Bryan Johnson and the Birth of the Blueprint Religion

Sometimes a story goes hard

During my fact-checking process for an upcoming magazine feature on him, Bryan Johnson had some concerns. They centered on his nighttime erections.

I’d spent years following and reporting on Johnson’s exploits in the brain computer interface and health fields. On this occasion in January 2023, though, my focus had zeroed in on Johnson’s Blueprint program. This consisted of him pursuing an ultra-healthy lifestyle and measuring his body and its biomarkers on an unprecedented level. As far as I could tell, Johnson was spending more on his body and health than any other human and was doing something quite original among health gurus by putting actual metrics behind his program and progress.

Through my reporting, Johnson and I had gotten to know each other well. He’d been very open about his past attempts to deal with depression and suicidal thoughts through a variety of measures. These included but were not limited to ketamine sessions, shaman-guided drug journeys in Mexico and snorting stem cells. When it came to Blueprint, though, Johnson had some reservations about what he wanted to share. How much the program cost him each year, for example, and some of the particulars around what he did to his body.

In the midst of doing interviews for the story, I’d stressed that the cost figure was crucial. If Johnson spent more than Lebron James ($1 million) on his body each year, that would be a thing. As far as I’m aware, we’d never really heard about a non-athlete investing in their bodies at elite-athlete levels, and people would want to know a great deal about why someone would choose to do this and what were the possible gains. Johnson, it would turn out, spent closer to $2 million each year on his body, including various rejuvenation protocols and the battery of medical tests needed to measure the health of his organs. After a little back and forth, he agreed to disclose this figure.

Johnson also agreed to go into detail on all of his health procedures even when the results were rather alarming. May I present to you – Project Baby Face.

That ain’t no baby.

This is how Johnson looked when I turned up for an interview at his home one day. He’d injected a scaffolding of fat into his face and suffered an allergic reaction of sorts in the process.

Right before the story hit, though, I asked Johnson to remind me of the device he used to measure the quality and quantity of his nighttime erections (One of soooo many health metrics he tracks). He voiced some hesitation about me including this in the story. (It’s the AdamHealth product for the curious.) To me it felt like we’d long ago crossed the rigid phallus Rubicon, but, for Johnson, knowing that his Johnson particulars would soon appear in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, the probing triggered some anxiety about exactly what he’d gotten himself into.

I would find out later that Johnson and his longtime Blueprint partner and marketing chief Kate Tolo were not just anxious but rather petrified about what would happen after the story hit. “I remember the day before the article came out,” Johnson says. “Kate and I were in my office, and we both had this moment of crisis. Like, “Oh nooo. What have we done?”.

Before I’d met Johnson for the first time, one of the people in his close orbit had warned me that he was quite sensitive to criticisms in the press. As I recall, a tech publication had written a story about him and remarked that his t-shirt appeared ratty, and, I was told, Johnson had taken great offense to the remark. For a person wired like this, revelations about erection measuring minutiae and drugs and depression would indeed seem like quite the shock to the system. Still, I put the erection monitor in.

When the story published on Jan. 25^th of 2023, the results were beyond spectacular. Yes, lots of people read the story, but, more than that, Johnson and Blueprint became an overnight sensation. Johnson and Tolo had spent many months trying to bring attention to Blueprint without much luck, and now, suddenly, there were hundreds of articles copying mine all over the internet.¹

Johnson’s health story played on morning news programs around the world. Most comically, the hosts of The View chided Johnson for being vain and spending so much money on his body, as if this were a revelatory concept for Hollywood.

Over the course of the next day, my inbox filled with requests from A-list directors and producers who wanted to make a documentary about Johnson. One request, in particular, caught my eye. It came from the famed documentarian Chris Smith, who has made "Bad Vegan," "Hollywood Con Queen," and "Mr. McMahon," among many others great films and series. To me, he has a gift for exploring the spots where internet life and real life mix and following eccentric people doing unusual things. We decided to partner on a film – the results of which just hit Netflix this month.

Much of what followed during this two-year journey caught me by surprise. Rather than being the talk of the internet for a week, Johnson’s story kept up its momentum. A big reason for this revolved around Johnson’s embrace of both the attention and the hate coming his way. He went from worrying about the erection monitoring disclosure to posting a great deal about his erections right away. Instead of being put off by and warring with people who called him a vampire and a narcissist, Johnson countered much of the criticism with a welcoming tone.

At least part of me had expected Johnson to self-immolate from the internet loathing. I did not see his turn as always stay positive health guru coming.

As the months went on, some things became more predictable. Johnson really savored the moment and morphed Blueprint from a personal whim into a full-blown health cult – a term which he does not dispute. He started selling supplements, aging tests and merch under his “Don’t Die” brand.

Johnson also faced a much more serious brand of criticism via a lawsuit from his former fiancé and a host of allegations from her and others that came with it. As the lawsuit played out, Johnson emerged victorious, but few people had much sympathy for the rich, weird guy trumping his ex, and the saga had the potential to quash Blueprint before it could fully cult. Once again, at least part of me, expected Johnson to unravel and for the Blueprint furor to die down.

Here in 2025, however, Blueprint appears to be humming along and building an ever-growing following.

Two years in, the mainstream critiques of Johnson’s health regimen remain the same, simple and amusing. It’s either that he’s too rich or too exacting in his lifestyle for any regular person to emulate and/or that he’s doing so much to his body in an N-of-1 experiment that the resulting metrics are worthless. It boils down to - we have no idea if all this effort amounts to anything useful, and Johnson is a rich, vain freak.

I’ve never really viewed Johnson or Blueprint through this lens.

What Johnson is doing seems closer to performance art and philosophy. He’s become a human Guinea pig for health experimentation and must push things to their limits on principle. The extreme nature of it is the point. I believe that Johnson does genuinely want to improve his health and find out what’s possible, and I believe that he wants to do this to command attention as well.

Lots of people like attention. It feeds the ego. While running his previous start-ups, Johnson had long felt like Silicon Valley and the broader tech world ignored him and treated him as an outsider. I’m sure he’s thrilled to now be invited to just about every tech event and to spend time with any influential person he wants.

I also happen to believe that the larger statement Johnson is making about society – the end result of all this effort – has merit. Johnson is rather directly asking if large swaths of civilization made a wrong turn. Drinking. Drugs. Cities overflowing with restaurants, fast-food joints and snack/drink shops that are terrible for you. Cookies so calorie dense they could fuel a mission to Mars. These are all things that lots of people know are bad. Johnson is simply asking far louder than most if, well, we went way too far in treating a lot of this as acceptable and normal.

Behind the scenes of filming "Don't Die" in Texas, Honduras and Utah

There are parts of what Johnson preaches that I’ve never been able to fully embrace. He talks, for example, about turning his brain off and allowing his health measurements to make most of his decisions for him. In other words, your brain talks you into snacking or drinking or taking drugs even though you know it’s bad for you. Your brain is working against you. That part I get. But the notion of dealing with this by shutting your brain off and turning yourself over to a health algorithm does not feel right on an intuitive level even if I get what Johnson is saying.

(I’ve also been upfront with Johnson that his lifestyle is simply too rigid for me. Nothing pleases me more than light nights with friends sharing too many bottles of wine over some great food. This is probably why I’ve done nothing but gain weight since knowing Johnson.)

That said, Johnson is building a religion, and religions tend to come with leaps of faith, and people inclined to be into leaps of faith desire such commandments as turning your mind over to your body. As far as religions go, you could do so much worse than one that revolves around eating healthy and sleeping well.

Another part of what Johnson preaches is staying alive to witness the miracles of the future. Johnson has a long-running love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence. He both fears it and is interested in its power. (Join the club.) He argues that many humans currently walking around Earth will have the chance to live, if not forever, then much, much, much longer lives than previous generations and that they may well witness amazing things and that they should desire this as a goal.

Sci-fi literature has explored these notions for decades. Ray Kurzweil wrote about similar ideas. I would posit, though, that Johnson has put more energy into building a religion dedicated to the future than anyone in recent times. As much as some people want to position him as a weirdo and a sideshow, I suspect he’s at the forefront of something larger.

If AI really hits the takeoff point and goes Singularity mode, I imagine there will be great religious upheavals as people try to find meaning and to adjust to all-knowing computers in the sky. Blueprint seems like an early stab at this. It encourages people to focus on their bodies and well-being – to turn inward and grasp at something they can still control. I might not be “in it” but am very much here to watch it play out.

1. “It was like hitting our head against the wall for a little while because it was just a bit of an empty void on the internet,” says Tolo.