Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die
by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:
I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.
I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.
If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.
I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.
I’d imagine the food such as the adobo tofu salad is probably healthier than much of the premade frozen stuff at the supermarket, but you can surely DIY on this stuff. Glad Dr. Mike curtailed his binging on Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. There are healthier snacks. I eat pistachios or cashews.
Is the “rascal self” a retooled id (Freud borrowed from Nietzsche)? Mine wants me to eat donuts at work. Bad rascal daemon. Wait is the customized algorithm the superego? “I” don’t need that in “my” life. A conscience that shames me is bad enough.
Score one for critical theory:
That tidbit of “cultural Marxism” made my morning. Fuck you Jordan Peterson. Horkheimer was wiser.
So…:
Whoah! That got dark. Does quantifying your nighttime erections inevitably lead down that path?
Ofc!
(Of course.)
But well elaborated & explained & specifics provided here.
Yeah, that salad is cheap and easy to make, I’ve done it myself. Without all the plastic packaging.
The program isn’t complete unless it comes with an internet-ready nighttime erection monitor!
I see from Friendly Atheist that a Christian Television channel has been fined £150000 for allowing Peter Popoff to advertise ‘Miracle Spring Water’ on their system. I expect that would be ideal to wash down one of these meals.
PZ@3: But the plastic is important! Without ingesting lots of delicious microplastics we will never look like Bryan Johnson.
I was taken aback at:
I don’t know enough about Bryan Johnson to say what darkness he brings to the table. I am a bit more familiar with Ray Kurzweil, who too is obsessed with longevity and kinda popularized the Singularity. His is a sad and all too human case. He misses his dad and wishes he could bring him back. The founder of Sirius XM is going down a similar path with digital scrapbooking. Some of this seems benign, but harkening back to the Vrba thread it reflects to a human tragedy, our realization of mortality due to our larger cortex, which Gould worked into touting the spandrel side effect of religion, though Gould didn’t cite Ernest Becker on his allusion to death-denial putting it on Freud instead. Christians have a ready made answer to this terror management problem. Bryan Johnson and Ray Kurzweil try to thwart death with technology. Good luck with that. Give me Camus instead!
Not to say trying to live healthier and extend your life past a time when doing otherwise would give you a heart attack is a bad thing. It seems more realistic. I wonder how much microplastic now resides in my huevos.
There are a lot of far more mundane ways to live longer.
Ways that actually work.
One well known risk factor is…money.
Rich people in the USA live 10 or 15 years longer than poor people. A lot of this wealth factor has to do with access to health care.
Hard Pass!
Another risk factor for dying is living in a GOP controlled Red state. Blue states residents on average live 2 years longer than Red states residents.
The difference can be a lot greater than 2 years. The longest lived residents of a Blue state, Hawaii, live 9 years longer than residents of the poorest Red state, Mississippi.
Again, a lot of this is due to access to health care.
I’m having left-over pizza for breakfast.
@ 1. Hemidactylus : “Whoah! That got dark. Does quantifying your nighttime erections inevitably lead down that path?”
Dunno. Haven’t tried it.
Horkheimer, quoted by Hemidactylus:
Instrumental rationality certainly seems like an idea that can be applied to some recent political decisions, when things are reduced to short-term metric-based calculations, rather than you know, principles.
That guy always makes me think of those Batman comics where the Joker is yelling, “I’ll show them how many boners I can make!”
There is one well known, robustly evidenced, and highly reliable means by which men can significantly extend their lifespans: castration. These guys never seem to fancy that one for some reason.
” ..highly reliable means by which men can significantly extend their lifespans: castration.”
I hope it doesn’t extend to “intellectual eunuchs” like trump.
As long as people remain gullible there will be scammers. There seems to be no end in sight for grifting. Trump has popularized it and the wagon train of grifters just keeps growing.
Those lecture tours may shorten his life but the money he makes will surely grant him eternal youth. Our only hope is he gets hit by a bus or his plane crashes. I’m for the bus accident to avoid other people from suffering.
With the prices of the lecture and meals he must be targeting the wealthy. With prices going up nonstop, I don’t see the common person being able to afford this grift.
I grew up in Silicon Valley.
“Instrumental rationality” sounds like programming. In particular, it sounds like programming where your salary depends on people who don’t know what they want or can’t articulate it. It doesn’t matter that they can’t tell how wrong they are and aren’t able to listen: they have the money. Capitalism says do what they pay you for and laugh all the way to the bank.
This plasticine-dude, now he has the money. Everything else follows.
Programmers do copy and share code, and they copy and share life hacks for dealing with the irrational world around them. It seems like kindness.
IF you expressed this or that change in diet in terms of actual lifespan extension–like, a year if you start when you’re forty? You’d have fewer converts. So they keep implying that the results are open-ended, and that forever is a possibility.
Wait I thought tofu was for beta cuck soy boys and would trans you? Someone needs to check with the Department of Propaganda Eating Silliness (DOPES).