The Immortality Gladiators

Social media and radical life extension

Written by Nicholas Agar.

Radical life extension is having a moment. Some billionaires hoard money to colonize Mars; others want to buy their way out of death.

Prominent among them is Bryan Johnson, a 47 year-old tech entrepreneur turned full-time longevity experiment. He’s the subject of the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, which follows his obsessive quest to slow and perhaps even halt aging. Johnson is his own test subject, enduring a punishing regimen: 130 pills a day, precisely measured meals, plasma exchanges, full-body MRIs, and regular check-ups with his personal longevity consultant. After two years, he claims to have reversed his biological age by more than five years. In 2023 he celebrated the “rectal biological age” of an 18-year-old.

The Netflix special presents his life as the apotheosis of self-absorption, though Johnson insists it’s all for humanity’s benefit. Few people can afford his routine, but that’s the point – his wealth permits him to push “the absolute outermost edge of possibility” for longevity science. Project Blueprint is the name for his plan to eventually rejuvenate everyone. If it succeeds, premature death will become a thing of the past.

Watching Don’t Die, it becomes clear that Johnson’s path to immortality may be cut short – not by bad science or sceptical critics, but by the very stardom brought by his success. Social media has further enriched him and made him famous. The Buggles told us that “Video killed the radio star”. There is a good chance that social media will kill the rejuvenation star.

Social media is trying to kill Bryan Johnson

Johnson started with money made in tech. He founded a company specializing in mobile and web payment systems. But he’s now turned his battle against aging into a lucrative business. The Netflix documentary doubles as an infomercial for Project Blueprint’s rejuvenation products. He will sell you expensive extra virgin olive oil purportedly optimised for anti-aging and mischievously branded as “Snake Oil”. His over a million Instagram followers include fans in awe about how “the world’s healthiest person stays fit”. Of course, social media brings the haters too. The more controversy he generates, the greater the engagement, and the more supplements he sells.

Historically, our medical risk pioneers have often been the poor and disenfranchised – those whose consent was, at best, ambiguous. Johnson is different. He’s wealthy, educated and clearly consenting. If he dies, it won’t be because the science was bad or the ethics murky. It will be because the incentives to escalate were too good to resist.

Overpriced olive oil won’t kill Johnson. The potential harms come from some of the interventions he offers to his followers as testing the boundaries of anti-aging science. He abandoned human growth hormone after 110 days due to side effects. He’s currently on what he calls “an aggressive Rapamycin protocol”. Rapamycin is a drug used to suppress immune responses in organ transplant patients, but with promising anti-aging effects in mice. There are obvious risks in suppressing immunity. When asked why he doesn’t use his wealth to fund clinical trials instead of self-experimenting, Johnson responds by blocking its proposer on social media.

The next step? Gene therapy. The documentary follows him to Prospera, a special economic zone in Honduras, where he undergoes an experimental procedure to boost follistatin, a protein that promotes muscle growth. Johnson presents the trip as another milestone in longevity science.

The business of immortality demands escalation

Johnson insists his methods are evidence-based, that his interventions, taken together, provide a net benefit.

But Project Blueprint is more than a personal experiment – it’s a brand. And like all online influencers, Johnson must keep pushing the envelope to stay relevant. The trajectory is clear: from pills to plasma exchanges, from growth hormones to Rapamycin, from Rapamycin to gene therapy. What comes next? Infusions of nanorobots programmed to kill cancer cells? I’d watch that, especially if it has a fun outcome deliverable in a YouTube Short. So would millions of others.

Social media thrives on escalation. Spectators at the Roman Colosseum didn’t come for polite sparring; they wanted blood. Johnson has already given us footage of doctors injecting him with genetic material to reprogram his body. He can’t just go back to vitamin pills. If he stops escalating, someone else will take his place and presumably most of his followers.

What happens when he goes too far? His Instagram followers will be grateful – they’ll know which experimental therapies to avoid in their own quest for eternal youth. Perhaps try a different genetic intervention with slightly smaller nanobots? They’ll already be watching the next anti-aging gladiator, the next influencer willing to risk everything for immortality.

There’s plenty of irony in the self-destructive paradox of cutting-edge anti-aging science. Mavericks like Johnson might offer much faster progress than medico-legal bureaucrats enrolling subjects in safe clinical trials.

Some of those testing the boundaries of rejuvenation science are likely to die. Perhaps the ultra-long-lived people of 2500 will place corpses on the climb to eternal youth in context. They will look at Johnson as we now look at early 1900s aviation pioneers. Many of them died attempting to fly aircraft that couldn’t be flown and thanks to them we now fly safely all over the world.

Thomas Jefferson told us, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Equally it seems that the fountain of youth must be refilled from time to time with the blood of rejuvenators overexposed to social media.

Nicholas Agar is a New Zealand professor of ethics at the University of Waikato and the author of Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement.

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