The marketing genius of Bryan Johnson
46 comments
·February 18, 2025olives
road_to_freedom
Which sleep tracker? Watches aren't accurate.
the_clarence
The whoop. I recently compared it with an actual sleep apnea test and the REM is not accurate at all. But it is interesting to see tendencies (drinking alcohol really messes up with your sleep, winter increases your REM, etc.)
lend000
Whoop is definitely not accurate for sleep data, but it's great for exercise and there's certainly value in seeing trends.
brookst
Accurate or precise?
Scales can be useful even if not accurate, so long as they are reasonably precise. Same for sleep tracking watches.
bambax
> You might have seen his Netflix documentary where he talks about taking 100 pills a day in order to live longer. Or maybe you saw his YouTube videos where he shows the world his workout routines.
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.
idopmstuff
“The sober truth is that religions are the most stable and strongest organizations in the entire world,” he says. “Say I’m a cult, and I’ll joke that my cult is better than your cult because it tells people to eat healthy food and go to bed on time.”
-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.
ecuaflo
But not about masking, and subsequently contracting covid, hurting his health more than any of his therapies have helped.
idopmstuff
What evidence do you have that he wasn't masking? That tweet doesn't seem to make any mention about masking, and there are definitely shots of him masking while traveling in his Netflix doc (which is well post-Covid).
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.
brailsafe
What's the significance of those tweets? He got covid? Who's she supposed to be?
bambax
> my cult is better than your cult
That's not possible, because I don't have a cult. That's the point. All cults are bad, they can't be ranked.
gniv
It's in the DFW sense: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
pfannkuchen
Cults are ideology startups. Most start ups fail. Doesn’t mean they all will.
solumos
We can look at this "cult-like" effect in a number of ways. Some will be specifically interesting to this community, since they apply broadly to startups.
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
hn_throwaway_99
These kinds of advice articles on "how to build your personal brand" always tend to leave out those pesky little important details, like "spend 2 million dollars a year on your health regimen", which first requires you to be worth 10s of millions after selling your fintech startup.
jzellis
Is that the guy who looks like a damp slightly younger guy and brags about his kid's boner? Where do I sign up for ticket to that train?
areoform
An interesting sociological tendence that I've noticed after talking to large-ish to medium-ish streamers is that haters fixate. And the greater that level of hate and fixation, the more successful that person seems to be.
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"
mcv
I thought this was about AC/DC or something. I've never heard of this guy, so I don't buy the claim that 90% hate him. I think 90% never heard of him. If only 1% of people who actually heard of him love him and his message to live healthy to live longer, that's really not a lot.
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?
solumos
People think that what he's doing is unnatural, and that it's wrong for a rich guy to spend so much money on trying to live forever when he could be supporting traditional longevity science. He also leans into the controversy in his social media posts[0].
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...
brookst
His message is “if you spend enough money and take enough supplements you’ll live forever”, which I don’t think is especially positive.
bambax
I saw this days ago and commented here:
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.
jasonjmcghee
It's part of HN
Second Chance Pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
bambax
Yeah ok, I was aware of this, but it doesn't say that the timestamps of comments will be modified! That's what I have an issue with.
It may be a minor, ridiculous nitpick, but it's like editing my content without my consent. It's bad.
robwwilliams
He experimented with getting transfusions from his son. Amazing that he actual does not sound as nuts as he is ;-) Yes sugar BAD. Hey that’s a good slogan! I must start marketing that. Damn Bob Lustig beat me to it.
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.
drpossum
[flagged]
areoform
> What if I replace "Bryan" with "Charles Manson"? And this is why I have no respect for "marketing".
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.
drpossum
No, because I wouldn't make a blanket statement of "if some fraction of people like <some technology>, then it clearly must be good" because it's an absurd statement to make. It takes away all nuance and conversation. It forces a one-perspective narrative and that's exactly why marketing and marketers-in-the-modern-sense are shit. (btw I'll gladly stand with my conviction and hypocrisy whilst you go stand with advertisers)
null
gherkinnn
So Pete here uses Bryan's marketing notoriety to draw people's attention to his own marketing services, one of which is being a LinkedIn ghost writer. Colour me amused, there's a clever remark buried somewhere in here. But time is running out, so I will leave thinking what special kind of tool hires a LinkedIn ghost writer.
tptacek
I can't get past "Don't die. What a slogan!" What a slogan, indeed.
silisili
I constantly go back and forth on this guy.
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.
beagle3
The boner measurement may seem weird, but it’s a very informative measure of general health, vascular health, and a few other things.
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.
the_clarence
I think he seems to be very honest and open. The only downsides is that he's a sample of one and he focuses a bit too much on appearances now. But he really built a brand of trust around his methods and I'm probably going to buy his oil, chocolate, powder, and replace functionhealth with his alternative
I actually quite like his content, and I consider myself generally wary of marketers and content creators.
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.