Photo: Agaton Strom//Redux
At any given time, there are a lot of people who are upset with Bryan Johnson, the very online guy who wants to live forever. The entrepreneur, philosopher, and “rejuvenation athlete” is in pursuit of the lofty goal of not dying. If he can’t do that, he intends to at least slow down his own aging by taking 50-plus pills a day and eating his dinner around noon. At 47, his skin looks pretty good, if a little Draculean from years of abstaining from sunlight. But Johnson says it’s the inside that counts, claiming that his body is running like someone years younger than he is. Someone like his 19-year-old son, whose blood he has injected.
Through his company Blueprint, Johnson sells supplements featuring collagen, creatine, and other vitamins commonly promoted by fitness influencers. Like anyone making a load of health claims purporting improvements in a customer’s life for the low price of $46.55, Johnson has attracted a number of people questioning the science behind his claims. He appears to be a true believer in what he’s peddling, though he also benefits from being rich enough not to have to listen to anyone. Over a decade ago, he sold his payments company, which owned Venmo at the time, to PayPal, netting him perhaps as much as $300 million.
As with so many situations with people who made their name online, the more you talk about Johnson, the more it seems that he wins. Recently, he explained this succinctly: “Bryan Johnson hate is good for business.”
Every so often, though, his haters can mess up his business as usual.
Johnson says he had never heard of the writer and lawyer Matt Bruenig until a few weeks ago, despite being a big reader. (Johnson said over the phone this week that he’s “probably read over a hundred” biographies of the great minds in history.)
For the past decade, Bruenig has been a popular voice of the wonky op-ed left, voicing progressive labor ideas in pretty much every paper and magazine that isn’t owned by the Murdoch family. (His spouse, Elizabeth Bruenig, a writer at The Atlantic who often tends to more Godly matters, has been printed in the rest of them.) If you’re concerned with the future of the Democratic party and how it can attract young voters with worker-friendly economic policies, you’ve probably run into his work. But Bruenig’s actual day job is as a labor attorney.
As it happens, Bryan Johnson has a profound love not just for aging slowly, but also for nondisparagement agreements. The New York Times reported a few weeks ago that Johnson required his staffers to sign 20-page NDAs blocking them from speaking about pretty much anything related to Johnson or his companies. One “opt-in” document to protect him from potential lawsuits informed his employees they had to be comfortable with extremely specific situations. These include being around Johnson while he has very little clothing on as well as “discussions for media production including erotica (for example, fan fiction including but not limited to story lines/ideas informed by the Twilight series and-or 50 Shades of Grey.)”
“That stuff is weird,” said Bruenig. But what really concerned him is what he described as “Johnson’s suppression of employee speech through these disparagement clauses.”
In late 2019, according to publicly available court documents, Johnson handed one of these agreements to Taylor Southern, an employee at Kernel, his neuroimaging company. She was also his fiancée, until court docs say that Johnson called off their marriage, forced her to move out, then fired her — all while she was being treated for breast cancer. “It’s kind of the problem with an employer becoming engaged to an employee: this whole thing gets so entangled,” Bruenig said. “The agreement forbids Southern from saying anything disparaging about Johnson without making any exceptions for her unwaivable right to speak about her working conditions.”
Last summer, Southern was looking for a way to get out of the nondisparagement clause that has barred her from speaking about this experience when she says she “stumbled across Matt’s blog” and reached out to him. Bruenig explained that she has a right to discuss her working conditions and agreements silencing dissent from other employees so long as she does so in coordination with other workers. After speaking with Bruenig, she and two more of Johnson’s former employees filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing to the watchdog agency that handles private-sector labor disputes that they should be released from what they see as overbroad clauses.
In March, Southern went public with her legal battle. She had sued Johnson, saying that he owed her $150,000 for rent and moving out post-breakup, per the Times. Unfortunately for her, the suit was moved to arbitration, where she was ordered to pay him $584,000 in legal bills thanks to a fee-shifting clause, a provision in the agreement she signed that forced her to pay his lawyers if she sued and lost.
Johnson’s attorney said that her social-media use violated the terms of her nondisparagement clause. Of concern was a video from February in which she described being “suddenly alone” after Johnson ended their engagement, as well as her posts on social media criticizing Harvey Weinstein and Sean Combs for their use of NDAs. “Given that Ms. Southern so frequently comments about Mr. Johnson, there is little doubt she is attempting to equate him with these individuals and paint him in a false light,” Johnson’s attorney wrote.
For Bruenig, this was a step too far. This week, he filed another unfair labor practice charge, describing this legal threat as a violation of Southern’s rights under the National Labor Relations Act. “If Mr. Johnson is uncomfortable with the fact that his use of non-disclosure agreements puts him in the same company as Harvey Weinstein and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, then he should reconsider how he conducts his employment relationships,” Bruenig wrote. As for the end of Johnson and Southern’s relationship, Bruenig’s argument had universal appeal: “Breakups cause people to feel alone. Saying so is not disparagement.”
From here, a lawyer for the NLRB will investigate the matter then kick it up to higher authorities at the watchdog agency if the unfair labor practice charge has merit. If the board ruled in Southern’s favor, no money would be awarded. “The remedies at the NLRB are not that great,” said Bruenig. “But it does help defend us in the case of a lawsuit. If he does start to actually bring lawsuits attempting to enforce this stuff, we can point to the existence of the unfair labor practice charge to hopefully get that lawsuit dismissed.”
Southern, for one, is happy to have Bruenig in her corner. “Matt is the first person to offer a little bit of hope that I’m maybe not stuck in this forever,” she said. But as the case at the NLRB moves forward at a bureaucratic pace — made slower by President Trump’s refusal to fully staff the board that rules on cases — Johnson doesn’t seem phased. He says he is unable to comment on the case involving his ex-fiancée, their breakup, and her ouster while she was battling cancer aside from describing the ongoing NDA spat as just “noise.” He stands by his ways: When it comes to NDAs in the workplace, “I think that more people should do this,” he said.
“The Times reports that somehow my use of NDAs is nefarious, that it’s somehow an evil plan to silence people,” Johnson said. “It’s actually the exact opposite. When people show up, I say, ‘Here is what our work environment is like, this is what we say, this is what we do, and this is what happens if you don’t like this. You do not have to work here.’”
Bruenig, who believes there needs to be a “policy-level” fix to restrict overbroad agreements imposed on workers, may not agree with Johnson’s claim that the workplace is made better with NDAs for all. He’s also not shopping Johnson’s products, noting that they’re often just longevity-branded versions of stuff you can get for cheaper at any store, like the product that Johnson markets as “snake oil.”
“It’s sort of aside from any of the issues we have, but why would you ever buy this?” Bruenig asked. “Just go to the grocery store and buy olive oil.”
