” he says, holding up his phone, showing a graph measuring his performance; and a report that his maximum heart rate of 189 shows a biological age of 31, and his muscular oxygen saturation and VO2 max constitute elite status for an 18-year-old. Before that, Johnson says he underwent 90 minutes of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, during which you lie in a massive capsule that delivers pure, pressurized oxygen to the body. And I got another 100% sleep score, a result most of us, living as if we were “addicted to death,” as Johnson puts it, could only dream of.
It refers to the things that we think make us happy, the pizza, the beer, and staying out late that interfere with your optimal health and advance aging, the things that are stripped entirely of routine, that which often leads us to wonder if a longer life is possible. these terms are even worth living.
“Personally, I’ve never been happier,” Johnson says. “Personally, I’ve never known anyone who was really healthy, and they’re like, ‘You know what, damn, I’m so healthy.’ I just feel bad”…I think it’s really a rich commentary on the state of our cultural game that I should be at the defense stand to justify why health is good and why everyone else who practices these encouraging practices to death are those who are living life. Truly, it is a paradigm shift How to understand the world.
Johnson’s fundamental health goals are, of course, far more relevant than his tech-guru aura suggests. Forget the experiments he has since abandoned with blood transfusions and rapamycin (a drug that extended the lifespan of mice), the light and oxygen treatments that only people in his stratosphere can afford , the team of doctors who study its results and brain measurement. Kernel technology that Johnson himself developed. Ultimately, you have a health and lifestyle influencer who has branded and marketed his personal routine, which he calls Blueprint, much like any other you’ll scroll through on Instagram.
“Most of Bryan’s benefits from this initiative come from sleep, diet and exercise,” says Chris Smith, the documentary’s director. “These are things that are accessible to everyone to different degrees. »
Smith began filming in March 2023, shortly after the viral moment where headlines announced that Johnson was spending $2 million a year to be 18 again. The director says spending time with Johnson has since motivated him to be more thoughtful and intentional with his own health. “Ultimately, as Brian states in the film, he’s trying to be on the edge to see what’s possible, so maybe we can all benefit.”
But his documentary, which gets to know the man behind the clickbaiting headlines and social media posts touting biometric data and nightly erection updates, also maintains some skepticism. On the one hand, Johnson’s radical journey to find treatments that will defy aging mirrors that of so many others who are crisscrossing their own Internet wormhole in search of health solutions for which the medical establishment has no of answers, whether it be remedies for chronic pain or help to treat it. sleep better. “Our health care system is just taking a tailspin while we’re on this deathbed,” says Johnson, sharing his cynicism about an industry he says has been hijacked by special interests . “It’s not preventative at all. This is not proactive at all.
On the other hand, the doctors and scientists who appear in Smith’s paper generally agree that Johnson’s experimentation with multiple treatments and therapies at once does not constitute solid science, because it is unclear where the the profits.
When I ask Johnson why he doesn’t spend his millions on research that meets current scientific models of health care, he resists. For him, building a new system makes more sense than improving the current one.
“It’s broken,” says Johnson, who says he is in touch with politicians like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and presumptive Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill to fix laws he says , hinder scientific development. “It’s not just about fixing the system. This corrects the zeitgeist.
At this point, we step back and look at the bigger picture built around Johnson’s Don’t Die philosophy, and how his carefully crafted diet and belief that we can extend our lifespan relates to his work in tech entrepreneur using AI to study and potentially improve the human body. For Johnson, Don’t Die is an ideology that merges the very human desire to live longer with scientific advances, a science-fiction synergy that he hopes will be enough of a game-changer for the human species. to put it on the map alongside him. Confucius and Karl Marx.
He says: “Don’t Die is political; economic; moral; social; ethics; religious; spiritual.
“At the same time, it’s IT. It’s basically built on physics… It’s a real ideology that AI can implement.