UrbanUpdate

Most of us can’t live like Bryan Johnson. Sure, we could eat better, stop drinking, and take the supplements that the venture capitalist and experimental body hacker recommends, but even if we wanted to do all that, it probably wouldn’t amount to much in comparison to the bizarre gene therapies—and hundreds of millions of dollars—that he’s able to put to work. So we settle for clout, brushing up against it at events like Bryan Johnson’s videoconference talk at the “Immortality Party” thrown earlier this week in downtown Manhattan.

The event was held at Spring Place, a co-working office and members-only social club that refers to itself as “not a house for creativity,” but a “home for creatives” at a rate of $1,000 per month for a designated desk. It was originally supposed to take place elsewhere, somewhere smaller, more casual, where a gin and tonic isn’t $25. But that was before over 1,400 people RSVP’d, attracted not only by the promise of a virtual appearance by Bryan Johnson but by a surprisingly clouted-up list of “hosts” and “DJs” for a science-forward event.

Johnson first came to prominence after being profiled in a mega-viral Bloomberg story, “How to Be 18 Years Old Again for Only $2 Million a Year,” which detailed the extreme lengths he goes to in the name of life extension. He has, perhaps improbably, stuck around in the public consciousness, regularly driving headlines for things like getting blood plasma transfusions from his teenage son, claiming an algorithm runs his life, and tweeting his personal erection metrics. Recently, he hosted a longevity-themed dinner with Kim and Khloé Kardasian, Kris Jenner, celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Jason Diamond, and podcast host Andrew Huberman. He has a nose for clout.

And now he was tapping in with New York’s downtown scene. Probably the best way to describe the milieu of this party is that nearly everyone on the flier, which included names like Matthew Donovan (who helped organize), Nolita Dirtbag, Yung Nihilist, Danny Cole, and Frost Children, had previously been featured on the newsletter Perfectly Imperfect, which the New York Times has recognized for chronicling the tastes of “downtown scenesters, influencers and 'it’ girls.”

The actual organizer of the night was DeSciNYC, a group that hosts monthly meetups in the city devoted to scientific topics, with an emphasis on decentering academia as the locus of research and inquiry. “I started DeSciNYC because I felt there were too many run clubs in New York and not enough places for people to gather and talk about science,” Michael Fischer, founder of DeSciNYC and one of the interviewees of the evening, told me. A noble effort, even if it is all wrapped up in the blockchain.

Before Johnson virtually took the stage, Cassidy Grady, downtown art gal and host of the reading series Confessions, stood before the crowd to read an imagined obituary of Johnson. If you don’t go to bed on time it means you do drugs, she said to some effect, and doing drugs is bad because it means you will die, and not dying is precisely what Johnson is all about.

Johnson’s practice of Not Dying—and talking about it to anyone who will listen—has made it so we all know far too much about him. Yet, beyond this, it’s as though we really know nothing about the man at all. In recent months, though, Johnson seems to have at least become a bit more likable. Maybe something has shifted in our public perception of him, possibly due to the mild sense of levity he has started to use in his posts online. In the talk, too, he came across as thoughtful, charismatic. I found myself thinking: I genuinely sort of like the guy! But still I wonder, what exactly is he buttering us up for?

Johnson's mantra is “Don’t Die,” which he thinks of as a game, one we’re all playing whether or not we chose to, “like capitalism.” And certainly, the way Johnson is doing it, it does seem as though it’s all for sport. He loves to list off his stats, especially about his penis. He might chronologically be 46, but that dick is 18. The best question of the night came from a young woman in the audience who asked broadly about whether he’s active or not, and more specifically if he practices more niche practices such as tantra or semen retention. He skirted the questions, stating only that he has not yet pursued the latter. It’s a shame, because we were all wondering whether he does anything that seems remotely human at all, looking for a hint of this cyborg appearing anything like us.

Nobody could quite tell me why they were there, except for rapper Danny Brown, who told me he was there to accompany the Frost Children, with whom he performed later in the week at Music Hall of Williamsburg. There was no one, at least, who was there because they wanted to live forever.

But not even Johnson himself really wants to live forever: The ethos of “Don’t Die” isn’t really even about living in perpetuity, but rather, living just long enough to witness the singularity. From that point, whether any of us are really alive or dead will be besides the point. Will we still be having a good time? Drinking? Fucking? Staying up too late? Will it matter to us at all? From Johnson’s perspective, they won’t. Or rather, we at least won’t be too concerned with the answers. If mainstream wellness culture is ultimately focused on optimizing us into becoming better workers and consumers, Johnson’s brand of wellness is one that strives to optimize us into whatever figures we’ll need to be under AI.

Of course, I don’t think everyone is really buying that. Is it free will that calls us to wait in a line snaking around the block because a few vaguely recognizable Instagram accounts will allegedly be in attendance? If AI really does present the most pivotal moment in evolutionary history, will I still feel stupid for having spent $46 on two pours of pinot grigio on a Monday night? (Heavy pours, but still.) Like the “why” behind Johnson’s whole project, or whether “not dying” is something most of us really even want to do, these are questions that are harder to answer. But Johnson knows that, he’s thinking about it, and he’s getting us all to pay attention by talking about his boners instead.

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