The Meme King of Longevity Now Wants to Sell You Olive Oil

“Ready, on three,” Jamie Love mentioned to the group of hikers as they huddled for a photograph. “One, two, three …”

“Don’t die!” they shouted in unison.

The dozen or so strangers have been gathered on the foot of Temescal Canyon Trail alongside the Pacific coast in Los Angeles on a cool Saturday morning in mid-December. Several of them, together with Ms. Love, 38, who had organized the outing, wore black T-shirts with the daring white textual content, “DON’T DIE.”

The hikers had come along with a shared purpose: to increase their life spans by means of weight loss program, sleep, train and no matter applied sciences may come alongside.

Not current was the religious chief of the gathering, the web celeb and centimillionaire tech founder turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson. In the previous 12 months, Mr. Johnson has arguably taken the lead within the race amongst Silicon Valley wealthy guys going to extremes in a quest to reside eternally. (Move over, Messrs. Bezos, Zuckerberg and Thiel.) Now he’s turning that longevity mission — and the net infamy he has earned due to it — right into a lifestyle enterprise, promoting dietary supplements and prepackaged meals to less-rich individuals who would additionally wish to reside for a really very long time. The hike, one among greater than 30 “Don’t Die Meet-Ups” world wide that day, was a cross between community-building and a guerrilla advertising and marketing tactic.

Mr. Johnson’s deal, in a nutshell: In 2021, he started spending $2 million a 12 months, by his personal account, to measure each facet of his physique, from lipid ranges to urination pace to mind plaque, with the purpose of reversing his growing older course of. He referred to as it Project Blueprint.

Every day, between 7 and 11 a.m., he eats the identical three vegan meals: “Nutty Pudding” (a mix of nuts, seeds, berries and pomegranate juice), “Super Veggie” (black lentils topped with broccoli and cauliflower) and a 3rd, rotating dish consisting of greens, roots and nuts. He workout routines for an hour each morning and takes as much as 111 tablets a day. (His pharyngeal muscle groups stands out as the strongest of all.)

Mr. Johnson claims that his routine (or “protocol,” as he calls it) has already slowed his pace of growing older, giving him, at 46, the utmost coronary heart charge of a 37-year-old, the gum irritation of a 17-year-old and the facial wrinkles of a 10-year-old, based on his web site. He publicizes his check outcomes so anybody can see pictures of his bowels or study the length of his nighttime erections. His “biological age,” he claimed till lately, is 42.5, based on one measurement of adjustments in DNA over time often known as an epigenetic clock. In different phrases, he has spent about three years shaving off — possibly — a bit greater than three years.

If the unique purpose of Project Blueprint was to excellent his well being, Mr. Johnson now describes it as making ready humanity to thrive in a world dominated by synthetic intelligence. Thus the brand new slogan: “Don’t Die.”

In an interview, Mr. Johnson mentioned he didn’t care what present-day folks considered him. “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me,” he mentioned. “The majority of opinions now represent the past.”

Mr. Johnson has an virtually Trumpian means to remain within the news. Since 2020, he has been the topic of 5 articles on Bloomberg documenting his quixotic pursuits: the brain-reading helmet developed by his firm Kernel; his bid to develop into, as he has put it elsewhere, the “most measured person in human history”; his resolution to obtain blood plasma from his 17-year-old son and cross his personal alongside to his 70-year-old father; and a current spherical of experimental gene remedy in Honduras. In September, Time photographed Mr. Johnson in his personal fitness center, bare however for a fastidiously positioned kettlebell — an on the spot meme. The New York Post has gleefully adopted his each transfer, operating greater than a dozen articles on Mr. Johnson previously 12 months, together with three about his penis.

On social media, the place he has greater than 700,000 mixed followers on X and Instagram, he is aware of the best way to trawl for consideration. He lists his stringent necessities for a romantic accomplice (8:30 p.m. bedtime, “no small talk,” “must give plasma”) and compares himself to spiritual figures (“Jesus fed bread and alcohol, impairing and aging/I will feed you nutrients that awake and create life”). His flat method and uncanny seems have drawn comparisons to “American Psycho”’s Patrick Bateman, a “‘Lord of the Rings’ elf,” a vampire and a “jacked cyborg.” One podcaster referred to as him “blood daddy.” He likes to pose in crop tops.

Now, Mr. Johnson mentioned, after three years of self-experimentation — which he referred to as “Phase 1” of Blueprint — he’s prepared for “Phase 2”: serving to others replicate his course of. Late final 12 months, he started promoting Blueprint-branded olive oil. This month, extra merchandise, together with powdered greens and tablet dietary supplements, turned obtainable on his web site. In conjunction with the rollout, Mr. Johnson introduced a “self-experimentation study” through which individuals pays for a starter pack of Blueprint merchandise, in addition to bloodwork and different exams to trace their outcomes. The 2,500 slots stuffed up inside 24 hours.

To his followers, who fly throughout the nation to fulfill him and hang-out Blueprint message boards on-line, this second is an thrilling alternative to unfold the Johnson gospel. Some Blueprint advocates are even constructing companies of their very own round his concepts. To his detractors, it’s a cynical try to monetize his recognition. Or, worse: They name it pseudoscience that would hurt the well being of his followers.

The enterprise is just one piece of the bigger imaginative and prescient, Mr. Johnson insisted. If we will algorithmically orient the human physique towards the only purpose of not dying, then, he mentioned, we will by some means extrapolate that course of to the planet itself. “Climate change is an alignment problem,” he mentioned. “Replace my body with planet Earth.”

So, within the meantime, why is he promoting olive oil? And why are folks shopping for it?

A Business, or a Cult?

Mr. Johnson grew up Mormon in Utah. Between school and enterprise college, he labored for a bank card processing firm promoting providers to companies. His gross sales trick was to supply potential shoppers $100 for 3 minutes of their time. If they didn’t join his plan, they may hold the cash. He rapidly turned the corporate’s prime salesperson.

In 2007, he based his personal fee processing firm, Braintree, which acquired the startup Venmo and, in 2013, was itself acquired by eBay for $800 million.

A 12 months later, Mr. Johnson acquired divorced and break up from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “You’re born a baby again, having to answer these really important questions that don’t have any answers,” he mentioned.

When I requested Mr. Johnson if he was constructing a faith, he mentioned sure. “Belief systems have proven to be stronger than countries, or companies, or anything else,” for serving to people attain objectives, he mentioned. “Every religion has been trying to offer a solution to ‘Don’t die’ — that’s the product they’ve generated,” he added.

In conversations about Blueprint, it’s laborious to keep away from the phrase cult. Mr. Johnson himself likes to joke: “Is this some sick and twisted cult trying to get me to go to bed on time?”

Jeff Tang, who lately began a Blueprint-based meal prep firm within the San Francisco space, mentioned a number of companies “feel like cults at the beginning,” citing WeWork for example.

Mr. Johnson’s acolytes fall into two normal classes: the well being and wellness seekers, and the tech crowd, which lately has develop into preoccupied with longevity.

Many Blueprint-curious attendees on the Los Angeles hike mentioned they cared much less about maximizing their life span than their “health span,” or wholesome years. Some discovered the predictability of Mr. Johnson’s plan interesting.

“Self-control and discipline — he just takes it out of the equation,” mentioned Sirish Pulusani, 40, who works at a longevity-based well being clinic. He wore an Oura ring, a Whoop bracelet and an Apple Watch — all of which monitor bodily metrics.

Theresa Cowan, 36, mentioned she needed to eat pure meals like Mr. Johnson’s, which she believes might have therapeutic properties, versus quick meals, which “is creating death to our cells.” Ms. Cowan, who has labored as an actress and singer, introduced her youngsters Makayla and Samuel, 8 and 5, on the hike. She mentioned she and Makayla deliberate to undertake the Blueprint protocol and make movies about it. (“You’d want to particularly cautious about this for anyone under 18,” mentioned Dr. George Kuchel, a professor of medication at University of Connecticut who research growing older.)

Ms. Cowan added that she didn’t give her youngsters vaccines or antibiotics. “I live my life against the grain,” she mentioned.

Plenty of meet-up individuals shared tales of trauma, usually health-related. Mr. Pulusani grew up with a extreme case of eczema. Ms. Cowan’s husband has a tumor in his bladder, and he or she hopes to influence him to undertake the Blueprint lifestyle in an effort to heal, she mentioned.

Four hundred miles up the coast, about 50 folks — largely younger, largely males — gathered on the identical day for a Blueprint hike beginning at Rockaway Beach south of San Francisco. It was a tech-y group: A former worker of Elon Musk’s mind implant firm, Neuralink, was there, as have been a handful of founders from Y Combinator, the start-up incubator. (One one who couldn’t make it threw himself a Blueprint-themed party in San Francisco the subsequent night time, with olive oil pictures and blood baggage filled with ardour fruit tea.) Mr. Tang, the organizer, carried alongside a cardboard cutout of Mr. Johnson’s well-known kettlebell picture.

Before the group set off, Mr. Tang gathered everybody on a grassy patch and posed a sequence of icebreaker questions, together with whether or not they’d wish to reside eternally. About half the attendees mentioned sure.

The Scientific Community Has Concerns

Mr. Johnson occupies an odd place within the discipline of longevity analysis, which has attracted a surge of funding lately. If there’s a spectrum between scientific rigor and pure advertising and marketing, many consultants argue Mr. Johnson is on the promotional finish.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, a professor of medication and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research, has spent years learning wholesome seniors he calls “super-agers” and has recognized a number of genetic markers related to longevity. He mentioned he appreciated Mr. Johnson’s bringing consideration to the longevity discipline.

“But is he contributing to it in a scientific way?” Dr. Barzilai requested. “The answer is no.”

For starters, he mentioned, Mr. Johnson’s methodology is way from the one accepted by the scientific neighborhood for a century: scientific research with giant teams of individuals, some with remedy and others with a placebo, ideally double-blind. (What Mr. Johnson described to me as his new “clinical trial” is … not that.) And Mr. Johnson, so far, has experimented solely on himself.

“Even if it works with him — which I don’t think it does — this unique person has unique genetics that probably are not applicable to a population,” Dr. Barzilai mentioned.

Dr. Barzilai additionally questioned Mr. Johnson’s resolution to undertake so many various interventions directly, making it unimaginable to find out trigger and impact — to not point out making a danger of dangerous interactions amongst remedies.

According to Dr. Barzilai, Mr. Johnson typically conflates markers of well being, like lung capability, with markers of growing older. “The fact that he’s doing better at things he’s trained for doesn’t make the rest of his body younger,” he mentioned. Similarly, different markers that Mr. Johnson measures could correlate with age however haven’t been proven to trigger growing older or de-aging.

Dr. Barzilai was not significantly impressed with Mr. Johnson’s outcomes, both. He himself is taking solely metformin, a diabetes drug whose life-extending potential he has studied, and doing intermittent fasting, which has been proven to enhance the life span of mice however not people. But when Dr. Barzilai, 68, met Mr. Johnson at a convention in 2023, they took a blood check and acquired related outcomes: “We were both about three years younger than our age,” he mentioned.

Experts are additionally skeptical of Mr. Johnson’s dietary supplements routine. Valter Longo, professor of gerontology and organic sciences on the University of Southern California, mentioned taking a considerable amount of dietary supplements risked antagonistic interactions.

“Some supplements may give you the nutrients you’re missing, but a lot, particularly in high doses, are likely to interfere with normal physiology and eventually do more damage than good,” he mentioned.

Andrew Steele, a biologist and an writer who writes about longevity, mentioned there was no proof that Mr. Johnson’s merchandise would assist folks reside longer. “None of them has slam-dunk human data saying this supplement or additive will improve life span,” he mentioned.

A University at Buffalo dietitian, Danielle Meyer, mentioned Mr. Johnson’s weight loss program can be laborious for a lot of ladies to undertake. (Blueprint’s feminine chief advertising and marketing officer adopted the complete routine for 90 days however has since switched to a much less intense routine.) “Our life stages have different needs,” Ms. Meyer mentioned. “Women of childbearing age, menopause — all these factors make it more complicated in females than in males.”

She additionally questioned the sustainability of the Blueprint program, pointing to analysis exhibiting that inflexible diets are troublesome to take care of. (Mr. Johnson restricts his each day energy to 2,250, slightly than the three,000 that his physique mass and train regime counsel he wants.)

Mr. Johnson acknowledges that it may be laborious to tease aside the variables in his routine, and that the adjustments he’s measuring with biomarkers haven’t been proved to trigger growing older or reverse it. But he dismisses consultants who criticize him, calling them the “longevity mafia.”

Achieving scientific consensus is gradual, he mentioned: “You’ll die before you get that.”

An Ugly Legal Battle

In December, Mr. Johnson posted a video on YouTube titled “My Ex-Fiancée Sued Me for $9,000,000,” through which he responded to a lawsuit that the actress Taryn Southern had filed after they separated in 2019. In a 2021 criticism, Ms. Southern claimed that Mr. Johnson had withheld cash he owed her for work, and that after their breakup — after Ms. Southern was identified with most cancers — Mr. Johnson had didn’t observe by means of on a promise to pay her lease and bills for a 12 months. Ms. Southern sought no less than $1 million in damages.

Mr. Johnson denied all accusations and contested the lawsuit. An arbitrator determined that Ms. Southern was sure by a separation settlement she beforehand signed, through which she forfeited her proper to sue Mr. Johnson. The arbitrator in the end ordered Ms. Southern to pay Mr. Johnson’s authorized charges.

In his YouTube video, Mr. Johnson framed the lawsuit as a shakedown — Ms. Southern’s legal professionals had initially sought $9 million in a letter — and an instance of “the dark underground accusation economy.” (Ms. Southern, who’s sure by a nondisclosure clause within the separation settlement, declined to remark.)

A December article in Vanity Fair highlighted Ms. Southern’s aspect of the story. After she acquired most cancers, Mr. Johnson referred to as her a “bad deal” and a “net negative,” based on the criticism. Ms. Southern’s account portrays Mr. Johnson as emotionally manipulating her and dangling the prospect of inventory choices in one among his corporations to stress her into signing the separation settlement.

Mr. Johnson dismisses the Vanity Fair piece and significant threads about his habits on X as “one-sided,” as they depend on Ms. Southern’s model of occasions. In an interview, he mentioned that the anecdotes within the lawsuit have been “entirely fabricated.” So far, he has declined to answer Ms. Southern’s particular claims, arguing that it wouldn’t change folks’s minds.

When I requested concerning the notion that he was controlling, Mr. Johnson advised me that after his earlier marriage had ended messily, he had insisted on having Ms. Southern — who additionally labored for his corporations — signal agreements stipulating the phrases of their association for the sake of readability.

“It had nothing to do with control, and everything to do with relationship hygiene,” Mr. Johnson mentioned.

Blueprinters I spoke with mentioned the case had not modified their opinion of Mr. Johnson. “I just scrolled right by it,” Ms. Love mentioned. “It’s not something I want to put into my consciousness.”

The Blueprint Stack

Mr. Johnson calls his new bundle of merchandise the “Blueprint Stack” — a coding reference that, like “protocol,” evokes the metaphor of human physique as laptop and life as algorithm.

Offerings embrace powdered variations of Nutty Pudding and Super Veggie, cocoa powder, and a dried combination of nuts and blueberries. He can also be promoting a “Longevity Blend Micronutrient Drink Mix (Blood Orange Flavor),” which incorporates the complement creatine and the New Age-favorite shrub ashwagandha, plus 4 totally different tablet merchandise, which altogether characterize a simplified model of his 100-plus tablet routine. As a wink to his skeptics, he plans to rebrand his olive oil as “Snake Oil.”

The present fundamental package deal prices $333 a month, however that covers solely about 400 energy a day. Mr. Johnson mentioned he deliberate to supply sufficient merchandise to account for an individual’s whole each day calorie consumption for lower than $1,000 a month. (Adults usually want between 1,600 and three,000 energy a day.)

“We’re trying to compete for the most nutritious food program in history,” he mentioned. “Like, so good that it’s not crazy to say the U.N. should be using this.” Mr. Johnson can also be speaking to 2 corporations — one offering a gene remedy, one other that gives stem cells from younger bone marrow — about arranging a reduction for Blueprinters. “The idea is to create the Costco of the health and wellness industry,” he mentioned.

Mr. Johnson places the recipes for his meals on his web site, so anybody can cook dinner them — and promote them. After the hike in Los Angeles, the group gathered round a picnic desk, the place Adrien Cohen, 32, who lately based a Blueprint-based meal prep start-up, distributed containers of Nutty Pudding and Super Veggie.

Mr. Tang, whose earlier challenge was organizing “T-parties” the place males gathered to measure their testosterone ranges, mentioned his meal prep firm was serving 1,000 Blueprint meals per week within the San Francisco space. He mentioned he deliberate to pivot away from the Blueprint branding, however for now it’s a “signaling banner for people who want to improve their health.”

Mr. Johnson mentioned he was delighted that others have been constructing their very own companies round Blueprint. However, he has trademarked the Blueprint title and mentioned he may ultimately attempt to work out licensing agreements with the opposite corporations utilizing it.

He declined to touch upon his present web value however mentioned he was much less targeted on creating wealth than increasing the attain of Blueprint. “This is not a money grab,” he mentioned. (Mr. Johnson mentioned that the enterprise’s revenues to this point whole a number of tens of millions of {dollars}, a declare that would not be verified.)

But, he mentioned, he’s reaching the restrict of experiments he can carry out on himself. Hence the brand new “clinical trial,” through which volunteers will devour Blueprint merchandise for 3 months after which get examined to measure the outcomes. (Participants must pay for the testing themselves, which quantities to $800 or $1,600, relying on the extent of testing.) There’s no management group, it’s brief time period, individuals devour 67 totally different therapies directly, they usually’re on the “honor system” to eat the Blueprint package deal and in any other case keep their base-line diets.

Mr. Steele mentioned that it’s unlikely the brand new research will yield helpful knowledge. “It will be impossible to know how much of any observed effect is real, or just the placebo effect,” he mentioned.

Mr. Johnson concedes that the design will not be that of a scientific trial that the mainstream scientific neighborhood will settle for. “Will this trial end up being reputable? We’ll see,” he mentioned.