The Bryan Johnson Fallacy
The presumption that what we know is all there is to know.
Bryan Johnson is an American entrepreneur turn longevity-obsessed ‘biohacker’. He has become rather well known over the last few years for his claims of reverse-ageing and his goal of living past 120. His strict and unusual regime has garnered millions of views online largely helped by its sensationalised premise. With a diet seemingly consisting predominantly of synthetic supplements and extracts and a morning routine permeated by electronic gadgets and a 4:30am start time, one might be excused for wondering how any of this could be considered ‘optimal’ for a human.
So has Bryan missed anything with his approach? Despite spending millions of his own purse on testing, biometrics, transfusions, scans, doctors, gadgets and food; has he been misguided by his own anemic view of biology and how the human body interacts with its environment?
It appears as though Bryan is a victim of a pernicious pattern of thought underpinned by an insufficient perspective life and ageing. He treats scientific literature as the single source of wisdom; the only place from which he can receive guidance. His thinking is pervaded by the notion that there is no knowledge beyond this and that logic and observation serve no purpose in understanding nature, of which humans are a part. Embedded in this worldview is an inadequate acknowledgement of the ever-present reality of unknown unknowns.
He has fallen prey to The Bryan Johnson Fallacy: The presumption that what we know is all there is to know.
Bryan Johnson has a complicated relationship with eternal life. Born into a Mormon family, he spent his early life and into his 20s evangelising. Following a trip to Ecuador, Johnson departed his faith, going on to become a highly successful entrepreneur. With time and resources on his side, he became enamored with his own personal health journey; something he claims had never previously been on his radar. With finances being no obstacle, his interest became an obsession, eventually spilling over into a race to stop or reverse ageing. There is little doubt that his previous experience in a more fringe religious sect left some psychological wounds and complex emotions with regards to life and mortality. How much this background might be influencing his pursuits is beyond the scope of this article.
It is no secret that Bryan Johnson sees the human body as a machine with discreet parts that work independently of one another. If asked, I am sure he would dispute this assertion, however, his vocabulary is clearly that of a mechanist.1
“I asked all my organs in the body… heart, liver, kidney; what do you need to be your best self?”
From: What would your organs order to eat if they could speak?
One simply does not use language like this when they understand that the human body is an integrated whole that is irreducible and not subject to compartmentalisation. His approaches are inherently reductionistic as he strictly adheres to being guided by ‘science’. While the scientific method is a tool of great power and influence, it is not a pure approach. Science in and of itself is a process, one that is ever changing. Ideally, it is guided simply by a free market of ideas and deep (and interdisciplinary) discussion.
Unfortunately, science has essentially become a business, strongly influenced by the mechanistic (and monistic) culture that pervades the West2. Works such as “Science Fictions” by Stuart Ritchie, “Whitewashed” by Carey Gillam, “Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe, “False Positive” by Theodore Dalrymple, “The Truth About Drug Companies” by Marcia Angell and “The Real Anthony Fauci” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (just to name a few) paint a very dim picture of the reputability (and replicability) of much of the work that is done in modern scientific investigations. Even the five-sigma result gained by CERN for the Higgs particle has been called under question.
Beyond these social/political/economic issues, there are pragmatic and philosophical limits to the understanding that can be gained from scientific investigations - particularly in the fields of nutrition, health and longevity.3 These fields are notoriously fraught with generalisations and fail to capture the complex web of interactions between the unique individual and their unique environment. This is why there tend to be substantial heterogeneity of results within these fields.
Then (and possibly most importantly), there is simply the realm of unknown unknowns. This was the realm microbes were relegated too pre-microscopy, or electric fields before Ørsted’s compass needle. We simply don’t know everything. Yet Johnson’s approach is to not only treat science as a final product, but obfuscate inductive reasoning, logic and most importantly, unknown unknowns. His approach makes it look like we already know everything there is to know.4
Induction allows us to integrate unknown unknowns as they are baked in to the observations we are starting with. This method of understanding is something I feel is vital in approaching problems of infinite complexity. Johnson’s approach actively dismisses unknown unknowns and has no mechanism through which they are sought.
Fundamentally, Johnson views the human body as a machine; something reducible. This is amplified by his insistence that there be a relationship between money outlaid and health outcomes. This is abject linear thinking which does not apply to biology or any complex systems. Johnson almost seems to brag in most of his videos about the over $2,000,000USD he has spent on his health and continues to spend. Again, I am sure if prompted, he would deny said claims about linear and mechanistic thinking; however, as pointed out, his rhetoric is inherently incongruent with any other viewpoint.5
He claims in many of his videos (like in the image above) that he is ‘reversing ageing’ or ‘ageing at the rate of an average 10 year old’. But even a casual observer with the slightest bent towards logic and rationalism might ask, “How could one even verify this claim?”. Ageing is not objective and we do not have any concrete way of measuring such abstract and complex phenomena.6 One might be tempted to reason (perhaps reasonably so) that there might not even realistically be a way to quantify concepts such as ageing in the first place.7
Johnson’s claims with regards to ageing are dubious at best and seed overly simplistic rhetoric into the public sphere; ideas that may ultimately be anti-useful. His ardent beliefs that the ageing process (a natural process) is one to be fought against or even treated with distain8 seems mismatched with his desire to understand what is optimal for humans (part of the natural world).
To get some insight into Johnson’s (and the team he employs) driving philosophy of health, it is helpful to get some insight into his methods and routines. His diet, in particular, is one that has garnered particular interest online due to its restrictive and repetitive nature.
A staple feature of his videos are displays of breakfast, lunch and dinner; most of which are essentially the same small meal with a tub of pills. Said meals are claimed to be based on the best available scientific evidence and the “perfect diet”. Philosophically, the notion of perfection is contentious at best. Seeking perfection is a fool’s errand.
Thermodynamically, ageing can be seen as the gradual loss of coherence within nested, heterarchical systems leading to a slow, yet inevitable increase in net entropy of the system. While the body continuously strives to maintain a net entropy of 0, there are times where ultimately, coherence is lost and energy unable to be directed during flow. At its core, this is ageing. The human body is exquisitely capable of offsetting energy loss through the complex interrelationships its integrated systems are involved in. But when in the wrong environment, the ability to direct these energy flows diminishes. Damage accumulates over time, contributing to the slow but predictable process of senescence. We are not perfect.
What does a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent lack?
Imperfection.
It seems that imperfection is baked into the fabric of our reality as humans. This is certainly the case in the Christian tradition.
Johnson’s claims of perfection are also objectionable from another important point of view. There is a complete and utter obfuscation of inter- and intra-individuality. Research dating back over 50 years demonstrates that individual requirements of certain vitamins is highly variable, with some not even appearing to need any whatsoever to avoid deficiency symptoms. Human gastrointestinal tracts (even within siblings) can differ up to 50% in length. Even anatomically there are substantive differences in how the pulmonary arteries are configured around the heart. How could sweeping and all-encompassing statements such as the ones made by Johnson adequately account for differences such as these? There is certainly no dietary pattern that overlaps even each individual that has seen his videos. The claim to have invented a ‘perfect diet’ also assumes that there are no shifting needs between sexes, person to person, day to day, season to season and year to year.
This assumption is particularly egregious as the diets that have maintained healthy and thriving populations in different regions of the world can be vastly different. The diet of the Sami people of northern Scandinavia differs wildly from the diet of those native to Indonesia. Both diets successfully supported populations free of chronic disease and facilitated the elderly to survive long enough to support their tribes and pass on their wisdom. The success of the diet is dependent on various other environmental and individualised factors.9
Research done by Jeff Leach and colleagues in Tanzania have shown the remarkable seasonal shifts in microbial ecology within the guts of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. These dramatic changes result from shifting resources. As the seasons progress (in equatorial regions, there is a wet and a dry season rather than the typical summer, autumn, winter, spring), food availability is impacted, influencing the foods they have access to at certain times of the year. Their diets are never static.10 This is because diets should shift with environmental signals to allow the body to cope with the ever-changing conditions. In northern communities, this is more obvious where carbohydrates are consumed in more abundance during the summer period where berries and plant foods are more readily available. Alongside long day lengths, this helps the body lay down subcutaneous fat that is vital for surviving winter temperatures and short day lengths. These important shifts are yet to be acknowledged by Johnson.
Another vital part of the story missed by Johnson is locality. Food is an environmental signal just like light, deuterium/hydrogen ratio and local magnetic field strength. It conveys information to the body as to where homeostasis is and how it might respond to certain stresses.
“The phytochemical composition of fruits, especially polyphenols, depends on the environmental conditions under which these fruits are cultivated and the agronomic practices followed. Therefore, the consumption of fruits from different origins, with different polyphenol signatures, could have differential effects on health. In addition, recent studies have shown that variation in the biological rhythms due to changes in the photoperiod in the different seasons differentially affect the metabolism in animal models, thus conditioning their response to food consumption.”
Evidence is accumulating that foods eaten out of season or from a region far away can have tangible effects on metabolism and homeostasis.11 This is because food is essentially a package of information regarding the local environment. Eating foods out of season (particularly fruits as their growing tends to be more sensitive to environmental conditions) conveys a message to the body that likely does not fit with the other environmental signals being received (day length, temperature, solar energy, magnetic field strength etc.)
You cannot grow cacao in Utah. Is it possible that by consuming it daily is providing an environmental signal that is incongruent with his other exposures? This is undoubtably something he has never considered. Interestingly, this is a question that could be reached with ease via inductive reasoning and logic.
Another staple in this anti-ageing subculture is sun-avoidance. It is obvious even to the average person as to why this is the case. Sunlight contains varying amounts of high-energy photons depending on season, latitude and altitude. Ultraviolet light is invisible to us and represents the highest-energy photons that can pass through the atmosphere.
These photons allowed life and self-organisation to emerge from the pre-biologic chemistry of the early Earth. UV light also allowed life to thrive in an oxygenated atmosphere; something that would have been toxic if it weren’t for UVC light interacting with water prior to the advent of bacterial photosynthetic pathways. We have much to thank these photons for as they made life possible.
Unfortunately, guided by reductionism and deduction, sunlight has been misunderstood, demonised and relegated to the category of ‘health-hazard’ and ‘cancer risk’. While this is not the place to delve into how and why this has happened, we have good evidence to show why these approaches have proceeded to give us incomplete and ultimately anti-useful results.
The work that has been done on the negative effects of UV light (note that I am using the term UV light instead of sunlight here; sunlight is NOT UV light) have been performed in conditions that prevent translation of the results in any kind of general manner in humans. The use of murine models12, solar simulators and NIR-dark lighting13 and in vitro experimentation fail to capture what occurs in the real world.
Accumulating research in real world exposures shows the exact opposite of what is seen in the lab. Sunlight-seeking behaviors reduce risk of mortality from all causes; including skin cancer.
“We found that all-cause mortality was inversely related to sun exposure habits in a ‘dose-dependent’ manner. The mortality rate was increased twofold amongst avoiders of sun exposure as compared to those with the highest sun exposure habits. In this study focusing on avoidance of sun exposure, women with ‘normal’ sun exposure habits were not at significantly increased risk of MM or of MM-related death.”
“Greater behavioural and higher geographically related UV exposures were associated with a lower risk of all-cause, CVD and cancer mortality. This study adds to growing evidence that the benefits of UV exposure may outweigh the risks in low sunlight countries. Tailoring public health advice to both the benefits and hazards of UV exposure may reduce the burden of disease and increase life expectancy in low sunlight countries.”
Instead of seeing this as a logical outcome, Johnson still claims that UV light is bad. The fact that he uses the language “UV light” instead of “UV-containing sunlight” is as stark a representation of his reductionistic philosophy as any. Sunlight is not UV light, and his language exposes him as not being able to parse out the nuances of how applicable his lab studies are in the real world.
In fact, he even advocates only being exposed to the sun when the UV-index is 3 or below. This is precisely the time in the day when UVA predominates without significant UVB. Without UVB, UVA can exert an immune tolerance effect; something Michael Holick, MD, PhD feels is a primary factor for skin cancer.
Johnson doesn’t even seem to realise that the high-energy photons from all of his lighting fixtures and biohacking gadgets are causing skin damage. Artificial light rich in blue wavelengths are a huge issue for skin. When not balanced with longer wavelengths (as they would be in sunlight), mitochondria are essentially poisoned.
Accumulating evidence demonstrates artificial light rich in (narrowband) blue is very dangerous to the skin with genuine concerns for premature ageing. Using a logical approach, one might assume this as blue wavelengths are also very high-energy (right next to violet and ultraviolet) and in artificial light are not balanced at all by longer wavelengths.
Yet, here we find Mr. Johnson amidst his anti-ageing morning routine for all to see. Before sunrise, blasting his face with high energy photons that cause skin damage in the name of anti-ageing. So much more could be said about his relationship to light, but this will have to suffice.
Lastly, Bryan religiously tracks his biomarkers to make sure what he is doing is working. However, his reliance on dozens of biomarkers to track and validate what he is doing gets to the very core of Johnson’s unfortunate predicament. He implicitly makes the assumption that what is measured and monitored is all that there is to know. There is no yielding to the fact that the reality is that we likely only really know (let alone understand) a very small percentage of biomarkers. We may know quite a bit about what these biomarkers do in a vacuum, but so little work is done on how these markers interact with one another, leading to non-linear dynamics.
“The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
- Bertrand Russell
An apt analogy might be how hundreds of years ago, illness was thought to be caused by bad odors - miasma. They came to this conclusion as they were limited in their ability to assess various biological factors. Johnson is a slave to the same anemia - an anemia of assuming that what is currently know is all there is to know. Undoubtably in a century, the vast majority of current analytic techniques and therapeutics will be superseded; many to probably be looked back on humorously like blood-letting and mercury. Yet these are the precise tools Johnson is currently using to help slow or suspend the ageing process.
This is precisely why a sole reliance on scientific, reductionistic and deductive reasoning is so limiting when dealing with the natural world. Nature is not machine-like. There is space for both induction and deduction in understanding health, but there must be adequate acknowledgment that the incorporation of unknown unknowns will necessarily come from the observation of nature.
There is a through-line of Johnson’s vocabulary implicitly outlining his world view. His language paints a very specific picture of his ideas and the framework through which he develops his protocols.
Eastern philosophies influence their sciences in a different way. In India, science and spiritual practices are not antithetical, but integrated.
One could feasibly learn far more about nutrition from the work of dentist, Weston A. Price’s work from the 1940’s than from a current nutritional biochemistry textbook. The inductive reasoning of Price provides deeper, more fundamental ideas of nutrition.
This is similar to the idea put forward by Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow” of ‘What you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI). Of course, vision is an embodied process; one in which we have great difficulty understanding. Basing your view of the world on vision alone is insufficient, much like basing your view of health and ageing solely on RCTs.
No doubt, his tech background has funneled Johnson down an analytical and reductionist worldview. His frame of reference is always data-driven. While this may work in the world of tech start-ups hoping to secure investment, it is not applicable to natural systems. Natural systems are not concrete, are dynamic and operate with continuity with the surrounding systems. Johnson favours isolation, nature favours integration.
While there has been an increasing interest in measures of biological ageing like the Horvath Clock, it is important to remember that these measures focus solely on methylation patterns in nuclear DNA. Without adequate reference to mitochondrial heteroplasmy’s role in ageing and disease, one must be careful reading too far into concepts like epigenetic clocks and certainly not using them like gospel (such as in the Rejuvenation Olympics). This is without even considering the fact that morphology is not determined by genetics, so the physical manifestations of ageing might not even necessarily be caused by genetics in the first place. To compound the issues of trying to ascertain a discreet value for biological age, the work of Russian scientists on the ‘Phantom DNA Effects’ in the 1980s and quantum effects proposed by Watson and Crick demonstrate clearly that there are still many things yet to be understood about what DNA really is and its roles in biology.
In hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza, age is tracked by seasons; so instead of an annual counting system, there is more emphasis on natural processes such as how many wet seasons has one lived through. This is where the notion of being ‘seasoned’ comes from. There is something to be said for the role of the elder in society (particularly Western societies) today. Losing them to apathy, ill-health and disrespect (ageism) may be having calamitous effects that take a generation to surface.
This pattern of thought never ends well. This type of motivation has led to countless disasters including Agent Orange, DDT, glyphosate, unbridled use of antibiotics, monocropping, ozempic, statin drugs and much more.
I will delve into this concept in much more depth in an upcoming article. It will be titled something along the lines of “The Environmental Gradients Hypothesis”.
In the context of natural, hunter-gatherer diets, food choice is rarely static. Their diets are characterised typically by feast-and-famine dynamics with little remaining stable and reliable.
While this information is preliminary and of low impact, it does fit logically with what we know about seasonal availability and seasonal adaptation. These results are being used as part of inductive reasoning: observation of the natural world first.
Mice are nocturnal and have very little exposed skin. In order to use them in experimental setups they must be shaved and exposed to light in a way that is completely foreign to their physiology. This is even more critical when an understanding of the role of circadian rhythm in cancer development.
In conversation with a well known vitamin D researcher, I was told that solar simulators typically have about 10% UV content. This is more than double the relative abundance available even on the equator. They are also static, a pattern that natural light never abides. These lighting setups in labs do not even begin to represent what true sun exposure is, potentially completely invalidating conclusions gained from sun experimental setups.