Mortality vs. millionaire: The devotions of Bryan Johnson

Becoming a multimillionaire opens exciting new avenues for hedonism. You can consort on yachts with models half your age, wash down Kobe beef with unpronounceable scotch, or collect rare wines — or wineries. Not Bryan Johnson: The 47-year-old former tech entrepreneur goes to bed at 8:30 every evening for a perfect night’s sleep. When he wakes, he has a four-hour routine that starts with downing 54 pills and a health drink he calls the “green giant.” His vegan meals look like something a rabbit would eat at a fat camp.

Johnson, the subject of the new Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, has taken the Silicon Valley enthusiasm for life- and health-hacking to its most well-known extreme. After exiting the electronic payments company Braintree, which he founded, Johnson has applied his personal wealth of several hundred million dollars to extending his lifespan — and perhaps even, he claims, defeating death. He takes both a holistic and organ-by-organ approach. He says he has the rectum of a much younger man.

Johnson is hardly a stranger to publicity. He was the subject of a lengthy Bloomberg feature in 2023. He very publicly documents his health quest, on X and elsewhere, with data updating followers on the state of his health down to the duration of his night-time erections, which he monitors. As Daft Punk might say, they’re getting “harder, better, faster, stronger” — more unsettlingly, he has posted data about his son’s night-time erections, as well. He sells a health plan modeled on his own, called Blueprint, and a pricey olive oil winkingly branded Snake Oil.

Bryan Johnson in “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever.” (Netflix)

The documentary is a solid, relatively short (an hour and a half), and engaging look at Johnson’s life and obsessive mission. It doesn’t offer much new revelation for those who have followed Johnson’s work, but it’s a nice primer for normies who may be unfamiliar with him — or with a certain kind of tech-world eccentricity.

We get a glimpse of Johnson’s life in a modernist mansion in Los Angeles and a sense of his ruthlessly busy daily schedule. We meet some of his personal assistants and medical advisers and his teenage son, Talmage, with whom he is somewhat attached at the hip. Among other things, Johnson has used his son as a “blood boy,” hoping to rejuvenate his body with his son’s youthful blood plasma. It’s almost too on the nose, literally vampiric, though an expert interviewed says there is a scientific basis for Johnson’s enthusiasm. The documentary also notes that Johnson gives his blood to his own father.

Don’t Die’s most interesting sections are those concerning Johnson’s family background. He was raised in Utah as a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons, and later broke from the church because of doubts. His childhood was tumultuous. His parents separated, and his father had personal problems — “At that time I wasn’t sure whether to find a girlfriend or have a line of coke, to go to temple or go have a scotch,” the father says. Many of Johnson’s family members are still religious, and his apostasy, later mirrored by his own son, caused significant distress and contributed to his divorce from Talmage’s mother. Earlier in life, Johnson was overweight, and he says his decision to retire from his tech career was due to its toll on his physical and mental health. There are more nebulous psychological components to Johnson’s crusade, of course: There is no zealot like the convert, as some of his acquaintances note, and he applies to his scientific mission the fervor he once gave his faith.

Although the documentary doesn’t go into this, a core tenet of Mormonism is the idea that the nuclear family unit is eternal and devout family members will be reunited in heaven — I wondered if Johnson’s desire to live forever could be tied to theological anxieties about his departure from his family’s faith. He is close to his son, to a point that can come across as a bit clingy and odd, and repeatedly mentions his despair about him leaving home for college. His relationship with Talmage, who previously lived elsewhere with his mother and had limited contact with him, also mirrors, to a striking extent, his relationship with his own father, with whom he grew close late in life after overcoming childhood disappointment at his failings.

The documentary does a so-so job of balancing Johnson’s own perspective with critical context. It mentions, briefly, his bitter legal feud with an ex who accused him of abandoning her while she was fighting breast cancer — a recent New York Times investigation also alleged that Johnson uses confidentiality agreements to closely control his public image. He disputes both characterizations. The film also interviews medical experts skeptical about Blueprint’s medical ideas. While Johnson certainly seems to have achieved some success in “hacking” his health, a doctor notes that it is difficult to say which of his therapeutic interventions are effective, because he is taking so many at the same time and there is no control. His is a sample size of one.

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The nice thing about using yourself as a guinea pig, of course, is that you don’t have to worry about consent for your experimentation: You assume the final responsibility and the risks. At one point, Johnson even travels to Próspera, a “charter city” in Honduras founded by Silicon Valley libertarians. The city is a special economic zone allowed to operate autonomously within the country, and frontier medical treatments are available. He tries experimental gene therapy. 

Near the end, there is a relatable scene of Johnson escorting Talmage to Chicago to start university. He cries while buying linens for him in a Target. “So, yeah, I hope you don’t die,” Talmage says. Later, at a group hike promoting Blueprint, Johnson is encircled by a group of people in a giant hug. One gets the sense that his real fear is not so much death as being alone.

J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.

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