Some Thoughts on Bryan Johnson and the "Don't Die" Movement

First, a preface. I’ve been a fan of Bryan since ~2014 when he started OS Fund. He wrote a great kids book in 2017 called Code 7 that I bought and read to my son; lots of wisdom in there. That’s just to say this is not a “picking on Bryan for his lifestyle” sort of post.

Now, I’ve been focused on both healthspan and lifespan, tinkering with my own health and fitness, for MUCH longer than Bryan (hell, long before most people had even heard of Bryan).

I seem to be doing OK, as my biological age increased just .3 years in 8 months, which would put my rate of aging at 0.45, MUCH better than Bryan’s and on a tiny, tiny fraction of his $2,000,000/yr ;)

I also 100% agree with Bryan that death is our enemy, and that conquering it should be one of, if not THE highest of human priorities. Don’t Die is a very good slogan.

I said as much in my book, The Grand Redesign.

And while we work towards legit immortality (which, with the help of AI, may not be far off), I’m all for improving your health and longevity to buy the necessary time to achieve that goal…

But I think it is critical to highlight that for the time being personalized medicine is the key to health and longevity, and very likely NOT some one size fits all approach like Blueprint, nor the extremist “all in” approach of Bryan.

Hormesis, more colloquially known as “the dose makes the poison,” applies here.

Too much of a good thing is often not a good thing.

Sure, if you’re going from extremely unhealthy to something like Blueprint, you’re likely to see improvements, but you’d almost certainly see that sort of improvement with any significantly healthy change to your diet and exercise. It’s not fucking sorcery.

And I will say that, if it takes something like Blueprint to make that initial leap easy for you, then fine, all power to ya! Improvement is better than perfection in the activation energy stage of a personal transformation.

But you should be VERY aware that Bryan has carefully, one-by-one, tested the efficacy of his interventions that are a part of his stack, based on his PERSONAL biomarkers. Not yours.

He’s very clear about this, but at the same time I think it gets both lost in the noise, and ignored by Bryan as he proselytizes Don’t Die.

I’ve looked over Blueprint carefully, and there are numerous things in there that can actually be negatives for some people…Astaxanthin, Omega 3, Ubiquinol, Red Yeast Rice. And if you’re adding these things in, not one at a time, but in one big bundle, how the ever loving fuck are you supposed to know which of the many times many conjoined interventions is causing the problem??

Now, I’ve defended Bryan, again and again, when people pick on him for his personal choices. He should be free to live his life as he sees fit, and if anything his work as a longevity guinea pig could eventually benefit all of humanity since he’s so open with the data. I can get behind that!

But then there’s shit like this:

I get that Bryan is trying to meme something into existence, and this social media poasting schtick is (hopefully) an act, but it’s still extremely dickish…and in this he’s almost certainly wrong.

Top that off with this sort of dogmatic bullshit:

Tim Ferriss is also someone who believes in tests and data, and a cheat day, run according to Tim’s 4HB protocol, especially for someone who otherwise has their diet, exercise, supplements, and sleep dialed in, isn’t going to hurt you :/

Bryan says he’s a big believer in data, but as far as I’m aware there is ZERO data to indicate that a single heavy meal in an otherwise healthy person does anything whatsoever to shorten their longevity. At worst they experience a temporary blip in their biomarkers, and bounce back relatively quickly to their baseline (24-48h).

Hell, there are even clear psychological and physiological benefits to something like a cheat day, again if done according to the protocol.

I do a cheat day every Saturday and have for years, but the rest of the week I run an 18/6 TRF with a ~500 calorie deficit, get 6-8 hours of exercise per week (80% Zone 2, 20% Zone 3/4; mix of walking, rowing, and body weight exercise), have my diet and supplements VERY carefully dialed in, and have a phenomenal sleep routine. According to my pace of aging (shared above), my blood tests, and my full body MRI from Ezra, cheat days clearly don’t hurt a damn thing.

The future should be built on truth, not ideology, propaganda, dogma, or obnoxious shit poasting :/

If you want to improve your health and longevity, you should be testing supplement interventions one at a time, not many at once, so you can actually tease out what works and what doesn’t, and so you can identify side effects if they crop up.

His nutty pudding, blueberry nut mix, and olive oil are probably fine (assuming you have no allergy issues). But the rest, maybe not the smartest choice unless you’ve tested the components individually on yourself.

You can easily run tests to determine what is and isn’t working via something like Function Health (no affiliation, I’m just a customer who likes what they offer.) And that’s what you should do.

Don’t rely one someone else to do your research for you. Go read the papers. Check the sample sizes, the replicability of the studies, the blinds, the confounding variables.

Test on yourself, carefully, systematically. Over time. With data.

Personalized medicine, NOT one size fits all.