Bryan Johnson Wants to Live Forever (If You Call That Living)
How the "World's Healthiest Man" developed an autoimmune condition
Bryan Johnson is a pioneer in medicine: he is suffering from the world’s most famous case of disordered living.
For those unaware, Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur turned millionaire biohacker. After making a reported $300 million by acquiring Venmo and selling it to PayPal, he turned to a new goal: living forever. Bryan now spends a reported $2 million a year to achieve his simple philosophy — Don’t die.
He pursues this goal by turning his body into a relentless science experiment: downing as many as 100 supplements a day; eating a meticulously optimized vegan diet; undergoing constant blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds, and biomarker tracking; wearing devices that monitor nearly every physiological metric imaginable; subjecting himself to experimental longevity treatments; receiving blood plasma from his teenage son in a highly publicized (and later discontinued) transfusion experiment; and even measuring and comparing nighttime erections with his child as one of countless indicators of vascular health — all in pursuit of squeezing every possible fraction of a percent out of the aging process.
He publicly documents all of this, including his literal dick measuring contest against his son.
And last week, he announced on X that his stomach is eating itself.
He has developed autoimmune gastritis, a condition where the immune system attacks the cells in his stomach that produce acid. He’d already been living with hypothyroidism, another autoimmune disease, since his early twenties. (This will come as no surprise to those who know of the interrelationship between Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and gastritis, known as thyrogastric syndrome when they occur together, as they so often do.)
For more than 20 years, the man hell-bent on avoiding death has been inching closer towards his ultimate fate, propelled by his own immune system.
All of the resulting conversation has focused on one question: how did this happen?
The resulting discourse has provided no shortage of potential answers. And while some may say that it’s uncouth to speculate on other people’s health conditions, I would argue that the manner in which Bryan shares his health forays so publically invites this speculation, and for those of us who are health researchers this is verrry interesting data.
As with all disease, it is a combination of factors.
In Bryan’s case, the three biggest factors are most likely because he rigidly avoids basic, foundational human health needs including the sun and nutrient dense food, he has achieved peak stressmaxxing by over optimizing every single aspect of his health, and he appears to have never fully processed the abandonment issues he developed from his relationship with his largely absent father.
He also routinely gets vaccines — but given everything else I’ve learned about him, I am starting to suspect this is the least of his problems.
Bryan Johnson is, in my opinion, the worst biohacker with the largest platform. His health influence is so bad that I wonder if he’s not a plant, designed to walk the masses straight into transhumanism and early mortality. In this essay, I will…
