A Rich Man Seeking Eternal Life

Reflections on Bryan Johnson’s Book, Don’t Die

Unlike most things that come across my feed due to the gods of the algorithms (the algorithms perhaps are themselves our modern gods), Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die caught my attention and this was because of the title alone. Johnson is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is best known for being the founder and CEO of Braintree which specializes in optimizing payments through mobile devices. In 2012, his company acquired Venmo for $26.2 million and then turned around and sold it to PayPal, the other bank transfer company, for $800 million one year later. Johnson knows something about technology and after making his millions, the decided to invest his money and love for technology into how to live forever.

Yes, I’m not joking. This is his attempt, and he has a point. We all take death as given factor in the equation of life. The only variable is the time we have, but the outcome is all the same. However, what if that variable could change? Philosophically, there is reason anyone should die. If an organism biological’s goal is survival, then its cells should fight for eternal existence. Jellyfish are immortal and even reverse their aging by transforming their cells, like our stem cells. The bowhead whale can live over 200 years.

Death, outside of accident or disease, is a factor of age, but what governs age and dying? Telomeres or protein structures at the end of our chromosomes regulate and preserve the information in our DNA. When cells divide a small part of the these telomeres are lost. When the is the telomeres reach a certain critical limit then the cells will deteriorate which leads to aging and death. So, telomere length governs the life of cells and therefore organisms. There are serval factors that can prevent the rapid deterioration of telomeres:

• Eliminating smoking

• Reducing obesity

• Proper environment, the nature of one’s occupation, and stress

• Diet, dietary restrictions, and exercise

• The consumption of fiber and antioxidants

• A low consumption of polyunsaturated fats and animal proteins

Johnson has taken all these factors to an unmatched degree of seriousness. By putting mullions into this self-funded research, Johnson has created a program called “Blueprint” that attempts to give a plan aimed at stalling the ticking clock towards death. To this end, he has made himself into a guinea pig to determine the bio markers conducive to longevity and offers this plan free to the public. The only question is if a “regular” human with a nine to five, and a job could achieve this level of discipline (in writing this article, I’m staying up later than I usually do).

Besides a strict diet of mainly vegetable and very few animal proteins. Johnson takes over 100 supplements in pill form each day, most of them in the morning. This food plan consists of only six different meals, and is as strenuous as the sleep schedule he maintains. Johnson sleeps alone, in a room that blocks all light, and on a temperature-controlled mattress while being monitored for his sleep score, which is consistently 100%. He exercises daily for one hour, with a combination of weights and cardiovascular activities. Everything that is done to himself, from cleaning his teeth to going to bed is a tightly controlled regimen rigorous enough for a Navy SEAL.

Back to the book. In Don’t Die , authored under his pen name, Zero, Johnson sets out what he seeks to achieve in his work:

I hope that these notes have been taken up as an actionable plan for humanity to brave its unknown and precarious future and they become an archive and explanation for the origin of the ideas that save the world.

It not only about the prevision of personal death, but providing solutions to save our world and the harms we have caused it. It is with promethean ambition that sets to explore human nature and the problems that plague humanity. He does this through not strict exposition, but the use of characters who are all parts of his own personality. Farm Boy, Self Critical, Game Play, Blueprint, Cognitive Bias, Dark Humor, Seeks Authority, Self Harm, Model Builder, Zero, Devil May Care, and Relentless gather at Scribe’s house in Venice, California. All the guests, except Blueprint, hiked up Mt. Kilimanjaro together. In reality, Johnson hiked the highest peak in Africa and, at the time, climbed the figurative pinnacle representing most difficult phase of his life. Scribe likewise sees this project just as important as that climb and this is why he invites his friends to gather in to make a plan. But this is not any plan, but to “Plan for the future of the human species.” For Scribe, it is of utmost importance that he writes these notes down because, even though he admits that no one knows the time they will die, Scribe knows that it will be tomorrow and he needs to leave this work behind.

And this is where the dialogue between the parts of himself begin. It is a wild dialogue about philosophy of mind, technology, religion, epistemology, health, and more. These discussions offer the same kind of purpose as Socratic dialogues (and Scribe describes himself as Plato, Socrates’ student and a playwright), to get at some kind of truth through the exchange. For example, in chapter 5 entitled, “Seriously, What Would You Do If You Were Dying?”, the characters’ answers to this question are thrown into a bowl and Scribe reads them one of the time, but all of a sudden the conversation comes to a head with the question of preserving one’s life. Scribe raises: “This is my simple question: If my hand was gangrenous, and I would die unless I cut it off, should I?” Of course, Blueprint says, “I vote: Do it.” The point is people would seek to save their lives at whatever cost.

Here is also the underlying reasoning to Bryan Johnson’s project. He has spent over two million dollars of his own money each year trying to slow the “death process” (invoked from the movie, Arrival, where the space aliens have no word for “dying”). If one had the resources to stop this process, what would one give up to do so? This is where the book and his life come together in mind boggling scenarios. For example, because studies have shown that intermittent fasting can lead to a longer life span and overall health improvements in rats (not yet shown in humans) , Johnson has taken to restrict his dietary consumption to about 2000 calories a day. He stands at 6’ and is 160.7 lbs., which means he is eating at a calorie deficit for his build. What prologued fasting does for males is reduce their testosterone, so Johnson uses hormone replacement therapy to counter the effects. This has also reduced his body fat percentage to only 6%. He is muscular and lean, but this has caused his face to appear emaciated, cheeks sunken in. So, he uses fat injections to fill his facial features. Extreme? Again, would you chop off your hand if it were stuck under a boulder with hope of rescue, like what mountaineer, Aron Ralston, experienced in Utah?

(Left: Johnson in his thirties, Right: Johnson in his late forties)

The most extreme treatment that Ryan underwent might have been a series of six plasma transfusion that he obtains from his teenage son. If this strikes the reader as vampiric, then I won’t argue with you. He eventually ceased these treatments because they were deemed not beneficial or even unbeneficial. What Ryan claims he achieved with his work is to slow his rate of internal aging to .7 to 1. This means that with every year an average person ages, he ages only 70 percent of that time. To date, he has prevented about five years of aging. What would be the price to hand back five years to a person’s life? (See my article, “Money is Infinite, but Time is Not”).

Now here is the cost/benefit analysis. Johnson spends a considerable amount of time in treatment of his body and recording a host of bio markers to indicate his progress. The use of his time to keep eternally young and what he gains from it might be a wash. Self Critical talks about this in the book:

“If you compare years of life taken to years of life added by the search for eternal life, it is one hundred percent weighted toward the life years taken side.”

But again, he is not purely doing this her himself, but for all of humanity. Besides his parents and three children also participating in the Blueprint diet and exercise routine, there is a cult following around the “Blueprint Protocol,” as Johnson describes it. Even though there are no numbers as to how many people are practicing Blueprint, he has a half a million followers on Instagram and 700 thousand on X. So, it is not all about himself, or is it?

Currently, Blueprint currently is offering their meal plans at $333 a month, but this accounts for only 400 calories a day. However, there are other food service businesses that cater to the Blueprint crowd and offer these prepped meals. However, all the ingredients, portions, and recipes are offered on his website. So, the tension between being the capitalist entrepreneur and the savior of humanity is clearly present. What people cannot obtain from sourcing their own olive oil to drink and pure “un-dutched dark chocolate, tested for heavy metals and from specific regions of the world with the highest polyphenol density,” Blueprint provides affiliate links to purchase. I’m sure they don’t have this kind of chocolate at the local H.E.B. or even Whole Foods.

In all of this, I cannot help but think about the Gospel story where Jesus is asked by a rich man, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’s response was for him to sell all he had and follow Jesus. Even the commandments that the man was following was not adequate. I’ve interpreted this story as a search for a quality of life that all the man’s riches could not buy. However, for Johnson, the search is not quality, but in fact the quantity. He wants to prolong his life, and stop the dying process all together.

Johnson, who was a former Mormon, once spoke about how his hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro was a pivotal time in his life. During that time he decided to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As he put it, the Church had an entire plan for him to live forever in Heaven if he would only follow the rules. This was not what he was needing, but a way to live before dying and going to heaven. This was the end of religion for him, and the beginning of the search for a different form of belief. He sought to henceforth “reconstruct Bryan,” his “understanding of existential reality.” This has become his life’s goal, to leave this legacy behind.

For all the detractors and critics of Johnson’s project, and the “science” of the project as a whole, Johnson seems like a very happy man who spends much time with his teenage son who lives with him. Each night they spend an hour together talking about their day, watching a show, or listening to music. Johnson makes the effort to share with people what he has learned about how Blueprint has affected him. One can find a free audio version online and digital version of his work on his website. One cannot help, but see not only the sincerity, but the pain and struggle that has made him both a millionaire and investor in humanity’s salvation from death.

My main takeaway is this:

• There are things that we can all do to prevent harm to ourselves:

• Getting a good night sleep, restricting caloric intake, exercise, avoiding prolonged exposure to the sun during noon hours.

• Some are easier than others, but all doable.

• We can make good choices now, for the future.

• We can do this in relationship to making the world a better place.

On the last point, Johnson does not have many answers. Climate change, war, and starvation are all social/political problems that buying more un-dutched chocolates and pills will not solve. Living longer lives does not necessarily mean we are living lives in meaningful commitment to one another, to the flourishing of humanity. Lastly, in many ways, we as a species have lived longer, at least in the “developed world,” than many generations before us, both in quantity and quality of life. The real question is then how we use that life to reduce the suffering of others and provide meaning to their lives.