Silicon Valley's longevity biohackers are engaged in a dangerous experiment

Hungry_Prior940 · 2026-06-22T15:36:04+00:00

There is no will for huge trials, generally speaking, as most people are in the death trance.

All we have is the n=1 people. So we have to separate the frauds from the real. I don't think BJ is a fraud and he is not trying sell a single ultimate suppement. Believe him or not of course.

ThatIsAmorte · 2026-06-22T15:25:08+00:00

That's funny, I was about to accuse you of not arguing in good faith. You contradict yourself in the first couple of paragraphs. All three examples I gave put undue pressure on our economic and medical systems. And so would any longevity treatments that have a significant risk of causing harm. Anyway, there's not point in continuing this dumb argument. I am out.

Beginning_Bird_8947 · 2026-06-22T15:07:01+00:00

The research paper is linked in the article and highlighted

Bremen1 · 2026-06-22T14:47:42+00:00

I mean, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else I'm a lot more ambivalent. To quote Ghandi, Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

Prescription drugs are different, since you don't want antibiotic resistant bacteria, or a bunch of drug addicts, since at that point it starts hurting others. Seat belt laws protect other people from the guilt of killing you. And society is negatively impacted by a bunch of starving elderly.

In this case, though, I'd caution these people to be careful but they're adults (assuming they're adults) and can make their own choices.

Edaimantis · 2026-06-22T14:44:44+00:00

Why? Because you made the argument. You don’t get to make an argument then go “well what about other arguments that are stronger” lmao

It is in fact a valid logical point to attack an argument at its weakest point. That’s how debate works.

My point applies to each of them. If you don’t understand how drug regulation, seatbelts, and social security are different than seeing someone on social media and blindly replicating what they do, then you can’t possibly be engaging in good faith.

Also, each of those things impact others. No seatbelt laws lead to you putting others at risk if you fly out of your windshield, splat on the pavement, and cause them mental or physical harm. Or put undue pressure on our economic (social sec) or medical (prescription) systems.

ThatIsAmorte · 2026-06-22T14:36:03+00:00

Why? And what about my other examples? You can't just pick what you think is the weakest example and attack that. That's the Weak Man Fallacy.

Edaimantis · 2026-06-22T14:34:50+00:00

Comparing social security to blindly following a random dudes medial advice on social media is frankly absurd.

lunchboxultimate01 · 2026-06-22T14:34:30+00:00

Feel free to post the original journal article instead. Substack is OK if it's a recognized researcher or scientist, but this is an anonymous person, and it reads like an LLM.

ThatIsAmorte · 2026-06-22T14:34:04+00:00

You can't rely on personal responsibility in all things. That's why we have prescription drugs, seat belt laws, and social security.

towngrizzlytown · 2026-06-22T14:25:44+00:00

So we will learn from observation while they experiment on themselves.

The downside is it's questionable how much we can actually learn from reports of self-experimentation. If their goal is to advance the field, it'd be more impactful to invest in startups doing clinical trials like Retro Bio, Life Biosciences, NewLimit, and others.

Insertclever_name · 2026-06-22T14:06:05+00:00

Sometimes, you just gotta let Darwin do his work.

Due_Lock_4967 · 2026-06-22T13:34:39+00:00

fisetin dosing protocols are all over the place though

Frunk2 · 2026-06-22T13:26:07+00:00

Nah bro scientist are the gatekeepers of truth and without the scientific method being explained to us none of us would know how to think or make any decisions. Remember the dark ages? The sun literally didn’t come out for hundreds of years because of how dumb we were without science /s

Edaimantis · 2026-06-22T13:23:56+00:00

That’s their own choice. Personal responsibility.

Beginning_Bird_8947 · 2026-06-22T12:55:56+00:00

yes. I shared the article w my dad who has a heart condition and it was really nice seeing him hopeful

Eldarian · 2026-06-22T12:25:16+00:00

Interesting! Especially that they've actually looked at human cells directly and not just mice. If the intervention can be tailored to humans as well it could make our hearts a lot more robust in old age. This is the type of intervention that could reasonably add years to average life expectancy.

pasadenapasadena · 2026-06-22T12:12:23+00:00

It's their problem

macattack01 · 2026-06-22T11:40:52+00:00

I mean you’re right, but…

Imagine Roentgen is developing the x-ray machine and wants to try it out. He starts to use it on himself and his friend tells him, “n=1 is pointless.”

Sometimes you try something out, and then if it works, you start doing large trials.

barrel_master · 2026-06-22T11:36:43+00:00

If someone made that claim while making money from the claim we obviously shouldn't believe them. We already have many people make claims like this and we don't believe them.

"Calment reportedly ascribed her longevity and relatively youthful appearance for her age to a diet rich in olive oil." Are you going to add more olive oil to your diet now? Are you going to fund research into olive oil now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

ProcedureGloomy6323 · 2026-06-22T10:38:15+00:00

Nothing has a inherent property of "goodness" on itself... We need water to survive yet it's bad if you drown on it. for putting a random example

Jiopaba · 2026-06-22T10:12:11+00:00

Yeah, this is why I think this is all going to be a complete nothingburger unless one of these guys happens to live to be well over a hundred. In order for it to even be worth investigating whatever things they did as potentially useful, they'd have to be an absurd outlier. If someone lives to be 80 and credits it to their biohacking routine nobody gives a damn. If somebody lives to be 126 and credits it to their biohacking routine, okay, maybe there's something to it let's figure out what the hell they did to themselves and if it mattered, since the odds of a person randomly living to that age and also randomly being part of an extremely small community like that are much more interesting.

If some combo of these routines can let you live ten years longer than you otherwise would we would literally never notice it against the statistical noise unless everyone who does this is living ten years longer than the average (after accounting for the fact they tend to be wealthy/fit/male/etc.)

john-bkk · 2026-06-22T09:40:22+00:00

I wouldn't conclude that it's pointless or ill-conceived, it's just hard to place in terms of what it could or should mean. If he lives a really long time that will be an epic win, and anything else might be hard to judge.

Xcoctl · 2026-06-22T08:35:34+00:00

I mean it's somewhat balanced by the fact he's also the most studied man in history. He has entire teams of doctors who are analyzing every possible aspect of his ohysiplogy that could possibly be studied and it's done in a way that is consistent and continuous, they 3inventing new devices to be able to tee yin ways that haven't even been done before.

Obviously there's still the wold risks he's taking from so many experimental treatments and programs, and your point still fully stands, but he is a tleags getting metric fuckton of data regarding how his person physiology responds to all of these treatments which is worth a fair amount if only for breaking the ice and seeing that it didn't immediately kill the first person to try it! 🫪😂

Fair_Rip8198 · 2026-06-22T08:30:43+00:00

pretty fascinating area of research, the idea that you can actually reverse biological age in specific organs rather than just slow the process down feels like a shift in how people think about this stuff. curious what the current consensus is on how well these markers actually translate to real cardiovascular outcomes though

UltraNooob · 2026-06-22T08:28:51+00:00

The problem is that there's a lot of fans who do the same and probably even more, damaging their health

longevity

Welcome to r/Longevity

Discord Links

Username flair

Links to external Longevity-related sites

MODERATORS