What It's Like to Attend a 'Don't Die' Summit, Where People Are on a Quest to Defy Death
AS THE WILDFIRES continue to blaze, I am at a dark, cavernous event space 20 miles away in downtown Los Angeles on a mid-January morning, raving with several hundred mortals and Bryan Johnson, the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur widely known for his multi-million-dollar efforts to age in reverse.
When not posing for photos, Johnson, who has a broomstick-straight posture and pallid complexion, moves to the deep house beat with the frenetic precision of a teenager trying to win “Dance, Dance Revolution.” Outside the throng of people surrounding him, a private security guard with a linebacker’s build and a wired earpiece stands stone-still watching.
The hour-long morning rave, which began promptly at 10:30 a.m., is the kick-off session of Johnson’s Don’t Die Summit, a day-long event designed to build a community around his Don’t Die ethos, which, according to a pledge on its website, means being 'at war with death.'
In 2024, Don’t Die hosted summits in San Francisco and Singapore and will put on two more this year in Miami (February 15) and New York (March 22). I attended the LA summit in January on a media pass, but around 600 people paid between $249 (general admission) and $599 (premium) for a schedule that includes a keynote by Johnson, a 'biological age test,' and a longevity “amusement park.” VIPs shelled out $1,499 to attend an exclusive dinner with Johnson the night before.
The event takes place just three weeks after the release of Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, a Netflix documentary about Johnson directed by the filmmaker behind Fyre (2019) and Tiger King (2020). The doc is yet another significant step in the entrepreneur’s quest to get people to buy into the “Blueprint Protocol,” Johnson's overall program for anti-aging. In just a few years, Johnson has become the subject of numerous gawking magazine profiles and mainstream internet obsession by posting his extreme health regimens (no sugar or alcohol, no food after noon, bedtime at 8:30 p.m., 40 supplements per day) and controversial life extension tactics (immunosuppressants, gene therapy, stem cell injections).
At the very least, Johnson is transparent, sharing both his anti-aging victories and mishaps. To appear younger, he had a donor’s fat injected into his temple, cheeks, and chin, leading to an immune reaction that caused his face to swell up like an overfilled water balloon. He also exhaustively publishes his personal biomarker data on his website and X, alongside claimed superlatives like “the most measured human,” “the best sleeper on the planet,” and “the healthiest man alive.” (He also touts the less awe-inspiring distinction of having done “more MRIs than anyone in the world.”) As a result, his overall content ecosystem blends the authoritative certainty of a scientist with the brain-hacking appeal of clickbait—one video, where Johnson goes to check his sperm count, is titled “How I’m DE-AGING My Penis.”
I first encountered Johnson on social media when an algorithm shoved him down my feed. As a former Olympic fencing athlete, I couldn’t help but take an interest in a man who claims to be the gold medalist of health. Beyond the spectacle, Johnson’s self-optimisation advice struck me as similar to other kinds I’d explored during my competitive years. I wanted to go to the summit not only to understand why the Don’t Die approach to health and wellness is catching on so quickly, but also to see if it’s legit – and what it might add to my own life.
Considering Johnson’s measurement-obsessed, ultra-quantified approach, I half-expected the Don’t Die crowd to be a horde of sweaty, male biohackers. However, since arriving at check-in, I’ve noticed that overall attendance seems remarkably gender-balanced (albeit predominantly white). And I’ve already met some very sensible-seeming people – an internal health physician, a functional nutritionist, and an executive in mainstream tech.
On the dance floor, an event staffer in a Grim Reaper costume shimmies past me, a prime example of how the event captures a tonal split in Johnson’s public persona – a dead seriousness about outrunning mortality and a wry awareness of how absurd his mission seems to many. Earlier in the reception area, I tried a pomegranate juice concoction called “Blood Boy,” a humorous reference to the 2023 media shitstorm Johnson created after publicising that he’d swapped plasma with his then 70-year-old father and 17-year-old son.
The juice nomenclature isn’t the only way Johnson has responded with winking self-parody to his critics, who call him a confidence man eager to sell solutions to illusory problems. In 2023, he launched Blueprint, a longevity-focused brand that now offers supplements, meal delivery, and biological test kits. After receiving backlash for Blueprint’s first product – a $37 olive oil – Johnson renamed it “Snake Oil.”
The music softens, marking the end of the rave. Johnson takes the stage, sweaty and shirtless, showcasing his hard-earned, shredded physique. Much ado has been made over whether the man does, in fact, look younger, with many saying that he actually looks worse as a result of his life-extension efforts (the pejoratives “vampire” and “wax figure” are often thrown around). When I initially saw Johnson in person, I realised these labels were cruel and inaccurate. But describing his appearance as healthy, as far as the word is commonly understood, also feels like a stretch. My first reaction was to think of a supermarket apple—an object that is gleaming and genetically modified to appeal but also leaves you wondering if it’s real food.
'We are here to become friends!' Johnson says, before changing into a black Don’t Die T-shirt that says, “Be the Next Evolution of Human.” His 30-minute welcome speech is part wayfinding explanation, part hype session for the Longevity Park, where we can explore vendors marketing products and services such as hyperbaric oxygen chambers, stem cell banking, and genetic age testing.
Before dismissing the crowd, Johnson asks if people know where they are going.
'Following you!' a man shouts.
I HEAD OUT into the reception area, another expansive hall with cold, concrete floors, and grab a serving of “Super Veggies,” black lentils, and garlic chicken – a modified recipe from Johnson’s vegan diet. Like the purple goo-ish “nutty pudding” I tried earlier, the dish is entirely edible but not exactly palette-thrilling. But, in the Don’t Die world, personal enjoyment is a distant second to avoiding things trying to kill you, like sugar, alcohol, and processed foods. One criticism Johnson faces is that his discipline leaves no room for life’s pleasures. (He doesn’t believe in cheat days.) His response to the criticism: “It’s never worth it.”
It’s now noon. With two hours to kill before Johnson’s keynote, I take the elevator upstairs to the Longevity Park. There, I chat with Ken, a slender, silver-haired octogenarian who learned about Don’t Die at another longevity conference Johnson spoke at.
'I want to live as long as I can and die young,; says Ken, who is eager to show me a screenshot of his recent testosterone test, which shows that his level is 863 ng/dL (this is technically within the "normal" range, but "normal" can vary from person to person). Ken doesn’t take any supplements, he tells me, and attributes the result to a German respiration device—one whose function he explains to me several times, but I fail to grasp.
An hour later, at 1 p.m., I head to a cordoned-off area to take my “biological age test” with about 100 other attendees. These kinds of tests usually require some kind of biomaterial, like blood or saliva, to analyse a person’s epigenetic clock. Today, though, we’re paired up to complete seven physical assessments, which includes one minute of continuous push-ups, a closed-eye balancing exercise, a measure of waist-to-height ratio, and a measure of grip strength. My tall and broad-shouldered partner, Mark, is a 52-year-old active member of the Coast Guard. He struggles with a test requiring us to stand up from the floor in a cross-legged position without using our hands. And I completely bomb the seated sit-and-reach, unable to touch my toes.
We finish up and begin entering our test results into the Don’t Die app, which Johnson had previously told us to download. However, we soon discover that our reaction time test, which had us catch a falling classroom ruler, used a different metric (centimetres from the bottom of the ruler) than the app requests (fractions of a second). We try to ask one of the event staffers about it, but he just shrugs. So we resort to inputting a finger-in-the-air conversion. (It would later turn out that the summit administered an entirely different test than the one listed in the app.)
'Well, there’s work to be done,' says Mark, after scoring a biological age of 59. He tells me he came to the Don’t Die Summit because he’s determined to stay in peak health to avoid becoming a liability to his shipmates. He feels the military lacks a preventative approach to health care and would like to see more non-mainstream modalities like stem cells injections for bodies worn down from years of service, toxicity testing for those deployed to unhealthy areas, and psychedelics for mental health.
My biological age comes in at 38, three years younger than my calendar age of 41. I know my reaction time guesstimate probably skewed my results and the test is a radical simplification overall. Still, pride swells within me.
'WE ARE TRANSITIONING from death being inevitable to something new,' Johnson says, arms outstretched. 'Is it being more healthy? Yes. Is it extending our lifespans? Yes. Is it enhancing our bodies? Yes. Is it immortality? We don't know.'
It’s 2 p.m., and about 600 attendees have packed into the main stage room to hear Johnson’s keynote speech, 'Building Your Future Self.' Having arrived a bit late, I find a seat in the back of the room just as he’s transitioning from a grand, prophetic opening to a more tactical lecture on habit formation. Johnson positions himself as a test case for humanity, pushing the limits of what’s possible in longevity. That is, we need not do everything he does and should instead apply the 80/20 principle. By adopting just 20 percent of his regimen, we can reap 80 percent of the results.
He begins flipping through a detailed slideshow, dispensing the kind of advice he often posts on social media about sleep, exercise, nutrition, posture, and self-measurement. Johnson’s health prescriptions are not novel, a fact he freely acknowledges. But there is something about hearing advice framed within the context of species evolution that makes you sit up straight and listen. When he flicks to a slide reminding us of an eight percent increase in the risk of death from fried foods, I recall the hamburger and fries I ate the previous day with a sobering jolt of guilt.
Johnson also spends about 10 minutes talking about Don’t Die’s efforts to build out its community – including the Summit series, the Don’t Die app, and Don’t Die “citizenship,” which involves taking a pledge to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light' à la the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. (About 9,000 people have received their Don’t Die “passports.”) He explains that taking such a pledge is about integrating Don’t Die with your identity, a technique designed to make abiding by its recommendations easier.
In a follow-up Zoom with Johnson after the Summit, I would ask him about a specific moment in the Netflix documentary, which addresses (but does not answer) whether Don’t Die is an early-stage cult. Johnson, who left the Mormon church in 2013, dismisses those concerns, noting that he feels the word “cult” has taken on too pejorative a meaning in modern parlance.
'The sober truth is that religions are the most stable and strongest organisations in the entire world,” he says. “Say I’m a cult, and I’ll joke that my cult is better than your cult because it tells people to eat healthy food and go to bed on time.'
The media often portrays Johnson’s obsession with life extension as a purely narcissistic pursuit, much like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Johnson, however, frames the choice to extend life as part of a broader philosophy that is necessary for the exact moment we are living through.
'Don't Die is the world’s next ideology that addresses what a species does when you give birth to superintelligence,' he says, referring to the radical changes he believes will soon be unleashed by the rapid development of AI. By and large, he’s optimistic, likening our uncertainty about the future’s potential to Homo erectus’s inability to imagine modern society. In that context, Don’t Die’s chief goal is to give people a framework to help them lean into the unknown and stay alive long enough to reap the possible rewards of what’s to come.
'MEN, IT'S IMPORTANT that you know this, so if you stopped paying attention, listen up,' Johnson says after about 45 minutes on stage. The quip is a segue to the topic of female health, and many women in the audience cheer loudly at the direct acknowledgement. Joining him on stage is Blueprint’s chief medical officer, Dr. Mike Mallin, an emergency physician with brown hair and a short-cropped beard. Their discussion ranges from pre-pregnancy to post-menopausal health. It has the characteristics of an Andrew Huberman podcast, vacillating between grand statements and hyper-technical medical language. The male audience members do seem quite clued in, with some even taking furious notes.
After another 45 minutes, the keynote session ends, and there’s a mass exodus to the main hall. I check the schedule and see that there’s another two-hour gap before the final panel. Johnson would later tell me he knows they need to add more programming to the event (and plans to do so at future summits). Still, I can’t help but feel the ticket price is pretty steep for a day spent absorbing Johnson’s familiar talking points and browsing a marketplace of products.
Figuring I haven’t done enough of the latter, I take the stairs back up to Longevity Park. There, I watch a grey-haired woman slip on a $500 anti-aging LED mask that glows red like something out of a Tron reboot. Then I speak to a tall Texan in a bolo tie who shows me a $125,000 cockpit-sized hyperbaric chamber and then hands me a titanium business card. Moving to another booth, an ebullient rep invites me to harvest and bank my stem cells. I politely decline that offer, but I do accept one to test a $19,000 wall-mounted massage device, which resembles an alien surveillance object. It turns out to be surprisingly delightful.
At the Blueprint booth, I sample Johnson’s “Longevity Mix.” The powdered mixture, which two female reps are serving dissolved in water, includes ingredients like glycine, theanine, and creatine. When I ask a young woman with feathered brown hair what she thinks of the product, she frowns in response. I, too, find the sample unpleasant – almost medicinal. But to be fair, I can count on a single hand the number of supplements I’ve taken that I’ve actually liked.
Afterward, I strike up a conversation with Sirish, a fast-talking wellness director. Several nurses bustle around his booth, strapping attendees with free longevity IVs that include biomolecules like arginine, L-Carnitine, and taurine. (Stem cell IVs are also available for an extra cost). Sirish and I dive into a sweeping conversation about Elon Musk’s multi-planetary ambitions and the transhumanist vision that we may one day be able to upload our minds to neural interfaces, achieving a form of digital consciousness in the cloud.
'If you're healthy and feeling good, why the hell would you want to die?' says Sirish, who, of all the people I’ve spoken to, seems to be the most Don’t Die converted. Naturally, this question, which is so simple, is the crux of why Don’t Die kicks up so much dust in the public sphere. We’ve spent thousands of years dreaming (and warning) about the possibility of living forever. But the brain has trouble accepting its reality, the same way it would struggle to cope with a reversal of gravity.
Johnson is well aware of this, which is partly why the internet hate no longer fazes him. Now, he sees people’s resistance to Don’t Die as predictable, so much so that he compares their reactions to the five stages of grief:
LEVEL 1, DENIAL: Bryan is so busy trying not to die that he’s not living.
LEVEL 2, ANGER: I hope Bryan gets hit by a bus.
LEVEL 3, BARGAINING: Are we allowed cheat days?
LEVEL 4, DEPRESSION: We’re all doomed anyway.
LEVEL 5, ACCEPTANCE: Fine, I’ll go to bed on time.
It was clear from my conversations with attendees that many fall somewhere on that spectrum. Earlier, Jackie, a dietician from Venice in her 30s, said, 'I don't know if I agree with everlasting life. Everything has a cycle. I’m all for longevity, though.'
Another 30-something attendee, a man who works as a “professional gondolier,” notes, 'Living forever has typically been the worst kind of punishment in traditional mythology.'
My personal favourite, though, was a young guy who offered the summit a provocation in the form of his T-shirt, which bore an image of the spiritual guru Ram Dass and the words, 'You Must Die.'
AT 5 P.M., THE event winds down, and the crowd thins to a couple hundred people. Johnson returns to the main stage with Dr. Mallin and another physician named Dr. Jonathan Kuo. The final panel, which the three deliver standing up, is called “How to Evaluate a Therapy” and aims to give attendees the tools to judge whether a longevity solution is evidence-based or marketing bullshit. Compared to the segment on women’s health, the discussion is even more technical. When Johnson asks the crowd for a temperature check on the content, numerous people look up from texting on their phones to give an affirmative whoop.
The event concludes with a “Farewell Singalong,” and a blonde man with a sweet, earnest voice plays a keyboard while leading the crowd in a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” Though the song is best known for closing down liquor-slicked bars, it somehow feels appropriate.
As the general ticket holders hug and exchange contact details, I grab a Lyft over to the VIP reception at an upscale, outdoor venue on the outskirts of Hollywood. It’s a cold night in LA, and many of the hundred or so people huddle around heat lamps. The morning rave’s deejay now plays chill lounge music, and a dozen brave souls attempt to dance – including a young man wearing a long cardigan sweater and the glowing Tron mask.
After ordering a “Patrick Bateman” mocktail (cucumber juice, pineapple juice, lemon juice, jalapeño, and agave) at the bar, I start chatting with Filipe, who works in the AI industry, and his partner Anna, who works in fashion. Both came to the Don’t Die Summit not knowing what to expect but enjoyed it even though Filipe worries that, with the launch of Blueprint, Johnson may be cashing in on his mission a little too quickly. But he believes that the entrepreneur has “good intentions,” a phrase I heard echoed several times by others.
Johnson enters the venue, still wearing the “Be the Next Evolution of Human” shirt, which I now realize has an image of two radioactive-looking fingers touching, like Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam. When the VIPs realize the man of the hour has arrived, the event’s gravity shifts, and a mini-crowd forms around him.
On the outskirts, I strike up a conversation with Hyun, an anesthesiologist donning a black puffer jacket. He tells me he came to Don’t Die after his patients started asking about longevity treatments and figured he’d check it out to stay on top of medical trends.
'Some of this is snake oil,' Hyun says, 'but there’s definitely some science behind it.'
By the time I’ve circled the space a few times, it’s 8:20 p.m, and the Don’t Die founder grabs the mic one last time to offer some parting words. As he’s trying to settle the crowd, the guy next to me shouts, 'Quiet! Daddy’s gonna speak!'
Johnson thanks his staff members and the attendees before reiterating his ambition to make Don’t Die the most influential ideology of its time, 'on par with democracy, capitalism, or any religion.' Then, after a group huddle, the Don’t Die founder swiftly exits, racing home for his bedtime.
When I finally get back to my house at 9:30 p.m., I realise I haven’t eaten anything since my small box of “Super Veggies” and chicken. Without knowing it, I was on Johnson’s plan – no food after noon – and I reason that I should just go straight to sleep. But as I lie in bed, my stomach growling, I reflect on Johnson’s spiel about the 80/20 principle. I rise out of bed and go get a snack.
You Might Also Like
