Bryan Johnson is playing the internet like an improv stage

Bryan Johnson wants to live forever—and he wants you to dunk on him while he does it.

The tech billionaire and biohacker, known for spending millions on an anti-aging regimen that once notoriously included infusing himself with a liter of his son’s plasma, has spent the past few years morphing into something stranger: a Good Poster. 

Before 2022, Johnson’s social media presence consisted mainly of longevity updates and somewhat dry explainers about his health regimen, Project Blueprint. Today, his posts across X and Instagram consist of memes, self-aware trolling, and a sort of nonchalant engagement style. People are eating it up. A recent selfie where he dressed as Ebenezer Scrooge, complete with a nightgown, nightcap, red glasses, and a candle, racked up 10 million views, 65,000 likes, and thousands of begrudgingly admiring comments.

I read him a handful of these on Wednesday during a conversation at Hotel Magdalena in Austin, TX, where he was giving a keynote address at the South by Southwest festival.

you up? pic.twitter.com/6lqqdHqm2F

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) March 10, 2025

“You are getting funnier, which is the best evidence of your whole thing working,” was one. “Weird man, I have grown fond of you,” another. “He’s Dan Hentschel posting now” read a third—a sentiment echoed across X, and a high compliment to a capital P Poster (Dan Hentschel is a comedian and iconic internet prankster). The majority of responses follow this same line of thinking — okay, maybe the anti-aging guy is a little “weird,” but the Scroogecore honk-shoomaxxing fit constitutes an objectively Good Post, everyone agrees.

Suddenly, Bryan Johnson is good at posting. That’s no coincidence.

the internet dunked on this guy for years but all it took was one good post to turn that around and make people love him. that’s why you should never stop posting. we’re all one good post from being beloved. one good post away from changing everything… https://t.co/l9Geiqhh3E

— nard (@avantnard) March 11, 2025

“I am a troll,” he told me during our conversation. “I want to be a troll. I think it’s really enjoyable and fun.” 

It might be fun, but Johnson’s trolling isn’t just for laughs. Like everything else in his life, it’s strategic. He believes memetics is the modern-day equivalent of religious texts and sermons, and engagement—whether positive or negative—could be a new form of conversion. 

Don’t Die—his ideology, movement, philosophy—isn’t about outliving humanity. It’s about convincing people that avoiding death is a cause worth rallying around. And if that means posting boner data about his teenage son to get folks on board, so be it.

Because Bryan Johnson has one rule about public perception: whatever standards the world has, he doesn’t care.

From biohacker to poster

October 2022 marked a turning point for Johnson. He’d been posting updates about his rigorous health regimen, Project Blueprint, for years, and nobody was paying attention. Then, Johnson says a tweet thread posted around the holidays got 50 million views and he woke one morning to a “tsunami of vitriol.” He began to reply as quickly as possible, and his default response “was just to kind of be playful.” Instead of retreating, he leaned in.

“I didn’t think about it, I didn’t plan it, no one coached me, I was trying to do my thing,” he tells me.

He quickly realized people were more interested in his response to the hate than the protocols of the Blueprint. 

“That’s really been true, I think, for the entirety of the projects,” he says. “I think a greater number of people pay attention to the way I interact with people rather than the actual protocol itself and the philosophy.”

“I just don’t feel very aroused by the hate,” he says. “It’s fine, it’s funny.”

“It doesn’t bother you at all?” I ask.

“Not at all,” he says. “I really enjoy it actually.”

His philosophy is that humans are all fundamentally the same, we’re all insecure, we’re all uniquely ridiculous, and (I’m not sure I agree here) most people are kind and want to see others be kind. So he adapted a posting strategy that leaves the door open: “Yes, and…”—a long-standing improvisational comedy rule-of-thumb that encourages one party to always agree with what the other has said (“yes”), then include something of their own (“…and”) to perpetuate the conversation.

Now it seems, he’s fully embraced posting as an approach to neutralizing hate. “There’s somebody who is going to insult me, I will accept the insult and then ‘yes and’ them,” he says. “It’s a great strategy because it defuses the hater. If you give them a ‘no but,’ then they’ve got something to work with, if you ‘yes and’ them, it just wipes it.”

Memes as modern-day religious outreach

For centuries, religions spread their teachings through solemn rituals and unwavering dogma. Bryan Johnson believes that in 2025, the most effective method of communication is through memetics.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, though. Seriousness and trolling are simply two sides of the same coin, both ways to spread ideology and build community. There’s truth in every joke. But where religion has traditionally relied on reverence, Good Posts are today’s language of influence. If his bathtub nudes, sassy inspirational missives, and low-res memes are any indication, Johnson is speaking it with ever-increasing fluency.

“Seriousness is also a memetics. It’s humor,” he says. “So we’re trying to speak a language developed for today. I think that modern-day religion is probably not what ancient religion was.”

pic.twitter.com/0CHuxiYJnW

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) February 18, 2025

Certainly not. At least not the religion he just started.

The premise of ‘Don’t Die’

Don’t Die isn’t meant to be a fleeting lifestyle trend or a tech startup. Johnson is structuring it like “the most efficacious systems humans have”—a religion or a nation-state, something culturally permanent. 

The idea rests on the inevitability of AI’s ubiquitousness in the very near future. If billions of AIs “solve” the “problem” of aging, it will change our entire way of existing in the world. What if we don’t have to die? The problem here is making sure artificial intelligence is working with us, not against us, because we’re running out of time to instill safeguards. There’s a window for humans to figure out how to align our goals with AI’s goals and secure our right to survive as a species. Governments, companies, political parties, none of our current systems will save us; Don’t Die offers a framework that might.

How does this scale to humanity?

Religion, science, and capitalism are history’s most formidable systems for mass cooperation. If they had a baby, it would be Don’t Die.

+ Like religion, Don’t Die is a comprehensive belief system.
+ Like science, Don’t Die is methodical,… pic.twitter.com/YbjWzYPa5R

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) March 7, 2025

“It just seems like the most obvious, sensible thing we could do,” he says. “Ultimately Don’t Die is not even that crazy or radical, it’s the most practical thing any intelligent being can do. We just want to exist.”

It’s a lofty message. Its dissemination requires attention, and attention requires entertainment. But death is a serious and difficult topic to talk about. By speaking the language of the internet, Johnson can talk about it “in a medium that doesn’t confront somebody,” where people can engage in thinking about their impermanence without feeling scared or defensive. He’s spreading the gospel of Don’t Die, one boner meme at a time.

Why he loves the hate

At this point, Bryan Johnson’s willingness to share the most intimate details of his body is well-documented—plasma swapping with his teenage son and father, taking ketamine and tracking his brain activity, meticulously optimizing and tracking his biomarkers through 100 different protocols every single day, chronicled in his new Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.

But nothing sparked more discourse than his Jan. 22, 2025 post comparing his and his 19-year-old son Talmage’s nighttime erections, complete with data on frequency and duration. 

Nighttime erection data from my 19-year-old son, @talmagejohnson_, and me. His duration is two minutes longer than mine.

Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright. pic.twitter.com/ruIYyPMrUC

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) January 22, 2025

Many criticized what they saw as a gross overshare or engagement farming, but to Johnson, it was just another data point, “a really important biomarker” for his son’s well-being. 

“He’s learning something about his own biology, he’s learning something about his own health,” he says. “Whatever standards the world has, I don’t care.”

And it seems neither does Talmage. The two read hateful comments together often, a shared bonding experience. Sometimes Talmage sends him some of the better roasts he sees about his dad online.

“We just laugh until we’re sick,” says Johnson.

If this sounds like cope, he’d argue that resilience to public criticism is an important skill to have. “I really would have valued myself learning how to take criticism to insult at age 19,” he says. “Because it’s such a limiter on success.”

The irony is that by leaning into the insults and simply posting through it, many who used to mock him have come to appreciate his internet presence. In an internet culture that thrives on outrage, refusing to get mad is the mark of a Good Poster.

Honestly so into Bryan Johnson. I got into it as a joke but after getting my data he did successfully gamify my health in my mind

His whole thing is also an argument against the utter creative bankruptcy of most health branding https://t.co/2BekhQ7y4i

— 𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ (@Grimezsz) March 13, 2025

Bryan Johnson isn’t just hacking his body. He’s hacking the internet. Three years ago, nobody was paying attention. Today, he’s part of the cultural zeitgeist, appearing on The Kardashians, posting his way to over half a million followers on X and 1.6 million on Instagram, and giving talks to auditoriums full of people. 

His success isn’t just in longevity science, but in understanding how attention works in 2025: Memes, trolling, and posting through it. 

The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.