Bryan Johnson and a search for healthy longevity

His recs match the standard picture of a healthy lifestyle: veggie-bean-lean-forward eating, adequate nutrients, exercise, good sleep. Following his recommendations seems fine? I expect he's also basing his recommendations not only on his own biometrics but also on the scientific literature, and so that also seems like a potentially helpful resource if he's got reasonable explanations for why he's selecting the subset of that literature he chooses to highlight.

Evidence his system can motivate and provide superior results to other diet-and-exercise regimens on the basis of his own personal results is, of course, massively confounded.

He's selling the supplements he recommends, he's extremely rich, he's unmarried (though has 3 kids, I don't know his involvement), he's being danced around by doctors all the time as far as I can tell, I expect he's outsourcing a lot of his domestic labor, and he has chosen a line of work where he's professionally invested in a low-stress, healthy lifestyle. He's clearly conscientious and extremely smart given his prior success in business. He probably wouldn't have blown up on the internet if he didn't happen to look young and fit. I question whether exposure to his protocols is any better at causing behavior change for the better than alternative systems, and there are intense selection effects for who chooses to and succeeds at following his protocol (and it's not just selection for the "disciplined and capable"). 

These are the fundamental challenges with trying to interpret n=1 longitudinal data. It's hard to update on unless you're a lot like the test subject. And this test subject is factually weird, so you're probably not like him. That doesn't make is ideas bad, it makes his evidence almost worthless to nearly everybody except him.

The reason his recs make sense is because they're drawing on a tremendous amount of standard scientific research. That information, in principle at least, you already had access to without him. So his n=1 longitudinal data seems more like a driver of the narrative and excitement around his brand than a meaningful point of evidence in favor of his specific lifestyle plan.

Similar to veganism, I expect him to live slightly longer and with a better health span, but with high variance. Even more so than vegans, he is exposing himself to black swan interactions by stacking up so many individual unusual interventions (exogenous hormones and peptides, lack of UV etc).

I respect that he offers his research for free, and I don't see a problem with him charging for personal consultation.

I would see charging for personal consultation as a plus. It sets up the incentives the right way. To sell personal consultation effectively to people willing to pay a lot of money for it you need to have a trustworthy reputation among people with a lot of money who are usually also smart and sophisticated about choosing who they listen to.

It's a very different business model from affiliate models that a lot of internet influencers use that come with different incentives.

The fact that he's a supplement salesman is a lot more worrying than him offering consultations.

His approach to achieving immortality seems to be similar to someone attempting to reach the moon by developing higher altitude planes. He's using interventions that seem likely to improve health and lifespan by a few percentage points, which is great, but can't possibly get us to where he wants to go.

My assumption is that any real solution to mortality will look more like "teach older bodies to self repair the same way younger bodies do" than "eat this diet, and take these supplements".

I don't know who this is, but no one was going to say that he's weird so his ideas must be bad.

The question one should perhaps ask is why you would like to live "forever"? Of course I understand the idea of having a healthy body, there is no fun being sick and in pain. But since we have no idea where we came from, where we are, and where we are going, perhaps there is as much meaning in death as we think there is in life.