The Meme King of Longevity Now Wants to Sell You Olive Oil

“Ready, on three,” Jamie Love said to the group of hikers as they huddled for a photo. “One, two, three …”

“Don’t die!” they shouted in unison.

The dozen or so strangers were gathered at the foot of Temescal Canyon Trail along the Pacific coast in Los Angeles on a cool Saturday morning in mid-December. Several of them, including Ms. Love, 38, who had organized the outing, wore black T-shirts with the bold white text, “DON’T DIE.”

The hikers had come together with a shared goal: to extend their life spans through diet, sleep, exercise and whatever technologies might come along.

Not present was the spiritual leader of the gathering, the internet celebrity and centimillionaire tech founder turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson. In the past year, Mr. Johnson has arguably taken the lead in the race among Silicon Valley rich guys going to extremes in a quest to live forever. (Move over, Messrs. Bezos, Zuckerberg and Thiel.) Now he’s turning that longevity mission — and the online infamy he has earned because of it — into a lifestyle business, selling supplements and prepackaged meals to less-rich people who would also like to live for a very long time. The hike, one of more than 30 “Don’t Die Meet-Ups” around the world that day, was a cross between community-building and a guerrilla marketing tactic.

Mr. Johnson’s deal, in a nutshell: In 2021, he began spending $2 million a year, by his own account, to measure every aspect of his body, from lipid levels to urination speed to brain plaque, with the goal of reversing his aging process. He called it Project Blueprint.

Every day, between 7 and 11 a.m., he eats the same three vegan meals: “Nutty Pudding” (a blend of nuts, seeds, berries and pomegranate juice), “Super Veggie” (black lentils topped with broccoli and cauliflower) and a third, rotating dish consisting of vegetables, roots and nuts. He exercises for an hour every morning and takes up to 111 pills a day. (His pharyngeal muscles may be the strongest of all.)

Mr. Johnson claims that his regimen (or “protocol,” as he calls it) has already slowed his speed of aging, giving him, at 46, the maximum heart rate of a 37-year-old, the gum inflammation of a 17-year-old and the facial wrinkles of a 10-year-old, according to his website. He publicizes his test results so anyone can see images of his bowels or learn the duration of his nighttime erections. His “biological age,” he claimed until recently, is 42.5, according to one measurement of changes in DNA over time known as an epigenetic clock. In other words, he has spent about three years shaving off — maybe — a little more than three years.

If the original goal of Project Blueprint was to perfect his health, Mr. Johnson now describes it as preparing humanity to thrive in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. Thus the new slogan: “Don’t Die.”

In an interview, Mr. Johnson said he didn’t care what present-day people thought of him. “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me,” he said. “The majority of opinions now represent the past.”

Mr. Johnson has an almost Trumpian ability to stay in the news. Since 2020, he has been the subject of five articles on Bloomberg documenting his quixotic pursuits: the brain-reading helmet developed by his company Kernel; his bid to become, as he has put it elsewhere, the “most measured person in human history”; his decision to receive blood plasma from his 17-year-old son and pass his own along to his 70-year-old father; and a recent round of experimental gene therapy in Honduras. In September, Time photographed Mr. Johnson in his private gym, naked but for a carefully positioned kettlebell — an instant meme. The New York Post has gleefully followed his every move, running more than a dozen articles on Mr. Johnson in the past year, including three about his penis.

On social media, where he has more than 700,000 combined followers on X and Instagram, he knows how to trawl for attention. He lists his stringent requirements for a romantic partner (8:30 p.m. bedtime, “no small talk,” “must give plasma”) and compares himself to religious figures (“Jesus fed bread and alcohol, impairing and aging/I will feed you nutrients that awake and create life”). His flat manner and uncanny looks have drawn comparisons to “American Psycho”’s Patrick Bateman, a “‘Lord of the Rings’ elf,” a vampire and a “jacked cyborg.” One podcaster called him “blood daddy.” He likes to pose in crop tops.

Now, Mr. Johnson said, after three years of self-experimentation — which he called “Phase 1” of Blueprint — he’s ready for “Phase 2”: helping others replicate his process. Late last year, he began selling Blueprint-branded olive oil. This month, more products, including powdered vegetables and pill supplements, became available on his website. In conjunction with the rollout, Mr. Johnson announced a “self-experimentation study” in which participants can pay for a starter pack of Blueprint products, as well as bloodwork and other tests to track their results. The 2,500 slots filled up within 24 hours.

To his fans, who fly across the country to meet him and haunt Blueprint message boards online, this moment is an exciting opportunity to spread the Johnson gospel. Some Blueprint advocates are even building businesses of their own around his ideas. To his detractors, it’s a cynical attempt to monetize his popularity. Or, worse: They call it pseudoscience that could harm the health of his followers.

The business is only one piece of the larger vision, Mr. Johnson insisted. If we can algorithmically orient the human body toward the single goal of not dying, then, he said, we can somehow extrapolate that process to the planet itself. “Climate change is an alignment problem,” he said. “Replace my body with planet Earth.”

So, in the meantime, why is he selling olive oil? And why are people buying it?

A Business, or a Cult?

Mr. Johnson grew up Mormon in Utah. Between college and business school, he worked for a credit card processing company selling services to businesses. His sales trick was to offer potential clients $100 for three minutes of their time. If they didn’t sign up for his plan, they could keep the money. He quickly became the company’s top salesperson.

In 2007, he founded his own payment processing company, Braintree, which acquired the startup Venmo and, in 2013, was itself acquired by eBay for $800 million.

A year later, Mr. Johnson got divorced and split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “You’re born a baby again, having to answer these really important questions that don’t have any answers,” he said.

When I asked Mr. Johnson if he was building a religion, he said yes. “Belief systems have proven to be stronger than countries, or companies, or anything else,” for helping humans reach goals, he said. “Every religion has been trying to offer a solution to ‘Don’t die’ — that’s the product they’ve generated,” he added.

In conversations about Blueprint, it’s hard to avoid the word cult. Mr. Johnson himself likes to joke: “Is this some sick and twisted cult trying to get me to go to bed on time?”

Jeff Tang, who recently started a Blueprint-based meal prep company in the San Francisco area, said a lot of businesses “feel like cults at the beginning,” citing WeWork as an example.

Mr. Johnson’s acolytes fall into two general categories: the health and wellness seekers, and the tech crowd, which in recent years has become preoccupied with longevity.

Many Blueprint-curious attendees at the Los Angeles hike said they cared less about maximizing their life span than their “health span,” or healthy years. Some found the predictability of Mr. Johnson’s plan appealing.

“Self-control and discipline — he just takes it out of the equation,” said Sirish Pulusani, 40, who works at a longevity-based health clinic. He wore an Oura ring, a Whoop bracelet and an Apple Watch — all of which track bodily metrics.

Theresa Cowan, 36, said she wanted to eat natural food like Mr. Johnson’s, which she believes could have healing properties, as opposed to fast food, which “is creating death to our cells.” Ms. Cowan, who has worked as an actress and singer, brought her children Makayla and Samuel, 8 and 5, on the hike. She said she and Makayla planned to adopt the Blueprint protocol and make videos about it. (“You’d want to particularly cautious about this for anyone under 18,” said Dr. George Kuchel, a professor of medicine at University of Connecticut who studies aging.)

Ms. Cowan added that she didn’t give her children vaccines or antibiotics. “I live my life against the grain,” she said.

A number of meet-up participants shared stories of trauma, often health-related. Mr. Pulusani grew up with a severe case of eczema. Ms. Cowan’s husband has a tumor in his bladder, and she hopes to persuade him to adopt the Blueprint way of life in order to heal, she said.

Four hundred miles up the coast, about 50 people — mostly young, mostly men — gathered on the same day for a Blueprint hike starting at Rockaway Beach south of San Francisco. It was a tech-y group: A former employee of Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink, was there, as were a handful of founders from Y Combinator, the start-up incubator. (One person who couldn’t make it threw himself a Blueprint-themed birthday party in San Francisco the next night, with olive oil shots and blood bags full of passion fruit tea.) Mr. Tang, the organizer, carried along a cardboard cutout of Mr. Johnson’s famous kettlebell photo.

Before the group set off, Mr. Tang gathered everyone on a grassy patch and posed a series of icebreaker questions, including whether they’d want to live forever. About half the attendees said yes.

The Scientific Community Has Concerns

Mr. Johnson occupies an odd place in the…