Bryan Johnson has this theory about long-distance air travel. It is designed to kill you. Think about it: When you fly overseas, what happens? Almost as soon as you sit down, you are offered an alcoholic drink. Then, right after takeoff, you are given a hot meal, that thick salty airplane sludge intended only to be enjoyed at thirty thousand feet. And this is just the beginning. All throughout your journey, as you fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, your face is blasted with zombifying blue light blaring forth from the headrest movie screens. By the time you reach your destination, you are a wreck. You haven’t slept, and your body is pumped full of substances which ensure that when you finally do collapse, you won’t rest—your circadian rhythm is out of whack. Unless you are taking an extended trip, you won’t even have time to recuperate before doing it all over again on the return journey. You feel like death because you are an agent of death. And you know that with each assault on your body you bring it closer to the final end.
But the self-described “world’s healthiest man” has a solution: “Don’t travel.” Or, if you must travel, for business or for any other reason, be mindful of the danger and prepare accordingly. If you play by his rules, you might make it out alive. Life is a game of survival, and death does not have to win.
Whenever Johnson goes anywhere exotic, he follows a strict regimen. Last year, he flew from Los Angeles to Bombay for a six-day tour of wellness culture in India, and he was careful, ever so careful. Before he stepped onto the plane, he put on blue-light glasses, better to protect himself from the blinding screens. He refused the flight attendant’s welcome drink. Instead, he popped some pills and fell fast asleep, undisturbed until the plane touched down beneath the soupy dawn of Bombay. The whole time he was in transit he did not eat. Johnson pays a personal chef to prepare all of his meals; he does not trust food from anywhere else. And so when he went to India, he took no chances. He packed an extra suitcase full of his own food, every calorie he would consume on the subcontinent. “It’s kind of ridiculous,” he admits, but “I want my systems, my routines.”
Systems and routines govern Johnson’s life absolutely. Every morning he wakes up at 5:00 A.M. and runs through a series of self-care rituals: scalp massages, sunlight therapies, minute body measurements. He consumes—never simply “drinks”—an eight-ounce cocktail of collagen, creatine, prebiotics, and inulin. He completes ninety minutes of vigorous exercise, during which he listens to music or a podcast or watches an educational video. He consumes a “nutrient-dense and longevity-enabled” breakfast, prepared by his chef. Then it’s off to work, which occupies the greater part of his day. Throughout, his routines continue more or less in the same manner—exercise followed by consumption—until about 7:30 P.M., when Johnson, tired but by no means worn out from a long day of optimizing his health and posting on Twitter, begins winding down. He falls asleep every night promptly at 8:30 P.M., and is, by his own reckoning, a champion sleeper.
Johnson tracks his daily progress along with a team of data scientists at Project Blueprint, the wellness company he created in 2021 to monetize his regimen. By all accounts Blueprint is a triumph. Johnson believes that through it he has demonstrated that health is a hard science, wherein human imperfection can be refined and even reformed by big data. In the last few years, he has become the face of a new, growing movement in American health culture whose aim is to harness that data for an ambitious goal: to live not just well but forever.
Forever is a long time, of course, and try as we might, no human being has achieved indefinite non-senescence. But Johnson believes he has figured out the secret, or at least discovered a path, to everlasting life. And he is more than happy to share his findings with the world.
“A couple years ago I was thinking about what the future of being human might be like,” he says at a conference in Los Angeles. “And it seemed kind of obvious to me that we have access to a lot of algorithms in our life. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be possible that an algorithm is just going to take care of my health for me?’” The more he thought about the idea, the more he liked it. It wouldn’t be all that different from Google Maps, except that instead of giving him directions around the city, the algorithm would provide a map to his body. That’s where Blueprint comes in: It is Johnson’s attempt to submit all agency in his health decisions to an algorithm attuned to his own person. “I made this agreement four years ago,” Johnson says, “where I said, ‘I agree to do everything the algorithm says.’” So far, he believes that decision has resulted in a vast improvement over his prior way of life. “When I was making my own decisions, I was making all these excuses, all these mistakes,” he admits. But he doesn’t need to worry about thinking anymore: “I really have trusted systems, habits, and science to do all that for me.”
I consider Johnson’s theories as I stumble around this conference, his flagship Don’t Die wellness summit, held in January. The course of my own life has not exactly set me on the road to El Dorado. I have two small children, which means that my systems and routines (such as they are) must be ad hoc and provisional at best, their constant changes dictated by considerations other than personal longevity. Even to reach the Don’t Die summit, I have to break many of Johnson’s cardinal rules of travel. Before my red-eye flight to L.A. I eat a plate of chicken and drink several beers in D.C.A.’s overcrowded Amex lounge. Once aboard the airplane, I accept a coffee, as well as the assorted snacks doled out over the Great Plains. As for harmful light, I give it no care: first I burn through a novel under a harsh fluorescent lamp, and then, finding that there are still three hours to go, I turn on the little T.V. and watch something entirely forgettable until we taxi to the gate.
It is about midnight Pacific time when I stagger into my downtown hotel. Of course I can’t sleep. So I wander the streets for another hour, among the homeless and drug-addled; blue light is the least of their concerns, and mine as well.
The next morning I wake up early and go downstairs. My hotel is designed in the style of what a post-structuralist might call avant-pop sensibilities. The walls of the lobby are lined with books, artwork, pre-Columbian sculptures. Above the bricolage is the neon portrait of a burlesque dancer on all fours, a burst of blue stardust expelling from her behind. I had not noticed that the night before. Nor did I realize that the LOVE sculpture out front on the street, seemingly identical to other ones in the downtowns of cities all over the country, is actually another four-letter word: PORN.
My two-mile walk to the convention center is totally silent. It is a warm Saturday, but the city streets are empty. A few miles away wildfires are burning through the suburbs. Houses, hotels, film studios—all consumed by the blaze. The night before I had received a short email sent by Johnson, who lives in the city, to all of us attending the summit, reflecting on how the fires strengthened his commitment to Blueprint. “Health is forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters,” he wrote. “I can only hope that people find unexpected hope, growth and opportunity.”
I wonder at what he could have meant by this, but the Californian mind is an inscrutable thing. The state is a strange place: charming, savage, mythical, and Los Angeles in particular lures its inhabitants on with an indulgent ease. Up ahead on Broadway the garish art deco marquee of the Rialto glints in the morning light. It was one of the first modern movie theaters—closed now of course, and falling apart, like almost everything else on the street. When I walk underneath the marquee, the bright colors of the façade give way to a decaying underside, steel I-beams rusting and exposed to the pale morning light.
The fires have a curious effect on the air. Although the sky is not cloudy, it is not entirely clear either. I feel as if I am moving through a hazy universe of unreality. The whole way up to the summit, I don’t see a single soul, living or dead.
But once in line at the convention center, I am surrounded, and soon fall into conversation with a group of middle-aged men. They are fitness buddies who have paid extra for V.I.P. passes. It is unclear what these passes get you, except the ability to skip the line forming around the block. And it is a long line: there must be more than three hundred people here. Most are north of thirty, and all are in good shape. Not all are Californians. My own group is from New York and attends wellness conferences as a pastime. As we make our way through security, we chat about smoothies, protein shakes, energy bars. Every year, they tell me, the products get better, more appetizing. Whole industries are forming around them. At the door the guards take our water bottles. (Johnson has provided his own drinks inside, specially prepared by the team at Blueprint.) We leave behind a row of half-finished glass bottles: Evian, Acqua Panna, San Pellegrino, other, more bespoke brands whose names do not register.
Inside, the summit is set up like any other industry convention. Downstairs is a large lecture hall that resembles the gathering space of a megachurch. Upstairs is an expo room, dubbed the “longevity amusement park,” where wellness companies whose products Johnson uses in his daily routine are offering free samples to attendees. There is also an impromptu cafeteria featuring some of Blueprint’s signature dishes, such as Nutty Pudding (a puree of nuts with berries) and a liquid called the Vampire (basically just beet juice), laid out for general consumption. My friends from New York rush for the Nutty Pudding—a Netflix documentary about Johnson recently made it a viral sensation—and enjoy it so much that they go back for seconds. I try it, too, though with less enthusiasm. The problem is not just that it tastes like dirt—though of course that doesn’t help—but that it was left out on a banquet table, where it became lukewarm and congealed. I leave off without even finishing my first bowl.
Similar disappointments await me in the amusement park. Johnson chose these brands to represent his vision for a world where health is not measured by bodily feeling but by empirically quantifiable results. And yet, as I walk the floor, I have to wonder—if these are the companies that the algorithm is guiding him toward, perhaps he should not trust it so blindly. I struggle to see how any of this stuff differs from the supplements aisle at the grocery store. While I circle the room, I visit the booths of a foam mattress company advertising data-driven “personalized sleep,” a caffeine startup hawking instant coffee packed with “functional mushrooms,” and a hair restoration clinic that promises to save its clients the trouble of a trip to Turkey. Blueprint itself is also here, and its sales representatives are handing out little cups of an electrolyte drink, or, as they insist on calling it, a “longevity mix.”
Before I can try the drink, a terrible din from the floor below distracts me. I had forgotten about the Morning Rave. Downstairs I find sober people dancing as sober people do, awkwardly, clumsily—except for Johnson, who, shirtless and sweaty, jumps into the middle of the crowd and abandons himself to the beat. Its pulsations are aggressive and repetitive, slick and highly produced, the sort of thing purists denigrate as “business techno”: music made by poseur Belgian models for doped-up office drones. On the large television screens overhead images of skulls flash in and out in an epileptic fit. Someone starts passing out glowsticks to straight-edge revelers—no cocaine, amphetamines, or any other uppers here either—when Death himself joins us, waving a plastic scythe as he wends his way through the mass of bodies toward Johnson.
Eventually the whole crowd gathers around Johnson, chanting, Don’t die! Don’t die! Don’t die! At this moment, anyone else would have looked like a cult leader, but not Johnson. A friend who danced with him at a conference in Florida describes his manner as that of “the most divorced man alive.” This presents too human an image. In the middle of a crowd, dripping wet under the strobe lights, Johnson appears luminous, otherworldly, as if the baby in Eraserhead grew up and sprouted a shock of black hair. Were he not the world’s healthiest man, I would think he is sick, very sick.
Once the music ends, Johnson steps onto the stage and wipes himself clean. This is his show, and he does not lack confidence in his ability to run it. By now the room has filled to capacity, and he begins preaching the good news. If you have spent any time among wellness geeks (and even if you haven’t) you are likely already familiar with much of his gospel. From guru to guru much of it is the same: Johnson exhorts us to sleep better, eat better, and improve our posture. He encourages meditation and regular exercise. I find myself nodding along—who doesn’t want to get a solid eight hours of sleep every night, eat fruit with every meal, and use his phone less in the evening? But the deeper we go, and the more Johnson focuses on how Blueprint’s algorithm directs his systems and routines—and how, given the chance, it will direct everyone’s systems and routines—the less appealing his message becomes.
Johnson, it must be remembered, did not begin his career as a wellness guru, but rather in tech sales. He was raised a Mormon in Utah and, like a lot of socially dislocated Gen Xers, his early exposure to the Internet primed him for success when the entire country adopted its use in the mid-1990s. Through the end of that decade and into the early Aughts, he founded a series of unremarkable tech startups, until he hit paydirt with Braintree, a payment processing company best known now for its acquisition of Venmo, which, in turn, Johnson passed off to PayPal in a shrewd sale that left him with more than eight hundred million dollars.
Since then he has poured his money into the wellness industry, first for health restoration, now life extension. And, as with the loose coalition of entrepreneurs who founded PayPal—most prominent among them Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—the logic of payment processing seems to have left its imprint on Johnson’s mind. For him, human life is much like capital, and the role of technology, just as in payment processing, is to transfer it quickly and efficiently from one state to another. In both transactions, he who directs that transfer—and acquires a bank of data in the process—exercises control not only over the flow of goods but over the goods themselves.
Regarding these influences Johnson appears surprisingly open. He believes that his company’s algorithm could make the human race immortal, but for the thing to really work, it’s going to need a lot of biometric data. This is one of his main reasons for holding the Don’t Die summit: to encourage attendees to download the Don’t Die app and enter their data into it. Johnson presents the process as a friendly competition. He boasts that he is “the Olympic gold medal champion of health” and, anyway, he already periodically posts his biomarkers online—wouldn’t you like to compete against him by posting your own? Besides, he adds, anyone trying to become healthy needs a community to hold him accountable.
“If you get four hours and twelve minutes of sleep, guess who’s calling you? Me,” he jokes. “You’re on display. You’re accountable to the community.”
If you do well in his game, you win points and status. If you don’t, you earn the community’s opprobrium. But that’s not all. Up to this point, the television screens in the lecture hall have displayed various slides illustrating the details in Johnson’s sermon, but now they switch to a large Q.R. code. This is an invitation for each person present to become a “Don’t Die Citizen.”
“What we are suggesting is that we really are a community, and this is your passport,” Johnson explains. “As we progress in various stages in our health, we get better and better, and we will have higher levels of status in the community.”
He then clicks to the next slide, the Don’t Die Citizenship Pledge, and reads a version of it aloud to the audience.
I pledge to . . .
rage, rage against the dying of the light,
become a practitioner of the don’t die ethos,
caring for myself, others and the planet,
and honor existence as the highest virtue.
Because we are . . .
at war with death and its causes,
building towards an infinite horizon,
and fighting for the freedom to exist
as long as one chooses.
Why? Because we have things to do tomorrow.
Among the audiences in which I usually find myself, besuited Morlocks crammed into the hotel conference rooms of Washington, D.C., and New York City, these sentiments—especially the furtive Dylan Thomas reference—would have provoked eye rolls, even scowls. But this is California, land of the Eloi. After Johnson finishes reading the pledge, the crowd erupts into cheers and swarms the television screens to scan the Q.R. code. The man sitting behind me beams as he squeezes his girlfriend’s leg. “The dying of the light,” he says. “He’s a poet.”
Once the crowd quiets down, Johnson launches into his peroration. In four hundred years, he predicts, when historians—if there are historians among a race of immortals—look back on the early twenty-first century, they will recognize Don’t Die Citizens as the visionaries who directed the transition of mankind’s estate from its current lot to something much better.
“They will see us as the first humans who saw this moment with clarity because we are transitioning from death being inevitable to something new,” Johnson says. “Is it immortality? We don’t know. Is it extending your lifespan? Yes. Is it being more healthy? Yes. Is it having enhancement? Yes. It is something in a new direction.”
But how will we get there? For Johnson, it’s a matter of faith. In his Braintree days, he was dealing with finite goods, moving money from one account to another. But now, in this new project, he is attempting something much more difficult: transforming a finite good, the human species, into an infinite one. He knows he can’t do it on his own; hence his belief in the algorithm and other extra-human aids that, if put to good use, could extend human life indefinitely.
“A.I. is now becoming pretty good at discovering things,” Johnson says. “Over the next few years, humans may not be the apex of knowing or discovering. And that is a massive, mind-bending shift for the species.” Up to this point, he adds, human beings have taken pride in their intelligence, their ability to figure things out for themselves. But, what if, like Johnson, we were to disclaim that ability and instead rely on other systems to lead us forward into the light? “If you think death is inevitable,” Johnson concludes, “you create an entire plane of existence that explains that given phenomenon. But if our lives are extended, we have to rebuild everything we understand about life. That’s what this community is about. It’s basically saying, ‘There is an open frontier of possibilities.’”
As I leave the lecture hall, I consider that Johnson’s open frontier leaves a lot of room for human fallibility—and I don’t think intentionally. Data science is a tricky field. For results to be meaningful, the data must be carefully selected and intelligently applied. But most importantly, the data must be accurate. And in health, it rarely is. Human beings are natural liars, especially when measuring our own bodies. We lie about our weight, our waist sizes, our ages—even when our wellbeing depends on our telling the truth. We lie sometimes for reasons of self-preservation, sometimes out of self-delusion, and always because of a fundamental imperfection in our nature. No algorithm, no artificial intelligence, however finely tuned, can account for this imperfection. And every project to purge imperfection from human nature inevitably founders on it, when human fallibility, so glorious and disastrous, drowns our best attempts to lift ourselves out of the sea and into the company of the angels.
In the lounge the women are talking about breast implants. I am waiting in line for my final activity of the day: discovering my bio-age. When we all walked into the summit this morning, we were issued scorecards and told that if we completed a series of exercises onsite and entered our measurements into the Don’t Die app, Blueprint’s algorithm would spit back out a number that corresponds to our age in health. It goes without saying that the younger, the better. Johnson, for example, is forty-seven years old, but through strict adherence to his routines, he has rolled his bio-age back by about a decade. We can all do the same, he assures us, if only we download the app, upload our information, and then keep using his service to track our progress and win points.
The bio-age tests take about half an hour and consist of seven exercises, half of which are performed with a partner. I am paired with Shannon, a middle-aged physician from Southern California, who, like me, is not a Bryan Johnson devotee.
And like me, Shannon finds the Johnsonians fascinating. As we begin the exercises, I ask for her medical opinion of the products on offer behind us in the amusement park. “Oh, I like talking to the vendors,” she says. “None of this stuff is mainstream.” At a nearby booth we see people scrolling on their phones as attendants hook their arms up to bags filled with a solution containing a “personalized I.V. therapy.” Shannon sees this as just another makeshift provisional solution to problems everyone else working in health care already acknowledges. “That is a Band-Aid,” she says, pointing at the I.V. booth.
I smile and pick up a ruler we are supposed to be using to test our reaction time. This is an old primary school exercise: One person drops the ruler; the other catches. Neither one of us is very good at it, so we run the exercise a few times and select the most favorable numbers. Ditto on the exercises measuring our grip strength and our arms’ reach while sitting. Both Shannon and I are dressed in business casual attire—I am certainly the only person at this conference wearing Sperry Top-Siders—and for the sake of our dignity, we fudge our numbers a little.
Before, in the lecture hall, Johnson had told us that working in groups leads to greater accountability and precision in measurement. Here I am finding the opposite to be true. One of the exercises calls for partners to measure the smallest part of each other’s waists. The idea is that an impartial stranger is more likely to give an accurate reading of what, for many people, is a sensitive number. But neither Shannon nor I is so heartless. We nod in silent agreement, and I pass off the tape roll to allow her to measure herself. As she wraps the roll around her waist, I look around the room and notice others offering one another the same courtesy. The data may be accumulating, but who can say if it’s worth anything?
Not long after, when I upload all of my information to the Don’t Die app, I receive a surprise. I am twenty-seven years old, six foot one, and one hundred seventy-four pounds. I walk about four miles a day and a year ago I stopped smoking. I admit I am not exactly health conscious, but aside from a bad knee, the result of an injury I received during a fistfight in high school, I consider myself to be in fairly good shape. None of that matters: according to Blueprint’s algorithm, I am fifty-six years old—on the far end of middle age.
Maybe it’s the jet lag. Maybe I am nearer to death than I had previously imagined. Or maybe my bio-age means nothing at all. In any case, as I make my way to the exit, I am accosted by Death himself. I have been avoiding him ever since I saw him on the dance floor jumping around in his ridiculous getup, but I suppose the encounter was always inevitable.
He is holding an hourglass filled with blue sand, and as he approaches me, he flips it over.
“Time!” he shouts. “Someone’s time is up! Could be you, could be someone else—but my guess is it’s you.”
I stare blankly at him, wondering if my eventual end will be this absurd.
“Name a replacement,” he demands.
“A what?”
“A replacement.”
He leans in, shakes his scythe, and growls. I suppose this is meant to be scary—a sort of West Coast memento mori—but I just can’t take it seriously. I erupt into laughter, and Death storms off, for the moment defeated.
