Review of DON'T DIE by Bryan Johnson
Review of DON'T DIE by Bryan Johnson
A narcissistic dialogue around ideas that are either annoyingly fractured or wholly unrealistic.
By: Bryan Johnson
Published: 2023
247 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
How best to extend the lifespan of humans and the lifetime of humanity presented in the form of a fictional dialogue between various aspects of the author's personality.
What's the author's angle?
Bryan Johnson is a biohacker who measures dozens and dozens of biomarkers. As a result of this he claims to be aging at 64/100th the normal rate. He’s also a former and, as near as I can tell, disaffected member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Who should read this book?
If you’re really into lifespan expansion, then maybe? Or similarly very concerned with X-risks? But I will warn you that the book is written in one of the more annoying styles I’ve ever encountered. Not only does it directly impede the transmission of information, it actively works against its inclusion..
Specific thoughts: A strange approach to X-risks.
I should start by speaking more about the style of the book. As mentioned, it’s a dialogue between different aspects of the author. We have the characters of Dark Humor, Game Play, Model Builder, Farm Boy, Seeks Authority, and at least a half dozen others. In the hands of a skilled author this might have resulted in a fascinating psychological dialogue. Johnson does not possess that level of skill, so instead of delivering a profound treatise on the challenges confronting humanity with a multidimensional point of view, he ends up creating a dozen or so annoying one dimensional caricatures. You know those people who won’t shut up about AI, or global warming, or Trump, or veganism? Now imagine 12 of those people, arguing for 250 pages.
As a result of this style, ideas are siloed into the fragmented personality buckets, and then further broken up by the dialogue into brief exclamations rather than cohesive principles. Questions are raised and never answered, either because the dialogue moves in a different direction or because the “character” that raised them is not one of the three or four central personalities. But isn’t that the whole point of having all of these personalities? To raise the same objections the readers have, and have those objections answered?
If you can get past the annoying structure and the weird narcissism (who writes a book where every single character is them?), Johnson is making arguments about how to deal with future technology and future risk. The personality aspect which seems to be a clear stand-in for Johnson’s true opinion is Blueprint. Blueprint is also far and away the most annoying. Like Johnson, Blueprint tracks dozens of biomarkers, is fixated on longevity, and eats a “pre-masticated” slurry of his own devising at very specific times.
At a certain point you begin to wonder why Johnson didn’t just write a book explaining his ideas. I’m not sure what he thought he was gaining with the strange conceit of having twelve different versions of himself engage in a weird version of therapy. I guess in a certain sense it models how he talked himself into all of these avant-garde ideas, and the dialogue has been an effective path of enlightenment since Plato. Unfortunately there are no fully realized characters in Johnson’s version, and his arguments have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or paradoxically fail to land at all.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the framing, but what are these ideas exactly? This excerpt is probably the best summary:
It was that moment when I realized what Blueprint was getting at with what appeared, at first, to be just a vain, anti-aging agenda of someone who lost their religion and needed to pick up the emotional pieces of the wreckage. No, it was much bigger than that. He was in the middle of the biggest magic trick he would ever pull: trying to get people to have individual and bodily familiarity with sensors, feedback loops, and the rigors of what it really takes to reverse something as impossibly unidirectional seeming as biological aging … as the first step in reversing something as impossibly unidirectional seeming as climate change or whatever plagues our future.
To restate it without the self-congratulatory flourishes: longevity is a really hard problem. If we can crack that problem—if we can accomplish the seemingly impossible project of living much, much longer—this will give us the confidence and the tools to crack all of humanity’s seemingly impossible problems.
Okay, so how do we solve aging? Apparently you start by consuming a premasticated slurry, and tracking everything under the sun about your health. For those that don’t want to do this—and Johnson is at least wise enough to know that most people won’t—there’s biological programming. Here’s one of the relevant excerpts from the book:
It’s not correct to say the past century was the century of physics. It was the century of programmable physics. Likewise, the twenty-first century is going to be the century of programmable biology. It’s already here in pieces. We’ve had our Wright Brothers moments. The sequencing of the human genome was probably the analog to that. How long did it take to go from that to the Moon? Sixty years? So what will genomes be like in sixty years? Unimaginably different from 1999, when the genome was first fully sequenced. And just like flight, which is a fight against the laws of nature and gravity, we will be able to print proteins, design proteins, create artificial telomerases and enzymes and the like. We will be able to fully program our present, our future, and our biological destiny.
Later he follows up this ten thousand foot view with a more practical description:
And so, Farm Boy, my point is simply that you can use your phone, right? It’s made to be readable by someone who cannot program or design microchips, right? You don’t need to know how cell towers work or how your voice gets alchemically transduced into a signal and then uncompressed on the other end as it gets bounced around cell towers or satellites or whatnot. You just have to know a phone number and a name and what you want to do with the device. That’s all. And so of course you’re not going to need to know how to program your darn body. You’ll get a few little buttons, like a thermostat, and you can tell it to turn to heat or cool and what your desired temperature is and everything else will do all the work. Just like every device ever. The point is not that we will all become programmers. The point is that the programming will be possible, and entire financial and technical ecosystems will sprout around the ability for an individual to pipe in their desires to their body and mind in a way that is unfathomable to us right now.
There’s this feeling currently that if some technology is not actually impossible that it will be mastered very soon.You see this very much in the realm of AI. Coming from that viewpoint it’s entirely understandable that Johnson would think that programmable bodies are right around the corner. And perhaps he’s right. There’s certainly some evidence to suggest he is, but I would assert that we’re looking at more of an S-curve. We had a ridiculously rapid expansion of technology as we figured out “programmable physics”, but we’re starting to plateau on that. I don’t think “programmable biology” is on the same curve as airplanes and computers. I think it has its own S-curve, and decoding the human genome, and even CRISPR will turn out to be more akin to Newton quantifying gravitation and inventing calculus than the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.
This is not to say we won’t get there eventually (and also we might not) but eventually could easily be 50, 100, or even 200 years from now, particularly if we’re talking about literally having an app on your phone with a slider for how strong you’d like to be or how long you want to live.1
What I am very confident of is that it’s not going to happen in the next twenty years. Why twenty years? Well, in addition to his ideas about life-extension, and programmable biology, Johnson/Blueprint also thinks that humanity will destroy itself and the planet in that time frame. Allow me to quote from the book:
I said, “Let’s actually do that poll. It’s a good one. Everybody gives their guess as to what percentage chance humanity has of destroying itself and our planet within, let’s say, within two decades. Blueprint, you lead.”
Blueprint: “One hundred percent.”
I suppose there’s some chance that Blueprint is not an avatar of Johnson.2 But that doesn’t matter, because Blueprint is the character putting forth these ideas, and if he thinks we can:
Develop the ability to program biology
To the point where we’ve solved aging
Then use the tools and knowledge thus created to solve all outstanding risks to humanity
All within the next twenty years.
Then he’s a severely delusional character who should not be taken seriously on anything. And it’s worse than that. If the chance that “humanity will destroy itself and our planet” in twenty years is 100%, then the chance we’ll do it in nineteen years is not going to be zero. It’s going to be very close to 100%. And the chance that we’ll do it in ten years has to be significant (even 10% is significant when you’re talking about the destruction of everyone and everything.) In other words in order to guarantee we avoid destruction we need to do all of the above in the next five years.
For me this revelation of Johnson’s certainty about the end of humanity was the biggest head-scratcher in the whole book, and it overshadows nearly everything else that’s going on.3 All of this is not to say that Johnson is obviously wrong. He could be right, but if he is, he should be writing books with a detailed plan of action titled: “We have FIVE YEARS to avert the apocalypse!” Not esoteric dialogues between annoying caricatures of himself.
This is basically the first example of my new plan to give some book reviews their own post. I’m hoping it will make them easier to find for people who really do want a review of a specific book. And I guess it also makes them easier to ignore as well if you’re not interested in that particular book. But that’s also a good thing. My aim is not to “generate clicks”. My aim is to provide some small amount of epistemological utility to the world.
Imagine the “Are you sure?” dialogue after you click the “I’m ready to die” button. And I didn’t even get into wireheading in this review. Would there also be an “Experience overwhelming orgasmic pleasure?” button? What keeps people from mashing that?
I read this for an SSC/ACX book club I belong to. When we met I asked them if Blueprint was a stand-in for Johnson and they all emphatically agreed that there was no other way to read the book.
Though the fact that Johnson has apparently climbed Kilimanjaro, but then seems to locate it in Nepal is also a pretty big head-scratcher as well.