Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”
i think he’s making a “pascals wager” type bet on life extension technology. where if he lives long enough to hit a timeframe where they do discover some magical life extension, then he is “saved”. therefore, you take every action that puts you towards that goal. if you do hit the magic tech window, then you can have infinite pizza and whatever afterwards.
i do get the rationale behind his decision but my goodness, it’s overkill. you could probably achieve 95% of the same “anti-aging” effect he’s going for by regular exercise, decent food and good sleep alone. the pill consumption, black sludge and all that; he’s asking for a heart attack.
is the extra 5% improvement left on the table really worth up to 75 years of… collecting stool samples and standing in infrared light boxes?
One good point is that he is apparently putting his test results online so other medical professionals may be able to glean some data from them. I have no idea if anyone is actually looking but we could discover some secondary result like the long term effects of the concoctions he is drinking or something.
The irony been he’s probably more likely to outlive us than normal simply because he is rich. I’d get way more sleep for example if I didn’t have to get up in the morning and go to work.
He will also have better healthcare than us and can afford higher quality food.
That’s it, I think. The doctors quoted are all.saying “of course he can’t live forever” but the regime he’s on doesn’t have to get him to eternity, it just gets him to the next great leap forward that extends life further (telomere extension?) that gets him to the next one (nanobots repairing the damage to our cells?) and on. I presumably ultimately until you can upload your personality to a computer or a clone or some such.
They’ve been saying for a while that some people born today will become functionality immortal, so if he makes himself young enough he could get down into that window and he’ll have the funds available to go all in on it when the technology arrives.
He does weirdly seem fixated on getting as healthy as an 18 year old, I wonder what his school days were like. The problem is that you can have the nighttime erections of an 18 year-old (but creepy but let’s run with it) and hammer your body fat right down to avoid cardiovascular problems but there’s a remorseless clock of potentially cancerous cells building up and drinking all the antioxidant sludge you want will only slow this down. He is likely getting regular MRIs to spot emerging problems early but the treatment is still brutal (I’ve just had a couple of friends go through it and their lives are permanently changed).
And even if you outrace the Grim Reaper, how about climate change? Would a man who drives 15mph be the sort to jump on Musk’s Mars Mission? If he wants to live forever, he’d be advised to invest his money and time in ensuring there’s a world worth living on in 50-100 years.
I was intrigued by how some of the things he includes in the mix are ones I am doing. The problem is, what’s actually effective as he is doing everything. For example, I love cinnamon and it’d be no great hardship to add that to my breakfast. But is he just mixing up concoctions of things that might work if he throws enough in one of them might work.
However, I agree - for most people, keeping a healthy weight, not eating too much red meat or ultra-processed foods and exercising would help them live a longer and healthier life. A lot of people aren’t even doing that.