It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon near Fisherman’s Wharf, and I’m watching a man gleefully swallow a tiny, pill-shaped robot with a video camera attached to it like it’s candy.

As it passes through his gullet and enters his stomach, giving us an exclusive inside look, spectators gasp, pulling out their phones to record it on the big screen behind him. This isn’t a corporate circus act or modern day sideshow – it’s just one of the many product demos taking place at the “Don’t Die Summit,” an expensive, state-of-the-art conference in San Francisco that’s supposedly showing us all how to cheat death with the help of the Bay Area’s latest biotechnology.

Helmed by an eccentric entrepreneur and tech founder, perhaps best known for infusing himself with the blood of his children, Bryan Johnson’s summit is, more or less, a shrine to him and his company, Blueprint. Online, he’s made a name for himself as an anti-death crusader, becoming the subject of countless parodies and literally positioning himself as a post-industrial symbol of the perfect man. After all, when he’s not injecting his hips with hundreds of millions of stem cells to achieve the joints of an 18-year-old, he’s often holding some sort of serum, promoting his wide variety of powder-based “foods” or subjecting himself to yet another form of cutting-edge shockwave therapy.

FILE: Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel, speaking at a web summit in 2017.

Generally speaking, many of the companies at his summit claim to do the same thing: They measure your blood, breath or DNA to identify which diseases you’re most predisposed to while telling you your body’s “true age.” And, for the most part, the people I spoke with were ardent believers who genuinely want to live longer, happier, healthier lives. But I couldn’t help but feel like this gathering – and the companies behind it – were stuck in the shadow of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos, the ghost of Silicon Valley’s fraudulent past.

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Regardless, I wanted to know more about the conference and whether there was some truth to........

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