I went to a longevity night hosted by Bryan Johnson in San Francisco. I needed a cookie afterward.

The one topic that makes people in San Francisco stop talking about AI these days is: eternal life.

When Baseten, an AI startup (what else?), announced a few weeks ago, it hosted a “private evening” with tech entrepreneur and sustainability evangelist Bryan Johnson and VC Sarah Guo at the SF office, more than 3,000 people registered for just 100 spots.

For the uninitiated, Johnson made hundreds of millions selling his payments startup to PayPal and now spends millions a year on a wellness regimen he shares with his 2.7 million Instagram followers. Johnson has been in the news a lot this summer after revealing that he did autoimmune gastritis, an incurable chronic disease of the stomach. Last month he said: “Maybe so have ‘taken this whole longevity thing too far’.

When I arrived, the registration table was full of people on the waiting list trying to get in.

“Don’t bother,” said the person at the counter. “It’s full.”

Once I got past the crowds, I was given a color-coded schedule with three stations: breathwork, Bioage testing, and a question-and-answer session with Dr. Carl SegerJohnson’s chief physician.

“Nothing you measure tonight is a judgement,” I was told. “It’s a baseline and all these markers can be moved.”

But first it was time for happy hour! No hors d’oeuvres or wine here. Can I interest you in raw vegetables and mocktails instead to take the edge off? I chose a refreshing “Tumeric Elixir” with orange juice, carrot juice, ginger and turmeric.

As soon as I walked in, I noticed that everyone looked overwhelmingly youthful. A tech founder in his 50s told me he felt old-fashioned. So either Johnson’s routine works wonders, or this crowd was emblematic of it Silicon Valley’s ‘youthquake’.

I asked an enthusiastic young machine learning engineer working at Uber why he was there.

“Bryan Johnson is just so cool!” he said.

But enough chatter. It was time to have my face scanned to find out my ‘facial age’. After a few minutes a lecture appeared. I was in the 80th percentile for wrinkles (which is apparently very good), but my “facial age” was older than my real age.

Feeling a little dejected, I walked over to the bioage stations, where the participants underwent a series of tests, such as grip strength, push-ups, and a leg stand, to measure their biological age. Johnson, accompanied by his new guard dog, Katara, walked by and playfully encouraged people to do a few more push-ups.

A few feet away, engineers were coding on giant screens. After all, we were in an office and not a gym, and the work had to continue.

Before the interview with Johnson, it was time for a dinner ‘accompanied’ by his personal chef Tara Amanya. There were box meals with chicken and vegetables, but I opted for the salmon, which was tasty but left me a little hungry.

Anything that encourages people to exercise more or eat healthier should be praised. Still, I was struck by how many questions came up throughout the evening from people looking for easy ways to hack life, as if it were an algorithm that could be exploited.

Time and time again people kept asking, “What is the An What can I do to live longer?”

I kept thinking of my grandparents, who had never heard of peptides or biohacking. They drank wine with dinner every night and usually ate whatever they wanted. They all lived well into their nineties.

Johnson is much more self-aware than he can appear on Instagram, and when interviewed by Guo to end the evening, he said, “We all know I’m going to die, but it’ll be getting hit by a bus or choking on broccoli.”

“I give you permission to enjoy the joy of it,” he continued. “That’s irony, and my ultimate enemy is irony.”

After the conversation ended, I walked back to my hotel and ordered a chocolate chip cookie.

Do you have a tip about life in Silicon Valley? Securely contact reporter Ben Bergman on Signal at @BenBergman.11