Until recently, Californian billionaire Bryan Johnson paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a monthly transfusion of one liter of blood from Talmage, his teenage son. The goal: to challenge death or at least remove its specter as much as possible. Johnson is 46 years old but, according to him, thanks to a ferocious diet, fitness regime and a cocktail of 111 pills every day, he has the heart of a 37-year-old man, athletic levels of an 18-year-old and inflammation levels below those of a 10 year old child. His odyssey, in search of eternal life, is at the center of a service by Time and the podcast The Immortals on Spotify: among other aspiring immortals there are Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who invested in the startup Altos Labs committed to cell rejuvenation, and the founder of PayPal Peter Thiel and his Methuselah, a non-profit that aims to make 90 the new 50.
Johnson thinks that any action that accelerates aging — eating a cookie or sleeping less than eight hours a night — is an “act of violence” against oneself. To contain which, after having succumbed to a life of excess for years, the Silicon Valley tycoon has hired a medical team of thirty people who are helping him slow down the inexorable accumulation of the damage of age. Today, he says, for every year of 365 days, he ages 277. The project is called Blueprint. The interest is there: before dismissing as bizarre efforts such as those with which Johnson spends the millions of dollars earned on the Venmo cash-sharing platform, it is worth reflecting on the success of programs such as Netflix’s Secrets to the Blue Zones which suggests 12 good practices for adding years to one’s life used by centenarians in Sardinia, Okinawa in Japan, Ikaria in Greece, Nicoya in Costa Rica and Loma Linda in California. On YouTube Johnson explains the genesis of the project: «Every evening I lost control by eating and drinking in excess due to the stress of daily life. Three children, a startup, depression, it was too much and I couldn’t control the damage I was doing to myself.” So Bryan “fired the other Bryan who took over every night.”
Today, in his opinion, “a future in which we do not accept harm as a norm should be one of the most important goals of the 21st century.” And so, wake up at 4.30am, go to bed at 8.30pm, 1970 daily calories consumed before 11am every morning in accordance with an extreme version of intermitting fasting. Johnson is not the only tech ultra-rich who seeks to nullify the effects of time on his body but is not satisfied with staying fit or maintaining good muscle tone: the ultimate goal of his investment is to hand over the body to an algorithm that makes death optional. A naive perspective for many professionals: «Death is not optional, it is written in our genes», says Pinchas Cohen, of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, according to whom, however, living longer is however possible: in the twentieth century the average lifespan increased from around 50 years to over eighty.
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