“Don’t die.” This is the idea that lies at the core of the philosophy of Bryan Johnson, the “man who wants to live forever.” He is a controversial biohacker, longevity and anti-aging advocate, tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and—by his own admission—the world’s most measured human. Johnson wants you—and himself—to live forever and be eternally young. “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement,” he boasts.
His argument to his cult-like followers is simple and seductive. If you manage to live just long enough, technology will have evolved to the point where you can, essentially, ‘cure’ aging and become immortal. You will have achieved ‘longevity escape velocity.’ He offers (free and incredibly detailed) protocols and (paid) supplements under the Blueprint brand to help you on your journey. And if you’re really rich and buy into his whole immortality schtick, you can get access to his mind-bogglingly costly $1-million-per-year longevity program.
But unfortunately, despite his intensely rigid, mind-bogglingly expensive, high-maintenance, and ethically dubious health and fitness protocols and self-experiments, there might be one thing that this longevity hyper-enthusiast can’t conquer. And not for a lack of trying.
Recently, Johnson, who considers himself the world’s healthiest person, has publicly admitted that he has been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease. Naturally, this throws a spanner in the works for all of his plans. And yet, he is dedicated to curing himself and redoubling his efforts to overcome mortality. However, with his health under even more scrutiny, many of his medical experiments are raising eyebrows. Talks about ‘cloning’ himself as a newborn, freezing his partner’s menstrual blood, plasma infusions from his son, and various medical interventions and invasive procedures are making people uncomfortable. Let’s get into what’s fact, what’s hype, and whether Johnson’s ambitious missions to cure himself and live forever are realistic or just incredibly loud and clickbaity self-promotion.
The biohacker’s stomach is eating itself, but he is adamant that he can cure himself
“My stomach is eating itself,” Johnson announced his autoimmune disease to the world on social media. He claims that between 2% and 5% of people have Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG) like him. Meanwhile, recent research puts this estimate between 0.5% and 4.5% of people globally. AIG mainly affects women and is often ignored or misdiagnosed. It can lead to anemia, nutritional deficiency, and an elevated cancer risk.
According to Johnson, more people may be dealing with this disease because “it hides.” The good news, according to the biohacker, is that he will “try and solve it,” vowing to share everything about his progress.
“As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business. Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression. Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining,” he explained.
Johnson emphasized that he does not know how long he has had AIG, but he has had issues with ferritin levels and thyroid problems for a long time. He noted that he overhauled his medical team and built Immortals, his $1 million-per-year longevity protocol, which led him to catch the underlying disease. A very ‘subtle’ way to pitch his expensive program.
He added that many people playfully give him a hard time, telling him to “live life” and “engage in self-destructive behavior like a ‘normal person.’” However, he stressed that if he hadn’t seriously focused on taking care of his health over the past half-decade, his situation “could potentially be very serious.” His advice is simple: don’t assume that you don’t have an undiagnosed health issue lurking and hiding. An unhealthy lifestyle can exacerbate these issues, while healthy habits put you in a much stronger position. “The absence of symptoms is not the presence of health.”
Johnson’s goal is not to manage the condition, but to fundamentally cure it together with his team. He rejects the idea that his incurable disease is, well, incurable. “Modern medicine has normalized too many conditions that erode our health, function, and comfort, shrinking the goal to monitoring and management while a cure is rarely even attempted. Most of these verdicts were handed down decades ago, in an era that predates nearly all of our current tech and science, and they have gone largely unchallenged,” he explains.
“We want to change that. In the age of AI, multiomics, and custom-built DNA, proteins, and cells, no condition should be presumed incurable simply because no one has yet tried to cure it with today’s stack.”
His experience with AIG has been sobering to say the least. On a more personal and philosophical note, the biohacker urged everyone to take care of themselves, others, the planet, and animals. “We fill our days mostly on things that are trivial next to what we ultimately care about. We know, deep down, however, that in the noise of it all, health is easily forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters. We spend a fraction of our lives truly sober to the preciousness of life. We feel it when someone we love dies, when a child is born, when we come close to death ourselves, or when a diagnosis marks our limit. In those moments, we are sobered, and the rarity of it all becomes self-evident. Imagine the existence we’d build together if that clarity didn’t fade.”
However, Johnson’s entire spiel with his illness may be a not-so-subtle attempt to get attention. Gastroenterologist Ashkan Farhadi, MD, notes that AIG is often asymptomatic and rarely life-threatening. Some people don’t even realize they have it. A good diet, regular exercise, and stress management can help you manage your health while your doctor can monitor the disease and address any deficiencies.
“This is how people make the news. If he [Johnson] had said I have a disease that is not that important and likely not going to affect my life, no one’s going to read that. From my perspective, we have a lot higher priorities when I see people in my clinic.”
The cult-like undertones and delusions of grandeur are unmistakable
Johnson’s ‘Don’t Die’ decentralized community is “united in defeating death and building prosperity.” They quote poet Dylan Thomas about raging “against the dying of the light”, claim that they are “at war with death and its causes,” are “building towards an infinite horizon,” and are fighting for “the freedom to exist as long as one chooses.” Predicting that humankind is currently “on the eve of the AI singularity,” they believe that now is the time to achieve “a human singularity” while securing “our species’ future.”
Their reasoning for doing all of this is (rather simplistically) “because we have things to do tomorrow.” Johnson’s ‘Don’t Die’ summits include starting the day with a morning rave, measuring your biological age, experimenting with the latest therapies, experiencing his branded Blueprint diet, and making new friends. You’re encouraged to accept the movement’s pledge, claim a ‘Don’t Die’ citizen’s passport online, and watch Johnson’s documentary on Netflix. Meanwhile, the community even has a mobile app that invites everyone to connect, compete on leaderboards, track their health and biomarkers, and “become your best self.”
In many ways, Johnson is a businessman and scientist at heart. That being said, he may not think he is a cult leader, but he has some of the characteristics. He is oddly charismatic (emphasis on ‘odd’) and creates an us-versus-them mentality. Specifically, the ‘other’ includes death, disease, and unhealthy living. Meanwhile, he is obsessed with greatness, saving humanity, and changing the world.
Cult leaders typically present themselves as the sole source of truth and authority, and everyone else who thinks differently is wrong. What’s more, they have very grandiose ideas of who they are and what they can achieve, and they are preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, or brilliance. Often, they are entitled and arrogant, want to be admired, and believe the rules should not apply to them.
On top of that, they are hypersensitive to how they are perceived, love being in the center of attention, want the best of everything, have controlling tendencies, and believe that they are omnipotent and have ‘magical’ solutions to problems. Superficial charm, aloofness, and an ‘allergy’ to apologies are also common traits.
What Johnson has in spades is his belief that he is unstoppable and destined for greatness. His redeeming quality is that he is super transparent about his goals. That being said, it’s difficult not to see someone as a cult leader when they promise you that together you can conquer death. Especially when that ‘someone’ uses confidentiality agreements to control his public image.
You can argue that the world needs experiment-happy risk-takers like him with vast resources to push the limits of medicine and longevity, but these expensive protocols are usually way out of ordinary people’s budgets. Thanks to his entrepreneurial spirit and well-timed business ventures, Johnson is luckier than most people on Earth. He has enough money to do, well, whatever he wants. And what he wants is to spend millions of dollars each year and take over a hundred pills per day to become the best version of himself. You, too, can follow in his footsteps if you have a spare $1 million per year. But much of what he says online feels like marketing.
Johnson’s obsession with living forever has led him to conduct bizarre experiments
It’s not every day that you hear someone bragging about how they “cloned” themselves “as a newborn.” That’s exactly what Johnson claims he has done. But (un)fortunately, it’s all a gimmick to get attention online. According to him, he has a “baby-Bryan” version of himself in a petri dish, which may allow him to become his “own blood boy” and “grow organs for transplantation.”
“This may be scary to some people… a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health,” he says. From his perspective, this can help him “rebuild” his body and “reverse aging.”
What Johnson actually did was create pluripotent stem cells that self-renew and can develop into any type of cell. They are wonderful for repairing damaged tissue. These cells typically only exist in embryos. However, new techniques can reprogram adult cells into an embryonic pluripotent state. As of yet, there is no reliable way to create organs from these cells.
Alex Dainis, who has a doctorate in genetics, told USA TODAY that Johnson was being misleading and irresponsible. She noted that his social media statements were inaccurate and attention-grabbing. “We’re currently able to make organoids, which are sort of like organ-like small balls of cells, but organs are such complex structures,” she said.
“It’s irresponsible to give people this hope without simultaneously providing a realistic timeline for when these things could be available, should we continue to fund their research and development.”
Meanwhile, molecular and developmental biologist Danielle Spice, PhD, said that even though induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are likely the next frontier of medicine, there is still a lot of work to be done. “Are we really at the stage where we can say that we’re cloning people, that we can make entire organs out of iPSCs? No, we can’t,” she pointed out. “Using sensational language like ‘cloning’ to describe this new tool is only being used to shock you but is not based in scientific reality.”
Meanwhile, Johnson has convinced his girlfriend and business partner, Kate Tolo, who does not consider herself a wellness person, to follow a strict routine and monitor her health, with the results shared on social media. The goal is noble: to map her biological data over the course of her menstrual cycle and create a detailed picture of her health to understand the severe pain behind her periods.
The tests, however, are unending. The Wall Street Journal reports that she spits in tubes, checks her temperature, measures her heart-rate variability, weighs herself, tracks her reproductive hormones, walks outside with a weighted vest, and uses a facial mask that protects her from UV. And at night, she sleeps “with an acrylic device inserted into her vagina, which she said is intended to track blood-flow variations. On certain days, there will be blood, hearing and taste tests to take, stool samples to analyze.”
Tolo turns out to have endometriosis. Uncovering the reason for her poor health is a huge win. This brings more attention to women’s health issues, which are often sidelined. “Women of reproductive age were frequently left out of research because their physiology was considered too variable, too difficult to standardize. The result is a body of medical knowledge built largely without them,” said Dr. Hillary Seger, part of Tolo’s internal care team.
But not everyone is celebrating. “Measuring and sharing openly your own data is great, but the concern is that it gets sold to other women as a path for them to do something, for which there’s no evidence,” neuroscientist and women’s health researcher Jennifer Garrison told WSJ.
Furthermore, Dr. Sara Szal, from Thomas Jefferson University, said that “more data does not automatically equal better health outcomes.”
According to Tolo, neither she nor Johnson is trying to influence other women’s behavior. “He’s living in a cage. I’m going to join him in that cage. This is not a normal way to live,” she said.
Your quality of life goes beyond supplements, strict protocols, and superficial shortcuts
The World Health Organization explains that global longevity rose until recently. Average global lifespans grew from 66.8 years in 2000 to 73.1 years in 2019. Meanwhile, healthy life expectancy (HALE) grew from 58.1 years in 2000 to 63.5 years in 2019. However, the Covid-19 pandemic reversed a decade of gains. “By 2020, both global life expectancy and HALE had rolled back to 2016 levels (72.5 years and 62.8 years, respectively). The following year saw further declines, with both retreating to 2012 levels (71.4 years and 61.9 years, respectively).”
As important as your diet and fitness are, Johnson might be obsessing over the wrong thing. His focus, instead, should shift to include the quality of his closest relationships, too. Decades-long research has shown that our positive relationships make us more resilient to stress, and result in us living happier, longer, healthier lives. Yes, exercise, sleep, and diet are vital, and you must take care of them, but a poor social life and loneliness erode your health, too. No matter how much we might all crave shortcuts to health and longevity, there are none. You have to have a more holistic approach to longevity instead of hyper-obsessing over whatever some influencer or entrepreneur tells you is The Next Big Thing.
Credit where credit is due—at least in the promo material—it looks like Johnson and his followers are enjoying themselves in a communal setting. However, it’s doubtful whether “making new friends” at a ‘Don’t Die’ summit counts as becoming a member of a positive and authentic community. We’re not saying that it can’t happen, but the cult-like undertones change the nature of those relationships from something genuine to obsessive-compulsive, calculated, and hierarchical.
Theoretically speaking, new research suggests that people may end up living between 146 and 194 years, with some potentially reaching over 550 years under near-ideal conditions, the BBC reports. These are the upper limits of human beings’ lifespans. Even if other causes of aging were removed, “the buildup of naturally occurring genetic changes would eventually stop our organs’ ability to function.”
Meanwhile, in separate research, Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the University of Birmingham, notes that aging might be more related to how our cells are programmed rather than linked to molecular damage.
“In other words, aging is an information problem rather than wear and tear,” he said, suggesting that if you were able to reprogram human beings’ cells, people could live up to a whopping 20,000 years old.
According to R. Osvaldo Navia, MD, from Tulane University, normal human aging is shaped by multiple interacting biological mechanisms. “Our genetic makeup influences our risk for many diseases, but our everyday health decisions also play a major role in determining how long and how well we live,” he told Healthline.
Researchers are constantly on the lookout for therapies that can directly target biological aging, but in the meantime, while there’s no panacea (yet), you should focus on your lifestyle. Regular physical exercise is—consistently—one of the best ways to improve your health span. It reduces the risk of disease and various cancers, protects you from cognitive decline, and maintains your muscle strength as you age. Beyond regular social interaction, you should stop smoking, lower your LDL cholesterol, maintain healthy blood pressure, and practice good sleep hygiene.
“These strategies clearly lower the likelihood of dying from conditions such as stroke or cardiovascular disease. However, whether they actually slow the fundamental biological processes that drive aging remains much less certain,” Navia said.
One hugely important predictor of longevity is your VO2 Max, or your body’s ability to deliver and utilize oxygen during exercise. Better cardiorespiratory fitness means lower risks of chronic disease and premature death.
“If you ask me what the secret sauce is, it’s really a number of things. It’s what you eat, drink, think, and do. It is not one particular nutrient or one thing you could buy. It’s not a peptide. It’s about doing it all and starting with exercise,” sports medicine specialist Bert Mandelbaum, MD, says. He notes that no single product or procedure will make you live longer, no matter what influencers and biohackers hype up.
At the end of the day, you have to be incredibly honest with yourself about your priorities. Mind-boggling expenses aside, ask yourself whether spending hours each day on longevity protocols, invasive tests, and popping dozens of pills is something that you can realistically do. Is the time you spend optimizing, micro-managing, and obsessing over every single aspect of your biology time spent well? Or can you pull back slightly and use the bulk of that time on more diverse pursuits, like creative work, travel, and strengthening the social connections that matter?
You should make your health a priority, absolutely! But you should never forget the core reasons you want to live a long, energetic life in the first place. From our perspective, the best health protocol is holistic, realistic, and gives you the freedom to chase what truly makes you happy. And true health and happiness won’t be something sold to you by an entrepreneur who hypes everything up and is desperately trying to become immortal while lying about cloning himself, no matter what he says about transparency.
Johnson has filmed some truly odd, cringeworthy things to convince you to take better care of yourself. The intent is positive, but the delivery hurts. Enjoy the secondhand embarrassment!
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