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.
he's unmarried (though has 3 kids, I don't know his involvement)
He is divorced, and one of his sons currently lives with him (also left Mormonism), at least for this year and maybe indefinitely. The rest of the family is still into Mormonism, and his wife tried to sue him for millions, and she lost (false accusations). It is unclear if he interacts much with the other children.
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 encourages people to measure things for themselves and not follow recommendations blindly. When he does give recommendations for things like sleep, he mostly suggests things that are basically free. The only expensive thing is the Whoop sleep tracker, which he considers important for figuring out what works for each individual.
The rest of the family is still into Mormonism, and his wife tried to sue him for millions, and she lost (false accusations)
In case you're interested in following this up, Tracing Woodgrains on the accusations: https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1743775518418198532
I don't like the way he treated his girlfriend, but that doesn't address whether his health advice is good. It did make me want independent verification of his claims about what he's selling.
Tracing Woodgrains' tweet reveals Johnson to be brutal and profoundly manipulative. Why think he only acts that way toward his wife, not his customers? Why be curious about the health advice offered by a person like that?
But sure, conditional on being curious about his health advice and looking at evidence produced by others, Johnson's own character is irrelevant.
Maybe, I haven’t compared the prices (I think he says it’s similar to the quality you would get from whole foods at a grocery store), but he gives all of the recipes for free if people want to do them at home.
The olive oil is $35 per 750 ml bottle. It's a little hard to find the quantity.
An ordinary olive oil might cost $12/litre or about a quarter as much. So, not outrageous, but still expensive.
I believe that he says there is a special quality to the olive oil he chose and that the average bottle of olive oil does not provide the claimed ideal benefits of olive oil for some reason. I'm not sure how true this is and how much he is marking up the price, even if it is true.
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'm not sure he thinks his methods will achieve immortality. his overt goals are reversing aging and improving quality of life. If he's talked about living long enough for drastically better tech, I haven't heard him say it. I think he does believe it would take too long to get to a general solution for aging for it to do him any good.
I don't know who this is, but no one was going to say that he's weird so his ideas must be bad.
I've added a link to the post.
Unfortunately, "he's too weird" was most of the response I got at ACX.
I've listened to some of his videos, and he strikes me as at least rationalist-adjacent.
https://www.bryanjohnson.com/
I was wondering what people think of him and his ideas, and whether they'd tried out any of his system.
I respect that he offers his research for free, and I don't see a problem with him charging for personal consultation.
I don't expect all of his ideas, even the ones he's been using for a while, to work for everyone, and I haven't seen anything about how much variation there is in what his clients seem to need.
I would like to see independent testing of his food and supplements. Are the heavy metals really that low? How good is the evidence that people are generally getting enough heavy metals from their food and supplements to be a problem?
I would appreciate it if people don't say that he's weird so his ideas must be bad.