`Meme king of longevity' now wants to sell followers olive oil
“Ready, on three,” Jamie Love said to the group of hikers as they huddled for a photo. “One, two, three …”
“Don’t die!” they shouted in unison.
The dozen or so strangers were gathered at the foot of Temescal Canyon Trail along the Pacific coast in Los Angeles on a cool Saturday morning in mid-december. Several of them, including Love, 38, who had organized the outing, wore black T-shirts with the bold white text, “DON’T DIE.”
The hikers had come together with a shared goal: to extend their life spans through diet, sleep, exercise and whatever technologies might come along.
Not present was the spiritual leader of the gathering, the internet celebrity and centimillionaire tech founder turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson. In the past year, Johnson has arguably taken the lead in the race among Silicon Valley rich guys going to extremes in a quest to live forever. (Move over, Messrs. Bezos, Zuckerberg and Thiel.) Now he’s turning that longevity mission — and the online infamy he has earned because of it — into a lifestyle business, selling supplements and prepackaged meals to less-rich people who would also like to live for a very long time. The hike, one of more than 30 “Don’t Die Meet-ups” around the world that day, was a cross between community-building and a guerrilla marketing tactic.
Johnson’s deal, in a nutshell: In 2021, he began spending $2 million a year, by his own account, to measure every aspect of his body, from lipid levels to urination speed to brain plaque, with the goal of reversing his aging process. He called it Project Blueprint.
Every day, between 7 and 11 a.m., he eats the same three vegan meals: “Nutty Pudding” (a blend of nuts, seeds, berries and pomegranate juice), “Super Veggie” (black lentils topped with broccoli and cauliflower) and a third, rotating dish consisting of vegetables, roots and nuts. He exercises for an hour every morning and takes up to 111 pills a day. (His pharyngeal muscles may be the strongest of all.)
Johnson claims that his regimen (or “protocol,” as he calls it) has already slowed his speed of aging, giving him, at 46, the maximum heart rate of a 37-year-old, the gum inflammation of a 17-yearold and the facial wrinkles of a 10-year-old, according to his website. He publicizes his test results so anyone can see images of his bowels or learn the duration of his nighttime erections. His “biological age,” he claimed until recently, is 42.5, according to one measurement of changes in DNA over time known as an epigenetic clock. In other words, he has spent about three years shaving off — maybe — a little more than three years.
If the original goal of Project Blueprint was to perfect his health, Johnson now describes it as preparing humanity to thrive in a
LOS ANGELES >> world dominated by artificial intelligence. Thus the new slogan: “Don’t Die.”
In an interview, Johnson said he didn’t care what present-day people thought of him. “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me,” he said. “The majority of opinions now represent the past.”
Now, Johnson said, after three years of self-experimentation — which he called “Phase 1” of Blueprint — he’s ready for “Phase 2”: helping others replicate his process. Late last year, he began selling Blueprint-branded olive oil. This month, more products, including powdered vegetables and pill supplements, became available on his website. In conjunction with the rollout, Johnson announced a “self-experimentation study” in which participants can pay for a starter pack of Blueprint products, as well as blood work and other tests to track their results. The 2,500 slots filled up within 24 hours.
To his fans, who fly across the country to meet him and haunt Blueprint message boards online, this moment is an exciting opportunity to spread the Johnson gospel. Some Blueprint advocates are even building businesses of their own around his ideas. To his detractors, it’s a cynical attempt to monetize his popularity. Or, worse: They call it pseudoscience that could harm the health of his followers.
Johnson grew up Mormon in Utah. Between college and business school, he worked for a credit card processing company selling services to businesses. His sales trick was to offer potential clients $100 for three minutes of their time. If they didn’t sign up for his plan, they could keep the money. He quickly became the company’s top salesperson.
In 2007, he founded his own payment processing company, Braintree, which acquired the startup Venmo and, in 2013, was itself acquired by ebay for $800 million.
A year later, Johnson got divorced and split 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 said.
When I asked Johnson if he was building a religion, he said yes. “Belief systems have proven to be stronger than countries, or companies, or anything else,” for helping humans reach goals, he said. “Every religion has been trying to offer a solution to ‘Don’t die’ — that’s the product they’ve generated,” he added.
Johnson occupies an odd place in the field of longevity research, which has attracted a surge of investment in recent years. If there’s a spectrum between scientific rigor and pure marketing, many experts argue Johnson is on the promotional end.
Dr. Nir Barzilai, a professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research, has spent years studying healthy seniors he calls “super-agers” and has identified several genetic markers associated with longevity. He said he appreciated Johnson’s bringing attention to the longevity field.
“But is he contributing to it in a scientific way?” Barzilai asked. “The answer is no.”
For starters, he said, Johnson’s methodology is far from the one accepted by the scientific community for a century: clinical studies with large groups of people, some with treatment and others with a placebo, ideally double-blind. (What Johnson described to me as his new “clinical trial” is … not that.) And Johnson, to date, has experimented only on himself.
According to Barzilai, Johnson sometimes conflates markers of health, like lung capacity, with markers of aging. “The fact that he’s doing better at things he’s trained for doesn’t make the rest of his body younger,” he said. Similarly, other markers that Johnson measures may correlate with age but haven’t been shown to cause aging or de-aging.
Barzilai was not particularly impressed with Johnson’s results, either. He himself is taking only metformin, a diabetes drug whose life-extending potential he has studied, and doing intermittent fasting, which has been shown to improve the life span of mice but not humans. But when Barzilai, 68, met Johnson at a conference in 2023, they took a blood test and got similar results: “We were both about three years younger than our age,” he said.
Andrew Steele, a biologist and an author who writes about longevity, said there was no evidence that Johnson’s products would help people live longer. “None of them has slamdunk human data saying this supplement or additive will improve life span,” he said.
Johnson calls his new bundle of products the “Blueprint Stack” — a coding reference that, like “protocol,” evokes the metaphor of human body as computer and life as algorithm.
Offerings include powdered versions of Nutty Pudding and Super Veggie, cocoa powder, and a dried mixture of nuts and blueberries. He is also selling a “Longevity Blend Micronutrient Drink Mix (Blood Orange Flavor),” which includes the supplement creatine and the New Age-favorite shrub ashwagandha, plus four different pill products, which altogether represent a simplified version of his 100-plus pill regimen. As a wink to his skeptics, he plans to rebrand his olive oil as “Snake Oil.”
The current basic package costs $333 a month, but that covers only about 400 calories a day. Johnson said he planned to offer enough products to account for a person’s entire daily calorie intake for less than $1,000 a month. (Adults typically need between 1,600 and 3,000 calories a day.)
Steele said that it’s unlikely the new study will yield useful data. “It will be impossible to know how much of any observed effect is real, or just the placebo effect,” he said.
Johnson concedes that the design is not that of a clinical trial that the mainstream scientific community will accept. “Will this trial end up being reputable? We’ll see,” he said.