For a second, I fell beneath the spell of Bryan Johnson.
Bathed in early-morning daylight, the 46-year-old L.A.-based tech centimillionaire and longevity movie star didn’t look a lot youthful than his age, though he claims to have the wrinkles of a 10-year-old and organs which can be a number of years youthful than his lifespan.
We had been standing on the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 13, forward of a Johnson-sponsored “Don’t Die” hike, one in every of many organized the world over that day and the one one hosted by him. Of the 500-plus individuals who had RSVP’d for the L.A. occasion, about 200 confirmed up. Some had slept of their automobiles to make it.
“The world is so filled with issues that take us away from what we actually need,” he advised the group.
Johnson led us in a respiratory train, swaying his pale and sinewy physique to the digital dance music tune “Sundream” by Rüfüs Du Sol. Eyes closed, arms draped over neighbors, his followers inhaled and exhaled slowly. Restaurant servers and retail employees embraced company executives and actual property brokers. Of their common lives, many of those Gen Zers, millennials and child boomers had been worlds aside. Right here, they had been linked by a want to dwell a very long time — possibly without end.
Blueprint, Johnson’s wellness program, has gained a cult-like fan base in L.A. and past. Comply with the routine, he says, and reduce your organic age, though scientists and others criticize his method. He’s only one topic, they are saying, and he tries many anti-aging strategies without delay, making it onerous to find out trigger and impact.
Johnson is undeterred.
“For the primary time within the historical past of Homo sapiens, it’s attainable to say with a straight face that demise could not be inevitable,” he advised me on the hike. It’s an announcement he has made many instances.
I had realized about Johnson at a celebration in L.A. months earlier, after noticing my first pesky eye wrinkles at age 35. Although I aspire to age fearlessly, I used to be feeling anxious about my waning youth in our image-obsessed metropolis.
One of many celebration friends, a dermatologist, regaled me with daring and seductive claims in regards to the tempo of anti-aging analysis. He stated a rich man in L.A. was spending hundreds of thousands on self-experimentation to uncover the secrets and techniques of everlasting youth in our lifetimes.
After I Googled him, I used to be skeptical. A former Mormon from Utah who created a credit-card processing firm that offered for $800 million, Johnson now brags in regards to the frequency of his erections and posts pictures of himself by which he appears as ghostly because the Roman statues on the Getty. He eats largely seeds, greens and greater than 100 each day dietary supplements. He workouts rigorously and pays for red-light remedy, amongst different issues.
He calls himself a “genetically enhanced human,” having undergone $25,000-a-dose gene remedy in Honduras that’s not authorized by the Meals and Drug Administration. It’s out there solely on the island of Roatan, the place Hondurans say they concern displacement by U.S. billionaires who’ve bulldozed their land to create a regulation-free playground for the wealthy. The remedy makes use of follistatin, a morphogenetic hormone that’s believed to spice up muscle mass and struggle irritation. In a single research, it prolonged the lifespan of mice.
However in individual, Johnson appears human. Bodily match however mortal. Center-aged.
In California, Johnson just isn’t distinctive. Psychonauts and seekers right here have lengthy launched into quixotic quests to transcend our frequent actuality, using every thing from pure medication and meditation to man-made chemical compounds and high-tech “transhumanism.” I’m cautious of such traits, which may be escapist. I experimented with them as a teen; they made me self-destructive and dissociated.
However on the hike, Johnson’s followers appeared health-conscious and current. His movies throughout social media, the place he has greater than 1.6 million followers, inspired them to prioritize self-care, they advised me. They weren’t so positive about Johnson’s immortality claims, however they believed in his wellness goals.
I met a 54-year-old most cancers survivor who stated she reversed her Kind 2 diabetes to pre-diabetes utilizing Johnson’s recommendation.
One other hiker, David McGill-Soriano, a 26-year-old Lengthy Seaside resident and gang prevention counselor, had been hit by a automotive. He discovered Johnson on YouTube whereas bedridden with a fractured tibia and different accidents. Johnson’s religion in human perfectibility, he advised me, impressed him to work to regain his power.
“I’m so grateful for the Blueprint,” he stated.
Whereas some see Johnson’s Blueprint as a technique to defy grind tradition, others see it as a way to hustle tougher.
“I’m at all times on the lookout for methods to be a great robotic and carry out higher,” stated Diego Padilla, a 48-year-old aerospace govt who was carrying his Yorkshire terrier up the path. He trusts Johnson as a result of he’d made himself a guinea pig.
“I don’t like animal testing in any way,” Padilla advised me, cuddling his canine.
Johnson, who says he’s tried shock remedy on his penis and infusions of his teenage son’s blood plasma to reverse getting old, measures quite a few biomarkers in his physique with a workforce of docs and posts the information on his web site.
“I feel he’s attempting to democratize what he’s doing,” Padilla stated. The Blueprint web site hyperlinks to units corresponding to a $150 erection tracker and a $599 epigenetic tracker, in case anybody desires to assemble their very own knowledge.
When I discovered Johnson on the path, I requested him how a single mother working three jobs may gain advantage from his program. He advised me he was making a wholesome meals service that may be cost-competitive with quick meals.
“We’ve mainly addressed the accessibility downside,” he stated.
To date, he’s advertising $30 bottles of olive oil he could rebrand as Snake Oil, $39 cocoa powder, $25 macadamia bars and different merchandise.
Some consultants warn in opposition to the protocols Johnson promotes. Valter Longo, director of the USC Longevity Institute and professor of organic science, says a few of Johnson’s therapy mixtures, such because the 100-plus dietary supplements, might be dangerous.
“You’ll be able to trigger short-term advantages, however finally that can most likely flip into long-term issues,” he advised me.
Earlier than pivoting to wellness, Johnson invested in corporations that endeavored to make the world programmable into zeros and ones. He spoke of people as reducible to code, arguing that the long run shall be much less about human or civil rights than about “evolution rights.” And he advocated for the merging of people and machines.
“The connection between human intelligence and synthetic intelligence (HI + AI) will essentially be one in every of symbiosis,” he wrote in 2016.
Johnson’s religion in AI is central to what he’s promoting at Blueprint. On the web site, he describes Blueprint not as a life-style model however as “an algorithm that takes higher care of me than I can myself.”
As we hiked, I advised him I used to be cautious of his argument that we must always defer to AI for our choices. I wished to know why he would encourage folks to surrender their free will at a time of rising authoritarianism and the erosion of our autonomy by way of Large Tech.
“Don’t you see a threat there?” I requested.
He replied that it was regular to be skeptical, as his concept was “on par with the largest concepts that Homo sapiens have ever handled,” corresponding to the truth that the Earth isn’t the middle of the universe. “This concept that we is probably not the most effective middle of decision-making?” I requested. “Precisely proper,” he stated.
Johnson argues that people are self-destructive and that we’d like AI to avoid wasting us from ourselves.
“What I’m suggesting is each human and each system must be in verify,” he advised me, including that expertise can even save the Earth. “We now have the identical downside with the care of the Earth as we do with our physique.”
As we reached the top of the path, with its view of the ocean, Johnson introduced a dance celebration. As Rüfüs Du Sol’s “On My Knees” performed on a speaker, he bobbed up and down. Different hikers joined in.
Ultimately, the group returned to the trailhead, the place Johnson’s workforce had ready “nutty pudding” and olive oil pictures for everybody. Johnson stood on a picnic desk and declared that he was plotting to barter reductions for his followers to get the unproved gene remedy in Honduras and different remedies. “We may turn out to be a bulk shopping for membership for longevity therapies,” he stated, to whoops and cheers.
“We’re going from Homo sapiens to Homo evolutis,” Johnson stated. “We’re a special species.”
It was a brand new type of manifest future, 100% California and oblivious to its potential wreckage.
