Comment by bambax
5 days ago
> You might have seen his Netflix documentary where he talks about taking 100 pills a day in order to live longer. Or maybe you saw his YouTube videos where he shows the world his workout routines.
No, I have not.
> extremes gain attention. It polarises people. 90% of people might hate Bryan or think he is crazy. He has a lot of haters. 9% of people might be curious but ambivalent. But if 1% of people love Bryan’s message, that’s all he needs. It’s better to have a small number of fanatical fans than lots of people who are luke-warm about you.
That's a recipe for a cult. Maybe creating cult followers is the ultimate goal of any "marketing" initiative. But it's not admirable, nor recommendable.
For this person who pretends they will not die, it's just ridiculous and unimportant, but when it comes to politics and MAGA obtuse fanatics, it destroys the world.
“The sober truth is that religions are the most stable and strongest organizations in the entire world,” he says. “Say I’m a cult, and I’ll joke that my cult is better than your cult because it tells people to eat healthy food and go to bed on time.”
-Bryan Johnson in https://www.menshealth.com/health/a63664080/bryan-johnson-do...
And hey, he has a point. His following is fanatical about stuff like... going to bed early, exercising and eating right.
But not about masking, and subsequently contracting covid, hurting his health more than any of his therapies have helped.
https://x.com/lauramiers/status/1846199554288292232
What evidence do you have that he wasn't masking? That tweet doesn't seem to make any mention about masking, and there are definitely shots of him masking while traveling in his Netflix doc (which is well post-Covid).
Also, those tweets seem pretty nonsensical - she quotes him posting about how he actively acknowledges Covid is very damaging and then attacks him for unrelated things that he does? Seems like those are just the tweets of someone who's a little nuts and hates the rich.
What's the significance of those tweets? He got covid? Who's she supposed to be?
> my cult is better than your cult
That's not possible, because I don't have a cult. That's the point. All cults are bad, they can't be ranked.
It's in the DFW sense: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
Cults are ideology startups. Most start ups fail. Doesn’t mean they all will.
6 replies →
> His following is fanatical about stuff like... going to bed early, exercising and eating right.
But that's the point. If he had just posted lots of articles about going to bed early, exercising and eating right, nobody would give a shit.
People know about him because he spends millions of dollars a year on his own personal health, has reached "uncanny valley" level in terms of his appearance, and makes truly bizarre posts comparing the "quality" and duration of his nighttime erections to his teenage son's. So tired of this world where people think stuff like this is something to emulate.
We can look at this "cult-like" effect in a number of ways. Some will be specifically interesting to this community, since they apply broadly to startups.
I think it's wrong to call Bryan a "marketing genius" and I don't think the article here gives meaningful advice or reflects Bryan's process in the slightest. I don't think that he does anything particularly novel with his marketing, and I don't think it's the case that he had a brilliant business idea in 2021 where he thought to himself, "you know what would be great for my next gig, is if I built a business around longevity, used myself as the sole test subject, appealed to the fitness/health communities, and created my own supplements to sell" — I think he developed an obsession around health and longevity given his struggles with it himself, he wanted to share the work he was doing with other people, other people became interested in what he was doing and the way he told his story, and the business sort of naturally formed around it due to gaps in the market for the quality of products that Bryan wants as well as the high-quality content he produces (he's still a capitalist).
People, such as the author here, love to apply a revisionist lens to success. You could imagine a similar article being written about the marketing genius of the early days of The Beatles or Bob Dylan — they stood out, wrote catchy songs, appealed to a somewhat specific demographic (that eventually broadened), differed from the mainstream (early on), and followed trends. Neither of them thought about marketing as a first principle. To borrow an idea from Rick Rubin, they were creating music that they wanted to experience in the world that no one else was making, and once they brought those ideas to life, there were others who enjoyed it as well. They were creating first for themselves, from their own obsession, and there was a latent audience ready to receive it.
The same goes for successful startups. Facebook's origin story certainly shares a lot of similarities. It also factors into Paul Graham's interest in obsession[0], and consequently YC's founding principles[1] of investing in those motivated by "consuming interest" rather than "money". Perhaps this seems like a bit of a digression, but this sort of obsession is what leads to a "cult-like" mentality, both within the organization as well as with its fans and users. This is something that Peter Thiel (and Founder's Fund more broadly) is known for supporting, as well as recommending in Zero to One[2]. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was an early supporter of the largest social network in existence and a scholar of Renee Girard/mimetic theory.
Which brings me to my final point — there are a variety of organizations, fanbases, religions, etc that embody this "cult-like" growth and interest. I don't think it's possible to avoid them, although it clearly has the ability to harm. At the same time, personal computers and the internet were once niche communities with cult-like followings. I don't think these manifestations of mimetic desire are something that we'd want to discard entirely even if we could — they're something that simply occurs due to our social predisposition as human beings, and it's amplified due to our interconnectedness via modern technology.
[0] - https://paulgraham.com/genius.html
[1] - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles
[2] - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/peter_thiel_710435