The August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Tad Friend titled How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It on the huge amounts of money swirling around the efforts by some to lengthen their lives and even to reverse the aging process. This is a small community of billionaires who are willing to invest huge amounts of money on research into the aging process so that they might become immortal or at least increase their lifespans considerably. Naturally, this has spawned an industry of researchers who cater to this need because of the money available.
And these rich people, labeled biohackers, are willing to go to great lengths to increase their own lives. The article profiles one Peter Diamandis who can be considered an evangelist for this cause. His shtick is to get rich people to give huge amounts of money to create competitions that offer massive prizes under the umbrella category of XPRIZE for breakthroughs in longevity research and methods.
His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next.
…The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients’ muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars. David Sinclair, a prominent geneticist whose lab recently reversed the effective age of cells in lab animals, told me that the prize had galvanized the field: “It’s helped change the focus from mouse studies to ‘Let’s do something in humans!’ It’s our Wright-brothers moment.”
…Diamandis’s network, known to its constituents as the Peterverse, is largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes. America’s richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead; Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, and Sam Altman have all funded anti-aging research. Joel Huizenga, the C.E.O. of Egaceutical, a startup whose “water-based drink” aims to reverse cellular age, told me, “We don’t work in mice. We work in billionaires.”
…Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarker-based “clocks” that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.
…Every few years, a new approach promises to turn the switch. These have included taking supplements, such as nad+, that help preserve genomic integrity; maintaining our telomeres, the protective caps on DNA strands which shrink as we age; perfusing our veins with “young blood”; and taking rapamycin, a drug derived from a bacterium discovered on Easter Island.
…Yet interventions that arrest one hallmark of aging often accelerate others. Rapamycin is popular with biohackers because it inhibits the senescent cells that cause inflammation—a condition so associated with aging that it’s often called “inflammaging.” But having too few senescent cells is dangerous, because senescence helps block tumors. Almost nothing the body does is always bad or always good: we walk a narrow footbridge between atrophy (cells failing to replicate properly) and cancer (cells replicating all too well). Caloric restriction, a “natural” alternative to rapamycin, shares some of its benefits—but it can also shrink muscle mass, lower your libido, and suppress neuronal function. Plus, you’re hungry all the time.
As you can imagine, dangling large amounts of money around attracts a lot of attention and participants. Their willingness to spend a lot of money and take extreme actions is quite extraordinary.
Today’s biohackers sometimes look to antiquity for inspiration. This usually involves hormesis—a mild ordeal, such as exercise, fasting, or cold plunges, that can shock cellular pathways into better health. The CAROL, a resistance bike that promises the benefits of a full workout in minutes, spurs users to pedal all out for twenty-second intervals by imagining they are being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. “Neanderthal man didn’t jog,” the bike announces. It’s unclear how CAROL knows that, or why emulating Neanderthals would improve our longevity, as those who escaped the tigers typically died in their thirties.
Most biohackers look to the future. The best known of them is Bryan Johnson, who founded the payments platform Braintree. Once rich and chubby and depressed, Johnson is now, at forty-seven, rich and ripped and determined to live forever. He spends a quarter of a million dollars a year in that pursuit. His regimen has included restricting calories to 1,977 a day, undergoing high-frequency stimulation of his abdomen to simulate the effect of twenty thousand sit-ups, and stimulating his penis with shock waves for some doubtless excellent reason.
Johnson leads a movement called Don’t Die, whose adherents hope that they, too, can reprogram their bodies and minds. Open-sourcing himself, he publishes his biomarkers online, everything from body-mass index to a total duration of nighttime erections (three hours and thirty-six minutes at one recent climacteric).
…Diamandis rises each morning at five-thirty and assesses his overnight biometrics, gathered by an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then, as he meditates, he employs three red-light-therapy devices: one for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria. Along with a Ka’Chava shake, he consumes the first of five daily pill packs: this includes a GLP-1 agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement. After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedalling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at a hundred and fifty grams, one gram for each pound he weighs.
…The clinic has five branches and twenty-six hundred patients. Most of them hope merely to be able to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in their seventies. For those with loftier dreams, there’s Epic, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar program that includes an exercise coach and a nutritionist, stem-cell “re-education,” and treatments such as therapeutic plasma exchange, in which plasma is filtered from your blood and replaced with albumin and antibodies from healthy donors.
These biohackers tend to take an inordinate amount of supplements.
According to Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic, you can make a thirty-two-year difference in your life span by implementing the no-brainer stuff (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.), but you can gain only four years by taking supplements.
Nonetheless, biohackers regularly tweak their “stack” of drugs and supplements, seeking minute advantages. The hope of “combinatorics” is that interventions enhance one another.
…Yet combinatorics often backfire: when young subjects took Vitamins C and E before strength training, it blunted many benefits of working out. There’s a pharmacological principle that when you combine three drugs you have no idea how they’re going to interact, as well as a hepatic principle that the more supplements you take, the more work your liver must do to detoxify them. (Many over-the-counter supplements are contaminated with fungus, mold, yeast, salmonella, and heavy metals.)
…When I mentioned the issues with combinatorics to Diamandis, he said, “It’s a very valid critique that I’ve also heard from my mom.” He added, “I’d love to start an A.I. company where you’d tell it what you want from your stack—more energy, or nootropics, or whatever—and then give it your genetic data and your medical baseline and the number of pills you’re willing to swallow, and it tells you exactly what to take. In the interim,” he said, opening a pouch containing his midday pills, “I’m manually doing this.” He recently reduced his daily load of supplements from seventy-four to fifty-two, to spare his kidneys, but he’s still taking more than any other patient that his Fountain Life doctor sees. [My italics – MS]
Get that? “He recently reduced his daily load of supplements from seventy-four to fifty-two“!
More traditional health experts seek to improve people’s health span, the years lived without illness, using slogans such as “Eat well, move more, stress less, love more” and think that focusing on increasing life span is pointless. Friend quotes Dr. Jordan Shlain, who runs five longevity clinics, who said, “Everything you do to improve your health span can improve your life span. Everything you do to improve your life span is fucking bullshit.”
Most of us just want to remain in decent health and last a bit longer than the actuaries predict. The implications of extreme longevity—of a transhuman future in which we have four careers, six replacement kidneys, and eleven spouses on pods orbiting Mars—are too much for us to absorb.
…Our awareness of death has an upside: it imbues our lives with beauty and meaning. Immortality would redefine the nature of both empathy and morality, because it would strip us of a common fate.
Not everyone thinks that living forever, or even significantly longer is a good thing.
Dan Sullivan, who co-hosts a podcast with Diamandis called “Exponential Wisdom,” said, “Peter really believes that immortality is a reality. I told him, ‘Living to one hundred and fifty-six seems reasonable, but living to seven hundred? I don’t know, Peter—I think you’re going to get lonely.’
…At seventy-seven, Ray Kurzweil takes eighty supplements a day, has an artificial pancreas to manage his diabetes, and appears to be in great shape. As he waits for technology to tide humanity onward, he is bewildered that some people have other plans. He used to have lunch with the economist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel for his work on how irrational factors cloud our decisions. Over lunch in late 2023, when Kahneman was eighty-nine but in decent health, they debated the wisdom of extending your life. “We’re at a point where problems can be reversed,” Kurzweil said. “Your kidneys are failing? Well, so what? It could be solved next week.” Kurzweil told me that Kahneman wasn’t persuaded. “He said, ‘Look at history! Billions of people have lived, lost most of their capabilities, and then died! Nobody’s escaped that!’ ” Three months later, Kahneman wrote to his family and friends that he had decided to die by assisted suicide: “I have believed since I was a teen-ager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief.” Kurzweil sighed, recalling the loss. “People really don’t want to be nonfunctional. But it’s death that’s the tragedy. Death is the loss of information, beauty, love—everything we know!”
The ultimate goal of these people is to clone their consciousness and then upload their digital brain to the cloud so that ‘they’ (whoever or whatever that is) will ‘live’ (whatever that means) forever. These ultra-wealthy people want their lives to never end and are willing to do whatever it takes to try and make it so.
Cicero is quoted as saying that to philosophize is nothing more than to prepare for death. Kahneman seemed to have absorbed that lesson, while these biohackers avoid it at all costs. What seems to be driving this eternal life obsession is explained by someone who said, “Even the super-wealthy people there are scared shitless and trying to buy their stairway to Heaven. And nearly all of them are deathly afraid of death.”
All this reminds me of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, whose quest for immortality via the Philosopher’s Stone brought alchemists from across Europe to Prague in the late 1500s/early 1600s. (The Stone, reputedly also enabling changing lead into gold, would in the best-case scenario pay for the heavy costs of its own research-and-development and then some.)
One of the first major blue-sky R&D efforts in history, Rudolph’s project did produce some notable results, including a cross-fertilization of techniques in what would eventually become chemistry, and the invention of the second (the astro-nomers/logists did significantly improve their precision). A heavily guilt-ridden Catholic, the Emperor sought to postpone death not from enjoyment of life (he lived in chronic poor health despite/because of the treatments of Europe’s leading physicians) but to avoid the eternal torments of Hell, to which he apparently went in 1612 at age 59; the Thirty Years War, arguably a result of his muddled policies, broke out six years later.
Will the tech-bros’ more optimistic sequel to Rudolph’s enterprise result in any comparable progress (that wouldn’t have happened anyway)? We should all live so long…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roycanivel/2025/04/05/in-memoriam-the-31-billionaires-who-died-over-the-past-year/
None of them lived to 100. So sad.😭
Funny: earlier today I had a discussion with a friend who wanted to talk about the British royal family. These are people with instant access to the best health care and the best of the best food cooked and presented to them and personal trainers and nannies for their children, and they never have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads or paying the electric bill on time. They never have to worry about unemployment or a leaking roof or a car that won’t start. None of the stressors that an average person will have to manage.
And yet, once they hit 30, their looks take a steep decline. And just recently two of them announced they were fighting cancer.
For various reasons I have to take at least 25 pills a day, and depending on pain levels and allergies up to 38 pills a day. Plus a couple of liquid medicines. It is tedious, one medicine can’t be taken with any others, some must be taken in the morning others at night, some need to be taken several times a day, but all of them are medically necessary so I do it. The medicines I take give me tangible results, really obvious ones in some cases, with better blood work in others. I really can’t imagine being so scared of dying that I’d take 54, let alone 72 for the kind of marginal gains existing supplements might offer.
And come on ‘nad+’? It makes these guys come across like pre-teens.
It would probably be more realistic if they invested the money into research for freezing the body without having the cells destroyed by expanding ice crystals.
Bona fide cryopreservation would be way cooler than popping pills.
Biohackers consider themselves to be a kind of transhumanist. Most other transhumanists don’t reject that claim outright, but do consider them to be idiots and quacks. Some biohackers are also some other form of transhumanist, such as the mind uploaders mentioned above, they’re just desperately hoping to live long enough for their preferred form of semi-immortality to exist. (And not all transhumanists are primarily immortalists, as the movement is more focused on improvement of quality of life, though the vast majority wouldn’t say no to quantity as well.)
4) @Jazzlet wrote “And come on ‘nad+’? It makes these guys come across like pre-teens.”
Not sure why you say this. Though it’s usually capitalized, NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is the oxidized form of a coenzyme central to metabolism. Were you thinking it was a brand name based on gonads or something?
I’ve not heard of it being useful for “preserving genomic integrity,” whatever that means, but it has shown some promise in creating new types of antibiotics, and a variety of other therapeutic uses due to its ubiquity in cell signaling and metabolism. Taking it as a supplement seems redundant, kind of like taking cholesterol supplements to increase testosterone production. It’s already all over the place in your body or you wouldn’t be alive.
The grift I found funniest was the “water-based drink.” Isn’t that pretty much most drinks, other than 101-proof ethanol-based ones, or maybe really thick smoothies? I suppose you could have oil-based drinks, but no one would buy them. Well, maybe these obsessives would if you convinced them it contained all their supplements.
Ridana @#7,
Actually, NAD+ was capitalized in the original article but in a different font that is smaller in size and when I cut and pasted it for the post, it came out as lower case and I did not catch it. I am not sure why the magazine switches fonts like that for some names.
I wonder if any of those rich guys would like to buy my map to the Fountain of Youth? I drive a hard bargain but I might settle for $10M or so.
I’m always amused by people who want to upload their consciousness to the cloud.
It seems most likely that you would be ignored or forgotten nearly immediately. Who would host this data and how would that be paid for? What would stop someone from making copies of you to harass for their own enjoyment?
Also, how do they expect to get any enjoyment out of their new digital life without a physical body to experience things. Let me know when someone manages to program a summer breeze or a warm apple pie, OK?
I might begin believing in a just god if this Diamandis guy gets hit by a bus.
It is rational to suppose that people are irrational and illogical. It is logical to suppose that people are illogical and irrational. Death is y’know, it’s one of those things.
My mother, a chiropractor -one of the few first women ones, lived to 99 and she took lots of supplements. Could have lived longer… COVID got her. I prefer to believe her supplements did not harm her any.
The hundreds of deaths that were part of my life from all my friends workers and acquaintances dying of AIDS should have massively increased my appreciation of art, truth, or beauty. It didn’t. Gosh golly based on one of the sources in this article it sure ought to have!
Maybe they’ll live longer, maybe it will be worth it to them. Perhaps they will screw themselves up royally. Jim Fixx died at 52.
@8 Mano,
It is the standard, at least in print works, to reduce the point size of an all-caps acronym. For example, if the body copy is 11 pt, then the acronym will be reduced to 9 or 10 pt. Otherwise, the acronym becomes visually dominant and jumps off the page. It seems that web sites don’t usually bother with this these days and leave everything the same size.
By the you reach the age of 15, most of the cells in your body have acquired hundreds or thousands of new mutations depending on whether they were replicating frequently or not. By the time you reach 60 years of age, your proliferating cells (e.g., blood cells, cells in your intestine) will have somewhere between 4000 and 40,000 mutations …
… more than half of all cancers are just bad luck due to spontaneous mutations that you could not have prevented no matter how much you watched your diet and worked out in the gym.
What’s in Your Genome -- Laurence A. Moran -- ISBN 978-1-4875-085903 page 94
Doesn’t matter how rich one is, biochemistry just doesn’t care.
Wellllllll… I am not unhappy about this.
We know that rich people spend their money doing stupid shit, so it’s inevitable they would have caught this particular brainworm.
And because this stuff is 99% bilge, it’s quite possible that their lifespan is going to be shorter not longer, the crazier the quackery the shorter the life. Plus they are gazillionaires and not really good at following actually sensible advice, as any fule no having billions confers superintelligence or something.
So we can probably expect a passel of ultra rich idiots carking it early, which I am all in favour of. Keep on truckin’ folks!
The biohackers I am more familiar with just enjoy experimenting with stuff. Like a guy that implanted magnets into his fingers, and as a result developed the ability to sense magnetic fields. Or people that follow all kinds of interesting fasting regimens in order to find out how much glycogen their bodies contained.
As for NAD+, it isn’t very stable, so people take a more stable precursor, either nicotinamide riboside (NR) or nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN). NR is absorbable directly, NMN has to be converted to NR to be absorbed. Also, NMN is no longer available OTC because the FDA is looking into whether it should be classified as a drug (yes, because of Sinclair’s research). In whichever form, NAD+ and its precursors are expensive. And you can only know if they worked for you decades later, maybe.
America’s richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead…
Well, gutting what little public-healthcare “system” we had will certainly accomplish that, even if nothing else does.
Ridana @7 ‘nads’ is a, well not a euphemism because it’s clearly a shortening, but slang for gonads that I have only heard from young boys, pre-teen may have been a little unfair.
@17: per the PBS Newshour today, Trump’s BBB will cut funding for SNAP-ED, an education program that exists to educate the public about nutrition. They go into preschools with food-tasting programs to introduce the kids to foods they might not know exist, work with public school cafeteria staff, hold sessions for adults, and work with gardens, farmers, and supermarkets to educate the buying public about nutritious choices and ways to prepare fresh foods. All on a shoestring budget, now being cut.
There’s a saying that goes, “When you know better, you do better.” The cuts will remove the “knowing better” part. And remember when the biggest crime ever committed against humanity was…Michelle Obama with her little backyard garden, inviting children to come learn about fruits and vegetables and sending them home with the produce from the garden?
“and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement” I don’t think that’s working too well!