Bryan Johnson has a clone. “I just cloned myself…as a newborn,” he posted on X last month. The 48-year-old venture capitalist is on a mission not to die, and he invests $2 million each year in this project. Bloomberg reported three years ago that “his test results show he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of a young adult.”

The announcement of his “clone” raised eyebrows. “This baby-bryan lives in a petri dish for now,” he said. “This may be scary to some people…a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.”

The tweet was clearly meant to draw eyeballs, and it was misleading. Developing a full human clone, which is now impossible, just to use it for parts would be obviously troubling. What Johnson is doing is attempting to use induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to replace tissue in his body with tissue that is genetically his.

That may be a good use of medical innovation. But that doesn’t mean this technology isn’t fraught with moral conundrums in other circumstances. As Ethics and Public Policy Center visiting bioethics fellow Katelyn Walls Shelton pointed out, “One concerning way these iPSCs could be used is through in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), to create sex cells (egg or sperm) which could then be used to create embryos. Or, iPSCs could be paired with a tech called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT for short) to form a legitimate human clone.”

These problems don’t seem to bother Johnson, who has made it his entire life’s goal to increase his longevity. He falls asleep at 8 p.m., eats hemp and pea protein powder for breakfast, uses AI to parse through his 1.5 billion data points, and easily lists stats such as his resting heart rate and heart rate variability.

This mission consumes him, and he calls it revolutionary. “Don’t Die is the next major ideology for the human race on par with democracy, capitalism, socialism, Islam, Christianity. It’s a new way of being,” he said to Time. “I try to make this very clear: I’m not saying ‘living forever.’ I’m saying, ‘Don’t Die.’ These are two very different concepts. Don’t Die speaks to the here and now, the absolute next moment you exist. It is a survival instinct.”

He describes himself as a prototype for a project that can help others live longer, and he embraces comparisons to Dorian Gray, Dracula, and Prometheus. But he seems dismissive of the many, many ethical questions his mission raises, including a total obsession with oneself and exploitation of others. In 2024, he shared that he had used plasma from his son Talmage, whom he called his “blood boy.”

On Ross Douthat’s podcast for the New York Times, Johnson spoke at length last week about his mission not to die, but he couldn’t articulate what it means to live.

Near the end of the hour-long interview, Douthat pressed Johnson on his philosophy.

“Somebody once said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ I feel like there’s a big part of human existence on this planet that is not devoted to optimizing power, wealth and money but is devoted to sacrifice for others …. We do that all the time. That’s what women do when they bear children. It’s what men do when they go to war …. it just seems to me like Don’t Die as a centering philosophy very strongly risks losing all of the benefits that human beings have gained from being willing to die. What are you willing to die for, Bryan?”

Johnson couldn’t answer the question. He hedged a bit before switching the subject to criticize the idea that death might be good (which, by the way, is not what Douthat said).

“What I’m saying is there is a future where Don’t Die is intuitive and natural and common sense, and we look back at our stage and are like: Those guys were barbarians, coming up with these stories about why sacrificial death was good for society,” Johnson said. “Don’t Die is a gigantic leap as a philosophical statement of: We value existence above all other virtues.”

The interview is worth listening to in full, as it demonstrates how Johnson’s relentless and self-centered pursuit of longevity pushes out all other “virtues.” When people with such philosophies are funding and developing new medical technologies, we should all be worried about where we are going.