Biohacker seeking immortality afflicted with incurable 'stomach eating' disease

39 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by ferryth
(lifesitenews.com)

81 Comments

cannonpr

5 hours ago

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.

Waterluvian

5 hours ago

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?

Melatonic

4 hours ago

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 ?

Hoodedcrow

2 hours ago

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

rtkwe

4 hours ago

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.

iLoveOncall

4 hours ago

> He also has a core belief of equating looking younger with his interventions working

And he looks pretty much exactly his age.

culi

4 hours ago

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.

Hoodedcrow

2 hours ago

The best biohacker is some 100+ year-old Japanese lady who just eats healthy and avoids stress

stronglikedan

7 minutes ago

The vast majority of people gotta get stressed to be able to buy food before retirement age. I wonder how old she was when she started the low-stress lifestyle.

pixel_popping

4 hours ago

Honestly, great idea, hope someone interested reads this.

Melatonic

4 hours ago

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

Wurdan

3 hours ago

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.

arjie

5 hours ago

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.

bena

4 hours ago

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.

arjie

4 hours ago

I was writing quickly and miswrote. I meant “the cancer that this condition increases the risk of”. Let me correct it.

nemo136

5 hours ago

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).

rglover

5 hours ago

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).

chabes

4 hours ago

Having a blood boy will not save you from inevitable death

theplumber

5 hours ago

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!

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

user

an hour ago

[deleted]

projektfu

4 hours ago

This website is a little creepy.

Jemm

5 hours ago

I completely support people who want to be guinea pigs for health science.

copperx

5 hours ago

What he's doing is not science.

somenameforme

4 hours ago

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.

copperx

3 hours ago

> 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.

pixel_popping

4 hours ago

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)

rtkwe

4 hours ago

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.

Clent

4 hours ago

If creating research data means one is performing science, the word means nothing.

pixel_popping

4 hours ago

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?

Wurdan

3 hours ago

I mean for one thing - the placebo effect exists. That's why double blind testing of new drugs is the standard

pixel_popping

2 hours ago

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.

LoganDark

5 hours ago

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.

Melatonic

4 hours ago

He donates blood or ?

rtkwe

4 hours ago

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.

Melatonic

4 hours ago

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".

LoganDark

4 hours ago

Is the solution really just to give away the PFAS to blood recipients?

rtkwe

3 hours ago

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.

Melatonic

38 minutes ago

Exactly. I believe for the firefighters they were not actually donating it.

For the average person (if we're all contaminated with some small level of pfas) I'm not sure there's a better solution to normal and regular (over many years) blood donation.

hoppp

5 hours ago

Now this news is everywhere and people seem to be mocking him, but he is a good guy.

bglazer

5 hours ago

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.

Melatonic

4 hours ago

He's actually Bio"hacked" himself though ! Most people just take supplements.

Isn't getting "hacked" suppose to be a bad thing ?

AndrewDucker

an hour ago

For someone on "hacker news" you're showing a surprising lack of knowledge of the multiple meanings of the word "hack" in computer circles.

Simon_O_Rourke

5 hours ago

Well said, he got what was coming to him too.

neonstatic

4 hours ago

> 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.

bglazer

4 hours ago

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.

neonstatic

4 hours ago

What he spends his money on is none of your business.

wonnage

4 hours ago

Turns out that when you amass a significant portion of society’s resources then society will be interested in what you do with them.

dpoloncsak

5 hours ago

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.

user

4 hours ago

[deleted]

garciasn

5 hours ago

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.

theplumber

5 hours ago

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

hoppp

5 hours ago

There is no proof that his autoimmune disease was caused by him "playing with fire", it's more likely to be genetic.

garciasn

5 hours ago

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.

Waterluvian

5 hours ago

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.

everyone

4 hours ago

Being good and wealthy are mutually exclusive.

neonstatic

4 hours ago

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.

khalic

4 hours ago

Nothing in his statement talked about the poor being better, just that every rich person becomes so by taking from others.

neonstatic

4 hours ago

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.

hoppp

3 hours ago

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.

somenameforme

4 hours ago

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.

hoppp

3 hours ago

He sold his company to another company. How is that taking from others?

elzbardico

4 hours ago

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.

neonstatic

4 hours ago

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.

tavavex

3 hours ago

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.

twothreeone

5 hours ago

[flagged]

ksd482

5 hours ago

That was unkind and unnecessary. Please keep these kinds of comments out of HN.

everyone

4 hours ago

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.

elzbardico

4 hours ago

> 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?

everyone

4 hours ago

This is absolutely hilarious. lolollol .. aw life is good.

trilogic

5 hours ago

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.

jmcgough

5 hours ago

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.

trilogic

3 hours ago

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.

jmcgough

an hour ago

> 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.