The marketing genius of Bryan Johnson
Johnson is a rich “freak” and his coverage is identical to the attention lavished on other “freaks” who lack self awareness.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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"
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?
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.
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.
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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.
I can't get past "Don't die. What a slogan!" What a slogan, indeed.
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.
I really lost faith in his science-based approach when I saw the "grounded bedsheets"[1] stuff in Blueprint.
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...
> Don't Die.
Death is a part of natural selection and necessary for the ecosystem. I am surprised that this pro-science guy does not get it.
My tired eyes read that as Boris - keyboard bashing deleted!
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.