Bryan Johnson wants you to know he doesn't plan on dying. And if you have $1 million sitting around, he'll show you how to not die, too.

Johnson, the 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who sold his payments company for $800 million and has since reinvented himself as the world's foremost longevity performer, announced last week that he's opening three slots in a program he calls "Immortals." For $1 million per year, a lucky trio of the ultra-wealthy will receive access to his exact anti-aging protocol, a dedicated concierge team, round-the-clock guidance from something called BryanAI, and continuous biological monitoring.

Here's the most shocking and newsy part of the story: In the first 30 hours after the announcement, more than 1,500 people applied, among them well-known entrepreneurs, athletes, politicians and of course, actors.

Johnson has spent roughly $2 million annually on himself for five years — more than 100 daily supplements, a strict plant-based diet, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, plasma exchanges, experimental pharmaceuticals and relentless biomarker testing. He publishes his results and claims his biological age is declining. He may be right about some of it. But, in all his photos nowadays, he looks embalmed, like someone who hasn't seen sunlight in years.

Expensive and Unproven

More to the point: his admirably dense, detailed protocol has a sample size of one. Johnson was born in 1977 or so. None of us, including Johnson, yet knows how long he'll live. (I wonder if there's a prediction market on Johnson reaching immortality ... ).

Also, let's not forget that biomarkers are proxies, not outcomes. The history of medicine includes plenty of interventions that improved the numbers without extending life — and some that shortened it.

What the $1 million premium buys is the experimental fringe — plasma exchanges, stem cell injections and an AI trained on one man's health data, none of which has been validated in peer-reviewed trials on healthy aging adults.

Most Longevity Hacks Are Free

You can do better, for a lot cheaper. For people over 50, the hierarchy of proven longevity interventions looks something like this:

Resistance training is the single most powerful tool available to you. Building and maintaining muscle mass after 50 directly reduces risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, cognitive decline and falls — the latter being one of the leading causes of death in older adults. You don't need a concierge team. You need a barbell, or a set of resistance bands, or just your own body weight. And a smidge of consistency.

Cardiovascular fitness matters enormously. VO2 max — your body's ability to use oxygen during exercise — is among the strongest predictors of longevity in the medical literature.

Sleep is not optional. Johnson's protocol emphasizes sleep optimization, and on this point, the science is unambiguous. Chronic poor sleep accelerates nearly every aging pathway there is — cardiovascular, metabolic, cognitive and immune. It's free to fix, and it may be the highest-leverage intervention available to most people.

Protein intake needs to go up as you age, not down. Most people over 50 eat far too little protein to support muscle maintenance. Current evidence points toward 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily, spread across meals. This is one area where Johnson's supplement-heavy approach distracts from a simple dietary adjustment almost anyone can make.

Metabolic health — blood glucose regulation, insulin sensitivity, waist circumference — predicts long-term outcomes better than almost any other single measure. A continuous glucose monitor, which costs a fraction of Johnson's program, can teach you more about your metabolic response to food and exercise than most annual physicals.

Who Wants to Be Immortal Anyway?

The $1 million Immortals program is a privately funded experiment with no control group, no peer review, and no regulatory oversight. Its participants are paying to be test subjects in a trial run organized by the guy selling the supplements.

Outside of Silicon Valley, it just gets called a luxury wellness program.

Johnson may yet prove to be ahead of his time. Some of his data could eventually point toward genuinely useful interventions. But the core of what he's doing — sleep, exercise, diet, monitoring — is available to everyone reading this, right now, without a concierge team.

Johnson's slogan, "Don't die," is catchy but meaningless. The proven way to live longer is to lift weights, sleep well, eat whole foods and spend time with friends. Even Bryan Johnson knows that.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Risen Wang at Unsplash