Why Isn’t Bryan Johnson Joining The Longevity World Cup?
Bryan Johnson, an American half-billionaire, sold his tech startup and embarked on a glorious mission of doing a series expensive longevity experiments on himself. Doing so he became the most prominent longevity influencer of our times. He ultimately popularized the idea of longevity competitions and today he identifies as a longevity athlete. For various philosophical reasons, I personally found these concepts revolutionary and ran with it. Two years ago, I started out by interviewing longevity athletes, then, because of some frustration about the lack of development of existing competitions, a year ago I started my own competition: The Longevity World Cup.
By now it has became the most advanced competition in the space, attracting every other prominent longevity athletes, but to my surprise not Bryan. I often wondered, as well as being asked the question: why is that? How come the person who basically created the field and his entire identity is tied to it has chosen to not compete in the best developed competition in the space?
Possibilities
For a while I believed it’s just because he haven’t heard of it, but it has been 8 months since the competition is live, it already has a decent online presence and has already attracted just shy of a hundred athletes. Unless he is living in a cave and it has no murals of the topic of his expertise , he must have heard about it by now. A few months ago even an official invitation has been sent to him on multiple channels. So this is an unlikely explanation.
Could be that he just can’t be bothered to apply? That’s another unplausible theory considering someone who tied his own identity in being a longevity athlete and regularly boosts about his standing on the Rejuvenation Olympics, the other major competition.
Then it could be a problem with the methodology. Perhaps Bryan has an issue with how the competition ranks? Perhaps the biological aging clock used on the Longevity World Cup is too unscientific to his taste? However in its current season LWC uses traditional blood tests for biological aging clock calculation and experts generally consider this to be a more reliable method than home test kits are, which the other competition he competes in uses. (Note I might have a bone to pick on this point, but I digress.)
And that leads me to what prompted writing this article in the first place. I just received an email from David X, a new applicant to the competition, in which he claims he calculated Bryan’s Phenotypic Age based on his latest published blood test and the results surprised me.
According to David’s calculations the difference between Bryan’s chronological and biological age is -6.67 years. If that’s true, that’d put Bryan to 70th place on the Longevity World Cup out of 86 competitors. Could this be the reason why he’s not rushing to compete? Would such a ranking jeopardize his public image, so he’d rather opt to not partake at all?
Verifying the Numbers
First things first, it’s quite hard to believe, so I need to verify these numbers.
Before that, I must note I tried to calculate his pheno age in the past, but I couldn’t find the data. At one point Dave Pascoe has claimed to calculate his pheno age, but I couldn’t dig up the data he worked on later on. But this time he finally published it:
He asked people to challenge him on his claim about the “World’s Best Biomarkers.” While that’s not the main purpose of this article, I suppose it can serve as an acceptance of that challenge as well.
What follows is the relevant pages of Bryan’s test results. Sidenote: I did not intentionally blur them, he uploaded it blurred to begin with. Nevertheless it’s still decipherable.
Here are the pheno age relevant biomarkers collected out nicely.
- RDW: 12.1 %
- Glucose: 91 mg/dL
- hsCRP: 0.3 mg/L
- Creatinine: 1.21 mg/dL
- WBC: 3.1 × 1⁰³ cells/μL
- MCV: 101 fL
- Lymphocytes: 38 %
- Albumin: 4.5 g/dL
- ALP: 77 U/L
Next I plugged them into the LWC pheno age calculator — which is currently the most accurate one on the Internet due to a bug and an issue discovered and addressed with other calculators.)
He’s 47.0 years old, subtract that from 39.3 pheno age, which leaves us with -7.7 years.
As you can see David made a mistake reading the glucose number, as well as he used 47.5yo instead of 47.0yo, which explains the difference.
-7.7 years on the Longevity World Cup puts Bryan Johnson near the bottom, to 64th place out of 86 competitors: just right below you never fucking guess who! Me :)
And that reveals my ulterior motive of even bothering writing this article: the bragging rights of beating Bryan Johnson in longevity🚀
The Real Reason Why Bryan Isn’t Competing
Flexing aside where does that leave us?
It leaves us staring at the uncomfortable reality that when the scoreboard doesn’t favor you, you’re tempted to not show up at all. Bryan has built a brand on being ahead of the pack and stepping into an arena where his ranking could appear mediocre might feel like unnecessary risk.
But that’s precisely why the greats in any field earn their respect — by showing up even when the outcome is uncertain. If we’re to make a sport out of longevity, the real test isn’t whether you can post your best numbers in a carefully curated way; it’s whether you’re willing to put them on the same scoreboard as everyone else and let the chips fall where they may.
It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, what matters is that you play the game.
