Right now though, I do worry that he’s just spending money ineffectively and no one but some grifters gets anything out of this.
Aside from anything else it's also pretty cool that he's 45 and has a VO2 max above 50 along with lifting reasonably heavy weights, regardless of how old he looks. I get the feeling from looking at his website that he cares as much about the numbers as his appearance, if not more.
Article: THIS MAN IS HARVESTING HIS OWN SON.
HN: look at his VO2!, i wonder what he benches?
insert principle skinner 'the kids who are wrong".jpeg here - but seriously HN? this isn't peak 'Weird AF' to anyone else?
Plenty of very exciting anti-aging research going on right now without subjecting your child to plasmapheresis.
For context I donate plasma twice a week. It's a 16-gauge needle and for a healthy young person like myself it takes 40 minutes or so each time. You eventually scar as your skin can't heal that quickly. People have asked me if I use heroin because of those two scars, one in each inner elbow. To think people would use something that literally already saves lives to maybe prolong their lives based on mouse trials where the mice were literally stitched together to share circulatory systems is plain evil.
Please consider donating plasma if you are healthy. It does remove some PFAS from your blood if you need an incentive besides the money. It takes multiple donations to make enough medicine for one patient.
"You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical." - Hannah Arendt
One of the worst things I've read in a while, in fact.
The plasma cycle thing is odd and I have concerns about coercion. However, I think most people are critical of him because he's richer and/or fitter than they are or because he's unusual, not making a principled moral stand. They're missing out: his self-experimentation is fascinating. 90% of it is probably bullshit or only gives a tiny incremental gain, but I just think it's neat that he keeps an unhinged geocities-tier[0] page detailing why he eats hummus with un-dutched dark chocolate from low heavy metal plantations. It's even neater that it's actually working for him in some empirical sense.
> hey're missing out: his self-experimentation is fascinating.
Sorry, I have to ask again, did you miss the bit where HE IS HARVESTING HIS OWN SON?
Anyway, the blood plasma stuff isn't the only thing that's fascinating, everything else is too. Go read his website. It's unhinged: as noted by you, he harvests his son for himself, and himself for his father; he writes shit like "My mind is demoted, Self is elevated"; he pays $11/serve for what's basically broccoli, cauliflower, and lentils; he pays for pretty much every single measurement it's possible to take. It's interesting: all the hard-to-fake biomarkers for performance look good, from heart rate to VO2 to bench; he was having so much blood drawn that he got an ultrasound of his veins to see what damage he'd done; he posts gifs of a capsule camera going down his gastrointestinal tract.
He's an insane person who posts his life on the internet and I find him fascinating. The HARVESTING of HIS OWN SON is really, genuinely interesting, and it doesn't stop being interesting just because it's weird and unlikely to do much.
This particular procedure just seems like a stunt.
Larger scale studies are of course stronger. But case studies have depth and are often the source of good hypothesis or the inspiration of other tests.
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That being said, this dude looks like a quack to me. But the alchemists we're all quacks but still laid the foundation of modern chemistry. So it ended up all being worthwhile.
This dude should be called out not for being a quack or for wasting so much money. He should be called out for using his son in this way. Hundreds of thousands of Americans need plasma transfusions every year. He's doing it for fun. And objectifying his son in the process.
There's a lot of exciting science happening in the anti-aging field. There's a reason researchers in the field think this is not only pointless but reckless. I've been hematoma'd. It's not fun. I would never speak to my father again if I got a hematoma or some other complication because he's afraid of his own mortality.