The Trouble with Bryan Johnson
Right now Longevity influencer Bryan Johnson is speedrunning through that famous Eric Hoffer quote:
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
In a sense, he's just the latest in a long lineage of charlatans making money off the promise to help people live longer, if not forever.
Like every fitness and health influencer before him, he might have started with good intentions but is slowly evolving into yet another supplement shill.
The money is just too damn good, I guess.
But that's of course all very predictable and boring.
More interesting is to talk about the fundamental problems with his approach to health and longevity.
The Shot-Gun Approach
Bryan Johnson is famously taking a "shot-gun" approach: "Let's try everything at once and see what we find."
This makes it virtually impossible to tell what's actually moving the needle.
On top of that, he's also giving little explanation for most of his choices.
If there is one paper that suggests that, for example, low doses of lithium might increase dementia risk, that seems to be good enough for him.
There are hundreds of threads on Reddit where people try to decipher why, say, he's eating macadamia nuts and strawberries but not almonds and apples.
With each supplement, with each drug, with each intervention, you're increasing the risk of unintended side effects.
It’s why “rich people often times have bad outcomes”. Doing more in a health context often backfires.
You might have done your research on the supplement vendor, but then the company gets sold to private equity and quality control goes down the drain.
Side effects might not show up immediately, but after taking some polluted supplement for a decade, they will.
So in summary, I don't think anyone is learning anything useful from Bryan Johnson's n=1 experiment.
The metrics he loves bragging about are most likely the result of just two interventions:
Caloric restriction
Potent anti-aging drugs (rapamycin, metformin, acarbose, 17-alpha estradiol)
These seem sufficient to explain most of the changes he's observing in his health markers.
That nutty pudding, the olive oil, or the dozens of supplements he's selling have little to do with it.
Caloric restriction (aka eating less energy than you burn) prompts the body to decrease sympathetic activity in order to conserve energy.
This shows up in measurements in the form of lowered body temperature and lowered heart rate, both changes Bryan Johnson frames as positive outcomes.
The downside, however, is that caloric restriction has severe adverse effects in the long run.
When your body goes into energy-saving mode, you - surprise surprise - have less energy. You start to feel horrible. Your body is sending you signals to change things ASAP.
Bryan Johnson seems to be mitigating this through hormone treatments (TRT) and psychopharmaceuticals, but he rarely ever talks about this.
He's already taking so much experimental stuff, why would he say no to a little Ketamine á la Elon Musk?
Potent anti-aging drugs like rapamycin basically mimic caloric restriction. There are strong indications from animal studies that they have a positive effect on lifespan.
But it's not clear why taking multiple of them at the same time while also restricting calories would have additional benefit.
If anything, the waters are muddied so much by his shot-gun approach that it's impossible to draw any conclusions.
Metric Hacking
The second problem with Bryan Johnson's approach is his obsessive focus on optimizing a set of metrics.
Yes, you can lower your heart rate and body temperature by starving yourself. But that doesn't mean it will do you any good.
Yes, you can cherry pick certain biomarkers, hack them, and then claim "I have the best biomarkers in the world. I am the healthiest person on the planet."
Buried on his website, he admits, for example, "Several heart markers including LV septal A' mitral, Aortic root diameter, LA E' latbasal and RVSP are all coming in decades older than my chrono age."
Also, he notes "severe headache symptoms causing to wake in the night."
Besides, his telomere length and most of his brain markers are around his biological age.
And that's, of course, just the stuff he's sharing publicly.
In addition, hacking biomarkers is conflating cause and effect.
I have no doubt that you can increase your nighttime erections by stimulating your penis with shockwaves.
You can make your face look younger through plastic surgery.
Your teeth do like nicer when you’re wearing veneers.
You can "de-age" your hair using potent medications like Finasteride and Minoxidil.
But I'm doubtful any of this will make you live longer.
Instead, if Bryan Johnson's other interventions were effective beyond manipulating biomarkers, would he really need any of that?
If all of his interventions really made his body 31 years younger, shouldn't this show up in all kinds of places instead of just a few selected biomarkers?
Entertainment
Bryan Johnson does a great job at deflecting any criticism that comes his way.
He managed to install an incredibly powerful frame:
He's also trying to take the wind out of his critics' sails by leaning into the weirdness and scamminess of it all.
"Haha, look, I'm naming the olive oil I'm selling snake oil. I'm clearly in on the joke."
"Haha, I can't stop talking about my penis health."
Just like with his namesake Bryan "Liver King" Johnson, it might be nice entertainment.
But don't expect to learn anything useful from either of them.