-
10 votes
-
Even solar energy’s biggest fans are underestimating it
16 votes -
A rare burst of billions of cicadas will rewire our ecosystems for years to come. The arrival of Brood XIX and Brood XIII will send shockwaves through forest food webs.
27 votes -
The Christian right is coming for no-fault divorce
44 votes -
A fire killed 18,000 cows in Texas. It’s a horrifyingly normal disaster. (2023)
20 votes -
I gave up meat and gained so much more | A tale of one person's life, culture, and growing up
38 votes -
America’s prison system is turning into a de facto nursing home
20 votes -
The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with ridiculously large cars
39 votes -
The dairy industry really, really doesn’t want you to say “bird flu in cows”
21 votes -
The revolutionary spirit of Soul Train
5 votes -
What if US public housing were for everyone?
29 votes -
Attempts to plant new Joshua Trees after destructive fires assisted by load carrying camels
16 votes -
Everyone’s a sellout now
33 votes -
The debate over subtitles, explained
27 votes -
The tragic story of this famous meteorite and the boy who fought the museum that took everything from him
14 votes -
AI can do your homework. Now what? We interviewed students and teachers on how schools should handle the rise of the chatbots.
22 votes -
What should kids know about factory farming?
22 votes -
How millennials learned to dread motherhood
50 votes -
What's inside this crater in Madagascar?
18 votes -
The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment
49 votes -
You can’t even pay people to have more kids
59 votes -
The US Supreme Court case seeking to shut down wealth taxes before they even exist, has potential to end existing tax worth hundreds of billions
33 votes -
All of this year’s National Book Award finalists, reviewed by Vox
14 votes -
Something weird happens when you keep squeezing
19 votes -
Patients don’t know how to navigate the US health system — and it’s costing them
50 votes -
Why everyone hates this concrete building, and why brutalism dominates US college campuses
18 votes -
Why Norway, the poster child for electric cars, is having second thoughts – we can't let them crowd out car-free transit options
43 votes -
What Israel should do now: Israel’s current approach is clearly wrong. Here’s a better way to fight Hamas — and win.
26 votes -
The race to mine the bottom of the ocean
13 votes -
What a striking new study of death in America misses
15 votes -
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
73 votes -
Inside the very strange, very expensive race to “de-age”
Whizy Kim The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your...
Whizy Kim
The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age
Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.”
Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”
Some participants
Steve Aoki, the DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, appears toward the bottom of the site’s “absolute” ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the lowest rate of aging.
The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the list, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. Most of the top 25 names, however, don’t spark immediate recognition, and some are anonymous.
Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 46 years old, is leading. But 46 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date.
He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is renowned for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for at least two hours daily, and has a penchant for ice baths. For a while, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, only ate fruit.
Lifestyles of ultrarich
Such extremes are common among the ultrarich, and particularly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd known for its obsession with making moonshot ideas into reality.
The wealthy indulge in countless health trends of varying dubiousness, whether it’s getting IV drips to reduce hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, implanting devices in the body to monitor health and live longer, even injecting themselves with young blood (a treatment called parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving). This year alone, Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million on reducing his biological age.
Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 percent of the wealthiest people on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d also be savvier than the rest of us about turning back the clock.
Investing in de-aging
Last year, according to a report from the news and market analysis site Longevity. Technology, more than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related companies worldwide, including from some big-name tech founders and investors. Many of these companies are aiming to prolong life by focusing on organ regeneration and gene editing.
The buzzy life extension company Altos Labs, which researches biological reprogramming — a way to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched last year with a whopping $3 billion investment, and counts internet billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its patrons. Bezos was also an investor in the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman, meanwhile, recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company vying to add a decade to the human lifespan.
Some of the most famous names in the death-defying sector are old: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Page in 2013.
Tally Health, a new biotech company co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who is something of a celebrity in the longevity community — boasts some Hollywood A-list investors: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.
Possibility of de-aging
“It’s not possible to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to some of the work that’s going on in epigenetics that may be telling us something about the rate of aging. It’s not yet telling us about longevity.”
No two people age in the exact same way. Discrete from chronological age, “biological age” is the attempt to capture the often invisible difference through epigenetic gene expression, the state of someone’s organs, their immune system, and more.
A 40-year-old with a history of heavy drinking and smoking, for example, may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)
Johnson again
Johnson, who made his hundreds of millions after selling a payments platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has become renowned not for what he’s invented, sold, or designed, as is the case for many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for the unimaginably strict lifestyle he leads.
According to his website and the many interviews he has given, he exerts constant vigilance over the 78 organs of the human body, consistently tracking everything from BMI to brain white matter. Johnson is often described as the “most measured man in human history.”
The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.
Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.
Leaderboard
Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.
Ultramarathon
It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”
27 votes -
Lead poisoning could be killing more people than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined
18 votes -
The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever
44 votes -
US researchers employed by federal Housing and Urban Development agency propose study re comparative effectiveness of cash grants vs current system of vouchers for housing assistance
15 votes -
Why most tennis players struggle to make a living
5 votes -
What’s going on with these viral, right-wing country music hits?
48 votes -
The NFL season opener is also the kickoff for the biggest gambling season ever
12 votes -
No Meat Required - Alicia Kennedy’s new book explores the tensions and triumphs of leaving meat behind
21 votes -
Why Silicon Valley is here. One radio engineer had a plan. And it worked.
3 votes -
Why you should divide your life into semesters, even when you’re not in school
19 votes -
“Going shopping” is dead: How stores sucked the fun out of an American pastime
62 votes -
The day women shut down Iceland
8 votes -
The pork industry’s forced cannibalism, explained
48 votes -
Why Americans love big cars
43 votes -
How cruise ships got so big
6 votes -
A fact-checked debate about euthanasia
21 votes -
Why so many baseball players are Dominican
7 votes -
How RVs get their swishes, swooshes, and swoops
5 votes -
When flight attendants fought the airline industry and won
10 votes