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 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.”
Maybe odd guys, maybe odd practices, but this doesn't surprise me at all.
I don't blink when someone dedicates their life to Pokemon cards, knitting, charity races, or some esoteric strategy game that only released on windows 95.
Why would I be surprised that some people obsess over the one thing we all have in common? Death is a disease in my mind - a biological shortcoming from which science will someday save us. It takes everything from you. No more Pokemon cards, no more knitting or charity races, no more computer games. Why wouldn't we want to rid ourselves of it?
Interesting side note, Abe Lincoln was terrified of death. It gave him a lot of anxiety. This humanness and relatability is one of the reasons he's my favorite president.
If humans do manage to extend their lives by staving off the physical deterioration of their bodies then I'd be curious to see what their psychological break point is. Even if you could have the body of a 20 year old for hundreds of years, I imagine you would still become jaded after about 100. How many times can you experience the same finite sensations before they no longer stir any meaningful feelings? You've had every possible meal and combination of ingredients countless times, you've said everything that you could ever say to your loved ones, you've seen all the sights which have lost their wonder, you've devoted hundreds of thousands of hours to all of the hobbies that you've lost interest in, and now nothing feels novel or gives you butterflies in your stomach anymore. Maybe suicide would be normalized as a personal choice once you've decided you've had enough? Or else we may need to develop powerful drugs that keep our neurotransmitters and hormone receptors from building too much tolerance. I think that the way that our brain functions and accumulates memories is optimized for the lifespan that we currently have.
As I get older I find some peace of mind knowing that there is a hard cut-off to all of this and I'll likely leave while still wanting more, rather than being bored with it all.
I can't actually imagine getting bored with life. Could be that I have ADHD.
I am endlessly curious. I would love to know everything, read every book, work every job, etc. As it stands now, you can spend several lifetimes learning only a part of what we know about science. You probably wouldn't even be able to catch up as people kept discovering new things, writing new books, and making new TV shows.
I imagine there would be downsides perhaps. Maybe you start to forget old memories and time just keeps moving faster and faster in your perception. But yeah, suicide would definitely be a pretty normalized decision for immortals I think.
It doesn’t sound like these guys are eating anything of variety anyway. The article quoted Johnson as saying he was formerly a slave to his desires and passions, but he's just become a slave to this desire of longevity instead.
I would think such a person would at least for a time, come to revel in the little variabilities of the day-to-day and put less energy into maintaining consistency. Many would likely become permanent nomads, and should off-planet settlements start taking hold, those would probably become a popular destination, with the struggles of sitting on the cutting edge of a frontier being quite fresh relative to everything else.
I have a hard time imagining that I would ever tire of being alive, assuming that my loved ones are also still alive. I am in my late 30s now, and I have actually found that my vigor for life has increased over time. The items on my bucket list accrue far, far faster than I can check them off.
This is a really empathetic perspective, and I like that you shared it.
Like you with Lincoln, I love Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in part because he was also, to my read, preoccupied with death.
I think there's a maybe HUGE difference when a billionaire uses vast amounts of wealth for Radical Life Extension (RLE) when the general consensus of billionaires is that they're exploitative and want to generally enslave humanity through unethical lobbying against work rights, which really only feeds into the idea of them living forever into a nightmarish realm of possibility. I'm all for them collecting Pokemon cards. But comparing RLE to collecting Pokemon cards? Really? What?
Note that I'm not talking about general every day health practices like eating well, but RLE specifically.
I pitty this dude. I watched his videos and honestly his effort is sincere and he seems like a great person -- as long as you believe a rich person can be good (I do). That said, there's something incredibly narcissistic when your house concentrate so much healthcare talent and resources that could be better employed to the benefit of those in need.
His entire life is like a sacrifice to the Goddess of NeurosisTM.
Everything about him is programmed down to the minute and measured in grams and milliliters. There is no place for joy, excess, or spontaneity. Dude's mansion is literally a clinic. Because everyone dreams of living in a hospital surrounded by Ivy League health professionals, right?
So yeah he may live to be 120, but is that robotic life even worth living?
He does play Catan at designated hours, probably while drinking some tasteless green concoction from a biodegradable container. Wild!
Bryan Johnson is like a perfectly tuned car that never leaves the garage.
While I am one of the staunchest crictics of the rich here, I wouldn't say I preclude them from being good.
I would say that they have often have a blindness to the life of the non-wealthy. I'm one of the poorer in a wealthy neigborhood and people stare at me like I have a third arm growing out of my head when I tell them I don't have a housecleaner or a landscaper.
And the less they're willing to divest of their wealth (say via paying taxes, donating to charities that neither they or their friends control, or paying their workers more), the less I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. There's a reason dragons sitting on hoards of treasure are rarely, if ever, the heros.
When the arguements for paying their workers less "because they're easily replacable" crop up, it definitely shows a lack of empathy for those whom "didn't make it."
Discussing the virtues of the rich on the internet may be comparable to discussing demonology under the Inquisition during the middle ages. Unless you renounce to all subtlety and nuance, you run the risk of being burned alive.
That is to say, unless you engage in the most vicious cynicism, you run the risk of being grouped with those that we are supposed to hate uniformly, intensely, and at all times.
Nevertheless, some demons are less perverse than others. It may be valuable for theologians to understand their positions in the morality scale. And, if even some demons are not that bad compared to the rest, it stands to reason that some rich are not as bad as their peers either.
Ultimately, debating the morality of the wealthy is not something I'm inclined to do. Contempt is not a pleasant sentiment, and my appreciation for grey areas only serves to aggravate everyone including myself.
You must either love the wealthy or burn them at the stake. Nothing in between.
It's so boring.
I might as well write about demons.
My thoughts exactly. Much of the joy of life, the joy of the process of living, is found in the in-between places, the unexpected things; all the unprogrammed stuff.
Going to be that person, but might this be organized less specifically than ~life.men? (Disclosure, Im not a man)
I mean, yea, the wealthy people the article mentions are all men, but is the topic really? Are wealthy women also taking part in similar lifestyles and simply not competing over it? Or, are there fewer women of the same level of wealth?
Anyway, I found the topic fascinating and wanted to see if it had been posted in Tildes yet. The idea raises great questions around inequality, class, etc: that the most wealthy are (attempting to) even further widen the divide of inequality at the highest end of the economic scale. It feels gross to me that such large amounts of wealth are being invested into projects to enhance longevity (any results of which will undoubtedly benefit the wealthy), when so many worldwide are struggling just to get by.
Also, ethical questions, especially regarding the father who receives blood transfusions from his 17 yo son. At what age did that start? How was the kid raised around the idea? Frankly, it sounds fucked up.
I also wondered about the categorization, and also that the article didn't mention that everyone was a man or that everyone they'd listed was a man, at least that I could see.
I felt similarly about the blood transfusion thing. Elizabeth Bathory is an Apt comparison that the article just glosses over with a "but it might do something" essentially
I had never heard of Báthory before, so that was a very interesting Wikipedia read for me. I'm pretty unstudied in history, so it left me curious if the article accurately portrays the debate about the events, or if historians tend to be more firmly on one or the other side of 'she did it' vs. 'She was framed'.
Yeah I'll be honest I don't know whether she was indeed that bad or if it's a "women on charge? Must be evil" sort of thing. She's evocative for the story regardless
There have been different takes on this quest in fiction. Robert Heinlein in if his books about Lazarus Long. C S Lewis That Hideous Strength. Joyce Carol Oates short story BD-11-1-86
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/08/-bd-11-1-86/304109/ (disturbing, horror adjacent)
Absolutely! My mind also went to 'altered carbon' (though neither book as far as i got nor the show really philosophized deeply on the methusalas).
Thanks for sharing that last story. As obvious as it was where the the story was going, i really didn't expect...
...
The boy to express relief as he died.
It feels like someone who always needs something. You can keep the extra decade, I'll take a little pizza in my life.