MrSkelter 15 minutes ago

Johnson is a rich “freak” and his coverage is identical to the attention lavished on other “freaks” who lack self awareness.

He’s a someone who has turned incredible good fortune into a reason to denude all simple pleasures from his life in a quest to extend it.

When he inevitably dies at a mundane age the hours of content he made will document his vanity and hubris.

olives 4 days ago

I actually quite like his content, and I consider myself generally wary of marketers and content creators.

I find most of his videos, which typically follow the format of "I conducted experiment X on myself; here are the results," useful and digestible without being overly pushy about selling his Blueprint product.

The sample size = 1 person (himself) casts doubt on a lot of his findings, but I've still made some lifestyle changes after watching his videos. I finish eating earlier, and anecdotally feel better. I've leaned toward eating more healthy nuts and extra-virgin olive oil, and I've also purchased a sleep tracker.

I have not made any Blueprint purchases.

  • road_to_freedom 9 hours ago

    Which sleep tracker? Watches aren't accurate.

    • the_clarence 8 hours ago

      The whoop. I recently compared it with an actual sleep apnea test and the REM is not accurate at all. But it is interesting to see tendencies (drinking alcohol really messes up with your sleep, winter increases your REM, etc.)

      • lend000 8 hours ago

        Whoop is definitely not accurate for sleep data, but it's great for exercise and there's certainly value in seeing trends.

    • brookst 8 hours ago

      Accurate or precise?

      Scales can be useful even if not accurate, so long as they are reasonably precise. Same for sleep tracking watches.

bambax 4 days ago

> You might have seen his Netflix documentary where he talks about taking 100 pills a day in order to live longer. Or maybe you saw his YouTube videos where he shows the world his workout routines.

No, I have not.

> extremes gain attention. It polarises people. 90% of people might hate Bryan or think he is crazy. He has a lot of haters. 9% of people might be curious but ambivalent. But if 1% of people love Bryan’s message, that’s all he needs. It’s better to have a small number of fanatical fans than lots of people who are luke-warm about you.

That's a recipe for a cult. Maybe creating cult followers is the ultimate goal of any "marketing" initiative. But it's not admirable, nor recommendable.

For this person who pretends they will not die, it's just ridiculous and unimportant, but when it comes to politics and MAGA obtuse fanatics, it destroys the world.

  • idopmstuff 10 hours ago

    “The sober truth is that religions are the most stable and strongest organizations in the entire world,” he says. “Say I’m a cult, and I’ll joke that my cult is better than your cult because it tells people to eat healthy food and go to bed on time.”

    -Bryan Johnson in https://www.menshealth.com/health/a63664080/bryan-johnson-do...

    And hey, he has a point. His following is fanatical about stuff like... going to bed early, exercising and eating right.

    • ecuaflo 9 hours ago

      But not about masking, and subsequently contracting covid, hurting his health more than any of his therapies have helped.

      https://x.com/lauramiers/status/1846199554288292232

      • idopmstuff 6 hours ago

        What evidence do you have that he wasn't masking? That tweet doesn't seem to make any mention about masking, and there are definitely shots of him masking while traveling in his Netflix doc (which is well post-Covid).

        Also, those tweets seem pretty nonsensical - she quotes him posting about how he actively acknowledges Covid is very damaging and then attacks him for unrelated things that he does? Seems like those are just the tweets of someone who's a little nuts and hates the rich.

      • brailsafe 8 hours ago

        What's the significance of those tweets? He got covid? Who's she supposed to be?

    • bambax 9 hours ago

      > my cult is better than your cult

      That's not possible, because I don't have a cult. That's the point. All cults are bad, they can't be ranked.

      • gniv 8 hours ago

        It's in the DFW sense: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

      • pfannkuchen 9 hours ago

        Cults are ideology startups. Most start ups fail. Doesn’t mean they all will.

        • butter999 8 hours ago

          Cults are scams designed to entrap and abuse people. Everything else is window dressing; their ideological positions will ultimately be changed or abandoned to consolidate the cult leader's power (ie Synanon spent years espousing a commitment to nonviolence, only to turn on a dime and begin arming themselves and carrying out assaults). They're not the nucleolus of "successful" ideologies any more than pyramid schemes are the nucleolus of successful businesses. Some of them will succeed in that they survive and spread, some of what they preach will be reasonable, common sense stuff. But ultimately they're an engine to abuse people and they will create much more misery than anything else.

          • pfannkuchen 8 hours ago

            How do you know it’s window dressing though? Like there are some people out there who legitimately believe some pretty crazy things, and they have some framing that convinced themselves so it is convincing to some other crazy adjacent people as well. I accept that some cults are what you say, but I doubt that all are.

            Probing question. Do you consider LDS to be a cult? I think you would find its characteristics in the beginning to be abusive in the cult abuse sense. Like the founder is like yeah, Space Jesus said that all these dozens of women should have sex with me exclusively from a young age. But most don’t consider it to be a cult today. Did it transition from bad cult to not a cult? Or is this what the lifecycle of all successful religions looks like?

            • butter999 8 hours ago

              In every cult I've ever read about, it's pretty clear that the person at the center was creating a structure that enabled them to abuse people. I'm sure there were people involved who were true believers. But the cult leaders were engaged in something closer to cold reading than good faith philosophical inquiry, figuring out what lands with an audience and then leaning into it.

              Your question about LDS is fair, I'm just not knowledgeable enough about LDS that I feel qualified to address it. What "successful ideologies" do you believe came out of cults, and why do you believe that?

              • pfannkuchen 7 hours ago

                Well I feel like if you’re not even familiar with the origins of LDS you probably aren’t interested enough in the development of ideologies to really engage with patterns in that data set. Thanks for your replies.

  • solumos 8 hours ago

    We can look at this "cult-like" effect in a number of ways. Some will be specifically interesting to this community, since they apply broadly to startups.

    I think it's wrong to call Bryan a "marketing genius" and I don't think the article here gives meaningful advice or reflects Bryan's process in the slightest. I don't think that he does anything particularly novel with his marketing, and I don't think it's the case that he had a brilliant business idea in 2021 where he thought to himself, "you know what would be great for my next gig, is if I built a business around longevity, used myself as the sole test subject, appealed to the fitness/health communities, and created my own supplements to sell" — I think he developed an obsession around health and longevity given his struggles with it himself, he wanted to share the work he was doing with other people, other people became interested in what he was doing and the way he told his story, and the business sort of naturally formed around it due to gaps in the market for the quality of products that Bryan wants as well as the high-quality content he produces (he's still a capitalist).

    People, such as the author here, love to apply a revisionist lens to success. You could imagine a similar article being written about the marketing genius of the early days of The Beatles or Bob Dylan — they stood out, wrote catchy songs, appealed to a somewhat specific demographic (that eventually broadened), differed from the mainstream (early on), and followed trends. Neither of them thought about marketing as a first principle. To borrow an idea from Rick Rubin, they were creating music that they wanted to experience in the world that no one else was making, and once they brought those ideas to life, there were others who enjoyed it as well. They were creating first for themselves, from their own obsession, and there was a latent audience ready to receive it.

    The same goes for successful startups. Facebook's origin story certainly shares a lot of similarities. It also factors into Paul Graham's interest in obsession[0], and consequently YC's founding principles[1] of investing in those motivated by "consuming interest" rather than "money". Perhaps this seems like a bit of a digression, but this sort of obsession is what leads to a "cult-like" mentality, both within the organization as well as with its fans and users. This is something that Peter Thiel (and Founder's Fund more broadly) is known for supporting, as well as recommending in Zero to One[2]. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was an early supporter of the largest social network in existence and a scholar of Renee Girard/mimetic theory.

    Which brings me to my final point — there are a variety of organizations, fanbases, religions, etc that embody this "cult-like" growth and interest. I don't think it's possible to avoid them, although it clearly has the ability to harm. At the same time, personal computers and the internet were once niche communities with cult-like followings. I don't think these manifestations of mimetic desire are something that we'd want to discard entirely even if we could — they're something that simply occurs due to our social predisposition as human beings, and it's amplified due to our interconnectedness via modern technology.

    [0] - https://paulgraham.com/genius.html

    [1] - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles

    [2] - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/peter_thiel_710435

hn_throwaway_99 9 hours ago

These kinds of advice articles on "how to build your personal brand" always tend to leave out those pesky little important details, like "spend 2 million dollars a year on your health regimen", which first requires you to be worth 10s of millions after selling your fintech startup.

jzellis 4 days ago

Is that the guy who looks like a damp slightly younger guy and brags about his kid's boner? Where do I sign up for ticket to that train?

areoform 4 days ago

An interesting sociological tendence that I've noticed after talking to large-ish to medium-ish streamers is that haters fixate. And the greater that level of hate and fixation, the more successful that person seems to be.

Of course, there is a critical threshold to this phenomenon - a hater singularity, if you will - after which the hate becomes negative, but before and up to that point, the hate just fuels the metrics.

Is there a historical equivalent to this fixation? People have watched trials and followed the stories of serial killers with revulsion and fixation pre-social media & live streaming, but that fixation seems more muted (in retrospect) than today's trend.

It's striking just how much negative emotions drive the "attention economy"

mcv 8 hours ago

I thought this was about AC/DC or something. I've never heard of this guy, so I don't buy the claim that 90% hate him. I think 90% never heard of him. If only 1% of people who actually heard of him love him and his message to live healthy to live longer, that's really not a lot.

As an example of how to build a brand, I'm not convinced. How do you manage to be so controversial with such a positive message?

bambax 10 hours ago

I saw this days ago and commented here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089426

The comments with the next or previous ids (43089427, 43089425) correctly state that they are 3 days old.

But my comment below says it was made 15 minutes ago??!? How???!?

It may be fine to repost a story to give it another chance or whatever, but changing the timestamps of comments is shady and, I think, unacceptable.

  • jasonjmcghee 10 hours ago

    It's part of HN

    Second Chance Pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

    • bambax 10 hours ago

      Yeah ok, I was aware of this, but it doesn't say that the timestamps of comments will be modified! That's what I have an issue with.

      It may be a minor, ridiculous nitpick, but it's like editing my content without my consent. It's bad.

robwwilliams 4 days ago

He experimented with getting transfusions from his son. Amazing that he actual does not sound as nuts as he is ;-) Yes sugar BAD. Hey that’s a good slogan! I must start marketing that. Damn Bob Lustig beat me to it.

If you want to live forever as a cognitive entity then the only solution is to start designing your robot body and hope AGI can implement a version of you even you can not tell apart from you and you.

drpossum 4 days ago

[flagged]

  • areoform 4 days ago

    > What if I replace "Bryan" with "Charles Manson"? And this is why I have no respect for "marketing".

    The trivial reply to your point is, What if I took {engineering / science topic} and replaced it with {weapon}? And this is why I have no respect for "engineering."

    I think scientists and engineers should learn how to be great marketers because we need to reach people where they are. Not where we'd like them to be.

    If you still feel viscerally icked out, then it's worth remembering, dosis sola facit venenum — only the dose makes the poison.

    • drpossum 4 days ago

      No, because I wouldn't make a blanket statement of "if some fraction of people like <some technology>, then it clearly must be good" because it's an absurd statement to make. It takes away all nuance and conversation. It forces a one-perspective narrative and that's exactly why marketing and marketers-in-the-modern-sense are shit. (btw I'll gladly stand with my conviction and hypocrisy whilst you go stand with advertisers)

gherkinnn 4 days ago

So Pete here uses Bryan's marketing notoriety to draw people's attention to his own marketing services, one of which is being a LinkedIn ghost writer. Colour me amused, there's a clever remark buried somewhere in here. But time is running out, so I will leave thinking what special kind of tool hires a LinkedIn ghost writer.

https://www.petecodes.io/linkedin-ghost-writer-for-hire/

tptacek 10 hours ago

I can't get past "Don't die. What a slogan!" What a slogan, indeed.

silisili 8 hours ago

I constantly go back and forth on this guy.

On the negative side - he looks obviously aged, he wears tons of makeup and teen clothes and stands out like a sore thumb. He seems to kinda shill products that may or may not be snake oil. He apparently took blood from his son, and now measures his and his son's boner in the middle of the night.

After all that you'd think I'm a hater, and maybe I am, but he open sources everything. There are more data points than a person would ask for. As weird as the boner thing is, it's slightly interesting. He takes brain scans and share them. Most of all, he seems like a genuinely affable person.

I don't know what to make of any of this, so I just sit eating the proverbial popcorn.

  • beagle3 7 hours ago

    The boner measurement may seem weird, but it’s a very informative measure of general health, vascular health, and a few other things.

    My friend who worked in a sleep lab as a student was tasked with measuring several aspects of boners. The Netflix movie “game changers” (or “you are what you eat”, don’t remember) also used these measurements to drive a point.

    It is not any weirder than a urine test or fecal analysis, which we all take for granted when looking for specific markers (e.g. protein in urine or occult blood in feces). It is, however, much cheaper and easier to carry out in a daily basis.

  • the_clarence 8 hours ago

    I think he seems to be very honest and open. The only downsides is that he's a sample of one and he focuses a bit too much on appearances now. But he really built a brand of trust around his methods and I'm probably going to buy his oil, chocolate, powder, and replace functionhealth with his alternative

pknerd 10 hours ago

> Don't Die.

Death is a part of natural selection and necessary for the ecosystem. I am surprised that this pro-science guy does not get it.

  • silisili 8 hours ago

    I hold this same belief, but have quieted about it because of how incredibly unpopular it is on this forum. Angry comments asking who am I to play God, if I'm so unhappy let me die and not them, etc.

    I used to get angry about such replies, but I guess I get it more now. Nobody wants to die, regardless of how scientifically, societally, and economically important it is to do so.

  • xixixao 9 hours ago

    What is human is far from “natural” for our original ecosystem.

    A better argument for death would be if you think it’s important for a healthy human society.

  • beagle3 7 hours ago

    So is teeth rot if you eat the wrong things. Are you surprised at dentistry and all the people who use its services?

    We are so far gone from the natural processes that this argument does not really have any meaning IMO.

    • pknerd 7 hours ago

      As per Bryan, it would be: Don't rot

  • emmelaich 9 hours ago

    Good for the gene, not great for the individual.

    Matter of values not science.

    • bambax 9 hours ago

      But how will individuals fare should death be defeated? A world without death, with stupid gurus running around topless to show off their abs, is absolute hell.

lareading 4 days ago

My tired eyes read that as Boris - keyboard bashing deleted!