In January, 2023, Bloomberg published an article about how tech entrepreneur turned longevity stan, Bryan Johnson, spends $2 million a year in an attempt to live forever—or at least until age 200, as the goalposts shift. Then a Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, dropped on January 1, taking a deep dive into Johnson’s quest and complex personal life. A strange thing happened along the way: Johnson felt much more personable and relatable than ever before to many viewers. Given the Bloomberg journalist is one of the producers, is this the latest propaganda piece by a supplements-pushing huckster, or is Johnson tapping into something much older and deeper about the human condition?
Show Notes
How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year
Politico piece on Mayor Karen Bass and LA Fires
Anna Merlan on LA Fire conspiracies
Ally Carter Diddy-List Fire Conspiracy Theory Shared by Former Bush Official
Nutritionist Reviews The Blueprint Supplements
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I'm Matthew Remski.
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Conspirituality 240, Brian Johnson's impossible blueprint.
different.
In January 2023, Bloomberg published an article about how tech entrepreneur turned longevity stan, Brian Johnson, spends $2 million a year in an attempt to live forever, or at least until age 200 as the goalposts shift.
Then...
A Netflix documentary, Don't Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, dropped on January 1st, taking a deep dive into Johnson's quest and complex personal life.
A strange thing happened along the way.
Johnson felt much more personable and relatable than ever before to many viewers.
Given the Bloomberg journalist is one of the producers, is this the latest propaganda piece by a supplements-pushing huckster, or is Johnson tapping into something much older and deeper about the human condition?
This week in Conspiratuality.
I'm joining, as always, guys, from the west side of LA, where we watch the Palisades fire rage on the hilltops about 10 miles to the north.
Our home is six miles from the ocean, and the enormous cloud of smoke billowing out over the beach at sunset Last Tuesday, it took up a third of the sky.
The winds that night were the most intense I've seen in my 35 years of living here.
They brought down an entire very large dead tree at the end of our block, which thankfully did not land on any cars or damage any houses or take down any power lines.
We're very lucky.
With winds still high, the evacuation warning zone crept anxiously closer and closer to us the following day, getting to within about eight miles of where we live.
But since then, it hasn't really moved any further south.
The winds where we are have subsided.
But nonetheless, in the wooded residential hills that surround the city, as well as the forests on the outskirts that are dense with dry brush and still being lashed by the windstorm on and off, fire after fire, as everyone will know, has started and rapidly spread with so many losing their homes and having to flee for their lives.
The city will never be the same.
It's one of those historic moments.
That will always be a before and after milestone in our lives.
But for now, we're really fortunate.
There's been a lot of media focus on wealthy celebrities losing multi-million dollar homes in the Pacific Palisades, and that has happened.
But the Eaton Fire that tore through Altadena has been as devastating.
And in that case, it's been that way to a more diverse neighborhood.
Historically, one of the first in LA where after a long battle with redlining, black families were able to buy houses in the 1960s.
I also want to point out that there's been a lot of focus on the millionaires, but Pacific Palisades, where I spent a lot of my time when I lived in Los Angeles, a lot of those people bought their houses in the 80s when houses were not super expensive.
So I get that we have this sort of culture of celebrity, but that really is a minority of citizens who lived in that era.
Yeah, and there are plenty of people who live and work there in service to that community and to some of those wealthier individuals.
Now, there's, of course, been an outpouring of love and concern from around the world.
There even were some firefighters.
The firefighters have come from other countries.
I saw today that some had come from South Africa, which warmed my heart.
And there have been other responses, unfortunately, that sadly fit right in with our beat here on the pod.
As with the 2023 Maui fires, one popular theory called this a directed energy weapon attack.
And the acronym they're using is DEW, in which a shadowy group of elites or even aliens might be deliberately deploying lasers.
To start fires as a way to enact some kind of land grab or to clear the way for a nefarious smart cities transhumanist agenda.
That one has been popping up more and more in my feed.
Most listeners will know that Trump and the usual bevy of Fox News and digital media right-wingers have wasted no time blaming the fires on their fantasy of woke mismanagement and on the lie that LA's fire department banned white men from joining.
Elon Musk has repeated these kinds of false claims on Twitter, and there they've also been openly attacking Mayor Karen Bass as a DEI hire, which we know is just coded for she's black, she's a woman, she's a lesbian.
Of course she's not qualified to be doing this job.
Missing from that kind of coverage has been any acknowledgement that the climate crisis is driving the conditions that make the fires more frequent and more severe.
They'll say, well, that's just an excuse.
Yeah, that's at the heart of it, right?
Like, they'll have to say anything to really get around the fact.
Yeah, you should have raked the leaves.
Trump also completely fabricated a water restoration declaration.
That's what he called it, out of thin air, which he claims...
California Governor Gavin Newsom refused to sign.
He said it would have given him access to millions and millions of gallons of water to put out the fire.
But this legislation does not exist.
That won't stop it from being part of the right-wing lore online about this catastrophic natural disaster.
And as anti-environmentalist Republicans love to do, Trump made a meme out of the smelt fish.
And falsely claimed that Newsom refused access to more water to try to protect this endangered species.
But the truth is, there's a huge water surplus in LA reservoirs, and the fires were not so out of control, especially in the first few days, because of a lack of water to put them out.
Really, the urban water infrastructure delivery system was just not built to fight fires of this magnitude.
And saving the smeltfish?
Turned out to just be a complete red herring.
So regarding Mayor Karen Bass, there is a complicated situation there that has to do with the city budget and the firefighters' union contracts, and the right has exploited this to make it sound as if the mayor irresponsibly defunded the fire department, because of course that's what all DEI woke people want to do, and that that's why the Palisades Fire wiped out 10,000 or 15,000 buildings.
But excellent reporting from Politico, which I will include in the show notes, clarified that in fact the city's fire budget increased more than $50 million year over year compared to the last budget cycle.
L.A. Fire Chief Kristen Crowley has, however, contradicted the mayor's perspective.
While at the same time also being outspoken in interviews about the main limiting factor in fighting the Palisades fire being the unprecedented windstorm, she said at one point, even with a thousand fire engines, it would not have been possible to get that fire under control.
The wind just made the fire spread too fast and too far, blowing those embers for miles, and it made fighting from the air too dangerous.
You know, I used to live three blocks from you, Julian, and Karen Bass was our representative to the government.
And I'll just say that she has always been controversial.
She's done a lot for the community, but she's also had ties to Scientology.
And she very much likes publicity.
She is very out in front of that.
So she has been a polarizing figure in democratic politics and in national politics for a long time.
And so, of course, the right is going to jump on her as a figure to attack.
Now, I'm not giving her a pass on everything that's happened, but at the same time, it's definitely been weighted against her, which is not fair.
Yeah, and it's a classic example of there being a kind of very wonky set of budget versus labor dispute conversations that have been happening to figure out how to allocate funds into different buckets, which when you put the buckets together, it's like, no, actually their progress is being which when you put the buckets together, it's like, no, actually On the one hand, I really want to support the fire chief in bringing up the facts of this labor dispute.
And on the other hand, it's like, well, is this exactly the right time for that when there is so much heat on California coming from the right?
Now, conspiracy theories, of course, have raged online, like the one spread by Ali Carter.
Now, her backstory that she's told on QAnon-friendly alt-right platforms includes being sex-trafficked by Satanists as a child through tunnels that run under the Getty Villa.
And Carter made a social media video back in October warning that explosions and fires might be used to try to cover up the evidence for QAnon's That's so tangled.
Oh, gosh.
That video was shared again last week and viewed over 2 million times, reposted over 4,000 times with captions linking her allegations to the fires.
You see?
She was right.
The usual paranoid posts on social media repeated ideas that the fires were behaving too weirdly to be natural, or they must be part of some larger plan by the WEF and BlackRock.
This is part of that land grab and smart cities kind of idea.
And these types of posts were viewed tens of thousands of times.
Mike Cernovich wondered out loud to his 1.3 million followers on Twitter if the fires were set by communist China sabotage teams.
And Derek, as you and our correspondent Mallory DeMille have covered, eager to cash in, opportunistic health influencers quickly started claiming that the same essential oils and home saunas and supplements, they've been claiming cure everything else, including the scary, dangerous fog, were also good for fire and smoke detoxification.
Mallory covered a particularly insensitive and unhinged take from someone doing exactly this grift.
And this person stopped just short of celebrating the Palisades fire because the houses were apparently all filled with dangerous mold and needed to burn.
And she added that the fires were set on purpose because homeowners had bought them cheaply years ago and presumably, if I'm following her logic, could now make a profit on the insurance due to increased property values.
And she kept DMing Mallory wanting to get on the podcast because we were tagged in it.
So she's like, I'll come on the pod and talk about this.
Nice.
We'll see how that goes in the pitching process in Slack.
But I've saved the worst for last because recently baptized and now smugly devout Christian Russell Brand delivered what I'm going to call his most despicable Instagram video on Thursday in a bathrobe with his wet hair up in a towel.
And at the end of the video saying I just came out of a cold plunge.
So sorry for all of this.
All of this was Brand saying that the Hollywood Hills being devoured by a roaming inferno reflected the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah and showed how cultures fall apart without reverence and connection to God.
I mean...
I'm so glad that you're safe, Julian.
Thank you.
It's been hard to watch the images pour in.
And then, Derek, I know you have so many friends there still, and you've been sharing these pictures of friends' houses that are gone.
I have a question for both of you, like a present and former resident of L.A. You know, usually when climate-related disasters happen, they happen to the poorest among us.
We've already discussed, you know, what are the demographics of Palisades?
And they're mixed.
And the impact upon the poorest among us is going to continue.
But my question is, given what you both know about LA society and politics, do you think that this could be a radicalizing moment for some of the powerful people who have the means to turn their full attention to climate?
Well...
I can only imagine that having gone through such intense personal experiences and losses, it would make them more likely to put their money and their influence behind initiatives to try to address climate change and try to be politically involved.
A lot of them already are to a certain extent, but hopefully it'll increase that.
And one thing we do know is that people do get radicalized when it affects them personally.
Long-tail effects of this.
But again, so where Julian now lives, where I used to live, you can be in Los Angeles and just see it and actually not be that affected if you don't go in that area.
But at the same time, the Palisades, to a lesser extent Altadena, but the valley still houses millions of people, is just woven within the fabric of...
And given that Runyon Canyon caught on fire, which is where so many people go to hike, these hills are where you go to be in nature when you live in Los Angeles.
The reach affects so many people.
So my hope is that it does have that sort of radicalizing effect because so much of the noise that Julian just identified is coming from people who either don't know Los Angeles or who have left like Russell Brand because he used to live in the fucking Hollywood Hills.
So yeah, fuck him.
But this affects everyone.
There's no one who lives in Los Angeles and has a soul that would not be affected by this.
So I hope that that does happen.
And we'll see how and if these areas are rebuilt because...
It's not like this is a one-off given climate change.
These areas, what you have to worry about next is mudslides when the rains do come, first of all.
And when the brush grows back, there's still going to be danger zones.
So how we manage, how they manage and deal with this is going to be telling in the coming months and years.
So I said last week that Josie Reisman's theory of Trump as a pro wrestling promoter style politician was going to be a guiding light for me this year.
And that bore out this week for me as Trump openly mused about taking over Canada, where I live, by, quote, economic force, unquote, and claiming that a majority of us would love to become residents of the 51st state, LOL.
Meanwhile, the Trump jet is on the tarmac in Greenland with Don Jr. in the cockpit, probably all coked up and tweeting that the Danish territory are just going to love their new U.S. overlords.
Yeah, it's so bonkers.
I mean, with regard to the Reisman interview, Matthew, I just want to say this is my new favorite thing that you've done on the pod.
It's really fascinating.
It's really insightful.
And you two had just excellent conversational chemistry.
So listeners, if you haven't checked that out yet, do go listen.
Yeah, thanks.
I really, really learned a lot from her.
And it leads me to this question of, I mean, it's a question over the last eight years, but now I'm asking it anew.
Like, What is Trump doing?
You know, it's not politics as we know it.
We've always known that.
And it's a mistake to take the bait and feed the beast.
That's the other piece that I think that Reisman is kind of like driving home for me.
And to just review two concepts from her work, you know, she talks about how the heel in pro wrestling, the bad guy, gains traction and popularity through heat from the spectators.
So he becomes a gravity well of attention through performing an evil part.
And so...
Trump can sub out the red baseball hat for like a pith helmet with MAGA on it, you know, like he's in the 19th century or something, and he's going to say, I'm sending troops to the Panama Canal, and everyone goes nuts.
And Trump's stock rises because the heel thrives on heat.
Secondly, there are three types of pro wrestling engagements, and all three are about manipulating storylines and emotional responses for the sake of the show, and then using those responses.
To determine what becomes real and where the story will go next.
So first of all, there's the work, which is completely staged and planned out as a match.
The outcome is known.
There's the shoot, which is more real in the sense that, you know, the wrestlers really have a beef with each other or something like that.
Established characters meet and they clash over something real.
And the outcome is unknown and the wrestlers can get hurt.
And then there's the worked shoot.
That's the third category.
And that's Vince McMahon's specialty, which is a mixture of planning and improv with potentially real consequences that fall out, not by intention or foresight, but spurred on by audience response.
I think we see the same dynamic played out a number of months ago between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, right?
Now, the bottom line here is that Trump is generating heat on international relations so that he can market test what kind of work shoot will keep him in the center of the ring.
And he was also doing all of that right around January 6th, right around the sentencing for his case in New York, right around the special counsel report potentially coming out.
So it's also a lot of misdirection.
Yeah, exactly.
And we can now categorize some of it.
Whatever he means by economic force, he's probably talking about proposed tariffs.
And that can really be seen as more shoot than work because Trump really did levy 10% on Canadian aluminum in the first term, but economically it backfired because the U.S. is just too dependent on our aluminum.
But he could roll the dice again on something like that because he just likes to fuck with people.
But is he really going to bypass the admissions clause of the Constitution and just annex us?
Like, is there popular support up here for annexation?
One of the things that the admissions clause says is that, you know, Congress can authorize the taking over of a territory, but most of the people in the territory have to say, yeah, we want to join.
You know, it's like, he doesn't give a shit about that.
And will Congress fund war against founding NATO member Denmark?
No.
Like, these are works on Trump's storyboard.
They're fictions that he's showing you.
During the wrestling promo phase of the administration, he's testing responses.
So the paradox is, based on audience response, Trump might gamble that it's worth turning the work into a work shoot.
And how will we know when that happens?
I don't know.
U.S. troops use Maine to stage for a Greenland operation.
Or they amass on the Canadian border.
Or a U.S. trade rep phones Ottawa to say that the U.S. is unilaterally lowering its purchase price on Canadian oil from the tar sands.
If any of those things happen, then we slide into shoot territory where he really might do something stupid and destructive, but not driven by ideology so much as by greed and the need for attention and the complicity of his fans.
So before concrete things happen, it's a work.
And the problem is...
If mainstream liberal legacy response to the work is, we heard a lot of this in Canada, is like, oh my god, is he serious?
Will he really do that?
How should we repair?
It's been a lot of pearl clutching up here.
Like, that is heat.
And he will follow that like Pepe Le Pew floating as he follows some sort of tasty smell.
But the caveat here is that Reisman's theory does not mean that Project 2025...
Is a work.
Or that there isn't a massive and planned infrastructure honed by 40 years of think tank discipline ready to destroy the entire country when Trump calls.
There are real shoots on deck and real guns are loaded.
So the public has to be informed about what those are, including the fact that Trump can pretend Project 2025 is all a work.
Yeah, one of the things I really appreciated about what you're saying here and about that interview, Matthew, is understanding that...
A lot of this is not necessarily all planned out for Trump.
It's more that he's immersed in this particular psychology, in this particular communication style, in this way of working the spectacle so as to get attention, so as to get heat, so as to just keep engaging in that feedback loop.
Exactly.
And so, like, according to Reisman, Project 25 is real, but it's like a fight script.
And Trump's instinct is going to be to float bits and pieces of it.
Based on the potential, he thinks, of any piece to generate heat, see how it plays, and where rewrites and improv is going to be needed.
Yeah, and there's got to be some kind of distinction here between Project 2025 as it sits on the desk of the Heritage Foundation and all those people who are very, very real and serious about what they're doing.
They believe it!
Versus how Trump rolls it in as a prop as part of his shtick.
Exactly.
So the bottom line for me is that reporting cannot, it has to be clear, but it can't do Trump the favor of whipping up heat on a work so that he's more likely to lean into the heel roll and pull the trigger on the shoot.
So what does this look like in practice?
You report on things without encouraging drama.
You never stoke a distractible and manipulable audience.
You report on Project 2025, as you guys have done, so that the details are clear.
But you also cede skepticism and irony about outrageous proposals by showing their foolishness or their impossibility.
So this is not feeding the pro wrestling audience.
You instead calm them down, make people more ambivalent and skeptical, more Canadian maybe.
You unplug the feedback loop that...
It encourages Trump's worst ideas to turn into reality, because I think the worst thing he could have is a bored audience.
And then meanwhile, you let him be boring, and then you get to organize different shit outside of the arena.
On January 25th, 2023, Bloomberg published an article entitled, How to be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year.
From that day on, it's been hard to escape Brian Johnson, the uber-wealthy former tech founder who now spends millions of dollars every year trying to lower his biological age.
Now, we've mentioned him in passing before, and he's become a bit of a celebrity in the biohacking and longevity spaces.
And then on January 1st, the Netflix documentary Don't Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever hit my feed, and I figured it was time to finally look at the man in more depth.
Although I'll admit I was going to ignore the documentary, and then Mallory actually texted me assuring me that there was some pushback on longevity science and criticism of what he's doing, so I decided to give it a shot.
Now, given how pervasive Brian has been in wellness spaces, I don't think a ton of background is necessary, but real briefly, he founded the payments app Braintree in 2007 because he didn't think that PayPal, which was the dominant online payments app at the time, was evolving to serve customers.
Braintree bought an app you might be familiar with called Venmo in 2012 for $26.2 million.
The following year, PayPal bought Braintree for $800 million, which netted Johnson, roughly $300 million.
Now, from a tech entrepreneur standpoint, he nailed it.
He did it.
He started something and then sold it to the people he railed against.
He then launched VC Fund in 2014. And then he created another company called Kernel in 2016, which was creating a brain-computer interface.
So by the time COVID rolls around...
Johnson was burned out from Silicon Valley, so he decided to devote his life to anti-aging protocols.
Now, just last week, he posted a six-minute video of what he does in a day, a sort of wake up with me and then I'll lead you through everything.
I want to play the opening of the video just to give you an idea of how he thinks about himself.
Three years ago, I asked the most unthinkable and crazy question possible.
Are we the first generation that won't die?
To explore this question, I hired a team of 30 medical professionals.
We measured the biological age of every one of my organs.
And then we applied the very best science ever done on healthspan and lifespan.
It's worked.
I now have the best biomarkers of anybody in the world.
I am the healthiest person on planet Earth.
Yeah, he's basing this off of a website that he set up and that you could crowdsource from.
And he measured his own biomarkers.
And so that's where it comes from.
But I seem to remember there was a woman somewhere whose biomarkers were better than him, who was just like an ordinary person who maybe had a fitness regime.
There have been all sorts of moments where these kinds of grandiose claims kind of fall apart.
No, I think she was even a grandmother, if I remember correctly.
But no, ultimately, he is the healthiest person on planet Earth, Julian.
Ever, ever.
What I want to focus on is this notion of longevity that's been prevalent in biohacking spaces for decades.
Seemingly part of human ambition for as long as recorded history, at least.
So I'm going to offer some background, talk about how it became popular in wellness, and then we'll discuss Brian Johnson in the last segment.
And Matthew will offer some insights into Johnson's Mormon upbringing as well, which is fascinating.
And he has a brief coming out with podcaster and journalist Blair Hodges this Saturday.
But first...
We've all watched a documentary, so what are your guys' thoughts?
Well, as you referenced, Derek, I was already pretty familiar with him from seeing him on YouTube here and there for like the last three years.
He's kind of an odd character.
The undertone of hyper-privileged soft narcissism is unavoidably close at hand throughout as we watch the workouts and the expensive quasi-medical treatments and the food and the off-label drugs and the supplement regimes.
Of a man whose entire life is now dedicated every hour of the day to himself as a prototypical Superman.
And it's very kind of isolated and lonely, we see, too.
I was surprised both by the documentary film, including some quite harsh criticisms, while also being sympathetic to him as a vulnerable and wounded human being, which he's open and self-aware about.
There are many minutes devoted to his relationship with his son and separation anxiety in anticipating him leaving for college.
And I have to say, it's rare to see such father-son closeness and love depicted on my TV screen.
That was touching.
But always also with this uncomfortable, surreal, at times maybe a bit creepy sense of them being on this billionaire longevity biohacking journey together.
The first time I saw him pivot to selling his branded olive oil and other products on YouTube, my eyes rolled really hard.
And they did that too, watching this film.
There's also the online engagement and the meetups that he does with fans, where the joke is that he started a cult.
But actually, it looks to me like all of that social interaction and positive regard is...
Kind of healing for him in a benign way, and he seems quite humble and real in those situations, and people just appreciate him.
He's not quite an evangelist.
He's not quite a fully-fledged snake oil salesman, although maybe he's getting there.
But he's got enough of both of those things that I still...
Yeah, I think the documentary suffers from timing because the only real question I want to hear from Venice Beach resident Brian Johnson is whether he's got any supplements or plasma that will protect him and his family from climate-driven wildfires.
Because, I mean, the irony at the heart of the entire project is, what do you...
Really protecting yourself from.
Like, it's not really something that he can answer.
At the same time, I was surprised because I went into it expecting to kind of be disgusted.
But I found him strangely compelling, I think, like you both maybe.
Before I say why, though, like...
I do want to say, you flagged this before, Derek, that Johnson's business is to make me to find him compelling, and that's what the film is for.
And I don't think he would have given the directors that access without having some curatorial or propagandistic input.
He's got an image to sell.
He's got products to sell.
And the main ding in that image so far is a civil suit brought by his former fiancé, who he separated from after she got ill with breast cancer.
She accused him of being a dominating womanizer and breaking promises of support.
She lost the suit and she has to pay his legal fees.
But he also admits that he's just shit at relationships.
And that just shines through.
Like you mentioned this warmth with his son.
And I think that was very touching in some ways.
But I also thought like if you did not have your biohacking longevity journey to talk about, like what would you actually talk about with your kid, right?
Anyway, setting aside the personality stuff and just the craven narcissism of using a fortune on your own body, setting aside the carbon footprint, there's a kind of earnest quality to the character as portrayed.
He's fragile.
He's also a deep materialist in a way that reminds me of the hardcore sadhus and ascetics of old India.
Or like the hardcore body modification people who pierce themselves a thousand times and they end up hanging barbells from their butt cheeks to test their limits and stuff.
There's a degree, it's almost jackass-y, right?
Like, there's a degree of taking the body that seriously, but also recklessly in a bro-science way, making the body into an experimental lab that I find really interesting.
It's not something I would ever do, and maybe that's why there's a part of me that admires it.
And he also comes really close to an actual criticism of the capitalism that lets him be who he is, because his first main line in the documentary is, our society is insane.
Before he launches into a critique of consumption, not like general consumption, not consumption of the oligarch class, not American consumption or Global North consumption, but like personal consumption.
And that's why his answer to all of this is so tiny and inconsequential and individualistic.
He's really just reduced everything down to his own body and whatever green sludge he can pump through it.
He thinks he can push back against insanity by purifying his consumption.
I don't think that's going to work.
I know I mentioned this to you offline, Matthew, but I kind of put it to the beer test or maybe the hike test because I don't think Johnson drinks.
Of all the influencers we cover, I don't think I ever want to be in a room with Aubrey Marcus.
I've been in rooms with Mickey Willis.
I don't think I ever want to do that again.
But I can totally imagine going on a hike with Brian Johnson and having a conversation.
Me too.
I can also imagine him knocking on your door and trying to get you to convert to Jehovah's Witnesses or something like that.
He's got a bright, cheerful, winning kind of presentation.
I feel really close to you, Derek, and I want to help you to live forever.
Let's go on another hike together.
We're all basically saying a version of the same thing a few different times, right?
Which is that the documentary succeeds in making him more relatable and more of an empathetic character, which is what he wants.
That's exactly what he needs.
He doesn't want to be the weird Bruce Wayne.
That's right, right.
You may not live forever, but your image will.
Let's pull back for a moment because the notion of living forever is...
In our oldest literature, so the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's one of the planet's oldest extant texts.
It's centered around Gilgamesh's quest for immortality.
Then you come to the Bible.
It's filled with so many outrageous stories, like the key figures live to 969. Some of the lesser ones, like Jacob, that poor soul, only made it to 147. As it happens, Bible scholar Dan McClellan, who I know you follow, I love his feed.
He uses social media to debunk biblical nonsense.
And he actually just posted a video the other day that talks about this idea of biblical ages because people really do think that Bible characters live to 900.
And I just want to play part of that because I think it's fascinating.
There are no data that support any of these lifespans that exceed 100 years in the Hebrew Bible because people didn't live that long back then.
These ages, according to all of the data that we have, are fiction.
They are made up, just like the Sumerian kingless long before, where kings are reigning for tens of thousands of years before the flood, and then only twelve or thirteen hundred years.
After the flood.
And then when we get to the Akkadian versions during the Neo-Babylonian period, which are the literary inspirations for a lot of what's going on in the primeval history and the rest of Genesis, they're only like 500 years or so, which aligns more with what we find in Genesis.
So the data indicate these are fiction.
They're stories, you know, just like mythologies.
We have the founder of the unified China going back before biblical times.
They were microdosing mercury, he was, and others to try to live forever.
There was elevated levels found in his tomb.
This is old stuff.
We have a modern version in colloidal silver.
But the modern quest really came with the discovery of DNA from Francis Quick and James Watson.
And so ever since then, there's been this quest that really emerged in its modern form in Silicon Valley, of all places, to try to extend life for as long as possible.
And this comes around to Dave Asprey, who coined the term biohacking in 2004. And he says he wants to make it to 180. Johnson sometimes says forever, sometimes says he wants to make it to 200. But this path was paved by computer hackers that were DIY biologists in the 60s and 70s.
Because of the emerging computer technology that would become the internet, they were sharing engineering and biotechnology tips in early chat forums.
And they called this garage biology.
Combination of technology with this religious quest.
Dave Asprey himself worked in IT and cloud computing.
He founded a very early online web store in 1993. You have Peter Attia, who some people will probably know.
He was actually working on cancer immunotherapy, but then he dropped out to join McKinsey& Company in Palo Alto, and he founded a longevity clinic in 2014. He's someone who's invested in a number of supplements companies as well as other technology companies.
And Brian Johnson is also still heavily invested in tech.
Well, I'm guessing his portfolio is still there because he's put money into a number of AI-powered drug discovery platforms and drone logistic networks.
He founded a biotech startup or put money into Ginkgo Bioworks.
We come to this place where we have the documentary which shows how he takes over 100 pills a day and he does numerous protocols.
One jumped off at the screen at me.
Penis shockwave therapy.
Dave Asprey has posted about this therapy before.
Basically, you wave a wand around your junk and low-intensity sound waves are supposed to stimulate blood flow.
It is used therapeutically, apparently, to try to treat erectile dysfunction, but Asprey has boasted about it making him bigger and last longer.
Johnson doesn't go into this one, but this is what these guys are concerned with.
Now, Johnson does talk about Blueprint, which is his supplements company, because all...
All longevity protocols eventually lead to monetization.
And again, talking about Personable, he launched his company by taking a dig at AG1, which I am not against.
On Twitter, he wrote when he launched the company, cancelling your AG1 subscription is good science.
Shots fired.
And then someone replied who was genuinely asking, because he's a biohacking fan, this Twitter user, what makes Blueprint materially different from AG1? And then Johnson replied, science.
But apparently it's also money because you can get the Blueprint starter stack for only $125 and you get olive oil, Julian.
You also get cocoa powder.
Awesome.
There's the longevity mix, which is his marquee product.
Some people might remember I was in a New York Magazine profile on Andrew Huberman earlier this year.
A nutritionist, Adam McDonald, was also interviewed.
I really like his YouTube channel because he's a sports nutritionist who actually goes into things that can actually help you.
He's not just a critic of supplements, but he focuses on health and performance products.
And he broke down what's in...
Brian Johnson's longevity mix.
I want to play a clip from that.
Let's look at the longevity mix because this one is the main part of all stacks.
It claims to be everything that your body's asked for.
It's difficult to confirm or refute the claims because it's really nebulous and invites the assumption that it will just help you live longer and maintain a better quality of life.
There are these boxes on the page that just have words in them.
I guess legally it would make it easy for the company to say that they didn't technically claim anything.
They just grouped words together.
If you ask me, it's actually pretty smart.
So longevity...
The mix contains some...
Pretty well-researched ingredients in mostly effective dosages.
Creatine, ashwagandha, altinine and some taurine.
Some of those, such as creatine, have greater effects than others and you could argue that indirectly they improve your longevity, whether it was improved strength from creatine or better sleep from ashwagandha and altinine or slightly lower blood pressure from taurine.
Then you have your more speculative ingredients, the types that only companies trying to sell them really push.
The ones that either have limited research in terms of the number of studies or practical application We're simply the ones that have no human research at all.
Basically, AG1, because Johnson did the same thing with AG1. There's some shit that has some light evidence, but then there's a whole bunch of other stuff, and you don't know what's actually in it.
But I love that moment that you guys laughed, because there's just boxes with words on it on the site.
There's no context for it.
Supplements companies do this all the time.
He goes on to discuss all the ingredients in that video.
It's great.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
We've said it.
The documentary is mostly a puff piece, but there are moments of criticism that are slipped in, and Blueprint is part of it.
So as I said, he takes hundreds of pills every day, and he does dozens of interventions in his tightly scripted protocol.
But that's not science because you can't possibly understand what's doing what when you're doing all of that.
So there is a scientist that's featured in the film and he mentioned that very thing to Johnson on Twitter telling him that if he really wanted to make scientific claims about longevity, he'd use his money to fund clinical trials on one substance at a time.
Johnson blocked him, which totally tracks if you're trying to make money selling supplements without the need for the burden of proof.
Yeah, one person at a time, one substance at a time with multiple people.
Yes, from a diverse group, a clinical trial, actually doing trials, yeah.
So that kind of ultimately leads to how I feel about him as a businessman and a person.
I mean, it is actually really great marketing.
But there's not a lot underneath.
And it just worries me when people buy into what he's selling without even understanding that Johnson himself doesn't understand it.
But if that doesn't concern you, you'll be pleased to know you can buy...
The Blueprint personal daily stack that Johnson uses for just $343 a month.
So accessible, so inexpensive.
Yeah, and I just have to say here, the through line, I love where you started and where you ended, Derek, but the through line is, you know, whether we're talking about the ancient yogis, as Matthew referenced, Or we're talking about the Bible and claims about eternal life.
And this is true in other religions as well.
Or we're talking about snake oil salesmen.
Or we're talking about tech bros.
Behind all of it is the existential anxiety we feel about having knowledge of the fact that one day we will die.
And there's just a lot of different ways of trying to manage that, that people have sold to one another over time in one way or another.
Well, speaking of those sort of like buried existential concerns, as you flagged, Derek, I'm going to interview my friend, the religious studies scholar and lapsed Mormon Blair Hodges.
He's the host of Family Proclamation's podcast.
And he's going to be able to tell me a lot about Brian's Mormonism story, because I think that's really fascinating and probably at the root of some things that are hard to understand, because Mormonism is really a perfect...
American frontier religion because it is unapologetically materialistic.
I was DMing with Blair and he wrote me this.
He said that in Mormonism, all things are matter, including spirit.
I'm going to ask him more about how that actually works.
He says, the resurrection of the dead is a literal reconstitution of one's physical body, including actual particles that were part of its mortal state, only made permanent, and I imagine sublimely transformed so that they would be incorruptible.
Now, I don't think you guys have ever had to play Lego Marvel superheroes with an eight-year-old for hours at a time, but it reminds me of how whatever hero you're playing with, when they get murked, your bricks just explode.
Explode apart in a golden shower, but then you instantly respond with the same bricks flying back into shape and just clattering together like...
And then you're ready to go again.
And that's what it kind of makes me think of, is that there's this very atomic, materialistic vision of the body just dissolving and then coming back together again somehow.
And I think that the Brian Johnson story is something...
It has something to do with how the...
Transformation of Mormon ideas comes into the tech bro realm or modernity.
He left the church and this cost him his relationship with two of his kids, which is why the relationship with his eldest son, I believe he's the eldest son, becomes so important in this particular film.
But he has all of the manners and like the self-control affect of somebody like Mitt Romney.
You know, somebody who, you know...
You slide a cup of coffee to him across the diner table and he just puts his hand up and smiles and says, no, I can't touch that.
He says he's no longer a Mormon, but I think he's doing a lot of the rituals of Mormonism.
He's even walking around like topless all the time, which Mormons don't do, but he's so lily white pale, it looks like he's wearing this very tightly fitted version of the Mormon temple underwear or something like that.
Well, that's a good way as we kind of wind down here because I want to give some high-level thoughts.
But the first one comes around image and body image because there's a lot going on in this documentary.
And I am not a person to ever talk about fashion, but I watched it with my wife.
She gives me really good insights.
She taught me what a vampire facial is, which is...
Blood is drawn from your arm and then this plasma is spun through a centrifuge and then it's injected into your face.
So he's doing that in the actual documentary.
I didn't know what he was...
There's microneedling going on, but she's like, oh, that's a vampire facial.
He uses a lot of hair dye and has a whole hair protocol because you can see in certain moments, I am a balding man, so I know this very well.
He has male pattern baldness, but he has ways of hiding that.
And people have commented online that he does not look younger than he used to.
He actually looks older, which is another fashion thing that was really spearheaded by the Kardashians of changing your body with surgeries and techniques to look a specific way.
And if you just looked at Brian Johnson, you could probably tell he's from Los Angeles for that specific reason.
So it just brought to mind all of these ideas around talking about the biological age and how young you are there.
But then you're also just kind of looking sort of alien in your affect and your actual physical presence.
Yeah, and the lengths that he's going to to appear younger, the way so many people in the entertainment industry do, whether it's the hair dye or not going in the sun or the incredibly white teeth, there are things that are clearly cosmetic that are very easy to call out and go, there are things that are clearly cosmetic that are very easy to call out and go, These are not actually indicators of you staying eternally youthful.
You're just doing the same shtick everyone else does.
That's an interesting layer.
Yeah, I don't know that I would say that he looks older to me.
it looks like he's sort of adopted a parallel body in a way.
And one of the things that stands out is just how brittle and fragile everything appears to me.
Like I'm, I'm kind of anxious watching him walk around.
Because he really has to treat himself like this perpetual preemie infant in a permanent incubator.
Yeah, with zero body fat or close to it, right?
He's so much thinner.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you guys about that.
Is that optimal to have zero body fat?
It depends.
So there's a couple arguments.
So first I'll just say that having grown up overweight like Brian did, I understand body stigma.
I had eating disorders.
From afar, his eating patterns are an eating disorder.
They just present as that in a lot of ways.
But there's actually, having taught fitness classes and been in that world, the idea of a six-pack is very much a misnomer.
If you have one, great, I guess.
But there's actually the work that it takes to get that.
There's an argument.
That it actually gives you a lot of back damage because of how much emphasis.
Your core is meant to support your lower back.
It's not meant to look good.
Now, if it does, awesome.
It's fine, but that is not.
So again, it's pure aesthetics here.
Very healthy people have some fat in different places around it.
We get so focused on body image, which is really dangerous.
Yeah, so I think that...
Let me amend that because you're right.
I mean, I started out by talking about babies, and there's something about that too.
But babies with no body fat, which is very odd.
But the whole thing seems to point to this yearning for this return to innocence.
And that comes through with the light therapies, the fact that he's walking around in a glass house.
He kind of looks like often Luke Skywalker in the Bacta tank after the wampa beats him up, or a fetus photographed in the womb.
And I just felt like, you know, you don't want to see him scrape his knee.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like, is he the health version of Bruce Wayne or is he the boy in the bubble?
Yeah.
Who like has to be protected from absolutely everything.
Yeah, like he's some ultra expensive car.
And if you got a tiny scratch on him, it would feel horrible.
But it also, I had so many thoughts about this.
Like it also reminded me of a kind of Victorian Gothic vibe in which he really wants to achieve physical alchemy.
But things just get weirder over time.
And eventually, you know, he's probably only going to be able to stay alive by becoming his own Frankenstein and his own monster at the same time, right?
The portrait of Dorian Gray doesn't get burned up in the wildfires.
You mentioned protected from everything, Julie, and that was another thing that jumped out because there's a moment where he's talking about he's using a dating app and he goes at lengths of telling the woman, or at least he's telling the interviewer that he's told this woman, How much she does not want to date him.
And my wife blurts out, oh, he has a rejection fetish.
This idea that it's both this thing to protect yourself, but also to signal that you are so different from everyone else.
How could you possibly want to be in my aura at this time?
Which I thought was really insightful as well.
I've never been on a dating app.
I don't know how they work.
I have many friends who have success from them.
But I would imagine if you're on one and you are starting by telling someone how much you don't want to be with them, I don't know how you get to a healthy relationship from there.
It's such a painful actual sort of center point in the documentary because he gets to this point where his son goes off to college and then he's reflecting about how, yeah, you know, I understand the science of longevity really includes being able to I don't really relate to anybody, and I'm shit at relationships, and I don't have any friends, and he had to leave his Mormon marriage at the age of 26, and who knows how awful he was in that situation, and just how much relational wreckage he has behind him.
And that's where we see him trying to figure out, well, how can I gather all of my online fans to go on a walk with me, right?
Which is the compensation or the feeling of like, no, I'll have community this way.
Yeah, and that whole shtick around what he does on the dating apps and really making a case to these women of all the different reasons why they really don't want to have anything to do with him, that also reminds me a little bit of some of the old sort of myths around becoming a spiritual apprentice, right?
Where you have to get through all of these different barriers.
We're going to test you to see if you really are up for what it's going to take to be with me.
Well, Mormons are not celibate by nature, but he's on a track where, you know, if he probably would be very anxious about becoming, you know, physical or intimate with anybody else, but because who knows what could happen?
Who knows how that could screw up your protocol or poison you with something or have you lose your seminal energy or whatever.
It's hard not to imagine him in a sexual situation acting the same way he does with all of his other protocols.
It's all very clinical.
It's all very, very sterile.
Yeah, we've got to do the blue light on here.
We also have to mention, because Matthew, you and I had a laugh on this, about Prospera.
Now, anyone who watched the documentary, this is fascinating.
I'm just learning about it.
I've heard about these ideas before.
But it's a charter city that is on the island of Roatan in Honduras.
It's a special economic zone with its own fiscal, regulatory, and legal framework, and it's entirely funded by venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
It is called a Zone for Economic Employment and Economic Development, or a ZED. It is the brainchild of a Nobel Prize-winning economist named Paul Romer, who was the former chief economist of the World Bank.
Now, these ZEDs are designed to be unrepealable for 50 years.
Now, what does this mean?
It gives global investors time to experiment with ideas that are outside of the scope of federal regulations of whatever nation they're in.
So basically, this is a...
Whatever the fuck you want to do zone.
And so in theory, you get things like – that's the theory of it.
But what you get in the documentary are unregulated – Biotech gene therapies, which is why Johnson goes there.
So this is something that has never been tested.
And he's like, yeah, I'll try these new therapies.
And he's actually going back.
He's saying he gained 7% muscle mass from this gene therapy, and he's going back.
So back to your point of Frankenstein earlier, this is an actual literal version of Frankenstein that is being done in an economic zone that is outside of the – this is Scientology in the water.
Yeah, well, it's actually Jurassic Park, or Frankenstein in Jurassic Park, where you're like, well, no, we haven't tested this before, but it's going to be here, it's going to be enclosed, and then once we prove the concept, then we can invite everybody to partake and obviously sell it to them.
No, no, nothing could go wrong.
Nothing could go wrong.
Exactly, exactly.
The kind of monsters that will be created there.
But, you know, overall, my final thought on this is that this is just science being used as cover for religion.
I mean, from without it, I work, you know, I work, besides this podcast, working in biotech spaces and with companies who are raising investment money, doing sort of deal page writing for them.
But, like, I'm...
Constantly reading about science that could help people.
One company I worked for, for example, is specifically focused on pediatric cancer development because most therapeutics for pediatric cancers are repurposed from older people.
It kind of crosses over with vaccines.
We don't do blind trials on children because we need to see that it worked in older patients.
But there's a problem with cancer because there's a lot of unique cancers that affect children only.
And so this company is using AI to develop specific therapeutics for children.
I think that's awesome.
I think it is a good example of how science can evolve and through technologies to help people.
When I hear Johnson and everything they're doing and all of the crapshoot that you're just throwing into your body, I just can't...
Do anything but look back to the epic of Gilgamesh.
You're on the quest for longevity and we know how this ends, which is with death, which everything else does.
And I just wish that he would, like that scientist in the documentary recommended, use that money to fund some trials.
I know of a number of companies who could actually use investment money that are specifically targeting therapeutics for people in need.
That would actually be helpful to people.
So ultimately...
Yeah, maybe I'd go on a hike with him, but I'm not going to buy any blueprint.
Sorry, Julian, you'll have to get your olive oil somewhere else.
And I'm not going to take this science too seriously.
You know, Derek, I think if you did go on a hike with him, you'd probably be in a really good position to make the social determinants of health argument to him and actually say, hey, you know, I know you're spending $2 million a year on these protocols.
How much have you got left over?
Because you could...
You could really bolster your image by doing X, right?
You could really help out a bunch of people parallel to this kind of selfish thing that you're working on.
That's what people are saying.
I mean, it sounds like I think you would be well-suited to make a kind of friendly pitch that way.
Let's make it happen.
I would love to.
We're seeing Taylor Swift donating tons of money to Los Angeles right now, and Travis Kelsey as well.
