To add some context, this is a relatively common form of gastritis impacting depending on location 3-5% of the population called Autoimmune Gastritis.
Now his biohacking might be related it might not, the issue with the guy is that he does too many interventions at the same time so it’s hard to really tell what’s going on. He also has a core belief of equating looking younger with his interventions working, to his defence he also runs more rigorous analysis on his body. Overall he isn’t the most interesting bio hacker out there, but he is the loudest.
Whenever I look up diseases and it reports a statistic such as "3-5%" I often feel like either I must not be interpreting it correctly, or it is so region-biased as to not be useful for how I'm consuming the data. Because it's hard to reconcile that apparently in the ballpark of 1 in 20 people have this?
It seems extremely common as people age. Your body just starts to break down as we get older and this is one, amongst many, ways that this manifests. A quick search suggests it shows up in about 50% of people over 70. [1]
Someone should make a website showing the oldest living biohackers. Presenting it as a sort of leaderboard
edit: I don't actually ethically endorse this. I was moreso poking fun at the morbidity of the biohacking influencer space which invites people to obsess over an influencer's health and inevitably turns into something gruesome when said influencer has a tragic health outcome.
These people always crack me up. They don't actually want to follow the science - they just want to take a bunch of pills (easy mode) and look good.
If you really wanna live a long time you probably need to be carefully making tons of fermented food the way our grandparents did but with the advances of modern science and monitoring. And of course eat an otherwise healthy diet with moderate and varied amounts of exercise and low stress.
And of course win the genetic + luck lottery.
Doubt the guy would be having GI issues if he was eating his own homemade Natto everyday
Edit: went to the guys site and the first product he's selling is a gut health pill that makes a lot of bold claims. Bullshit meter is off the charts
The article suggests he eats a vegan diet and exercises daily, so it's not like he's just popping pills on the couch between McDonalds meals. He seems like a complete loon in every respect, but it seems a bit unfair to say he just wants to take pills and nothing else.
It seems like a high-prevalence low-impact disease. Considering how much he self-scans it’s no surprise he found one of these. The cancers that he could get as a result are not particularly dangerous and lifespan is barely affected by it.
His idea would be cool if not for the lindy effect: each one of his "tests" has a somewhat low probability of extending his life by a few months / years.
However each of his tests, as they are new, also has a smaller probability of having ruin effect: killing him or leaving him disabled in the process. Multiplying the treatments increases significantly the downside risks (1 failure is enough) while the positive will not compound (you will need many of them to work to see a significant effect).
This is heartbreaking to see (from the doc about this guy, he seemed to genuinely believe this was a good idea). A good warning about the limits of control humans have over things (and why brute-forcing it can often lead to bad outcomes).
I wonder if the methods he used are any better than all sorts of incantations or ancient “cures”…a worthy goal that proved money can’t solve the ultimate disease…yet!
Why would you say that? I'm not a fan of the guy, because I think he's searching for unicorns, but he is 100% engaging in pure science. Hypothesis, experiment, data, falsify, repeat.
It literally is, and in many circles (illicit drugs, bodybuilding, cosmestic...) it's thanks to those community that we have early-on data. Go look for information about latest psychedelic derivatives, user reviews is the only thing we have accessible, it is Science, a doctor is aware of side-effects because of reporting, user reporting (assuming relatively trusted) is genuinely useful for the world.
It's also useful because most AI models are able to talk about what the community is saying about drugs and the model can correlate that with many other things and it does enhance diagnostic and it's quite useful to train medical models.
See a relatively "new" example is about Vapes, there has been deaths and so-on due to people experimenting with illicit ones, without those reports, we will never have in future Science book and AI models that some chemicals are dangerous to inhale or whatever (it's a shitty example but you get my point)
It's not good data for any particular procedure because he's doing so many at the same time so you can't really use the data to support any particular procedure in a rigorous way.
Agreed, but many drugs have a direct effect, not subtle and it's pretty much immediate to know, let say a user try that new sub-q injectable from a shady forum that discuss X compound that is supposed to cure acne, then follow protocols from other users, then do their report, often with photos, it's useful even if it's not standard, as you have a clear picture of before/after usage of that drug (it's probably fair to say that the acne clearing is that isn't placebo effect), it's useful even after a drug is authorized on the market as well as it gives additional user reports of efficiency. Realistically, some data is better than none.
Saying that wouldn't be useful is kinda like saying HN/Reddit isn't useful because it's all anecdotal, that applies to almost all topics in life.
Lastly, let's not pretend that most doctors do actually follow properly a patient blood before/during/after a course of a drug, in most cases, doctor will just ask How did it go, any side effects?... That's a new "data" for the doc, all anecdotal, almost the same value as a "trusted" rando on Reddit.
I thought the article was talking about his blood transfusions to explain any part of how he ended up with this disease but no, he just has it (for some reason) as a result of something that happened at some point.
No he takes blood transfusions from his son along with a lot of other questionable procedures and supplements. No one really knows why he developed this problem and it's pretty common but in association with so many exotic medical procedures it's spawned a lot of assumptions about the cause.
There are some side effects with blood transfusions that may be an experiment in itself. For example, blood bags can transfer plasticizers to the blood, which is a method to detect if athletes have been doping.
Yeah that's what I thought. Which is pretty weird.
Funnily enough donating blood actually can have big benefits for health - they did a study on Firemen who have massively higher PFAS blood levels (exposure to fire fighting foams). Turns out by regularly donating blood it forces the body to make new blood which was the only reliable way to dilute the "forever chemicals".
I mean as a solution for high PFAS levels simply drawing blood and throwing it away would also work just fine too. Also the levels in the blood the recipient receives would be diluted by their own blood too unless they were getting a lot of PFAS'd blood often.
He's hubristic and selfish. None of his "research" is going to benefit anyone (himself included), making this essentially a huge waste of time and resources. Bryan will die just like all the rest of us, despite being very rich and self-obsessed. He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people. Instead he's acting like just another huckster promising a fountain of youth. He does this using bombastic terms and taboo methods (e.g. using his son as a blood boy), in a way that's calculated to direct enormous public attention towards himself. The science he advocates for is sketchy at best and the results of all his
"experiments" will tell us nothing because we can't reproduce his methods (his program allegedly costs >$1M per year), nothing is blinded or controlled, and N=1. He's a bad person who uses bad methods to glorify himself and now he probably gave himself an autoimmune disease. He deserves to be mocked.
> He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people
There we go again. There's always that one guy in the crowd, who knows better what you should be spending your money on. Also, that guy has the moral right to tell you. He is a really good person, you know! So you should listen! You should also thank him.
Fwiw, people mocked him long before this news broke. People aren't hating on him as a result of his diagnosis, just found a new (and admittedly ironic) point to pick at.
He’s unfathomably rich and unfathomably stupid; doing insane shit to his body and actively recommending others do the same and that’s why he’s being mocked.
“Good guy” or not, he’s paying the price for playing with fire.
At least he walks the walk. I won’t say he is stupid. You see stupid people(a big chunk of the human population) looking for immortality in more stupid things so I would place him way above these folks
I didn’t say they were related. I said he’s doing insane shit to himself because he has the money to do so. But it’s that he recommends others do the same and that’s stupid.
I mean, you never know for sure. It's all just PR and messaging. Especially from a tech CEO with money. The thing that I struggle to reconcile is how much he's been involving his teenage son in this experimentation. That's a pretty gigantic red flag for me, I guess.
I hope you are writing this from a really poor place, like a Brazilian favela. People there must be really good. Why would you not live with them? I am certain you are not some hypocrite, who lives in an affluent, evil place. That would really disappoint me, because I really want to believe you are not full of BS.
By that logic, every poor person becomes so by giving to others. Neither statement is true. They equated being rich with being evil, which is plain stupid and I don't understand why you are defending it.
I agree with you, but I think it's also easy to see where people like the person you're responding to are coming from. Corporations have become pretty nasty in modern times. It's no longer really about offering the best product for the best price, but instead coercing and exploiting people so much as possible to squeeze every single penny out of them, offering as little as possible in return, and then somehow turning everything into rent.
Age is often a factor here. If you're older then you've known a different world of capitalism than what's being put on display in contemporary times. By contrast for younger people, this sketchiness is all they've ever known.
A single amoral poor person doesn't matter because they can't do anything to you short of physical violence. A single amoral ultra-wealthy person can and will make sure everyone plays by their rules, they are unstoppable forces in society. Not every evil person ends up being rich, but the incentives in our society basically ensure that past a certain point of extreme wealth we're selecting for the most ruthless and self-centered people who know how to play the game. Even an initially good person that managed to climb the ranks on merit or real innovation eventually has to make the choice between ethics and getting more money, and we know which way they tend to go.
HN is/was a bastion of venture capital and big tech. This is literally Y Combinator. Maybe reflect on why the tides may be slightly shifting away from idealist absolutism even in a place like this. You'll probably find genuine grievances and criticism instead of Red Scare cardboard cutouts that you'd look so good taking down.
He hired real doctors right? Not like witch doctors or faith healers or something? I wonder was there an issue of them not being able to tell the boss no, no matter how screwy his ideas were?
I know Putin is also doing a similar thing, he has a team of doctors who are supposed to keep him alive forever. But he certainly seems the sort of boss you cant disagree with or give bad news to (we can see that in how he commands the war) so maybe he will also hopefully die sooner than we think.
There is nothing more valuable than doing what you believe and love in the life. Especially when doing no harm, furthermore trying to solve a great problem with great benefits for society.
Is incredible but understandable, that many don´t get it.
He's going about this in the least scientific way, though. When n=1 and he has a million confounding variables, it reads more like fear of his own mortality than a meaningful research project. And this is a business for him now, he sells supplements through his Blueprint program.
What he did is filtering through all the noise and getting straight to the point, doing what he believes no one else has done and leading by example. We can argue about ethical and non conventional ways ofc that need to be optimized. The noise like this post comments will always be there, but doesn´t really matter actually :). Then being jealous or "skeptic" because he made some money out of it, it is nonsense. An example: most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day (an easy one is vit D). How is that bad, Informing and providing them with the solution? (ignorance at it´s finest). Reminds me of how ancient people was burning a "witch" cause knew how to heal with herbs.
> most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day
The most common cause of death globally is cardiovascular disease. The people buying supplements from him are buying his longevity supplements which likely have limited benefits to anyone.
To add some context, this is a relatively common form of gastritis impacting depending on location 3-5% of the population called Autoimmune Gastritis. Now his biohacking might be related it might not, the issue with the guy is that he does too many interventions at the same time so it’s hard to really tell what’s going on. He also has a core belief of equating looking younger with his interventions working, to his defence he also runs more rigorous analysis on his body. Overall he isn’t the most interesting bio hacker out there, but he is the loudest.
Whenever I look up diseases and it reports a statistic such as "3-5%" I often feel like either I must not be interpreting it correctly, or it is so region-biased as to not be useful for how I'm consuming the data. Because it's hard to reconcile that apparently in the ballpark of 1 in 20 people have this?
It seems extremely common as people age. Your body just starts to break down as we get older and this is one, amongst many, ways that this manifests. A quick search suggests it shows up in about 50% of people over 70. [1]
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11879357/
Lot of these are a spectrum. 3 to 5% might have a mild form that's aggravated by super spicy food or something but otherwise not very noticeable.
And then maybe a percentage of those people have a more debilitating version ?
It's funny how I haven't even clicked on the article yet, but the title and this first comment IMMEDIATELY made it clear which guy this is about
He's also one of the more bizarre publicly, with him using his son as a blood bag. Not unique but the publicity of it was a bit unusual.
> He also has a core belief of equating looking younger with his interventions working
And he looks pretty much exactly his age.
Someone should make a website showing the oldest living biohackers. Presenting it as a sort of leaderboard
edit: I don't actually ethically endorse this. I was moreso poking fun at the morbidity of the biohacking influencer space which invites people to obsess over an influencer's health and inevitably turns into something gruesome when said influencer has a tragic health outcome.
The best biohacker is some 100+ year-old Japanese lady who just eats healthy and avoids stress
Honestly, great idea, hope someone interested reads this.
These people always crack me up. They don't actually want to follow the science - they just want to take a bunch of pills (easy mode) and look good.
If you really wanna live a long time you probably need to be carefully making tons of fermented food the way our grandparents did but with the advances of modern science and monitoring. And of course eat an otherwise healthy diet with moderate and varied amounts of exercise and low stress.
And of course win the genetic + luck lottery.
Doubt the guy would be having GI issues if he was eating his own homemade Natto everyday
Edit: went to the guys site and the first product he's selling is a gut health pill that makes a lot of bold claims. Bullshit meter is off the charts
The article suggests he eats a vegan diet and exercises daily, so it's not like he's just popping pills on the couch between McDonalds meals. He seems like a complete loon in every respect, but it seems a bit unfair to say he just wants to take pills and nothing else.
It seems like a high-prevalence low-impact disease. Considering how much he self-scans it’s no surprise he found one of these. The cancers that he could get as a result are not particularly dangerous and lifespan is barely affected by it.
Seems interesting but not consequential.
Hilariously, his self-scans did not catch this.
It's also not cancer. AIG makes him more susceptible to certain cancers, but he does not have cancer yet.
And looking at what he's done compared to the symptoms, it's possible he's been inadvertently self-medicating his condition for a bit.
He's currently blaming his lifestyle before his "biohacking" for his condition.
I was writing quickly and miswrote. I meant “the cancer that this condition increases the risk of”. Let me correct it.
His idea would be cool if not for the lindy effect: each one of his "tests" has a somewhat low probability of extending his life by a few months / years.
However each of his tests, as they are new, also has a smaller probability of having ruin effect: killing him or leaving him disabled in the process. Multiplying the treatments increases significantly the downside risks (1 failure is enough) while the positive will not compound (you will need many of them to work to see a significant effect).
This is heartbreaking to see (from the doc about this guy, he seemed to genuinely believe this was a good idea). A good warning about the limits of control humans have over things (and why brute-forcing it can often lead to bad outcomes).
Having a blood boy will not save you from inevitable death
I wonder if the methods he used are any better than all sorts of incantations or ancient “cures”…a worthy goal that proved money can’t solve the ultimate disease…yet!
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804049
This website is a little creepy.
I completely support people who want to be guinea pigs for health science.
What he's doing is not science.
Why would you say that? I'm not a fan of the guy, because I think he's searching for unicorns, but he is 100% engaging in pure science. Hypothesis, experiment, data, falsify, repeat.
> he is 100% engaging in pure science. Hypothesis, experiment, data, falsify, repeat.
For starters, you don't conduct two simultaneous experiments on the same subject because of confounding variables, let alone 50.
It literally is, and in many circles (illicit drugs, bodybuilding, cosmestic...) it's thanks to those community that we have early-on data. Go look for information about latest psychedelic derivatives, user reviews is the only thing we have accessible, it is Science, a doctor is aware of side-effects because of reporting, user reporting (assuming relatively trusted) is genuinely useful for the world.
It's also useful because most AI models are able to talk about what the community is saying about drugs and the model can correlate that with many other things and it does enhance diagnostic and it's quite useful to train medical models.
See a relatively "new" example is about Vapes, there has been deaths and so-on due to people experimenting with illicit ones, without those reports, we will never have in future Science book and AI models that some chemicals are dangerous to inhale or whatever (it's a shitty example but you get my point)
It's not good data for any particular procedure because he's doing so many at the same time so you can't really use the data to support any particular procedure in a rigorous way.
[flagged]
If creating research data means one is performing science, the word means nothing.
Why not? How does a report of someone taking X drug and doing bloodwork every week and posting it for everyone to see is nothing?
I mean for one thing - the placebo effect exists. That's why double blind testing of new drugs is the standard
Agreed, but many drugs have a direct effect, not subtle and it's pretty much immediate to know, let say a user try that new sub-q injectable from a shady forum that discuss X compound that is supposed to cure acne, then follow protocols from other users, then do their report, often with photos, it's useful even if it's not standard, as you have a clear picture of before/after usage of that drug (it's probably fair to say that the acne clearing is that isn't placebo effect), it's useful even after a drug is authorized on the market as well as it gives additional user reports of efficiency. Realistically, some data is better than none.
Saying that wouldn't be useful is kinda like saying HN/Reddit isn't useful because it's all anecdotal, that applies to almost all topics in life.
Lastly, let's not pretend that most doctors do actually follow properly a patient blood before/during/after a course of a drug, in most cases, doctor will just ask How did it go, any side effects?... That's a new "data" for the doc, all anecdotal, almost the same value as a "trusted" rando on Reddit.
I thought the article was talking about his blood transfusions to explain any part of how he ended up with this disease but no, he just has it (for some reason) as a result of something that happened at some point.
He donates blood or ?
No he takes blood transfusions from his son along with a lot of other questionable procedures and supplements. No one really knows why he developed this problem and it's pretty common but in association with so many exotic medical procedures it's spawned a lot of assumptions about the cause.
There are some side effects with blood transfusions that may be an experiment in itself. For example, blood bags can transfer plasticizers to the blood, which is a method to detect if athletes have been doping.
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/scientific-research/ov...
Yeah that's what I thought. Which is pretty weird.
Funnily enough donating blood actually can have big benefits for health - they did a study on Firemen who have massively higher PFAS blood levels (exposure to fire fighting foams). Turns out by regularly donating blood it forces the body to make new blood which was the only reliable way to dilute the "forever chemicals".
Is the solution really just to give away the PFAS to blood recipients?
I mean as a solution for high PFAS levels simply drawing blood and throwing it away would also work just fine too. Also the levels in the blood the recipient receives would be diluted by their own blood too unless they were getting a lot of PFAS'd blood often.
Now this news is everywhere and people seem to be mocking him, but he is a good guy.
He's hubristic and selfish. None of his "research" is going to benefit anyone (himself included), making this essentially a huge waste of time and resources. Bryan will die just like all the rest of us, despite being very rich and self-obsessed. He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people. Instead he's acting like just another huckster promising a fountain of youth. He does this using bombastic terms and taboo methods (e.g. using his son as a blood boy), in a way that's calculated to direct enormous public attention towards himself. The science he advocates for is sketchy at best and the results of all his "experiments" will tell us nothing because we can't reproduce his methods (his program allegedly costs >$1M per year), nothing is blinded or controlled, and N=1. He's a bad person who uses bad methods to glorify himself and now he probably gave himself an autoimmune disease. He deserves to be mocked.
He's actually Bio"hacked" himself though ! Most people just take supplements.
Isn't getting "hacked" suppose to be a bad thing ?
For someone on "hacker news" you're showing a surprising lack of knowledge of the multiple meanings of the word "hack" in computer circles.
Well said, he got what was coming to him too.
> He could spend his enormous wealth on supporting real research and proper studies on real diseases that hurt lots of people
There we go again. There's always that one guy in the crowd, who knows better what you should be spending your money on. Also, that guy has the moral right to tell you. He is a really good person, you know! So you should listen! You should also thank him.
> He deserves to be mocked.
Just look how good this guy is.
Yes exactly, there are good and bad things to spend money on. This is a bad way to spend money for the reasons I explained above.
What he spends his money on is none of your business.
Turns out that when you amass a significant portion of society’s resources then society will be interested in what you do with them.
Fwiw, people mocked him long before this news broke. People aren't hating on him as a result of his diagnosis, just found a new (and admittedly ironic) point to pick at.
> but he is a good guy
That definitely doesn't seem to be the case, especially if you look beyond his bio-hacking endeavors. His treatment of employees and ex-partners seems pretty horrible: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/technology/bryan-johnson-...
He’s unfathomably rich and unfathomably stupid; doing insane shit to his body and actively recommending others do the same and that’s why he’s being mocked.
“Good guy” or not, he’s paying the price for playing with fire.
At least he walks the walk. I won’t say he is stupid. You see stupid people(a big chunk of the human population) looking for immortality in more stupid things so I would place him way above these folks
There is no proof that his autoimmune disease was caused by him "playing with fire", it's more likely to be genetic.
I didn’t say they were related. I said he’s doing insane shit to himself because he has the money to do so. But it’s that he recommends others do the same and that’s stupid.
I mean, you never know for sure. It's all just PR and messaging. Especially from a tech CEO with money. The thing that I struggle to reconcile is how much he's been involving his teenage son in this experimentation. That's a pretty gigantic red flag for me, I guess.
Being good and wealthy are mutually exclusive.
I hope you are writing this from a really poor place, like a Brazilian favela. People there must be really good. Why would you not live with them? I am certain you are not some hypocrite, who lives in an affluent, evil place. That would really disappoint me, because I really want to believe you are not full of BS.
Nothing in his statement talked about the poor being better, just that every rich person becomes so by taking from others.
By that logic, every poor person becomes so by giving to others. Neither statement is true. They equated being rich with being evil, which is plain stupid and I don't understand why you are defending it.
Really, people have a specific "hate heuristic" and whatever triggers that they will hate.
It can't really be reasoned with because it's a subconscious reflex.
Heuristics overwrite reasoning for most people because they don't consume much resources in the brain, the cheaper path is selected by default.
I agree with you, but I think it's also easy to see where people like the person you're responding to are coming from. Corporations have become pretty nasty in modern times. It's no longer really about offering the best product for the best price, but instead coercing and exploiting people so much as possible to squeeze every single penny out of them, offering as little as possible in return, and then somehow turning everything into rent.
Age is often a factor here. If you're older then you've known a different world of capitalism than what's being put on display in contemporary times. By contrast for younger people, this sketchiness is all they've ever known.
He sold his company to another company. How is that taking from others?
Some of worst evilest motherfuckers I knew were dirty poor, and some of them were filthy rich.
Evil Motherfuckerness seems to be uniformly distributed across the social strata.
I agree. I think it has nothing to do with how much a person has and everything with who they choose to be.
Unfortunately, stupid communist ideas are very popular on this website. Say "eat the rich" and they will clap.
A single amoral poor person doesn't matter because they can't do anything to you short of physical violence. A single amoral ultra-wealthy person can and will make sure everyone plays by their rules, they are unstoppable forces in society. Not every evil person ends up being rich, but the incentives in our society basically ensure that past a certain point of extreme wealth we're selecting for the most ruthless and self-centered people who know how to play the game. Even an initially good person that managed to climb the ranks on merit or real innovation eventually has to make the choice between ethics and getting more money, and we know which way they tend to go.
HN is/was a bastion of venture capital and big tech. This is literally Y Combinator. Maybe reflect on why the tides may be slightly shifting away from idealist absolutism even in a place like this. You'll probably find genuine grievances and criticism instead of Red Scare cardboard cutouts that you'd look so good taking down.
[flagged]
That was unkind and unnecessary. Please keep these kinds of comments out of HN.
He hired real doctors right? Not like witch doctors or faith healers or something? I wonder was there an issue of them not being able to tell the boss no, no matter how screwy his ideas were?
I know Putin is also doing a similar thing, he has a team of doctors who are supposed to keep him alive forever. But he certainly seems the sort of boss you cant disagree with or give bad news to (we can see that in how he commands the war) so maybe he will also hopefully die sooner than we think.
> I know Putin is also doing a similar thing, he has a team of doctors who are supposed to keep him alive forever.
Oh really? have him told you so? Amazing. Did he give you more details about the treatments?
This is absolutely hilarious. lolollol .. aw life is good.
[dead]
[dead]
There is nothing more valuable than doing what you believe and love in the life. Especially when doing no harm, furthermore trying to solve a great problem with great benefits for society.
Is incredible but understandable, that many don´t get it.
He's going about this in the least scientific way, though. When n=1 and he has a million confounding variables, it reads more like fear of his own mortality than a meaningful research project. And this is a business for him now, he sells supplements through his Blueprint program.
What he did is filtering through all the noise and getting straight to the point, doing what he believes no one else has done and leading by example. We can argue about ethical and non conventional ways ofc that need to be optimized. The noise like this post comments will always be there, but doesn´t really matter actually :). Then being jealous or "skeptic" because he made some money out of it, it is nonsense. An example: most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day (an easy one is vit D). How is that bad, Informing and providing them with the solution? (ignorance at it´s finest). Reminds me of how ancient people was burning a "witch" cause knew how to heal with herbs.
> most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day
The most common cause of death globally is cardiovascular disease. The people buying supplements from him are buying his longevity supplements which likely have limited benefits to anyone.