I really appreciate how the author dramatizes hypothyroidism, which I've also had since 25, and in the modern world, it's like the most treatable, easy to live with condition on earth. Taking a tiny pill once daily, with the lone drawback that as soon as you take the pill you have a 5min timer to taking a dump.
I was reading this and didn't understand the point until I got to this:
"I overhauled my medical team earlier this year. It was the rebuild to lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol. With greater capacity, we revisited everything."
And realized this person is speaking the language of scams.
Ehhh, not really, I have been loosely following him for a while and he is overall pretty genuine (i.e. laser focused on his health experiment above all else)
He was the founder of Braintree which sold to paypal for $800M. He then was divorced and listless with near infinite money, so decided to see what would happen if money was no object and you tried to live a perfectly healthy life as dictated by current medical research, and document it.
He does sell supplements and now whatever immortals care is, but I can't imagine he makes much money from either compared to his NW (and passive income from it). It's more likely that there is demand from people following his experiment to get in on his findings (which are all public anyway, but convenience is king), because again, he doesn't have much incentive to scam people and his goal is already a selfish one, to live forever. But at least he openly shares everything on that path.
Edit: Since people really snag on the money part, since money makes you evil by default, let me rephrase:
"Bryan Johnson, a greedy billionaire, has totally fucked up his latest scam, and you can easily copy everything he does because he foolishy doesn't even try hiding any of his routines, regimens, daily meals, or even obfuscate any of the ingredients in the supplements he sells. That's right, you can fully copy what he does without giving his greedy hands a single penny. He even accidentally shares all his medical findings publicly too."
Just because someone has a high net worth does not mean they are not trying to scam people, and it is good to be on the lookout for that.
Every human being is self-interested, at least to some degree. So, it is perfectly expected that he seeks money, fame, status, power, sex, etc.
But he doesn't seem to exhibit these to an abnormal degree, and in any event, you can just evaluate his claims based on evidence and logic and they either succeed or fail.
Just because the Wright Brothers were selling airplanes doesn't mean that they didn't fly.
I buy a lot of his supplements. They're competitively priced for what they are, and what's in them is based on the studies and science they dig up. Not all of them will be cost-effective for whatever benefit you're trying to gain, but that's the case with all supplements.
We don’t know what his ACTUAL routine is, just what he chooses to disclose. I don’t know that he’s withholding information, but I also have no way to verify how honest he’s being.
With $1B NW, the government will pay you $150k per day in interest. In stocks you are looking at ~$500k per day (with more risk).
Why you would ever waste your time running a supplement scam, when you passively earn $150k-$500k per day doing nothing, is probably the most perplexing proposition people are making here (which frankly I don't even think they are aware that they are making it).
He could just make an AI startup if he was really interested in doubling his NW.
At some point, it's just keeping score. Elon Musk doesn't need to be a trillionaire, he wants to be one. None of the world's billionaires need to be that rich, they are just competing against each other.
Ehh, you’re giving the guy a lot of grace cause he’s rich. I believe the GP was correct and have anecdotal evidence to support that he may be deceptive.
I followed him very loosely 3 years back and he was touting the effectiveness of a hair dye that he claimed permanently restored hair color at the follicle level if you followed their prescribed routine. As in no more greys, permanently. The company was called Mayraki and nobody had ever heard of them before Bryan’s videos and while I’m not saying he was scamming, I find it likely something dubious was going on with a high likely hood of him being paid for this advertising.
He went as far as saying he had his medical team biopsy his scalp and found the hair was not grey below the skin line so therefore was 100% true. It was quite a convincing narrative at the time to try this $100 hair dye.
The internet, especially Reddit, is now full of angry people with grey hair (and less money) that claim this product didn’t do anything beyond a regular dye but for 5-6x the cost. I can attest to this myself.
I dunno. Billionaires are wont to pick up a lot of fanciful special interests like rockets or climate change or ending world hunger, but Brian Johnson deciding that he's going to devote his fortune to his own immortality is like 7 red flags rolled into one - not to mention that it's like 50% of the comic book villain arcs.
In fact, I think a good heuristic is probably the opposite. The type of person who becomes that rich is probably more willing to scam than the average person.
I think a better take would be "He publicly shares everything about his lifestyle and routine rather than paywalling them, so if he is running a scam, he probably needs some pointers"
Even his supplements are just concoctions of stuff anyone can buy, the ingredients are fully transparent. Anyone can follow what he does without giving him a penny.
> He publicly shares everything about his lifestyle and routine rather than paywalling them, so if he is running a scam, he probably needs some pointers
Disagree. What he does is run a YouTube channel that appears to do that. That makes it an ideal vehicle to advertise supplements with little research or scientific backing to an uninformed and trusting audience.
Each day the stock market likely moves his NW more than the ARR of his supplement company.
Again, if he is trying to run a supplement scam with an NW north of $1B, he needs some pointers. Dude could announce an AI startup tomorrow and get more funding than any of his current companies would make in a lifetime.
I know many will draw a line between Hubris and Nemesis here, but I feel really sorry for this guy and just wish some good health for him. I personally find the whole long life influncing and health hacking movement annoying, but I recognise that many, if not most, of the folks involved are acting in good faith and just trying to feel better themselves or help others feel better.
He probably can't any more (I have no idea what the implications of his stomach disorder are, but I don't imagine great). But if he can I hope he has a beer and just relaxes and gets some happy vibes for a time.
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
Bad news #2:
2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
Good news:
I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.
As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.
Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.
Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.
It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).
My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.
By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.
I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.
Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.
We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.
Wonder if he has Hashimoto's, an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks the thyroid, causing hypothyroidism. The hypothyroidism lowers stomach acid, impairing iron absorption. Sounds similar to what is being described.
Have you done iron infusions? My wife has to get these once in a while. She had gastric surgery years back and has issues with absorption of oral supplements.
First, I could tell you this guy was going to fail, and he will continue to fail because he does not consider genetics in any of his treatments or ideas. We’re all genetically different and that’s gonna determine our diet and where our nutritional deficiencies might occur.
Next, I believe he most likely gave the gastritis to himself because there are many things that can give rise to autoimmune diseases including several medications. If medication can do this, jamming a ton of supplements down your throat can also do it.
Believe me, I’ve been bio hacking myself for the last 20 years as well, but I’m poor. And that’s what it’s probably saved me. But I’ve come to a place to know what I can know and know what I will never know. It’s a happy balance between being healthier but not under the delusion that I will live forever.
No granted I am in a much worse position to start than Brian Johnson. I am poor and I have a serious mental illness, but I think I’ve done way better than him although I am 60 now and the stress of being homeless and suffering under this great separation of wealth has made things harder. I don’t have the money to get rid of my stress so maybe if you’re out there Brian Johnson and you wanna talk, hit me up.
Will he share all or will he try to sell you some fad instead? I wish him the best, and hope he recovers, but my money is on him trying to sell something new that won't work.
His protocols are usually pretty robustly researched. The worst thing you can say about Bryan Johnson is that I personally believe he over-indexes on suspect science, but that's it.
His longevity protocol trial with group of people had negative overall results according to ny times. His supplements tested to not contain what it claimed
Thanks; I read the story you linked. It mostly reads as a hit piece centered around various legal allegations tied to stringent confidentiality agreements. There isn't much substance beyond that. The article briefly discusses some vague customer complaints about allulose-directed side-effects from his 'longevity mix', but the actual complaints are incredibly vague and you could attribute side-effects to or from basically any supplement. The article is basically a long-form screed saying over and over "he makes you sign confidentiality agreements".
I don't like Bryan Johnson per se, I just don't think that mal-intent has been substantiated.
For your second claim, I had to use ChatGPT to source it. It turns out that there was a problem with an earlier batch of one of his many supplements being out of spec per the COA. This is common and not unusual. He provides lab testing and COA for his current supplements. The unusual part is that anybody even ever knew his supplements were out of spec because companies don't really publish COA - and people knew because he did publish COA.
You know what? "Will share all" except my money is more like it. Because just getting $50,000 from this guy would remove all the stress from my currently homeless living in a minivan life and take away the majority of stress that is a trigger for my schizoaffective disorder. So you know what? Eff this guy.
Guy is a weirdo, I remember logging into Twitter a few weeks ago and he was talking about his wife like she were some lab experiment. I don't know if it was a joke but it coming from a weirdo didn't help.
In medicine, if you look hard you will likely find something.
That part that confuses me about his story is: not once does he mention the symptoms or side effects. Unless I somehow missed that part, or he's leaving them out for private reasons, his evidence and symptoms are entirely lab-based.
Bodies are weird and do "abnormal" things in reaction to the environment, stress, physical activity, nutrition, etc. -- not everything your body does has to be a disease, a disorder, or something wrong.
He talks about how if he hadn't spent (ungodly amounts of) money tracking his health over the years, he could be in worse off condition. But I'd bet that if he hadn't been tracking his labs, he would've lived a pretty normal life.
Maybe the outcomes at 80+ years might be slightly different? But bodies will still naturally deteriorate over time and humans cannot live forever.
We need to get back to regenerative farming that already has time proven solutions for weeds (ok maybe not the same yield straight away but at least its sustainable)
If your soil is just a chemical laden dust bowl then there are 2nd and 3 order effects from that
Anything that kills yield drives up the cost of food.
So while organic sustainable farming works and produces food, what is not shared is that the yield per unit work is dramatically higher for the chemical laden stuff.
Better robotic weeding drones using lasers or spray guns to kill weeds. We can still get high yields and cut back on weed killers and possibly pesticides if they can do pests too.
I’m not qualified in the least to discuss this topic.
I think the cocktails of experiments and supplements he’s done might not be good for the body.
There is an underlying fear of death that gets these guys as they age. They’d trade all the wealth they have if they could be $X years younger. That is I think worth “solving” more than some immortality thing.
Well he just « overhauled » them… which I’m going to interpret as laying off a bunch who didn’t flag this to him earlier. If you just got hired by a billionaire who fired everyone on the prior team for not catching something, and is paying you to be brutally accurate are you going to order 1 biopsy? 2?
One gives you a high potential for false positives or negatives, two data points with opposite results is just as useless. Three is the gold standard to create a consensus among sensors, a lesson Boeing learned with their angle of attack at the cost of many lives.
It's kinda disgusting how many people seem to enjoy his misfortune. Even though he never hurt anyone and has been an overall positive, if peculiar, person. I hope he recovers or at least contains this and continues with his mission
I'd like to see this guy die at 100 or something because I personally think immortality is bad for the world, but like 50 or whatever he is now is just sad. He could do a lot of good for the world by sharing lessons to help people live healthier lives.
How positive would he be if instead he had spent a bit of his wealth in improving the world, like curing a disease instead of just trying to live forever?
To me he reminds of those stories of wealthy medieval ladies bathing in the blood of virgins. You just know this psychopath is one capitalistic stepping stone away from doing it.
To those suffering similar issues: don't give up. There are many off label options to pursue. Immuno-modulation is, from my observations, understudied. I won't list anything here though.
Also, we're continuously finding new roles that microbes play in autoimmune disorders, eg rheumatoid, a condition which I myself have managed to reverse from utterly disabling to perfectly functional. My rheumatoid was almost certainly triggered by microbial (bacterial/viral) activity.
H Pylori is ubiquitous, and quite transmissible. Medical journals describe the many ways it can transmit, even via flies landing on utensils, plates, etc. I do not suggest pylori is directly at work here, but the growing consensus when treating it is that reducing it, not eradicating it, may be the better approach. Considering the many ailments it might be contributing to, including some forms of cancer, protocols for managing it may be prudent. But pylori is one of many, and there are countless strains of it alone.
I got to the point where I would get rashes from touching certain materials. That persisted for over a year. Not presently though. Doctors literally mocked me though, and without the temptation of insurance to milk, would ave nothing to do with me, at times literally taunting me.
My last encounter with an ER doctor was due to nasal swelling and pain, accompanied by extreme fatigue and malaise. During the visit, he told me to simply use any sharp object to remove the internal swollen matter and consider taking antidepressants. As soon as he left the room, so did I, and promptly the hospital itself. Unconventional disorders can seem futile, but there are, until corporately aligned LLMs centralize information and substitute the internet altogether, many medical journals, case reports and research papers that remain available.
I had chronic high BP sitting often around 197/170. Doctors told me I'd need to remain on BP medicine indefinitely, and that it would almost certainly be irreversible. When I could no longer afford regular tests, my GP sent a certified letter dismissing me as a patient. That was the end of my BP meds. 4 years later, without any medication, my BP sits at ~128/87, which may not be ideal, but is better than it was while on the meds.
I will say, that if we can wangle a truly FOSS LLM, rigorously policed for corporate and institutional influence, a lot of what is presently ailing us could be resolved. Many answer are out there, many waiting to be conceptually synthesized, but there is a lot out there. And there is a lot of incentive going in both directions.
I know he is trying to be healthy as is possible but for some reason, on Twitter this will attract loonies rambling about antivaxing and carnivore diet every time. Horrible site.
1. try taking Saccharomyces Boulardii asap, it is a very different kind of probiotic, a yeast actually, that tends to push out the bad and promote the good
2. JAK-STAT inhibitors are the only known drug to get the body to stop attacking itself from autoimmune diseases, but not a cure and unfortunately they cost an absolute fortune without insurance but importing from Canada and India is possible
I would normally be inclined to jump in and top your recommendation with other, spore forming probiotics, eg Subtilis, Coagulans, etc.
My old friend in Aussieland has been struggling with a multitude of ailments, gastrointestinal among them. After doing a few hours of well-intended research, I gave him a list of things I thought might help, all with disclaimers and contraindications noted. He chose to pursue the Coagulans. It nearly killed him. At first I was skeptical and insisted it was something else, or perhaps a tainted batch (which it may have been). He nearly lost consciousness, became weak, turned red, and swelled with difficulty breathing. Neither of us have an official professional evaluation of the cause, but it seems he had a severe allergic reaction to that strain, possibly as a result of microbial conflict, endotoxins, who knows, but it sure did scare the hell out of him.
That did not change my perspective on probiotics, but it was a reminder that each individual is, well, individual, and much of what we do experimentally is a gambit.
Saccharomyces Boulardii is not like any other probiotic
go ask google or chatgpt to explain why and you'll get it, more than I can narrate here
it will not colonize and can even be taken with antibiotics to help the gut survive
as long as the person is not allergic to yeast they would be fine in theory
once a person stops taking it there is no trace of it in your system 3-5 days later
ps. never take multi-strain probiotics, if you think the supplement world is sketchy there is absolutely no regulation or consistency to the probiotic world
Just in case you thought I had anything to do with your comment being d-voted, I didn't. I almost never d-vote anything, and my comment-voting 'privileges' have been suspended due to excess u-voting. That said, I was not disputing your suggestion, but rather adding a pinch of anecdote. Saccharomyces Boulardii is one of the only 'probiotics' regularly used in clinical environments, and for good reason. Its protective effects in C-Diff alone give it credibility lacking in many prescription medicines.
No dispute here, other than for cases of compromised immunity, where pretty much everything is a potential risk.
I really appreciate how the author dramatizes hypothyroidism, which I've also had since 25, and in the modern world, it's like the most treatable, easy to live with condition on earth. Taking a tiny pill once daily, with the lone drawback that as soon as you take the pill you have a 5min timer to taking a dump.
I was reading this and didn't understand the point until I got to this:
"I overhauled my medical team earlier this year. It was the rebuild to lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol. With greater capacity, we revisited everything."
And realized this person is speaking the language of scams.
Yes, IMHO, he is overly dramatizing "mild gastritis" and I think he is doing it so all of us sit here yammering on about him like he is some genius.
Ehhh, not really, I have been loosely following him for a while and he is overall pretty genuine (i.e. laser focused on his health experiment above all else)
He was the founder of Braintree which sold to paypal for $800M. He then was divorced and listless with near infinite money, so decided to see what would happen if money was no object and you tried to live a perfectly healthy life as dictated by current medical research, and document it.
He does sell supplements and now whatever immortals care is, but I can't imagine he makes much money from either compared to his NW (and passive income from it). It's more likely that there is demand from people following his experiment to get in on his findings (which are all public anyway, but convenience is king), because again, he doesn't have much incentive to scam people and his goal is already a selfish one, to live forever. But at least he openly shares everything on that path.
Edit: Since people really snag on the money part, since money makes you evil by default, let me rephrase:
"Bryan Johnson, a greedy billionaire, has totally fucked up his latest scam, and you can easily copy everything he does because he foolishy doesn't even try hiding any of his routines, regimens, daily meals, or even obfuscate any of the ingredients in the supplements he sells. That's right, you can fully copy what he does without giving his greedy hands a single penny. He even accidentally shares all his medical findings publicly too."
Just because someone has a high net worth does not mean they are not trying to scam people, and it is good to be on the lookout for that.
Every human being is self-interested, at least to some degree. So, it is perfectly expected that he seeks money, fame, status, power, sex, etc.
But he doesn't seem to exhibit these to an abnormal degree, and in any event, you can just evaluate his claims based on evidence and logic and they either succeed or fail.
Just because the Wright Brothers were selling airplanes doesn't mean that they didn't fly.
>Every human being is self-interested, at least to some degree. So, it is perfectly expected that he seeks money, fame, status, power, sex, etc.
Bit of a reach there.
I buy a lot of his supplements. They're competitively priced for what they are, and what's in them is based on the studies and science they dig up. Not all of them will be cost-effective for whatever benefit you're trying to gain, but that's the case with all supplements.
Could you elaborate? Which ones do you buy, what do they do, and what made you want to start taking them?
I used to buy his act too but once he started doing psychedelics and live streaming it, it became clear it was all just a scam
Yes, that was it for me too. Because anyone who understands neurobiology understands how psychedelics work and wouldn’t bother with them.
Sarcasm?
https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/research/clinics-and-pr...
https://psychedelics.cornell.edu/
https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/research-unit/center-science...
https://psychedelics-study.harvard.edu/research/
https://www.hopkinspsychedelic.org/
We don’t know what his ACTUAL routine is, just what he chooses to disclose. I don’t know that he’s withholding information, but I also have no way to verify how honest he’s being.
> He does sell supplements
Kind of says everything we need to know?
> Since people really snag on the money part
This is the whole part :) it's a good thing to snag on in my opinion
With $1B NW, the government will pay you $150k per day in interest. In stocks you are looking at ~$500k per day (with more risk).
Why you would ever waste your time running a supplement scam, when you passively earn $150k-$500k per day doing nothing, is probably the most perplexing proposition people are making here (which frankly I don't even think they are aware that they are making it).
He could just make an AI startup if he was really interested in doubling his NW.
1B NW != 1B accruing interest
At some point, it's just keeping score. Elon Musk doesn't need to be a trillionaire, he wants to be one. None of the world's billionaires need to be that rich, they are just competing against each other.
Great info, and seems less likely cash grab than some.
Still a scam can include other "deceptive schemes" – maybe he's just trying to get fame or plain old attention.
Ehh, you’re giving the guy a lot of grace cause he’s rich. I believe the GP was correct and have anecdotal evidence to support that he may be deceptive.
I followed him very loosely 3 years back and he was touting the effectiveness of a hair dye that he claimed permanently restored hair color at the follicle level if you followed their prescribed routine. As in no more greys, permanently. The company was called Mayraki and nobody had ever heard of them before Bryan’s videos and while I’m not saying he was scamming, I find it likely something dubious was going on with a high likely hood of him being paid for this advertising.
He went as far as saying he had his medical team biopsy his scalp and found the hair was not grey below the skin line so therefore was 100% true. It was quite a convincing narrative at the time to try this $100 hair dye.
The internet, especially Reddit, is now full of angry people with grey hair (and less money) that claim this product didn’t do anything beyond a regular dye but for 5-6x the cost. I can attest to this myself.
I dunno. Billionaires are wont to pick up a lot of fanciful special interests like rockets or climate change or ending world hunger, but Brian Johnson deciding that he's going to devote his fortune to his own immortality is like 7 red flags rolled into one - not to mention that it's like 50% of the comic book villain arcs.
"he's rich therefore he has no incentive to scam anyone" is not a good heuristic, though it will help you get a degree from Trump University.
In fact, I think a good heuristic is probably the opposite. The type of person who becomes that rich is probably more willing to scam than the average person.
I think a better take would be "He publicly shares everything about his lifestyle and routine rather than paywalling them, so if he is running a scam, he probably needs some pointers"
Even his supplements are just concoctions of stuff anyone can buy, the ingredients are fully transparent. Anyone can follow what he does without giving him a penny.
> He publicly shares everything about his lifestyle and routine rather than paywalling them, so if he is running a scam, he probably needs some pointers
Disagree. What he does is run a YouTube channel that appears to do that. That makes it an ideal vehicle to advertise supplements with little research or scientific backing to an uninformed and trusting audience.
Each day the stock market likely moves his NW more than the ARR of his supplement company.
Again, if he is trying to run a supplement scam with an NW north of $1B, he needs some pointers. Dude could announce an AI startup tomorrow and get more funding than any of his current companies would make in a lifetime.
I know many will draw a line between Hubris and Nemesis here, but I feel really sorry for this guy and just wish some good health for him. I personally find the whole long life influncing and health hacking movement annoying, but I recognise that many, if not most, of the folks involved are acting in good faith and just trying to feel better themselves or help others feel better.
He probably can't any more (I have no idea what the implications of his stomach disorder are, but I don't imagine great). But if he can I hope he has a beer and just relaxes and gets some happy vibes for a time.
> But if he can I hope he has a beer and just relaxes and gets some happy vibes for a time.
He can't; not because of his stomach, but because he's spiritually incapable of enjoying a beer
Wow what a piece of shit.
First part of the very long tweet:
Bad news #1:
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
Bad news #2:
2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
Good news:
I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.
As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.
Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.
Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.
It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).
My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.
By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.
I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.
Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.
We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.
Wonder if he has Hashimoto's, an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks the thyroid, causing hypothyroidism. The hypothyroidism lowers stomach acid, impairing iron absorption. Sounds similar to what is being described.
Have you done iron infusions? My wife has to get these once in a while. She had gastric surgery years back and has issues with absorption of oral supplements.
First, I could tell you this guy was going to fail, and he will continue to fail because he does not consider genetics in any of his treatments or ideas. We’re all genetically different and that’s gonna determine our diet and where our nutritional deficiencies might occur.
Next, I believe he most likely gave the gastritis to himself because there are many things that can give rise to autoimmune diseases including several medications. If medication can do this, jamming a ton of supplements down your throat can also do it.
Believe me, I’ve been bio hacking myself for the last 20 years as well, but I’m poor. And that’s what it’s probably saved me. But I’ve come to a place to know what I can know and know what I will never know. It’s a happy balance between being healthier but not under the delusion that I will live forever.
No granted I am in a much worse position to start than Brian Johnson. I am poor and I have a serious mental illness, but I think I’ve done way better than him although I am 60 now and the stress of being homeless and suffering under this great separation of wealth has made things harder. I don’t have the money to get rid of my stress so maybe if you’re out there Brian Johnson and you wanna talk, hit me up.
https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2072069730517860385
> I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.
Will he share all or will he try to sell you some fad instead? I wish him the best, and hope he recovers, but my money is on him trying to sell something new that won't work.
His protocols are usually pretty robustly researched. The worst thing you can say about Bryan Johnson is that I personally believe he over-indexes on suspect science, but that's it.
His longevity protocol trial with group of people had negative overall results according to ny times. His supplements tested to not contain what it claimed
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-...
Thanks; I read the story you linked. It mostly reads as a hit piece centered around various legal allegations tied to stringent confidentiality agreements. There isn't much substance beyond that. The article briefly discusses some vague customer complaints about allulose-directed side-effects from his 'longevity mix', but the actual complaints are incredibly vague and you could attribute side-effects to or from basically any supplement. The article is basically a long-form screed saying over and over "he makes you sign confidentiality agreements".
I don't like Bryan Johnson per se, I just don't think that mal-intent has been substantiated.
For your second claim, I had to use ChatGPT to source it. It turns out that there was a problem with an earlier batch of one of his many supplements being out of spec per the COA. This is common and not unusual. He provides lab testing and COA for his current supplements. The unusual part is that anybody even ever knew his supplements were out of spec because companies don't really publish COA - and people knew because he did publish COA.
You know what? "Will share all" except my money is more like it. Because just getting $50,000 from this guy would remove all the stress from my currently homeless living in a minivan life and take away the majority of stress that is a trigger for my schizoaffective disorder. So you know what? Eff this guy.
Chronic attention seeking weirdo discovers he has common condition, will now have to do iron and B12 supplementation. yawn
Did he somehow wronged you or are you just having a bad day?
Guy is a weirdo, I remember logging into Twitter a few weeks ago and he was talking about his wife like she were some lab experiment. I don't know if it was a joke but it coming from a weirdo didn't help.
Personally I am happy that there are weirdos and that they share their weirdness.
What he has may not be a very serious disease yet I was interested in learning about his experience and felt sorry for him.
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In medicine, if you look hard you will likely find something.
That part that confuses me about his story is: not once does he mention the symptoms or side effects. Unless I somehow missed that part, or he's leaving them out for private reasons, his evidence and symptoms are entirely lab-based.
Bodies are weird and do "abnormal" things in reaction to the environment, stress, physical activity, nutrition, etc. -- not everything your body does has to be a disease, a disorder, or something wrong.
He talks about how if he hadn't spent (ungodly amounts of) money tracking his health over the years, he could be in worse off condition. But I'd bet that if he hadn't been tracking his labs, he would've lived a pretty normal life.
Maybe the outcomes at 80+ years might be slightly different? But bodies will still naturally deteriorate over time and humans cannot live forever.
> But I'd bet that if he hadn't been tracking his labs, he would've lived a pretty normal life.
Well I mean we have a control group consisting of just about every other person diagnosed with this disease, right?
The wikipedia page [1] suggests you're probably right, especially given that he is male.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrophic_gastritis#Signs_and_s...
> humans cannot live forever.
I think Mr Johnson disagrees
I wouldn't be surprised if it's the glyphosate
We need to get back to regenerative farming that already has time proven solutions for weeds (ok maybe not the same yield straight away but at least its sustainable)
If your soil is just a chemical laden dust bowl then there are 2nd and 3 order effects from that
Anything that kills yield drives up the cost of food.
So while organic sustainable farming works and produces food, what is not shared is that the yield per unit work is dramatically higher for the chemical laden stuff.
Sure, but we'll save money on healthcare and prescriptions instead.
> Anything that kills yield drives up the cost of food.
You are making an assumption that "organic" = "driving down yields"[1] and that yield is the most important aspect of a food.
[1] https://rodaleinstitute.org/blog/new-research-reveals-organi...
I am glad that an organic farming non-profit investigated organic farming and found no downsides.
Better robotic weeding drones using lasers or spray guns to kill weeds. We can still get high yields and cut back on weed killers and possibly pesticides if they can do pests too.
What makes you suspect that in particular? Farms use all kinds of different chemicals besides glyphosate.
Yes
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Largely genetic, though diabetes can contribute to it's appearance.
I’m not qualified in the least to discuss this topic.
I think the cocktails of experiments and supplements he’s done might not be good for the body.
There is an underlying fear of death that gets these guys as they age. They’d trade all the wealth they have if they could be $X years younger. That is I think worth “solving” more than some immortality thing.
> Even before this finding, my team had ordered five biopsies to be taken from three regions of my stomach.
This is really invasive and I definitely hope there were solid grounds to order this. If not, his team has a pretty gung-ho approach.
Well he just « overhauled » them… which I’m going to interpret as laying off a bunch who didn’t flag this to him earlier. If you just got hired by a billionaire who fired everyone on the prior team for not catching something, and is paying you to be brutally accurate are you going to order 1 biopsy? 2?
One gives you a high potential for false positives or negatives, two data points with opposite results is just as useless. Three is the gold standard to create a consensus among sensors, a lesson Boeing learned with their angle of attack at the cost of many lives.
It's kinda disgusting how many people seem to enjoy his misfortune. Even though he never hurt anyone and has been an overall positive, if peculiar, person. I hope he recovers or at least contains this and continues with his mission
Same.
I'd like to see this guy die at 100 or something because I personally think immortality is bad for the world, but like 50 or whatever he is now is just sad. He could do a lot of good for the world by sharing lessons to help people live healthier lives.
He could do a lot more good using his wealth to solve problems that aren't "how is Bryan Johnson going to live to be 100"
How positive would he be if instead he had spent a bit of his wealth in improving the world, like curing a disease instead of just trying to live forever?
To me he reminds of those stories of wealthy medieval ladies bathing in the blood of virgins. You just know this psychopath is one capitalistic stepping stone away from doing it.
Isn't he already injecting himself with the blood of youths? I figure the medieval freaks would have done the same if they could
Why this was flagged?
To those suffering similar issues: don't give up. There are many off label options to pursue. Immuno-modulation is, from my observations, understudied. I won't list anything here though.
Also, we're continuously finding new roles that microbes play in autoimmune disorders, eg rheumatoid, a condition which I myself have managed to reverse from utterly disabling to perfectly functional. My rheumatoid was almost certainly triggered by microbial (bacterial/viral) activity.
H Pylori is ubiquitous, and quite transmissible. Medical journals describe the many ways it can transmit, even via flies landing on utensils, plates, etc. I do not suggest pylori is directly at work here, but the growing consensus when treating it is that reducing it, not eradicating it, may be the better approach. Considering the many ailments it might be contributing to, including some forms of cancer, protocols for managing it may be prudent. But pylori is one of many, and there are countless strains of it alone.
I got to the point where I would get rashes from touching certain materials. That persisted for over a year. Not presently though. Doctors literally mocked me though, and without the temptation of insurance to milk, would ave nothing to do with me, at times literally taunting me.
My last encounter with an ER doctor was due to nasal swelling and pain, accompanied by extreme fatigue and malaise. During the visit, he told me to simply use any sharp object to remove the internal swollen matter and consider taking antidepressants. As soon as he left the room, so did I, and promptly the hospital itself. Unconventional disorders can seem futile, but there are, until corporately aligned LLMs centralize information and substitute the internet altogether, many medical journals, case reports and research papers that remain available.
I had chronic high BP sitting often around 197/170. Doctors told me I'd need to remain on BP medicine indefinitely, and that it would almost certainly be irreversible. When I could no longer afford regular tests, my GP sent a certified letter dismissing me as a patient. That was the end of my BP meds. 4 years later, without any medication, my BP sits at ~128/87, which may not be ideal, but is better than it was while on the meds.
I will say, that if we can wangle a truly FOSS LLM, rigorously policed for corporate and institutional influence, a lot of what is presently ailing us could be resolved. Many answer are out there, many waiting to be conceptually synthesized, but there is a lot out there. And there is a lot of incentive going in both directions.
I know he is trying to be healthy as is possible but for some reason, on Twitter this will attract loonies rambling about antivaxing and carnivore diet every time. Horrible site.
my 2 cents
1. try taking Saccharomyces Boulardii asap, it is a very different kind of probiotic, a yeast actually, that tends to push out the bad and promote the good
2. JAK-STAT inhibitors are the only known drug to get the body to stop attacking itself from autoimmune diseases, but not a cure and unfortunately they cost an absolute fortune without insurance but importing from Canada and India is possible
I would normally be inclined to jump in and top your recommendation with other, spore forming probiotics, eg Subtilis, Coagulans, etc.
My old friend in Aussieland has been struggling with a multitude of ailments, gastrointestinal among them. After doing a few hours of well-intended research, I gave him a list of things I thought might help, all with disclaimers and contraindications noted. He chose to pursue the Coagulans. It nearly killed him. At first I was skeptical and insisted it was something else, or perhaps a tainted batch (which it may have been). He nearly lost consciousness, became weak, turned red, and swelled with difficulty breathing. Neither of us have an official professional evaluation of the cause, but it seems he had a severe allergic reaction to that strain, possibly as a result of microbial conflict, endotoxins, who knows, but it sure did scare the hell out of him.
That did not change my perspective on probiotics, but it was a reminder that each individual is, well, individual, and much of what we do experimentally is a gambit.
Saccharomyces Boulardii is not like any other probiotic
go ask google or chatgpt to explain why and you'll get it, more than I can narrate here
it will not colonize and can even be taken with antibiotics to help the gut survive
as long as the person is not allergic to yeast they would be fine in theory
once a person stops taking it there is no trace of it in your system 3-5 days later
ps. never take multi-strain probiotics, if you think the supplement world is sketchy there is absolutely no regulation or consistency to the probiotic world
Just in case you thought I had anything to do with your comment being d-voted, I didn't. I almost never d-vote anything, and my comment-voting 'privileges' have been suspended due to excess u-voting. That said, I was not disputing your suggestion, but rather adding a pinch of anecdote. Saccharomyces Boulardii is one of the only 'probiotics' regularly used in clinical environments, and for good reason. Its protective effects in C-Diff alone give it credibility lacking in many prescription medicines.
No dispute here, other than for cases of compromised immunity, where pretty much everything is a potential risk.
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