Wealthy tech entrepreneurs are by all accounts a hyper-competitive bunch.
Whether or not it’s taking a shuttle to the sting of house, shopping for the greatest yacht, or difficult each other to a cage combat, with nice wealth and energy appears to come back a voracious want to have interaction in video games of one-upmanship.
The Rejuvenation Olympics, a web-based leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this 12 months, takes the rivalry of the wealthy to the subsequent stage. The sport? “Reversing” your age.
Individuals compete not on bodily talents however on how shortly and by how a lot they’ll gradual their “organic age.” It’s virtually who may be the perfect Benjamin Button. Rivals do that largely by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and dietary supplements they eat), being bodily energetic, and retesting their “age” repeatedly. They’re not truly reverting to a younger model of themselves — that’s not biologically potential. Relatively, these opponents are racing to see who can age the slowest; because the Rejuvenation Olympics web site quips, “You win by by no means crossing the end line.”
Just a few gamers of this peculiar sport stand out: Steve Aoki, the DJ and inheritor to the Benihana restaurant chain, seems towards the underside of the positioning’s “absolute” rating, which displays the 25 opponents with the bottom fee of getting old. The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the checklist, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. A lot of the high 25 names, nevertheless, don’t spark quick recognition, and a few are nameless.
Proper now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who’s 46 years outdated, is main. However 46 is simply what opponents describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which implies, merely, the years which have handed since his beginning date. In keeping with one well-known “organic age” check, he’s getting old at a fee slower than his chronological age. He has made waves for his outlandish life-style that’s oriented completely towards the aim of not simply showing younger, however turning into youthful: He has claimed that he eats 70 kilos of greens monthly, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s alleged to stimulate hair progress. His physique fats as soon as fell to a harmful 3 p.c (although it has since bumped up a couple of share factors).
The Rejuvenation Olympics have a tendency to draw this sort of individual: these obsessive about gathering and analyzing their private well being knowledge, with the monetary means to experiment with the trivia of their life. But Johnson and the opposite Olympics opponents are hardly alone of their costly makes an attempt to realize maximal well being. Such extremes are frequent among the many ultrarich, and significantly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd recognized for its obsession with making moonshot concepts into actuality. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is famend for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for a minimum of two hours every day, and has a penchant for ice baths. For some time, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, solely ate fruit. The rich take pleasure in numerous well being traits of various dubiousness, whether or not it’s getting IV drips to scale back hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen remedy, implanting units within the physique to watch well being and stay longer, even injecting themselves with younger blood (a remedy referred to as parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving).
The optimized life-style, with its fixed monitoring and regimentation, prices cash. This 12 months alone, Johnson will reportedly spend a minimum of $2 million on lowering his organic age.
There’s a sure hubris to the tech founders who insist they’ve cracked the code to an extended, more healthy life. Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 p.c of the wealthiest folks on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d even be savvier than the remainder of us about turning again the clock.
Amongst varied well being and wellness fads, longevity is the pursuit receiving a lot of the eye — and cash — from the ultrarich. Final 12 months, based on a report from the information and market evaluation web site Longevity.Expertise, greater than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related corporations worldwide, together with from some big-name tech founders and buyers. Many of those corporations are aiming to lengthen life by specializing in organ regeneration and gene enhancing. The buzzy life extension firm Altos Labs, which researches organic reprogramming — a approach to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched final 12 months with a whopping $3 billion funding, and counts web billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos amongst its patrons. Bezos was additionally an investor within the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman, in the meantime, just lately invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, an organization vying so as to add a decade to the human lifespan. A number of the most well-known names within the death-defying sector are outdated: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Web page in 2013. Neither is it simply Silicon Valley that’s excited concerning the prospect of dwelling longer. Tally Well being, a brand new biotech firm co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who’s one thing of a superstar within the longevity group — boasts some Hollywood A-list buyers: John Legend, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.
Principally, in case you’re anybody with any sort of critical cash, likelihood is you’ve thrown a few of it into the life-extension business.
However all this hype and capital additionally means there’s a better likelihood of being offered bullshit. Simply because somebody seems to be getting old extra slowly proper now doesn’t imply they’ll stay longer, and consultants are extremely skeptical of the concept of turning again the clock completely.
“Someone’s obtained to blaze the path,” however there are additionally loads of corporations providing snake oil, says Michael Lustgarten, a Rejuvenation Olympics competitor who has a PhD in physiology and is a scientist at Tufts College’s Human Diet Analysis Heart on Growing old. “The longevity group often will get enthusiastic about snake oil — the most recent complement or the most recent mouse examine that extends lifespan.”
“It’s not potential to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an getting old professional and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics on the College of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to among the work that’s happening in epigenetics which may be telling us one thing concerning the fee of getting old. It’s not but telling us about longevity.”
Life extension does sound like pseudoscience at first blush, however epigenetics, which is worried with how our genes are expressed relying on atmosphere and life-style, is one subject that’s broadly thought of promising, making immense strides over the previous decade in unlocking the secrets and techniques of how we age.
The primary epigenetic “clock” was devised by Steve Horvath in 2013, however private epigenetic age exams for customers began getting fashionable only a few years in the past. (Contestants within the Rejuvenation Olympics take these exams to trace their progress.) Epigenetic age testing may give us a tough concept of how outdated somebody is chronologically in the event that they don’t know — for instance, if somebody doesn’t have a beginning certificates.
More moderen variations of the exams are providing clues not simply to chronological age however to how a lot getting old is occurring biologically primarily based on environmental components and life-style habits, which may then probably be used to foretell the chance of illness or demise. Right here’s the way it works: No two folks age within the very same manner. Discrete from chronological age, “organic age” is the try and seize the customarily invisible distinction via epigenetic gene expression, the state of somebody’s organs, their immune system, and extra. A 40-year-old with a historical past of heavy ingesting and smoking, for instance, might have a better organic age than somebody who by no means drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to have the ability to change his authorized age to match his organic age.)
The testing is nothing like an annual bodily; it’s extra a burgeoning wellness pattern for many who have a couple of hundred {dollars} to spend on a house DNA check. The makers of such age exams contend that realizing your “organic age” may be the impetus for making wholesome life-style adjustments.
There may be some promising proof behind makes an attempt to increase the human lifespan. Even “younger blood” transfusion, regardless of seeming too Elizabeth Báthory to be an actual medical process, has some reputable science behind it — analysis has proven that parabiosis (the scientific time period for blood and plasma switch) in mice can have regenerative results on some cells. The difficulty is that longevity startups usually go too far with claims about what new proof may imply for the way forward for human getting old.
“I’ve referred to as the anti-aging business the second-oldest occupation,” says Olshansky. “Folks made the identical claims 2,000 years in the past about some magical elixir that’s going to make you reside longer and more healthy.” The distinction is that the fountain of youth is now being “pushed by lots of people who’ve some huge cash — to earn more money.”
Johnson, who made his tons of of tens of millions after promoting a funds platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has turn out to be famend not for what he’s invented, offered, or designed, as is the case for a lot of different Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, however for the unimaginably strict life-style he leads. In keeping with his web site and the many interviews he has given, he exerts fixed vigilance over the 78 organs of the human physique, persistently monitoring all the pieces from BMI to mind white matter. Johnson is usually described because the “most measured man in human historical past.”
The purpose isn’t merely being wholesome. It’s laser-precision optimization of his well being.
Johnson, for instance, by no means eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s merely not part of his algorithm. “I used to be only a slave to myself and my passions and my feelings and my subsequent want,” he mentioned in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t imply he by no means stumbles, however when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as if he has dedicated a minor crime.
Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the sport together with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s group of 30-plus docs and different well being consultants — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab primarily based in Kentucky that gives the organic age check kits that contributors within the Olympics should submit. The cheaper model prices $229. The dearer one, at $499, offers extra knowledge in your outcomes, together with how habits like smoking or ingesting alcohol have impacted an individual’s getting old pace.
Hannah Went, director of operations at TruDiagnostic, tells Vox the corporate is hopeful that, ultimately, a wider swath of customers will take part on epigenetic testing. However proper now, their purchasers are usually rich — the sort of people that can dedicate time and cash to de-aging. To this point, virtually 30,000 folks have measured their organic age with Went’s lab, and a little bit greater than 1,700 of them have consented to submit their outcomes to the Rejuvenation Olympics. Solely the highest 25 are posted on the homepage rankings.
Lustgarten, the Olympics competitor, believes he’ll transfer into the highest 10 the subsequent time the leaderboard is up to date. Like different longevity chasers, he continuously screens his biomarkers and makes tweaks to his weight loss plan or train routine as wanted.
It’s a contest that contributors hope by no means ends — probably the most extremely of ultramarathons. Probably the most devoted members within the longevity group are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over dwelling. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for a minimum of the subsequent 70-plus years.”
Correction, September 26, 4:40 pm ET: A earlier model of this story misidentified Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashton Kutcher as buyers in Tally Well being.
