We know Bryan Johnson gobbles 100 pills a day. He pumps his son’s plasma through his veins. He does light therapy on his junk and wants to live forever. But do we understand how Johnson’s fascinations reflect his Mormon heritage? No. No we don’t.
That’s why we called our very own Salt Lake City expert, Blair Hodges, host of the Relationscapes podcast.
Blair joins Matthew to discuss Johnson’s transhumanism, which has roots in the LDS but has also led him away from it. They cover the spirituality of his money, whether he’s trying to become a living god, and how his home gym has some distinctive Mormon temple elements. Also: is Bryan really as polite as he seems, or is he hiding
Blair has degrees in journalism, religious studies, and disability studies from the University of Utah and Georgetown University. He directed communications for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies at Brigham Young University before moving to the nonprofit sector. He has served as communications director for Volunteers of America, Utah and RMHC of the Intermountain Area. He’s currently working on a research project on the history of intellectual disabilities in Mormon thought.
Show Notes
Relationscapes—Blair Hodges
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, as well as individually on Blue Sky, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
And we are independent media creators, so we really appreciate your support.
And with me today is friend of the podcast, Blair Hodges, religious studies wizard and host of the Relationscapes podcast, which is available on all podcast channels.
Welcome, Blair.
It's good to be here, Matthew.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
And you're joining me today not to talk about James Carse and the case against belief, which I think was our last visit, which was great.
But I want you to help us understand what's going on culturally and spiritually.
With Brian Johnson, who spends two million bucks a year on his longevity protocols with the aim of perhaps living forever.
We just did our main feed episode on him this week.
Derek went into a lot of great detail on the sketchy science behind his 100 pills per day regime and his gene scrambling practices.
But there's this big piece of the puzzle with him, which is just how Mormon...
This guy is.
And who better to talk with than you?
You share that Mormon heritage with this ageless wonder.
And so I asked you to watch the Netflix doc, Don't Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.
And here we are.
So let's just go with first impressions.
Based on your shared Mormon background, is Brian Johnson someone you recognize?
Do you walk in any of the same circles?
The documentary is actually the first that I'd ever personally heard about Brian Johnson.
I'm a lifelong Mormon.
I was born in the church, raised in the church, served a mission for the LDS Church.
I'm joining you right now from Salt Lake City, the headquarters where the global headquarters of the church are.
I did Mormon studies as a focus in my university education.
I worked for the church at Brigham Young University for eight years.
So I'm very plugged in and connected.
But had not heard of Brian Johnson.
And I don't know how long he's been disconnected from the church.
And I'm not sure that if I had put on the documentary that I would have clocked his Mormon background very quickly.
Because he seems more to now be more of this wellness guru tech bro kind of guy.
More than Mormon at this point.
So in terms of my first impressions of him, he didn't immediately come across as Mormon.
Now there were some things that started to clue me in.
His voice and his accent.
The biggest one was his son.
Being named Talmadge, which we can talk about that later, but I do know a few church members who know Brian.
Mormon circles aren't huge exactly, so some of the folks that I know have actually been really close with him.
In fact, there's a group called the Mormon Transhumanist Association.
It still exists.
These are Mormon transhumanists, and I know that Brian has presented at their conferences, and he was an enthusiastic participant there for a while, and the group still exists.
It claimed to be the largest religious collective of transhumanists in the world, which is interesting because most transhumanists are sort of post-religious or secular.
It's kind of a more secularized version of religion.
But I think these Mormons and Brian, while he was heavily involved, see Mormonism as particularly well suited to transhumanism.
This idea of the perfectibility of humans, the human race.
And my acquaintances tell me that Brian was really...
He was a dyed-in-the-wool believer.
He was all in.
They wouldn't have guessed he would ever leave the church.
They say that transhumanism kind of became a big catalyst for him leaving.
And then I think family dynamics probably played a role as well.
When your faith and perspective starts to differ from your loved ones in Mormonism, that can cause a lot of tension.
So that obviously comes up in the documentary as he's kind of estranged from two of his kids.
His ex-wife, I should say, her face is blurred out.
So I see a person who got really into transhumanism.
Well, we're going to get into how the transhumanism sits within Mormonism generally, or really can grow out of it.
But besides Johnson himself within this documentary...
I think the co-star is his money.
So what can you tell us about, you know, Mormon conceptions of mammon to start with?
Yeah, well, first I'd like to say I don't have his money and I kind of wish I did or maybe I don't.
Right.
It seems to be, it would be tough.
But yeah, I want to talk about two aspects of the money thing.
First, institutional wealth and then individual wealth.
And I think institutionally, Mormonism has come a long way from its organization back in 1830.
It started out, Joseph Smith came from a very poor family.
A lot of early Mormons, converts were from lower classes.
They were ridiculed for that.
And now it's grown to probably the second wealthiest Christian church in the world behind Catholicism.
Wow.
The net worth is estimated to be $250, $260 billion.
That's where the church currently sits.
I don't know how to add up the value of Islam or other global faiths that don't have a centralized governance structure, but in terms of an organized church, Mormonism is right up there with Catholicism.
I don't think Catholicism can be surpassed.
It's ancient enough.
How did that accumulation happen so fast?
Yeah, what's interesting is that it wasn't steady growth.
You'd think they just sort of...
Grew and grew and grew.
But even back in the 1960s, the church was actually heavily in debt to about the tune of $32 million.
It had...
Tried a really rapid expansion program, started building buildings all over the country and in different places in the world, and was really in financial arrears.
That's actually when the church stopped publicly publishing an annual financial statement, and they do that to this day.
You don't actually know their exact holdings.
They have a supposedly independent accounting firm that issues an annual.
it that just says, yep, everything's good.
And of course, we now know there's their problems with that because the church had set up a number of shell corporations and was exploiting tax law.
But after the 1960s, they they just got a lot more conservative with how they used money.
So all faithful members are required to donate 10 percent of their income to the church.
No questions asked.
It's called tithing.
And as that money added up, the church also had a lot of for profit businesses and land holdings in Utah.
It was the pioneers that came and settled here.
They were able to control where the railroad went and where, you know, Where businesses grew up.
And so a lot of for-profit companies, a newspaper, a publishing arm, banks, hospitals, all kinds of things, and just started investing that money and had really great, really smart investors.
And they took that income, that tithing income from the church and the business income, and now it's ballooned, as I said, to over $250, $260 billion.
So you're not contributing this much, but if we can imagine that, well, I think Brian Johnson's net worth is about $400 million.
Over the course of his career, he's probably chipped in, or at least until he left the church, about $40 million.
I mean, that would be a not uncommon story for a wealthy Mormon, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, Mitt Romney as well, one of the wealthier Mormons.
There are quite a number of wealthy Mormons.
A lot of the folks that are involved in the Mormon Transhumanist Association and its leadership have connections to the software industries.
One of the former presidents, his dad founded WordPerfect, which was the word processing kind of before Microsoft Word took over.
WordPerfect was the thing, yeah.
So there's a lot of money to be made and to be had.
The economy in Utah is pretty strong.
That's the central base of the church.
And like I said, just really smart investing, and they've hit on a lot of investments.
Yeah, and then there's MLMs as well.
Oh, for sure.
You've got new skin, you've got, you know, this is sort of the MLM capital.
How do they justify it all?
I mean, you know, Jesus tells disciples to sell all they have, to give it to their poor, follow him.
What do the Mormons say about that?
They typically point out that running a church isn't free, so it costs an estimated $6 billion annually to run the church, according to the church.
That includes paying its higher officers.
The lay ministry doesn't get paid, so your local congregation leaders, bishops that are over small congregations, stake presidents that are over a number of those congregations, they aren't paid.
But your apostles, your 70s, receive a somewhat modest, I mean, to me it's a...
Ton of money, over $100,000 a year.
So paying church officers, building and maintaining its properties.
It has an aggressive temple building program right now.
And the church also gives about a billion dollars annually to direct charitable concerns.
People criticize that and say, well, if you have $200 billion, $1 billion annually is not all that much.
I'm kind of sympathetic to that, but also I've worked for a number of nonprofits in Utah that directly benefit from...
And still do benefit from the generosity of what the church gives.
So there is quite a bit of charitable giving, not just in the United States, but abroad as well.
And then church leaders will say that they've built a huge nest egg.
They see it as sort of a rainy day fund, that if the church needed to, it would be able to persist and run as...
It is today for a number of years because of this reserve.
And they also say a market crash could wipe out some of those holdings or things like that.
So the underlying ethic that the church embraces seems to be that there's no problem with money per se.
Money is sort of a neutral thing as long as you use it to build up God's kingdom on earth.
That's what they see themselves as doing.
And so having wealth is a sign of doing it right and having God's favor as much as anything else.
All right, so we don't know anything about Brian Johnson's charitable instincts, so let's turn to individual wealth and how that works in Mormonism.
Yeah, so critics of Mormonism, and I think especially some former Mormons and ex-Mormons, tend to point out that, correctly, that Mormon scripture, which includes the Bible, the Book of Mormon, a book called The Doctrine and Covenants, which was written by, revealed to Joseph Smith, the original.
The founding prophet of the church.
All these scriptures have a lot to say about the dangers and the evils of wealth.
And actually, the Book of Mormon, I think even more than the Bible, speaks about inequality in really aggressive ways, which of course made sense to Joseph Smith and his early followers who came from, as I said, the lower classes.
So the Book of Mormon purports to be revelation for today.
So it was written by an ancient people.
The record was given to Joseph Smith, and these ancient people are delivering a message to the present.
And one of the main messages in the book, I'll quote it right here from the Book of Mormon.
It says, speaking of the future, So it's excoriating greed.
It's excoriating Kind of ornate church buildings and the church is building these amazing temples.
So some people will say, hey, what's going on here?
You're kind of doing the opposite of this.
And I think a lot of Mormons would apply these types of warnings to individuals instead of institutions.
So it's not unusual, I don't think, for wealthy Mormons themselves to rise up in the ranks of the church.
As I said, Mormonism has a lay ministry.
Local congregations are led by...
Local leaders, they don't get paid for their work, and that's a lot easier to do if you have some money, if you're not focused as much all the time on nine-to-five work or whatever.
Also, if you're wealthy, it's sort of a sign that you have some kind of acumen, that you're talented and probably that you are successful.
So again, the Book of Mormon talks about wealth being the product of righteous living.
So early on in the record, you have a people who are told by God, if you keep my commandments, you shall prosper and be led to a land of promise.
You shall prosper in the land.
This is a recurring theme in the Book of Mormon.
It keeps going back to this.
If you keep the commandments, you'll prosper.
That includes wealth.
But be careful, because when you get wealthy...
Then things get really sticky and you start oppressing people.
So Mormons will call it the pride cycle.
It really should be called the wealth cycle.
It's this pattern that happens in the Book of Mormon of wealth, generation, and accumulation, greed, centralization, oppression of the poor, and then a collapse, and then it kind of starts all over again.
All right.
So it does sound like there is a critique around, you know.
The appropriation of surplus value, for example, or, you know, the kind of wealth that exploits or despoils the environment, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And you have, like, progressive-minded Mormons who can make use of Mormon scripture in very easy ways to point out the systemic issues of wealth inequality, but also personally, and I think...
For someone like Brian, and again, he's no longer a member of the church, but he would have been raised with this idea of wealth being a good thing depending on what you do with it.
So I'll read another section from the Book of Mormon here.
This is from a book inside it called the Book of Jacob.
It says, Think of your brethren like unto yourselves.
Be familiar with all and free with your substance that they may be rich like unto you.
But before you seek for riches, seek for the kingdom of God.
And after you've obtained a hope in Christ.
You shall obtain riches if you seek them, and you'll seek them for the intent to do good, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to liberate the captive, to administer relief to the sick and afflicted.
So that's a core principle of the Book of Mormon.
If you're seeking riches, first of all, you've got to be righteous to do it, and second of all, you'll do it because you want to be a blessing to others.
And I think Brian actually kind of, in a way, still sees himself as doing this.
I see him as saying like, Okay, sure, I could fund these clinical trials or this or that.
I'm going to make myself the experiment.
I'm going to put my money into myself as a way to find out, and then that can bless everybody.
Right, seek ye the kingdom of God first before ye seek the actual riches.
I mean, that's the...
scriptural stuff that we always look at, which is you can really sort of push it in whatever way you want.
The borders orders of it are pretty porous and flexible, right?
It's not like there's going to be somebody who says, no, you've sought for the kingdom of God enough on your own, Brian.
Now you've got to sort of dole out.
I suppose he might have elders or mentors who might sort of try to nudge him this way or that way if he's still part of the church or not.
I don't know that anyone would individually sort of approach him about it, but it's the kind of thing you'd pick up at church.
Like, Mormons go to church every Sunday.
They hear talks.
Instead of sermons, they say, We heard a talk today.
Any member of the congregation could be asked to give a talk.
So you're going to hear these messages from fellow congregants.
They're not necessarily going to pull you aside and directly be like, now, Brian, you're getting pretty wealthy.
What are we doing with your money?
That would probably be pretty taboo.
I haven't experienced anything like that.
I'm not wealthy, so I guess I... But it sounds like there's a politeness protocol that would probably override that.
Okay, so we're going to get to that at the end because he is a very cheerful character.
You know, bro science as religion kind of turn here, because when we were planning this out, you said this fascinating thing to me in text.
You told me that Johnson's hypermaterialism is really Mormon in the sense that...
In the religion, all things are matter, including spirit.
That 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 they are made permanent.
So can you say more about that?
Like, how is spirit matter in Mormonism?
Yeah, Mormonism is thoroughly materialist.
And I think more than most faiths.
And when we say materialist...
We're not talking about money right now.
We're not talking about capitalism.
We're talking about actual matter.
You're asking about spirit matter.
So let's go back in time a little bit.
Mormonism seems like it's kind of a latecomer to the religion game.
Charles Dickens famously was scandalized as Mormonism spread through England.
That Mormon founder Joseph Smith claimed that these heavenly visitors delivered these ancient records to him and engraved them on plates, which he translated by revelation.
And he scoffed about it.
Charles Dickens wrote, what?
Angels in the age of railways?
He's basically like, what the hell is this?
Like, who's believing this?
And Joseph Smith himself was actually kind of sympathetic.
To that mindset as well.
He was actually a really big advocate of education and scientific progress.
He started a university in the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois, which at the time rivaled Chicago in size.
And if the Mormons hadn't been summarily kicked out of the state at the gun barrel, probably would be the first or second biggest city.
And you wouldn't have a Salt Lake City.
You'd have a Nauvoo.
But Joseph's revealed scripture.
Kind of weaved in some scientific ideas of his time and materialism was part of that.
So his revealed scripture insisted that truth is one great whole.
Any truth anywhere in the world, he said, should be gathered into Mormonism.
So when it came to spirit, he taught that everything has some sort of material substance behind it and therefore a causal explanation.
The idea is that this earth that we live on and all of its people are in some sense already sanctified by God.
Becoming mortal and getting a body for Mormons and for Joseph Smith was a step forward.
It was a fortunate fall rather than, oh, Adam and Eve ate this fruit and they became gross and they were going to die and this sucks and God has to come fix it all and elevate everybody.
It was like, no, becoming embodied is a good thing.
And it's towards something even better.
And Joseph Smith put God himself into that plan, insisting that God has a body and that God is bound by certain eternal laws as well as anyone else is.
That there's this eternal matter and there's a way to deal with it.
And when you know how to deal with it, that's the power of godliness.
And so this means there's no such thing as a miracle in Mormonism.
It's just the outcome of eternal laws being properly applied in ways that we don't comprehend.
And to Mormons and to Joseph Smith, God wants people to learn those laws and progress, but he wants them to sort of figure it out.
He's not going to give them all the answers.
It's part of this life to learn and grow.
And this is where people might have heard that Mormons believe they can become gods someday or rule over their own planets and stuff.
But for Mormons, that's not part of the day-to-day experience of the religion.
And even those who think in those ways, the idea is not to just become this god and become all-powerful.
It's to lift others up.
Again, it gets back to that seek the kingdom of God.
And what are you going to do with that?
You're going to lift other people up.
You're going to raise other people up.
So everything being matter, everything being spirit, even spirit being matter, is part of this overall plan, this cosmology that God's part of and humans are part of.
And if you learn to do it the right way.
then that plan continues.
Religious structure, I think, because everything that you just said seems to challenge and maybe even collapse all of the Cartesian echoes of everything else that most other people are brought up with in their religions of origin.
So what you're saying is that...
The story, which I think becomes kind of a joke on South Park, that you inherit your own planet with your sister-wives in the sects where polygamy has persisted.
Is that a metaphor for the majority of Mormons, or was it always a metaphor for some of them?
Yeah, I think that's been taken more and less literally over time.
It certainly was a big emphasis.
In the wake of Joseph Smith's death, it was something that church leaders after him really developed.
There's a man, Orson Pratt, Parley Pratt, these early Mormon apostles.
Brigham Young was part of this story, really emphasizing that style of plan.
Mormonism has now shifted sort of away from that, and most Mormons today think more in terms of having your family together forever, that eternal life is to be with the ones you love.
And some of them, and I think that...
The top church hierarchy certainly believes that that actually does include procreation in the afterlife.
Wow.
I think the theological reason why Mormonism is so insistent against gay marriage, against transgender folks, because they believe that there's something inherently eternal and true about heterosexual union, including sexual union, and that this is sort of how God populated this planet by creating spirit children.
Every human is part of this family.
But again, Mormons are just thinking mostly in terms of their own families.
Like, when I die, I'll be with my spouse again.
My kids will be with me.
We'll be together.
And I don't think most members really get as far as thinking about, like, oh, I'm going to have my own planet and populate it and stuff.
Like, that's kind of more, I would say it's more folklore in Mormonism today.
Most Mormons just think about being with your family forever.
Well, I mean, folklore, but also more mainstream, we still have this conception that if you're not participating in the heteronormative reproduction, whether it's here or in the afterlife, you're not really doing your job, right?
Correct.
You're not going to be queer.
In the cosmos, yes.
And actually, you can't be, because you wouldn't be doing your job.
Correct.
And if you're righteous, by the way, and you're gay...
Guess what?
The resurrection is going to fix that for you, so it's all going to be good.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so post-mortal conversion therapy.
Oh, man.
Okay, well, speaking of family, we mentioned him before.
You know instantly that Brian Johnson is Mormon because his eldest son is named Talmadge.
So how does that figure in?
Yeah, as soon as I saw Talmadge, I was like, whoa, light bulb, okay.
Talmadge is not a first name you hear all the time, right?
No.
This is clearly a direct reference to an early Mormon apostle of the early 20th century.
His name is James E. Talmadge.
And this tells us a lot, I think, about Brian and his Mormonism.
So James Talmadge was one of the most highly educated people to ever become a Mormon apostle.
The Mormons have 12 apostles that lead the church.
They say it's constructed like Christ's church in the ancient days, 12 apostles.
And a president of the church, they're all considered prophets, seers, and revelators.
So Talmadge, he was a chemist, a trained chemist, and a geologist with a PhD.
And it was unusual for someone like him to rise in the ranks.
He was part of this scientific advancement wing of Mormonism that was happening around the turn of the century.
He was progressive.
He believed, again, in these ideas that you should gather up all truth.
It should all be part of Mormonism.
And his views ultimately lost out to other church leaders who had different views.
They shifted the church more toward Christian fundamentalism and anti-evolution perspectives, that evolution was evil and bad.
And Talmadge, as a geologist and chemist, was like, what are you talking about?
This is just, you know, this is...
God working according to God's laws.
We can reconcile this with Mormonism.
In fact, Mormonism proves the truthfulness of evolutionary views.
Well, to these more fundamentalist-minded leaders, that wasn't the case.
And even today, I think the church kind of tries to have it both ways.
And I think this is probably where some of Brian's discomfort with the church came from.
So I mentioned I worked at Brigham Young University.
It's the church's flagship university.
There, you have professors today, this very day, in the religious education department.
They don't have a religious studies department because why study it?
We're just educating.
I wish I was joking, but that's really what's going on.
But you have professors in the religious education department who insist that evolution is a demonic falsehood.
And then, this is at an accredited university, then at the same school, they have a terrific biology department there.
You can get a state-of-the-art...
Education in biology.
I know professors in the biology department who are absolutely terrific scholars and who are church members, faithful and active, who see no conflict between those things.
But I think a lot of Mormons still are in this fundamentalist mindset.
So for Brian to name his son Talmadge, I think he was aligning himself with that tradition.
In Mormonism, of scientific progress, of optimism, of gathering up truths throughout the world, of connecting with the world, not being insular, he obviously had a lot of affinity with that side of Mormonism, and I think that probably caused some tension for him.
I know I've certainly experienced that myself, that that is not the predominant view in Mormonism today, and the more you embrace that, the less comfortable and less conforming you are at church, which I think that circles us.
Back to transhumanism, again, Mormons have long held to the belief that technological advancement would be part of God's plan.
So advances in communications technology, that's God's spirit.
Coming down and inspiring people to make it so the gospel can spread further through all this technology.
Health technology, the same way.
Anything that can improve a person's life can be part of this gospel project.
That's certainly right in line with James Talmadge's beliefs.
And to the point where, I mean, Mormonism, people might be picking up on this can...
Turn dark really quick.
Mormonism flirted with eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The idea that living a Mormon life would perfect the human race.
And as soon as you're talking about perfecting the human race, you start pointing out who's not perfect and start coming up with reasons why they're not.
In fact, polygamy was tied into this, that the sex practices of Mormons...
Through polygamy would elevate the human race.
This was a higher way to procreate.
And they were responding to critics who were saying polygamy is going to cause birth defects and cause all kinds of health issues and it's gross and it's incestuous and bad and it's going to corrupt.
And Mormons are like, actually, no, polygamy is the true way.
It's going to elevate everybody.
Right, except maybe women.
But it sounds like, you know, if you had the grace to afford polygamy, your lineage deserved to flourish.
Like, that would be the sort of proof of concept.
Well, with regard to the materialism, though, and this very surprising strain within Mormonism that moves towards the sciences in a very particular and, you know, agenda-filled way.
I get this atomistic picture of, you know, how the body is seen.
And I wonder if that makes a kind of micromanagement of its particles.
Like, you know, Brian Johnson is spending all of his time targeting precise tissues with microdoses of this drug and that drug.
Does that make sense from a Mormon perspective?
Is it like, is he taking apart a pocket watch to clean it so that it'll run forever?
Yeah, so I think as people can kind of pick up, I don't think most Mormons have sat down and thought through the metaphysics of it, but I think Brian has.
I really do.
I think that he, yes, that he's thinking about, like, targeting things on this sort of micromanaging level.
And he's actually written stuff before he kind of wrote this book of fiction.
I forget the name of it, but it's kind of about his transition out of Mormonism.
He's critiquing Mormonism in terms of scrupulosity.
He's saying, okay, Mormons have this plan.
You have to follow it to exactness, and that's going to save everybody, but it's really hard, and that causes problems.
I don't like the scrupulosity.
I don't like the regimen.
Mormonism preaches perfectionism, which you can make all these cultural critiques.
What's interesting to me is he's now carried all that with him, so he is doing this sort of, to me, a very Mormon approach to his physical health, and physical health...
It has long been an important part of the Mormon project.
I mentioned polygamy as one way that Mormons believed they were elevating health, but there was more.
Joseph Smith revealed a health code that Mormons call the word of wisdom in the 1830s.
And originally, it was a word of wisdom, not a commandment.
It was like, here's God's views on how to be healthy.
And it included things like hot drinks aren't for the body, alcohol.
Try to avoid that.
Smoking tobacco and any kind of tobacco, no.
That's to like heal your cow or something.
Don't eat too much.
AG1, like smoothies.
What did he have?
Recipes?
Yeah.
It was part of the temperance movement, right?
It was part of this religious move to elevate the human body as a temple of God.
And this is why Mormons today don't drink alcohol typically.
They don't smoke or not supposed to use or abuse drugs.
And I see Brian.
Kind of pursuing a sort of secular version of the word of wisdom, which in the church has become a commandment.
It was a word of wisdom.
Now you have to abide it if you'd like to participate in the temple, the highest rituals in the Mormon church.
I see him doing a secular version of like, okay, I've got my regimen.
And just like Mormons would say, if every blessing from God follows...
From obeying a commandment.
So I see him as saying, like, if you do it right, you will reap the benefits.
There's got to be this algorithm that's going to solve the puzzle of health.
And he's left Mormon scrupulosity and taken on this scrupulosity of health in his body.
Right.
Now, can that go too far for the Mormon mainstream or even adventurous, scientifically-minded Mormons?
Like, does the body as a temple idea go overboard when we're talking about plasma injections?
Yeah, I mean, that's the question.
I think most, I really think most Mormons today would see what Brian's doing and sort of feel like...
Like you do, or like I do, which is like, whoa, this seems extreme.
I'm not really particularly comfortable with this.
I'm also kind of intrigued by this.
Like, I'm going to kind of see what happens to you.
Yeah, I think everybody's kind of wishing that he was older, actually.
Or at least people who are our age.
It's like, I wish you kind of were 70 instead of actually younger than me right now.
Yeah, but I think what really strikes me about his whole approach, though...
That maps on Mormonism as well, is that the original revelation, the original word of wisdom, talked about avoiding these substances and having good health as part of a public health concern.
And that there were kind of these scheming folks that were trying to cause addiction and stuff.
And Mormons today will point to the tobacco industry and all that's been discovered about all of their horrible...
I mean...
They were doing the climate change thing before climate change where they were saying, oh, tobacco's good for you.
Dr. Smith says enjoy this.
Put a pep in your step with a cigarette each morning.
And like, no, it was a conspiracy.
Like it was people making money.
And the word of wisdom is like, hey, we need to think about public health as well.
But Mormons today don't really think, you know, aligning more with the Republican Party.
They're not as focused on communal and public health.
They're focused individualistically, which is I'm not going to drink alcohol.
I'm not going to smoke.
My kids aren't going to do that.
We're not thinking about the system in which that exists.
And I think for Brian, he is also individualistically pursuing health.
He's not funding clinical trials.
You know, one of the guys in the documentaries criticizing him for like, hey, why don't you put this money into this study that we can actually draw scientific conclusions from instead of just making yourself a lab rat?
And Brian blocked him on Twitter.
So Brian's taking this individualistic sort of Messiah type of approach.
He even compares himself to Jesus.
He like his dad says he wanted to be a Joseph Smith.
He wanted to found a movement.
So he's like, I'm going to do that.
Health individualistically.
I'm going to be the example, the lab rat, and then other people can follow me.
And I think that maps on to how Mormons.
A lot of Mormons view the word of wisdom today as well, which is an individualistic program instead of a public health program.
Well, speaking of individualism and maybe self-regard and self-concern, maybe a little bit of narcissism, he admits he's shit at relationships, right?
On our Thursday episode this week, I gave some of the details of the civil suit that was filed against him by an ex-partner for alleged neglect and cruelty.
We know that he divorced his Mormon partner.
He's estranged from two of his kids, and it seems that they're still part of the church, and that's been a matter of estrangement between them.
Um, what can you tell us about where his sort of relational skills as presented in the documentary intersect with, uh, these monastic desires that he seems to have?
Yeah.
And I don't personally know anything about his relationship any more than what we see in the documentary.
Um, But I can say that family separation in Mormonism can be extremely painful.
I mentioned how important the family is to...
The Mormon cosmos.
It's sort of your eternity.
And the idea, there's this idea of like, we don't want any empty chairs in heaven is what some parents will say, like empty chairs at the dinner table kind of a thing.
And former Mormons and some progressive Mormons have coined this sad heaven that Mormonism wants to teach that families can be together forever.
But what it ends up teaching is families can't be together forever unless.
They do X, Y, Z. And so to see Brian disconnected from his family that way, we don't know, right?
We don't know.
Maybe he was a total jerk in his family.
Maybe there were other issues.
Maybe he cheated on his partner or whatever.
Whatever the case is, leaving the church.
I'm sure is a big part of this.
And people who leave can definitely often talk about feeling ostracized, judged by people who stay in the church, seen as a threat.
It's not often as extreme as your Scientology, where they become suppressive persons and everybody's supposed to ignore them.
It's more just a cultural thing of like, I don't know exactly who you are anymore.
I feel kind of uncomfortable about this.
I might harbor my own fears that I could.
I follow in that path, and I don't like that because I'm comfortable and love my Mormonism, so I'm going to kind of hold you at arm's length.
So I see him, and his son talks about it as well, feeling alienated and kind of reconnecting with his dad and how much they connect on this level in ways that nobody can because they've both left the church.
And for all we know, Brian did some terrible things, or maybe he didn't.
What we do know is it is tragic to see him.
Disconnected from his family this way.
And this is definitely something that happens in Mormonism.
Mormonism doesn't have a monastic tradition in terms of having monks or nuns or people that go off and dedicate themselves completely to contemplation or anything like that.
I mean, heck, even our missionary program, you have to have a— You have to have a companion.
No missionary goes out alone.
So Mormonism is very social and very communal.
And I think that's one of the reasons Brian came across as quite lonely to me in the documentary.
He's seeking human connection.
He's like trying to meet up with people from Twitter to find community.
Okay, I might be stretching here, but...
I have this pop culture image.
I think it comes from big love of the inner sanctum of a Mormon temple.
And you enter it, you know, on special days.
You wear your finest raiment.
You sit around in luxurious chairs.
You're rehearsing for a divine afterlife.
Is this kind of what Brian Johnson is doing in his fabulous Venice Beach House?
Well, at first, I didn't think so.
I saw his house as sort of SoCal Tech Bro type place.
And I thought, okay, this is just sort of almost cookie cutter.
But then he gets into his gym, and I don't know a lot of gyms like this.
The walls are covered with these murals of vegetation and outdoors kind of thing.
This is what Mormons experience.
Anyone who's toured a Mormon temple before it's closed off to the public will know that the instruction rooms that we sit in, and as a Mormon, I've done all of these rituals myself as well.
The walls are covered in these beautiful images of the world.
And you begin in the Mormon temple ceremony as though you're an Adam and an Eve in a Garden of Eden and that you're going through that process yourself.
And the walls are covered in vegetation and beautiful outdoor.
So I see him – I know he's done with Mormonism, but it seemed to me like he had built his own sort of temple where he was perfecting his own body, that he was putting himself in this environment.
Which is so weird, too, because he's surrounded by beauty.
You look out his windows and he's got these ocean views and these wonderful things.
But here he's built to himself this sort of simulated temple where he's perfecting himself.
And it struck me as quite Mormon, actually.
Right.
And he's not listening to talks or reading scriptures.
He's doing squats.
Exactly.
Exactly so.
He's doing that body perfection thing.
The body's a temple.
amazing can i put one other footnote on that yeah um i wanted to point out that some of the discourse around brian is that he's weird and awkward and like maybe robotic and stuff and is that like a mormon thing they think i think of mitt romney i just want to point out that like for me i yeah i don't know a ton of mormons that have the affect of brian and stuff i think some of this discourse can slip into ableism yeah i think neurodivergence might be a factor i can't diagnose people obviously but like i encourage people to be careful about how they talk about uh
Brian and folks like Brian, like Mark Zuckerberg, even Elon Musk.
I have big beefs with these folks.
But when we make it about their awkwardness or stuff like this, we kind of slip into territory that I don't think we want to go to.
I think progressives and liberals see this with Trump when they talk about his weight and stuff.
And people are like, hey, maybe we don't need to go after his appearance.
I think we should keep that in mind with personality as well.
And so for Brian, again, I'm not diagnosing him.
I like to stick to—I'm way less comfortable with his wealth and what he's doing with it than the fact that he just seems kind of weird to me and awkward.
Rounding up here, and my apologies if this is a stereotype, but my impression is of a lot of Mormons, he has a kind of winning charisma about him.
He seems to be bright, cheerful, approachable.
He reminded me of my one and only visit to your hometown of Salt Lake City.
I was there on a cross-country drive.
I stayed overnight in a hostel, and then I spent the afternoon.
I don't know.
I can't remember where there's a boulevard in front of...
Temple Square.
Temple Square.
Okay, so I walked along there.
I realized that I wasn't...
I think there's a visitor's center where there's some...
incredible displays of the entire Mormon story.
And it felt like going to a museum or a science center or something like that.
Um, it, it kind of reminded me of, um, I don't know if you play Halo or if you've seen it, The last video game I ever played, actually, was Halo.
I think I beat Halo 3, and then I haven't really gamed ever again.
Okay, all right, all right.
Well, check out some of the visuals for Halo Infinite, or you can watch the series because they give you really good visuals of how the Halo is actually conceived of, this sort of bright, manufactured...
Beautiful planet that is on this sort of ring in space that's hovering and it's placed there by this ancient society and all of the buildings are gorgeous and they have this kind of like Mormon architecture to them as well.
Yeah, so anyway.
Battlestar Galactica was inspired by Mormonism as well.
Oh, was it?
Oh, damn.
So anyway, it's really beautiful.
And then the people who approached me while I was on the square.
To try to interest me in coming to a class or coming to a service or something like that.
They were uniformly the most pleasant, but also most beautiful and beautifully put together, well-dressed people I've ever met in my life.
It was kind of like, I mean, the setting was halo, but it's like everybody was AI generated, you know, to be absolutely a perfect representative of this movement.
Yeah, they didn't send me to Temple Square on my mission.
Yeah, so in all of this, I see, I can feel, when Brian comes onto the screen, I'm like, oh yeah, I can picture him there.
I can imagine him doing a mission.
I can imagine him in those clothes.
I can't imagine him or anybody on that square playing a gangster or somebody from New York City, like you talking to me.
So there's this politeness.
I'm walking to the temple here.
That's right, that's right.
What does that politeness conceal?
I guess it depends on who's being polite.
Mormonism definitely believes in the power of appearances.
There's a sense in which every member represents the church.
There's a saying, every member a missionary.
And there's also a saying about...
Having the image of Jesus in your countenance.
And people talk about having a light in your eyes.
It's this optimism.
It's this knowledge that you're secure in your beliefs about what life is for.
And following God's plan brings happiness.
It's called the plan of happiness in Mormonism.
There's a scripture that says men are that they might have joy.
And just like all scripture, it does say men instead of like people.
But there's a sense in which living the gospel will change who you are and will make you better, will elevate you, not only because that's just good for you, but also because you become a walking, talking representative of the church that will help bring others to the truth.
And it's definitely experienced that way of like, we like this way of life.
We want to share this way of life with others.
We need to be good representatives of it.
And so that politeness, I think, is part of the demeanor that Mormons are encouraged to develop to connect with other people who aren't Mormons.
As a missionary in our official missionary handbook, the phrase used there was, "Carry yourself.
Hmm.
And these are, you know, 18-year-old boys and 19-year-old girls and expecting us to carry ourselves with quiet dignity.
And I can tell you that we didn't always do that.
The missionaries you see on the street, you know, they like to play around and goof around and play practical jokes and do all sorts of fun stuff behind the scenes and have interesting conversations.
But yeah, when we're talking to Matthew Remsky on Temple Square, we're going to have that smile.
We're going to have that.
And I think an honest concern.
I definitely experienced my mission as a time of really trying to connect with other people.
This is where I got interested in other religions and why I ended up studying religious studies.
It backfired on them.
You went on mission and you became interested in other things and you started reaching out and you started seeing other ways of life.
Well, they still got eight years of my professional life as I worked for the church.
So, I don't know.
Their investment might have paid off a little bit.
But yeah, the politeness can conceal stuff.
Because appearance matters so much, it can be easier to get away with affinity fraud.
Utah is kind of the affinity fraud capital of the United States, especially investment schemes.
MLMs, again, as you mentioned, can be very...
Affinity fraud based, which is like, hey, join my downline and we're all going to get rich.
This is going to be great.
Most people that enter into those arrangements end up heavily in debt.
Most people don't make money on those.
Your bishop offers you a great investment idea.
This happens a lot.
The churches actually had to issue official statements to discourage members from investing with each other.
Like, hey guys, let's not do that.
Scam the other guys.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's direct our scams to the world.
But yeah, that politeness can definitely cover up really dark things.
You can play the part of a Mormon and behind the scenes not be that.
So Mormons might point to an Old Testament scripture, a Hebrew Bible scripture that says, the Lord looks on the heart, not the outward appearance.
That's definitely something that comes up sometimes for Mormons of like, hey, it's not always how it looks.
