‘Don’t die’: Who is Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker behind Netflix’s new immortality documentary?

"The response is algorithmic. It's mathematically predictable," said tech millionaire and "longevity athlete" Bryan Johnson in 2023, when asked how he dealt with his numerous and sometimes vicious critics.

"If you, in any given time over the past couple thousand years, plot a behavior that is outside two standard deviations from the norm, you get a biochemical reaction and people responding to it," he told diet guru and fellow 'biohacker' Dave Asprey.

"And so I have zero emotional attachment to it. I view it with amusement, and I view it as predictable as the sun rising."

It was a typically cheerful – and typically nerdy – riposte from the 47-year-old man who bills himself as "the healthiest person on the planet", and who has proclaimed it his mission to beat death itself.

Once a mobile payments entrepreneur whose start-up was bought out by PayPal, Johnson now spends a reported $2 million or more per year on an all-encompassing, medically supervised health and fitness regimen designed to find out whether a human being can age backwards – with himself as the guinea pig.

Now Johnson is the face of a new Netflix documentary entitled Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, which takes its name from the anti-death movement that Johnson is attempting to found, and goes live on January 1.

"Last year, I saw a headline about a man spending 2 million dollars a year to become 18 again," said Don't Die's director Chris Smith, who previously directed Fyre and executive produced Tiger King.

“That initial curiosity led to a 12-month journey following Bryan Johnson’s quest and its effect on those closest to him, while interviewing experts from around the world to get a better understanding of the people trying to live healthier, longer.

"A year later, I drink less, go to bed earlier, and wear a ring that tells me how bad my sleep is."

So who exactly is Bryan Johnson? What drives him to live such an extreme lifestyle, and what is he actually trying to achieve?

‘I basically don’t trust anything in reality’

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that after we die, the most virtuous among us will be elevated into a state of divinity akin to God himself.

Endowed with ultimate knowledge and wisdom, they will spread out across the vast cosmos to create their own worlds, populate them with mortal children, and govern them as God now governs us.

That is the faith in which Bryan Johnson spent the first 34 years of his life. Raised in Utah by his mother and stepfather, he served as a Mormon missionary in Ecuador before attending Brigham Young University and the Chicago Booth School of Business.

It was, he would later tell endurance athlete and wellness podcaster Rich Roll in a January 2024 interview, genuinely comforting to believe that if you simply followed a clear set of rules you would one day have eternal life.

That began to unravel, Johnson said, when he read a warts-and-all biography of Joseph Smith, the 19th century prophet – or charlatan, as his critics would say – who founded Mormonism and he realized the narrative his church had fed him.

"Most of us are born into this world, and we never really understand the systems we're born into," Johnson recalled. "I had no idea I was in a fishbowl until I was 21 years old. And so it makes me wonder how many other fishbowls I'm in [today]".

At 24, overloaded by caring for a new baby while building a tech start-up, Johnson fell into chronic depression that would continue to trouble him for more than a decade. Incessant suicidal thoughts turned his own brain into an enemy, even as he reached uncommon heights of financial success.

In 2012, his mobile payments company Braintree acquired Venmo – then a much scrappier start-up – for $26.2 million. Only the following year, Braintree itself was acquired by PayPal for a whopping $800 million, giving Johnson a payout that pretty much set him up for life.

All of which left him in an awful state of health. “I would routinely commit self-destructive behaviors, and specifically in the evening at seven o’clock, would try to soothe my stress by eating food,” he told The Independent from his home in Los Angeles.

“And that caused me to gain a lot of weight, and that caused me to not sleep very well, which then caused me to not feel very well in life.”

At the end of it all, he ended up with a different philosophy from what Mormonism had taught him.

"It's really simple," Johnson told Rich Roll. "I basically don't trust anything in reality. Not authority. Not my mind. Not my perception, nothing. I just trust data and numbers. And the only thing I believe in is that I don't want to die."

Butyric acid and blood plasma transfusions

Every morning when he wakes up, according to his website, Bryan Johnson drinks four supplement mixes and takes 20 pills. There's collagen peptides, iron supplements, boron and lithium and vitamin B5; butyric acid, taurine, ashwaganda and glycine and L-Theanine.

And that's just for breakfast. Johnson's website lists 11 more pills listed at "dinner" (taken at 11am, so as to ensure maximal ease of sleep come nightfall), a spoonful of extra virgin olive oil with each meal, and 300 micrograms of melatonin before bed (strictly at 8:30pm, having risen at 4:30am).

The number of pills used to be far greater before Johnson began using his own mail-orderable supplements packs, which combine numerous compounds in one dose.

On top of this chemical cavalcade that would tongue-tie Tom Lehrer, there's regular exercise plus a regular battery of unusual treatments and diagnostic tests.

According to a 2023 Bloomberg News profile, which brought Johnson to public attention, this regimen – known in totality as "Blueprint" – is devised and managed by a team of more than 30 doctors and health experts led by UK-based regenerative medicine doctor Oliver Zolman.

The idea, Johnson explains, is to stop relying on his fallible, addiction-prone human brain for his health and rely instead on data “I basically removed myself from taking care of myself and built a system in place that takes better care of me than I could of myself,” he told The Independent.

The matter of Zolman's fee is somewhat unclear: Bloomberg put it at $1,000 an hour, but Zolman later told Fortune magazine that he had never charged that amount. Either way, the overall package reportedly totals $2 million a year.

As a result, Johnson claims that his cardiovascular capacity is equal to the top 1 per cent of 18 year olds; that his levels of body inflammation are 85 per cent below the average 18 year old; and that he is now aging at a slower place than 99 per cent of 20 year olds.

Still, Zolman told Bloomberg back in 2023 that he had not yet achieved any "remarkable" results – defined as reducing the effective age of one of Johnson's organs by years or decades.

"In Bryan, we have achieved small, reasonable results, and it’s to be expected," Zolman said.

Despite the expense, Johnson argues that the “core” of Blueprint is things most people can afford: good sleep, plenty of exercise, and a healthy diet.

“It sounds more intimidating than it actually is,” he told The Independent. “The data is compelling that if you do these things and you do these things well, you can slow your rate of ageing.

“It really is just basically saying it’s worth it to do the basic things we’re all told. And if you do them in a rigorous way, you can expect to have meaningful results in the speed at which you age and your overall health.”

Asked which part of Blueprint is his least favourite, he said he sincerely loved all of it. “I’ve never been happier. I’ve never been healthier. I’ve never had more energy. I’ve never been more stable. I’ve unquestionably never [been] better.”

Not that Johnson will do just anything. He says his team combed through thousands of academic papers to find what works, and he has frequently given up treatments that showed no value.

One of those was getting a blood plasma transfusion from his own 17-year-old son, matched by a donation from Johnson to his 70-year-old father. The latter apparently showed great benefit, but the former did not, he said.

To some observers this was a step too far. Biochemist Charles Brenner called the procedure "gross, evidence-free, and relatively dangerous". But Johnson countered that his son had volunteered for the treatment and that there is virtue in experimentation, however strange. "You and I live in a previous generation’s crazy, and every generation falls for the same trap,” he said.

Indeed, Johnson is often mocked or insulted on social media by people who see him as nothing more than the latest in a long line of rich, powerful people who cannot come to terms with their impending death – from the ancient Chinese emperors who died from drinking dodgy immortality potions to the 20th century fad for cryonic preservation.

But Johnson insists that this is not actually about him, or at least not only about him. His goal is to persuade the whole world that the human aging process can be beaten, and courting media attention is merely a means to an end.

‘I'm genuinely trying to map the future of being human’

On the popular betting site Polymarket, there is – or was, as of late December – an active betting market for the length of Bryan Johnson's night-time erections. (Johnson says they are a key marker of cardiovascular and physiological health for cis men.)

This fact, and the fact that Johnson himself happily highlighted it on X (formerly Twitter), is testament to his self-consciously publicity-happy method of spreading his message, embracing social media buzz and criticism alike.

So what is the message? According to Johnson, the fact that he is seen as so eccentric by so many people is proof that our society is in the grip of some deep delusions about the nature of human health and death.

"What is your number one priority today?" he asked Rich Roll. "Actually, let's say number zero priority." The answer, they agreed, was survival. So all of us are already trying to not die at every moment of our lives.

But if that's true, Johnson argues, then we go about it in a strange way. We let ourselves be tricked and addicted by things that slowly kill us, by drugs and junk food and couch potatoism. We all say we want to live, but we don't take it seriously.

Johnson's solution is to set himself up as the longevity equivalent of an Olympic athlete. This is all the more important, he claims, because the incredible pace of technological change over the past few centuries shows we cannot hope to predict what might be possible in 50 or 100 years. He believes there's every chance we will figure out a way to beat death within his lifetime, and he intends to help that happen faster.

"I'm genuinely trying to map the future of being human. This is not a lackadaisical 'I want to be healthy'," he said on Asprey's Human Upgrade podcast. "This is, 'I want to evolve with superintelligence into the next evolution of human, and I'm willing to do anything along that path."

"Superintelligence" means AI, which Johnson naturally believes will soon prove so much better at making decisions than us that we will inevitably entrust it with much of our lives. Johnson's "Blueprint", which relies on data to measurement to guide decisions, is merely a prototype.

Challenged by Rich Roll on whether this was a "dystopian" vision, Johnson claimed that we've already said yes to this. We've embraced a role for AI in determining our media diet: what we listen to on Spotify, what we watch on Netflix, what we see in our news feeds.

The human brain, he went on, is "an absolute disaster", the bodily equivalent of an absolute monarch before the American revolution. He likens measuring his body's performance and basing his health decisions on the results to making his body a democracy, where all his organs get a vote.

“Every society, every generation builds something that scaffolds the next society and the next generation. And so, if we’re thinking about our species, what are we trying to scaffold for? It might be [the ability to] automate perfection, so we don’t struggle with the things we struggle with today. Because we all know when we have a health issue, life stops,” he told The Independent.

If, Johnson claims, we can only learn to do what's best for our bodies and lifespans, perhaps we can also learn to do what's best for society – and communicate that lessons to AI before it eats the world.

"What can we agree upon? It's 'don't die'. It's the game every single human being on this planet plays every second of every day.

"Right now, we don't agree on 'don't die.' We kill ourselves, we kill each other, we kill the planet. We are a violent species, killing everything around us, and that's why this is such a relevant revolution."

Even those procedures that might seem cosmetic serve this purpose, according to Johnson. In a video posted on X in December, he explained that his low-calorie diet and certain supplements had made him look gaunt and yellow, causing people to worry about his health and to dismiss the utility of Blueprint.

“My biomarkers were fantastic; we were excited. But when I went out in public... there was a big disconnect between the success we were feeling as a team, and the perception. It turns out that facial fat is really important to how someone gauges someone's youthfulness,” he said.

Likewise, he told The Independent that he was worried people who saw him being insulted and attacked for his appearance would be discouraged from following his example. That spurred his team to begin “Project Babyface”, intended to rebuild his facial fat and create an image that did not jar so much with his message.

In the end, Johnson says he does not really care how many people alive today think he is vain, or silly, or quixotic, or deluded, or a weird vampire elf, or whatever else.

"I genuinely would rather be respected by people in the 25th century than I would be respected right now," he told Asprey. "Because by definition, the majority of everyone who lives right now is living in the past."