The World’s Most Famous Longevity Influencer May Be Regretting It

Medical Examiner After devoting his life to living longer, Bryan Johnson is seemingly rethinking his choices—but don’t expect him to stop anytime soon. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nitish Pahwa? July 31, 20262:59 PM Bryan Johnson in 2017. Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It was a message rolled out gradually throughout the social networks: Bryan Johnson, the celebrity multimillionaire best known for injecting himself with his son’s plasma so as to slow the aging process, posted on all his accounts this week that he’d “been thinking things over and wonder if i’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.” He didn’t elaborate further, and my own attempt to interview Johnson over this epiphany fell through. So the public was left only with the implication that the man whose entire claim to fame revolves around his quest for immortality was perhaps having some regrets, inspiring a flood of bemused comments and aggregation posts. This standout declaration was just one entry in a public diary demonstrating how Johnson, once a firm adherent to his supposedly life-prolonging and surprisingly popular “Blueprint protocol,” was now taking things in even more unorthodox directions. In recent days, Johnson has shared that he ate meat for the first time in six years, stowed his girlfriend’s menstrual blood in a deep freezer, started developing a “clone” of himself in a Petri dish (which is not possible), and began collecting his honest-to-goodness tears in order to study “eye longevity.” The millions of devotees who take Johnson’s quest for immortality seriously may have better understood what was going on here. Last month, the 48-year-old shared that he’d been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, an incurable, difficult-to-detect condition that increases one’s likelihood of developing stomach cancer. Having come to an understanding that he could not fix this, and realizing he could not crack the direct cause, Johnson announced that he would stop trying to cheat death (for now) and go from offering longevity advice to “building the infrastructure to allow individuals to discover and resolve their own health issues.” Essentially, the man appears to be opting out of the medical establishment altogether, while using his own girlfriend and his “clone baby” as experimental proving grounds for self-starter cures involving lots of peptides. And he’s inviting us all for the ride. Rather than forgoing his life’s mission, as was the impression many received from this week’s posts, Johnson is taking his whole shtick into newer, more outrageous directions—and, eye longevity aside, it may be a literal cry for help. The ex-Mormon tech entrepreneur has long been clear that he doesn’t let the haters get to him—criticism is “expected and fine,” as he once told Bloomberg—but his post-diagnosis statements indicate that the public reactions thereof, much of which took clear schadenfreude in the fact that Mr. Longevity cannot transcend basic biology, may have rattled him more than the disease itself. Such overarching public sentiment inspired Johnson to pen a 700-word essay on why that mindset was the “most interesting phenomenon happening on earth right now.” (Basically, because he’s a nonconformist and the rest of us are sheep.) It also inspired him to solicit input on how he should address his newfound condition, only to outright dismiss everyone’s suggestions (e.g., sunbathe and eat meat). He further compared himself to death-defiers of yore like Gilgamesh, Asclepius, and Jesus, while proffering a scientific assessment of why “being mean is bad for your health.” (“A single hostile interaction locks you in a cortisol penalty box for 60-90 min.”) In between such commentary and the publicization of his girlfriend’s endometriosis diagnosis, Johnson put a relentlessly positive spin on a condition he’d described as his “stomach eating itself,” claiming it to actually be the “best thing to happen to me in a long time.” For the first time since he kicked off his fame-making anti-aging regimen in 2021, the world’s most famous biohacker appears to be less afraid of the prospect of death than of the fact that so many people, seemingly, want him to die—and would likely celebrate his demise, were such an implausible event to occur. Personally, I wish neither ill nor illness upon Johnson. But I do think many have collectively misunderstood his apparent message of regret. To ascribe to particular diets and exercise practices that micro-optimize your body is one thing; you may be putting yourself through trials the Jackass guys would never dare, but at least it’s your own body. Assigning yourself the heavy duty of curing all disorders, however, strikes me as even more hubristic than comparing oneself to Jesus Christ. Rather than focus solely on his particular body and its cultish observers, Johnson’s latest venture offers itself up as an explicit project for the masses, one that seeks to have everyone opt out of medical science in order to take diagnosis and treatment into their own hands. After all, he claims to have discovered his girlfriend’s endometriosis through period blood samples. In a moment when MAHA woo-woo is ascendant and A.I. entrepreneurs are vowing their new data centers will “cure cancer” (a maddeningly vague and scientifically inaccurate phrase), Bryan Johnson seems to be hoping, ultimately, that his combination of tech futurism and system skepticism will make the masses less likely to wish death upon him. How could you possibly root against the guy who wants to “cure all diseases,” whatever that means? That’s what his seeming break with longevity actually entails: an overhaul of his life’s mission away from “lifemaxxing” toward more specific goals like curing the incurable. And instead of just putting himself through ludicrous physical trials, he’s realizing this pivot with the help of a 30-year-old girlfriend who seems perfectly willing to become “the most measured female in history,” as Johnson puts it. Who knows whether any of it will work. Really, I’m just warning you not to expect Bryan Johnson to stop tracking his son’s erections or recording the microplastic content of his semen going forward. If anything, expect much more unhinged measures in the name of a cure-all. If Johnson cannot stop for death, he’s not gonna have death stop for him, either. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Health Medicine Social Media Fitness