Just being well is not enough at rich tech influencer’s Don’t Die Summit | Analysis

Alek Ivanov, president of an HVAC company in Southeast Pennsylvania, gives weekly pep talks to his employees — energy drink-chugging air-conditioning repairmen, he calls them — on topics like health and longevity. He has a lot more specific advice to dole out after spending the weekend surrounded by fellow “biohackers” at the Don’t Die Summit.

The Miami confab was devoted to human longevity and hosted by Bryan Johnson, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and investor turned health influencer who describes himself as “the world’s most measured human” and a “rejuvenation athlete.”

The thousand or so people drawn to this Florida fountain of youth represent a cultural phenomenon at the intersection of technology and wellness.

Biohacking was once the province of data-driven Silicon Valley types who tracked their activities, sleep, bone density, and other wellness markers in shared spreadsheets. Johnson grafts that techie mindset onto a broader internet culture obsessed with physical wellness. He has claimed his techniques have pushed his biological age five years below his chronological age of 47.

Today, the proliferation of wearable measurement devices and home tests has brought such calibrations to the masses, and to new levels of obsession.

Wellness is now no longer enough. One must achieve the more quantifiable “longevity,” and biohackers have many more choices than ever.

Summit-goers entered the Mana convention center in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighborhood through purple doors marked with arrows saying, “Longevity ahead. Exit to mortality is closed. This way to a longer life.” A man in a grim reaper costume greeted visitors at the reception desk, a kitschy reminder that the enemy must always be kept at bay. The day’s attendance fee was $349.

A year ago, I wrote a story about the boom in DIY testing, and on Saturday, I immersed myself in a battery of tests. During the daylong summit, I had my hair follicles yanked out by a handsome and youthful-looking clinician working for Acorn Biolabs, which called itself a “personalized regenerative medicine” company. He was going to extract and preserve my stem cells, which would be frozen for use in medical treatments tailored to my needs — or just repurposed into serums for a custom facial.

I had my blood drawn by a start-up, Mito Health, which said it would use it to measure more than 100 so-called biomarkers revealing the health of my heart, metabolism, hormones, and nutrient levels through lab work far more comprehensive than any offered by standard primary care providers. When results come in, the company’s AI software will give me personalized insights and health recommendations, an executive said. “The end state is we are building a doctor personalized for you,” he said, adding that in the future, “everyone will have an AI doctor in their pocket.”

It sounds like something I’ve heard before in my dozen or so years covering the tech world, but each time the far-fetched pitch feels a bit closer to being real.

I also did a bunch of red-light therapy and had my DNA sequenced by way of a cheek swab from a health-and-genetics prediction start-up called Nucleus. I skipped out on the morning ecstatic dance rave and the slate of physical tests from Johnson’s company, Blueprint, that purport to tell you your biological age based on your fitness level. But I did eat what was billed as the “world’s healthiest lunch” of plain boiled chicken, broccoli, and lentils — a pure example of tastelessness and of Johnson’s penchant for superlatives.

I couldn’t resist taking what Blueprint calls “the world’s first microplastics blood test kit.” This involved stabbing myself repeatedly with a metal blade until I extracted enough blood to fill a thumbprint-sized circle on a white card; a normal metal syringe, I was told, would contaminate the test results because it contains plastic.

One evening, I heard Johnson pitch rapt VIP guests on what he has described as his new Don’t Die religion, which he announced recently on X. The former Mormon, who sold his payments company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million in 2013, was holding court in a private area in the Miami Aquarium.

It’s ecumenical, he stressed. “You can be Catholic Don’t Die. You can be Chinese Don’t Die. You can be American Don’t Die. You can be Jewish Don’t Die,” he said as a hammerhead shark swam above his head. “It is the one thing we all have in common.”

That day, an article in the New York Times had come out about Johnson, detailing his company’s extensive use of nondisclosure agreements. Johnson seemed unfazed. He talked about how the company was planning to announce a new effort, Don’t Die Certified, in which consumers would pay to test everyday food companies’ products for toxins and companies would compete for Blueprint’s measurement-focused certification.

The most important thing, Johnson said, was to break the assumption “that humans are always mortal.”

What he didn’t really address was the growing gap between who has access to these emerging therapies and who doesn’t.

Ivanov, the HVAC entrepreneur, tried to ask a question at the VIP dinner, but Johnson didn’t see him amid a sea of raised hands. “What I was going to ask was how to make this make sense to the people who work at my company,” he told me afterward.

Biohacker culture has emerged against the backdrop of people feeling let down, and even abandoned, by the traditional medical system. There’s a belief that all these new sensors and data points allow patients to put more information in their own hands rather than have it flow through doctors they might not trust.

In the U.S., many of these new approaches exist in regulatory vacuums.

Some of the emerging start-ups are founded by well-respected clinicians and researchers and are careful about not overpromising. But others less so.

Certain experts have pushed back, arguing that more data doesn’t necessarily lead to better health outcomes and that sometimes numbers offer the illusion of a certainty that isn’t there.

Johnson’s religious posturing and internet barbs aside, a growing group of people — mostly well-off and under 40 — are clearly willing to invest far more in emerging health practices. They’re pushing the boundaries of what’s knowable, opening a new front in the age-old battle against death.