I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the human desire for immortality, as embodied in one man’s obsession.
Bryan Johnson, an ex-Mormon entrepreneur turned biohacker, believes we’re on the brink of inventing medical technologies that will halt or reverse aging. To ensure he stays alive until that day comes, he’s living by a strict diet, exercise and sleep protocol he invented himself. The benefits of those practices are hard to argue with, but he’s not stopping there. In a bid to bring the advent of immortality that much closer, he’s using his own wealth to fund a bewildering variety of medical treatments – from blood transfusions to genetic engineering – which he’s willingly testing on himself as the guinea pig.
Is there any scientific validity to any of this? Is Johnson advancing the cause of anti-aging research, or just making himself a laughingstock for no discernible benefit? Or, worse, is he putting his own health at risk in the service of a foolhardy quest?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
The base of Johnson’s protocol is a strict diet, sleep and exercise regimen which he follows with religious exactitude, like a medieval monk who abides by a book of hours.
He wakes up at 4:30 AM and completes a vigorous hour-long exercise routine. He eats a vegan diet (the same meals at the same times every day, with barely any variation), consuming his last meal of the day at 11 AM. He avoids alcohol, caffeine and other recreational drugs. He goes to sleep promptly at 8:30 PM every night.
He undergoes a battery of regular medical tests and measurements—from weight and body composition, to grip strength and VO2 max, to regular MRIs and blood tests—aimed at assessing his overall health and gauging his biological age, as opposed to his chronological age.
Johnson’s intention is to buy time through a stepping-stone method (and I do mean buy; reportedly, he spends $2 million a year on all of these treatments). Even if none of the therapies he’s currently using will prolong his life indefinitely, the idea is that they’ll extend it enough that other, more effective anti-aging therapies will be invented in his lifetime, which he can use to extend his life still further, and so on.
Some thoughts:
* Even if he cracks the code FOR HIMSELF, there’s no guarantees his practices will scale to the population at large. People are highly variable in their DNA expression. Also, for example: say his diet consists of the peanuts-at-every-meal plan: this obviously will not work for someone who’s allergic to peanuts.
* This dude is spending $2 Million/year on himself. Obviously, this amount is completely out of reach for all but the 1%. It also depends vitally on someone with no other obligations than themself (e.g. no children or pets or friends) and the luxury of their own schedule. The retail worker who never knows from day-to-day what kind of schedule they’ll be working or even the average office worker would never be able to maintain this schedule. Forget about the medical scans; they are neither affordable nor appointments available to the average person.
* Given his diet and his exercise and sleep patterns, who else would WANT to live like this?
Yet more proof that today’s super-rich upperclass are ignorant, clueless, indifferent to reality, and far too selfish, self-important and greedy to be trusted with any power or influence over the rest of us. This is why capitalism, and capitalists, have to be closely watched and regulated by a sensible state just like the rest of us shmucks are.
Katydid: If he “cracks the code” for himself, he’ll at least be able to crack it for those of his friends and family who can afford all the specialized treatments. I really don’t think he gives a shit about “the population at large.”
PS: I really don’t think bazillionaires like Johnson would ever WANT “the population at large” to become immortal like them. That would be a HUGE threat, both to their self-image as ubermenschen, and to their ability to hog the world’s wealth and resources for themselves. That would just be a larger version of buying a super-expensive fancy fur coat to flaunt in public, only to see a construction-worker wearing the same thing.
@2, Raging Bee: I guess I could have worded my thoughts better. I’m not saying Johnson would give two figs about his way working for other people. My point was that should whatever he’s doing work out for him, personally, that doesn’t mean it would work out for everyone.
For example, one of my neighbors recently passed away at the ripe old age of 100-years-and-some-months. He smoked, he drank, he ate a lot of foods of questionable nutrition. He’d had several strokes of varying seriousness. Despite that, his mind was sharp and he lived semi-independently (he didn’t drive, but he could cook, run a vacuum, and handle his own laundry) on the ground floor of his grandchild’s home. Had he not choked to death on some food, he might still be kicking around. I would never suggest that his habits would lead to a long and healthy life for all people everywhere–just that in his particular case, what he was doing worked for him.
To ensure he stays alive until that day comes, he’s living by a strict diet, exercise and sleep protocol he invented himself.
Based on…what, exactly? His own tastes and feelings about what’s “healthy” to him? If it’s based on actual expert medical advice or recommendations, then he can’t say he “invented” it. (Who, specifically, is using the word “invented” here?)
My understanding is that he has doctors on call to give their professional advice (he’s worth enough to pay for it), but ultimately he decides what to add to his protocol, based on whatever standard he uses for what counts as sufficient evidence.
What’s a 2039? My notion of time only goes up to 19 January 2038, at 3:14:07 a.m. GMT.
Why would anyone even want to live forever?
Living forever is the only thing I can think of that would actually be worse than dying. Especially if you have to go through all that diet and exercise régime shit in order to do it.
Over the end-of-year break, I caught up on some tv watching. One episode of a doctor mystery-illness-of-the-week show had the plot about someone wanting to live forever. A tech-bro with all the money in the world was following his own fitness regime and testing out drugs for himself on paid volunteers. He hired one of the doctors on the team to work for him, as well, as his on-call doctor. One of his health tweaks gave his test subject cancer. Because it’s a tv show and not reality, the team figured it out, cured the test subject, but it was too late to cure the man.
Even if this didn’t happen, I agree that living forever at the price of no social life and being hyper-focused on health 24/7 with never any downtime is not a fun way to live.
I may have seen that episode. IIRC it ended with one of those time-lapse montages alternating between the test-subject, getting progressively better, and the tech-bro, getting progressively worse and finally dying.
And yes, it really did kind of sum up the arrogance and emptiness of the tech-bro buying high-tech means to cheat death, at the expense of everyone else, to give himself an eternal life that’s pretty much empty of…life.
“Sandman” has a sub-plot that deals with the question of eternal earthly life more compassionately.