For a moment I fell under the spell of Bryan Johnson.
Bathed in early morning sunlight, the 46-year-old Los Angeles tech billionaire and longevity celebrity didn't look much younger than his age, though he claims to have the wrinkles of a 10-year-old and organs that are various. years younger than his life expectancy.
We were standing at the Temescal Canyon trailhead in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 13, ahead of a “Don't Die” hike sponsored by Johnson, one of many organized around the world that day and the only one organized by him. Of the more than 500 people who had I confirmed my attendance For the Los Angeles event, around 200 people showed up. Some had slept in their cars to get there.
“The world is so full of things that take us away from what we really want,” he told the crowd.
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Juan Guerrero
Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
Johnson led us in a breathing exercise, swaying his pale, wiry body to the electronic dance song “Sundream” by Rüfüs Du Sol. Eyes closed, arms wrapped around neighbors, his fans inhaled and exhaled. slowly. Restaurant servers and retail workers embraced corporate executives and real estate brokers. In their regular lives, many of these members of Generation Z, millennials and baby boomers were worlds apart. Here they were united by the desire to live a long time, perhaps forever.
Blueprint, Johnson's wellness program, has gained a cult following in Los Angeles and beyond. Follow the regimen, he says, and lower your biological age, although scientists and others criticize his approach. He's just one subject, they say, and he tries many anti-aging methods at once, making it difficult to determine cause and effect.
Johnson is undeterred.
“For the first time in the history of Homo sapiens, it is possible to seriously say that death may no longer be inevitable,” he told me during the walk. It is a statement that has made many times.
I had learned about Johnson at a party in Los Angeles months earlier, after noticing my first annoying eye wrinkles at age 35. Although I aspire to age without fear, I felt anxious about my waning youth in our image-obsessed city.
One of the party guests, a dermatologist, regaled me with bold and seductive claims about the pace of anti-aging research. He said that a rich man from Los Angeles was spending millions on self-experimentation to discover the secrets of eternal youth in our lives.
When I Googled it, I was skeptical. Johnson, a former Mormon from Utah who created a credit card processing company that sold for $800 million, now boasts about the frequency of his erections and posts photographs of himself in which he looks as ghostly as the Roman statues at the Getty. He eats mainly seeds, vegetables and more than 100 supplements daily. He exercises rigorously and pays for red light therapy, among other things.
He calls himself “genetically enhanced human” after undergoing a $25,000-per-dose gene therapy in Honduras that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It is only available on the island of Roatán, where Hondurans say they fear being displaced by American billionaires who have They devastated their lands create a regulation-free playing field for the rich. The therapy uses follistatin, a morphogenetic hormone that is believed to increase muscle mass and fight inflammation. In one study, it extended the lifespan of mice.
But in person, Johnson seems human. Physically fit but deadly. Middle aged.
In California, Johnson is not the only one. Psychonauts and seekers here have long embarked on quixotic quests to transcend our common reality, employing everything from natural medicine and meditation to man-made chemicals and high-tech “transhumanism.” I distrust these types of trends, which can be escapist. Yo experienced with them when I was a teenager; They made me self-destructive and dissociative.
But during the walk, Johnson's fans seemed present and aware of his health. They told me that videos of him on social media, where he has more than 1.6 million followers, encouraged them to prioritize self-care. They were not so sure of Johnson's claims of immortality, but they believed in his welfare goals.
I met a 54-year-old cancer survivor who said she had reversed her type 2 diabetes to prediabetes by following Johnson's advice.
Another hiker, David McGill-Soriano, 26, a Long Beach resident and gang prevention counselor, had been hit by a car. He found Johnson on YouTube while he was bedridden with a fractured tibia and other injuries. Johnson's faith in human perfectibility, he told me, inspired him to work to regain his strength.
“I am very grateful for the Blueprint,” he said.
While some see Johnson's Plan as a way to challenge routine culture, others see it as a means to try harder.
“I'm always looking for ways to be a good robot and perform better,” said Diego Padilla, a 48-year-old aerospace executive carrying his Yorkshire terrier along the trail. He trusts Johnson because he had become a guinea pig.
“I don't like animal testing at all,” Padilla told me, hugging his dog.
Johnson, who says he has tried shock therapy on his penis and infusions of your teen's blood plasma to reverse aging, measures numerous biomarkers in his body with a team of doctors and publishes the data on his website.
“I think he's trying to democratize what he's doing,” Padilla said. Blueprint's website links to devices like a $150 erection tracker and a $599 epigenetic tracker, in case someone wants to collect their own data.
When I met Johnson on the road, I asked her how a single mother working three jobs could benefit from her program. She told me that she was creating a healthy food service that would be cost competitive with fast food.
“We've basically addressed the accessibility issue,” he said.
So far, it's selling $30 bottles of olive oil (which it might rebrand as snake oil), $39 cocoa powder, $25 macadamia bars, and other products.
Some experts warn against the protocols Johnson promotes. Valter Longo, director of the USC Longevity Institute and professor of biological sciences, says some of Johnson's treatment combinations, such as more than 100 supplements, could be harmful.
“It may generate short-term benefits, but eventually that will probably turn into long-term problems,” he told me.
Before moving on to wellness, Johnson invested in companies who strove to make the world programmable into zeros and ones. He spoke of humans as reducible to code, arguing that the future will be less about human or civil rights than about “evolution rights.” And he advocated the fusion of humans and machines.
“The relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence (HI + AI) will necessarily be symbiotic,” he says. wrote in 2016.
Johnson's faith in AI is central to what he sells at Blueprint. On the website, he describes Blueprint not as a lifestyle brand but as “an algorithm that takes better care of me than I take care of myself.”
As we walked, I told him I distrusted his argument that we should hand over our decisions to AI. I wanted to know why you would encourage people to give up their free will at a time of increasing authoritarianism and the erosion of our autonomy through big technology.
“Don't you see any risk there?” I asked.
He responded that it was normal to be skeptical, since his idea was “on par with the most important ideas Homo sapiens has ever had,” such as the fact that the Earth is not the center of the universe. “This idea that maybe we're not the best decision-making center?” I asked. “Exactly right,” he said.
Johnson argues that humans are self-destructive and that we need AI to save us from ourselves.
“What I'm suggesting is that every human being and every system must be under control,” he told me, adding that technology will also save the Earth. “We have the same problem with caring for the Earth as we do with our bodies.”
When we reached the end of the trail, overlooking the ocean, Johnson announced a dance party. As “On My Knees” by Rüfüs Du Sol played on a speaker, he swayed up and down. Other hikers joined in.
Finally, the group returned to the trailhead, where Johnson's team had prepared “pecan pudding” and olive oil shots for everyone. Johnson stood at a picnic table and declared that he was conspiring to negotiate discounts for his fans to receive gene therapy untested in Honduras and other treatments. “We could become a wholesale club for longevity therapies,” he said, to shouts and cheers.
“We're moving from Homo sapiens to Homo evolutis,” Johnson said. “We are a different species.”
It was a new form of manifest destiny, 100% Californian and oblivious to its possible ruins.
