The first thing to know about Bryan Johnson is that there are two of him. One is Bryan with a “y,” the forty-six-year-old founder of the Blueprint life-extension system. This Bryan Johnson spends his days submitting to full-body scans, blood tests, and something called “penis rejuvenation” in search of physical immortality. The other is Brian with an “i,” a forty-five-year-old influencer known as “Liver King” who advocates an “ancestral lifestyle” allegedly unavailable to modern humans due to our penchant for living indoors, staring at our computers, and cooking our food.

On the surface, the two Johnsons seem totally opposed. Bryan is a vegan who subsists on custom-made vegetable goos and avoids sunlight, while Brian eats a pound of raw liver every day and sports a deeply bronzed physique. Bryan, a tech centimillionaire who made his fortune on payment-processing apps, telegraphs introspection and asceticism — at least, when he is not posting about injecting his penis with vasodilators. Brian, who used to work in his wife’s dental practice, is a self-described “dominant man” who perches on a plush throne and gleefully chows down on raw organ meats, often in staged family meals featuring his obviously reluctant children.

Whereas Brian seeks to recapture man’s lost prehistoric grandeur through pull-ups and squats, Bryan prepares his flesh vessel for an AI-mediated technofuture. Yet their distinct views of exercise, nutrition, and even time itself contribute to one and the same political project. Drawing on American individualism, Silicon Valley’s quenchless thirst for “optimization,” and the self-help platitudes of a hippie culture that curdled in the late 1970s and ’80s, the Johnsons and their ilk help constitute a right-wing politics I call “lifestyle fascism.”