The marketing genius of Bryan Johnson
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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.
Scales can be useful even if not accurate, so long as they are reasonably precise. Same for sleep tracking watches.
Incredibly accurate
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"
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.
-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.
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.
That's not possible, because I don't have a cult. That's the point. All cults are bad, they can't be ranked.
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?
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?
Are Mormons touchy? I haven't seen any touchiness from them. If anything I feel like they get made fun of so much in mainstream culture that they are kind of immune to it.
But that's the point. If he had just posted lots of articles about going to bed early, exercising and eating right, nobody would give a shit.
People know about him because he spends millions of dollars a year on his own personal health, has reached "uncanny valley" level in terms of his appearance, and makes truly bizarre posts comparing the "quality" and duration of his nighttime erections to his teenage son's. So tired of this world where people think stuff like this is something to emulate.
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
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.
Second Chance Pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
It may be a minor, ridiculous nitpick, but it's like editing my content without my consent. It's bad.
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?
I specifically recall a lot of backlash when the news about his plasma exchange with his father and son hit social media[1], and more generally with the yellowness of his skin when he was taking higher doses of carotenoids[2].
[0] - https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1660698319830790144?lang=...
[1] - https://www.yahoo.com/news/anti-ageing-activist-bryan-johnso...
[2] - https://fortune.com/well/2023/07/13/blueprint-ceo-bryan-john...
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.
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.
He consistently points out that he’s an n of 1, but since these experiments cannot be ethically performed on greater numbers of people the n = 1 is a start.
However, it’s very likely he will do things that will indeed hurt his health.
He’s also stated several times that he’s much more likely to die of something extremely mundane.
Finally, it’s a bit presumptuous of you to state he’s excluded simple pleasures from his life. He enjoys himself far more than he did earlier when he wasn’t healthier, and most importantly, has repaired relationships with both his father and his son. He considers being a dad the most important and enjoyable part of his life.
All of this may be bullshit, but unless one has evidence of it being bullshit, it’s pretty clear that he at least appears to understand what simple pleasures in life are better than most people and claims to be able to enjoy them more than most other people, and most jnportantly, more than he did when he hadn’t started on this journey.
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.
If you can be fooled by such obvious pseudoscience woo, what else in his protocol is nonsense?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blueprint_/comments/13rhmhi/groundi... https://www.tiktok.com/@_bryan_johnson_/video/72776118827464...
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.
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.
Death is a part of natural selection and necessary for the ecosystem. I am surprised that this pro-science guy does not get it.
Matter of values not science.
A better argument for death would be if you think it’s important for a healthy human society.
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.
We are so far gone from the natural processes that this argument does not really have any meaning IMO.