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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 Nolita Dirtbag, Yung Nihilist, Danny Cole, Matthew Donovan 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.
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