The flamingos open their eyes and glance around. Suddenly, they remember that this is the second annual Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, not a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi retreat. The instructor guiding them is, in fact, Bryan Johnson, the investor-cum-longevity influencer who has set himself the modest goal of becoming the first human to not die. “If your balance lasted between zero and seven seconds, your biological age is 60 to 80.” Several 40-somethings look distraught.

The scene was undeniably nutty. But behind the biohacking and balance tests, MAHA is becoming something much more serious: a political movement with money and institutional backing that is moving well beyond its activist roots.

Johnson might seem like an unlikely ambassador for MAHA. He is a Silicon Valley millionaire whose transhumanist worldview has little in common with the more quotidian concerns of MAHA’s crunchy moms. He worries about the end of the human race; they fret about Red 40 in their kids’ cereal. 

But this strange alliance is what makes MAHA one of the most dynamic and politically potent forces in the United States today. Having evolved from a populist insurgency into a viable electoral coalition, MAHA in 2026 looks very different from the movement that helped propel President Trump to victory in 2024. It now counts in its ranks biotech bros like Johnson, health-care CEOs, and world-famous athletes, all of whom appeared at this week’s summit. 

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Some of MAHA’s original supporters view these additions less as a success than a hostile takeover. They pointed to the summit’s corporate sponsors and its speaker list, which featured more CEOs than MAHA moms, as evidence that the movement has sold out or been captured. As one despairingly wrote: “It is a betrayal of what MAHA claimed to stand for.” 

This is, however, a misread. That the movement is now working with figures it has long opposed should be seen as a victory, not defeat. The truth is that the only way to effect change in a country dominated by powerful pharmaceutical and corporate interests is to do so from within. That doesn’t mean MAHA should abandon its principles. But it does require resisting the temptation to frame every compromise as a betrayal, or allowing red lines to congeal into purity tests that leave it isolated from the institutions it is trying to change.

There was plenty of bad blood going into the summit. Days earlier, activists vented their fury online about the proliferation of corporate sponsors paying $300,000 for a seat at the table, while various “medical-freedom” stalwarts were left at home. Why, for example, was there no panel discussion on vaccine injuries? Why was a UnitedHealth representative talking about affordable health care? Why were scientists who lost their career for asking questions not given a hearing?

As one of a handful journalists allowed to report on the summit, I was curious to see if this anger filtered into the crowd. There were some familiar faces: celebrity chef Andre Rush, Del Bigtree, RFK’s former communications director, and Mark Gorton, MAHA Institute’s president, who once said that he was “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference.” But they did not have any speaking role. In fact, most of the attendees looked as though they had just stumbled out of a boardroom meeting, with off-stage conversations revolving around advances in cancer research and boosted breeding in potatoes. Despite a healthy showing of amber-lens glasses, peptide-grown muscles, and one “vaccine police” T-shirt, this was not a crowd of cranks.

Having covered RFK during his presidential campaign in 2024, I was struck by how much had changed. Back then, Kennedy’s supporters comprised a motley bunch of crusty hippies, vaccine skeptics, and disillusioned Bernie bros. It was, in many ways, an expression of what used to be called the California Left: a blend of serious and kooky critiques of big business’s role in America’s health crises. 

Channeling that spirit, Kennedy was the ultimate outsider candidate, building his campaign around three core issues: ending the forever wars, cutting America’s debt, and fighting chronic disease. It was the last of these issues that really galvanized his campaign, as Kennedy railed against agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, The Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All, he charged, were “controlled by giant for-profit corporations,” and the uniparty was “in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big Ag.” Now, he’s in charge of those very agencies, with the Big Pharma executives he once denounced appearing at his summit.  

Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has delivered some of the changes MAHA activists had long demanded, particularly on food additives and ultra-processed foods, but some of his bigger promises have stalled. His pledge to identify the root cause of autism within months went unfulfilled, he failed to win funding for a new chronic-disease agency, and his push to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising has gone nowhere. The biggest blow of all was Trump’s executive order to boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate, forcing Kennedy to defend a chemical he’d spent years opposing.

These defeats have understandably angered many of Kennedy’s erstwhile supporters. But his success on food dyes demonstrates why it is best to work with, rather than against, industry. In the last year, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Conagra, and other major food companies all committed to eliminating FD&C colors, which have been linked to behavioral concerns in children, from their US products. The FDA now runs a “natural-dye-pledge” website that allows the public to track whether companies actually deliver.

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Perhaps his greatest success, though, is that the fight today against regulatory capture, and for cleaner food, has become a rare bipartisan cause. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation phasing out ultra-processed foods from school lunches, and by 2029, the state could become the first to label them in grocery stores. Earlier this year, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said that he “absolutely” supports some of Kennedy’s initiatives, including more testing of infant formula for microplastics and a push for healthier foods in schools. And progressive Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been trying to drum up support for taking on Big Ag and Big Pharma. If Kennedy wasn’t in the picture, these topics may not have received the same kind of air time.

America’s pharma and food industries are notorious. The drug industry is routinely among the biggest spenders on federal lobbying, and it funds much of the FDA’s drug-review work through user fees, which means the regulator and the regulated are financially entangled by design. Similarly, the food industry is run by a handful of mega-corporations that control most of what fills supermarket shelves. These are fiendishly difficult opponents, and it would be unfair to judge Kennedy on failing to upend a decades-old system after just 20 months. 

In the short term, he can focus on the issues popular with the public — fighting chronic disease, ultra-processed food, pharmaceutical influence, and environmental chemicals — while avoiding those that aren’t (such as his obsession with altering childhood vaccine schedules). Such efforts may not save his party from looming defeat in the midterms, but they would at least allow Kennedy to work across the aisle.

The great midcentury historian Richard Hofstadter once argued that the problem with third parties is that once they have stung, they die. His point was that these movements are often strongest when they are outsiders; once they have acquired power and begun implementing their agenda, they lose the energy that gave them their force in the first place. The same logic might apply to MAHA. Activists upset with the slow pace of change have already started to question if Kennedy really is the chosen one, and what life will look like once he’s gone.

This is no bad thing. For a movement to expand, it needs to shed some of its more eccentric adherents and broaden its appeal. That the summit’s loudest critics are also the supporters of the most unpopular policies is a telling sign that it is moving in the right direction. MAHA is growing up — and its followers should, too.

Johnson’s bio on X, where he has 1.8 million followers, reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” He is now best-known for his quest to defeat age and achieve immortality, which he has branded as Project Blueprint, and for the various tech initiatives and companies he has founded or financed to help others do the same. But his original fortune came from Braintree, an online payment company, which he founded and which later acquired Venmo; the combined product was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. 

The immortality influencer has dark hair, marble-white flesh, and a neutral, Tom Cruise-ish affect. His physique reflects rigorous daily workouts; he seems to have created a body much younger than his 48 years. And his posts on X are intentionally, I think, provocative: he gained notoriety most recently by posting in praise of the health of his girlfriend’s “vaginal biome.” 

In a viral post this past month, however, Johnson announced that he is suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder, AIG (autoimmune atrophic gastritis), in which the stomach lining consumes itself. AIG isn’t a death sentence, but it is a bad sign for someone who doesn’t plan to die. On July 29, Johnson made headlines again, by posting on X: “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.” 

Before Johnson’s diagnosis, I had already begun to see him as a tragic hero in a classical sense: larger than life but also susceptible to the kind of tunnel vision the gods punish their heroes with. So his illness, which he insists he will find a cure for, is cosmic irony. AIG increases inflammation, abhorred by biohackers, and prevents the absorption of critical nutrients like iron and B12.

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In my own play, I didn’t write a tragic ending where the Bryan Johnson character gets sick or dies, nor do I think anyone should wish for Johnson to have an encounter with death to learn his lesson. Rather, I think that we should take the ups and downs of Johnson’s immortality “journey” as early feedback on a philosophical experiment that is just beginning, and that may soon become a global, radicalizing phenomenon. 

Johnson isn’t the first techno-utopian to be an immortality influencer: Google language-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has been a transhumanist since the 1990s. But Johnson represents the migration of these ideas to the mainstream. I know someone writing a book about Próspera, an island off the coast of Honduras that is attempting to create a year-round life-extension clinic, an immortality spa, if you will. And unlike early transhumanists, Johnson’s message arrives at a time when technology has visibly accelerated in radicalizing ways. No one used AI four years ago; now it is everywhere in everything. Many of Johnson’s posts regard therapeutic breakthroughs and many of these breakthroughs are driven by supercomputers solving problems exponentially faster than any human laboratory could solve them. 

Whether normies know it or not, elites are planning to live for a very long time; the effort is already well underway to radically alter the destiny of the human body, or at least some human bodies. Autocrats like Xi Jinping and Putin are on advanced therapeutics, it’s safe to say. They will live as long as they can, and will rule as long as they live. Business leaders, thought leaders, and athletes are having longer primes, eventually, maybe, they will have indefinite ones. Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, and LeBron James have already demonstrated that the window for elite athletes can be longer with the right practices. Getting to see our favorite athletes play longer doesn’t seem so bad; ageless autocrats, however, are less desirable.

Bioscience is also offering women the opportunity to have children much later in life. Celebrities with access to expensive health care, like Anne Hathaway, now regularly have children in their 40s; the next horizon is childbearing in the 50s.

Our quest for immortality may be active, in the form of broscience, next-generation supplements, and extreme fitness, or passive, via surgeries and organ replacement. But soon, or perhaps even now, there will be a marked distinction between those who are intending to die — and refusing any enhancements — and those intending to live. 

What this amounts to is a secular immortality cult that replaces heaven with perfected existence forever on earth — and former heaven-focused mortal activities such as prayer and religious practice with constant techno-biological self-enhancement. Among the rich and soon the merely affluent, an extremely deep piece of cultural memetics — the ultimate acceptance of mortality — will start to fade. And whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.

Johnson’s announcement of his chronic illness made headlines around the world. This reflects, I think, the extent to which he has already succeeded as an influencer and quasi-philosopher. His is the first announcement from a future that believes it’s a surprise to get sick and die at all.

It is impossible to overstate how much of a change this presents. The supreme value in a society that accepts mortality is to pass something on to the future. In one that doesn’t, the direction of human activity boomerangs back upon itself. The point of life becomes biological self-maintenance. Moreover, the transhumanist ideal threatens the monopoly of all mortality-derived wisdom — and mortality-backed experience, altogether.

We can’t experience the same moments, works of art, highs, or griefs over and over, without fundamentally changing their impact on us. It may be that life is rich because it is limited, and extended life becomes a form of torture. It may also be that our cognitive hardware is well adapted to our natural lifespans, and that experience does not get better with time. For some of the characters in my as-of-yet-unstaged play, life becomes unbearably lonely as some choose to die and others choose to live out enhanced lifespans.

Longer lifespans, or the promise of longer lifespans, will also change the calculus between parents and children, and the decision-making of prospective parents. If you believe you may escape death, why have children at all? On the other hand, bringing children into a world with less death may also be an incentive to have children; but the globe cannot, in the long run, support a world with life and no death. Something will have to give.

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The most laudatory thing that one can say about Johnson’s moral framework is that it is a moral framework, and that it is not nihilistic, even if it is arguably narcissistic. He uses his own resources and he has defined his own values. It would be hard to argue that he is hurting anyone, and his self-experimentation, even if it doesn’t yield immortality, will likely end in useful therapeutics for the rest of us mortals.

But it is also likely that his Faustian quest commences a Faustian epoch — anything short of total control over our bodies, down to the level of not only cells, but maybe subatomic particles, will be considered a failure.

In the face of such a terrifying prospect we will need powerful — and not entirely rational — protection.

Johnson was raised Mormon, and it is hard not to see that his vision of an immortal, multi-planetary species with extended consciousness resembles the multi-planetary heaven of Mormonism. In general, his message of “don’t die” is part of the message of the later phases of Abrahamic tradition; to never die is to constantly “resurrect” the youth of the aging body. 

All cults promise some kind of immortality, whether through forgiveness, salvation, consciousness-raising, bodily resurrection, or in this case, scientific super-enhancement. Thus, even if Johnson himself is having doubts, his announcement of a chronic illness, instead of discrediting his philosophy, takes part in the miraculous. He is now a prophet, attempting to perform the miracle of healing or raising the dead. And he has the world’s attention.

It is another irony that the lucid, rational promise of secular immortality seems guaranteed to produce mysticism. Transhumanism offers salvation through the supposedly knowable, but it confronts us with existential shocks. The Christian faith, which offers salvation through faith — the fundamentally unknowable — has been more stable. 

For better or worse, the latter half of this century seems like it will be more existential than the first half — and more existential than technological. Technology will be merely the foundation for a revision of what it means to be human. Casual agnostics and atheists may soon find that to not think about mortality or immortality with greater intensity and purpose is considered extremely strange or bad. And established religions may turn toward the supernatural and “proofs” of eternal life, to compete with the promise, backed by data-driven therapeutics, of indefinitely extended life.

Pascal’s Wager argued that faith was the best bet based on probability, especially considering the possibility of eternal damnation. Johnson’s Wager, on the other hand, asserts that there is no downside to seeing how far you can take biological life.

But like any philosopher, Johnson is liable (and free) to change his mind, when the thought experiment becomes a real experiment. We’ll see what the next phase of his immortality, or mortality, brings us.