Competition for the best Button: why no one will win the Rejuvenation Olympics
Rich people have discovered a new competition - to reverse biological age. What will be the finish line in this game?Flying the shuttle, buying the biggest yacht or challenging themselves to a fight: with great money and power comes a greedy desire to participate in survival games.
"Rejuvenation Olympics," an online leadership game launched by tech millionaire Brian Johnson earlier this year, takes rich people's rivalries to a new level. The point of the game? Reverse your age.
Participants compete not in physical ability, but in how quickly and how significantly they can slow down their biological age. A kind of competition for the best Benjamin Button. To do this, the contestants basically adjust their diet (in particular, they use macronutrients and supplements), engage in physical activity and regularly recheck their indicators. At the same time, they do not revert to a younger version of themselves - this is biologically impossible. Rather, participants compete to see who will age the slowest. The Rejuvenation Olympics website says, "The one who never reaches the finish line wins."
A few participants in this peculiar game stand out: Steve Aoki, DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, was at the bottom of the site's "absolute" ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the slowest rate of aging. Biohacker Ben Greenfield and millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis also made the list. However, you won't instantly recognize most of the names in the top 25, and some prefer anonymity.
The current leader is tech millionaire Brian Johnson, who is 46 years old. But 46 is just a "chronological age," which contestants refer to simply as the years since his birth. According to medical tests, Johnson is aging slower than his chronological age is moving. He has become known for his unusual lifestyle, which is entirely focused on not only looking young but also getting younger: he claims to eat 32 pounds of vegetables a month, most of them in the form of purees. He uses blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a helmet with infrared light, which is supposed to stimulate hair growth. The amount of fat in his body once dropped to a dangerous 3% (though it has since increased slightly).
The rejuvenation Olympics tends to attract exactly the kind of people obsessed with collecting and analyzing data about their health who have the financial means to plug in experiments. Johnson and other Olympics participants, however, are hardly alone in their expensive attempts to maximize their health. Such extremes are common among the ultra-wealthy, particularly those from Silicon Valley.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is known for his eccentric health habits: he eats once a day, meditates at least two hours a day and enjoys ice baths. Steve Jobs was a fruitarian for a while. Wealthy people are taking advantage of many wellness trends, whether it's oxygen therapy, implanting health tracking devices into the body, and even infusing young blood.
Optimizing one's lifestyle with its constant monitoring and adherence costs money. Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million dollars this year alone to slow his biological aging.
Founders of technology companies who claim to have cracked the code to a longer and healthier life have a certain amount of hubris. Society sees them as idols, geniuses whose ingenuity has made them the chosen 0.0001% of the richest people on the planet. It's easy to believe that they will prove to be more savvy than everyone else and will be able to turn back time.
Last year, according to a report from the website LongevityTechnology, more than $5 billion dollars was invested in longevity companies around the world, including from well-known founders and technology investors. Many of these companies seek to extend life by betting on organ regeneration and gene editing. Last year, Altos Labs, a biological reprogramming (turning cells into plastic pluripotent stem cells) research company, received an impressive $3 billion investment, and its backers include billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos was also an investor in anti-aging company Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company that is trying to increase human longevity by another decade. Some of the biggest names in the anti-death sector are well known: Calico Labs, a longevity research subsidiary of Alphabet, was founded by then Google CEO Larry Page in 2013. It's not just Silicon Valley that's concerned about the prospect of living longer. A new biotech company called Tally Health, co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair, who is well-known in the longevity community, boasts investors from Hollywood's elite: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal and Zac Efron.
In general, those with really big money have already invested some of it in the life extension industry.
But all the hype and huge investment also means a greater likelihood that you'll be sold some nonsense. Just because someone thinks they're aging slower doesn't mean they'll live longer. Experts are highly skeptical of the idea of turning back time.
"Of course someone has to discover new possibilities, but there are also a lot of companies peddling pacifiers in bright wrappers," says Michael Lustgarten, a participant in the Rejuvenation Olympics, a doctor of physiology and a researcher at Tufts University's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. - "It's common for the longevity community to get excited about 'superfoods': the latest supplement or the latest life-extending study in mice."
"It's impossible to reverse age," says Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. - There is reason to believe that some of the work being done in the field of epigenetics can tell us about the speed of aging. But it doesn't tell us anything about life span."
Life extension sounds like pseudoscience at first glance, but epigenetics, which deals with the study of how our genes manifest in response to our environment and lifestyle, is one promising field that has made huge strides in the past decade in unlocking the secrets of aging.
The first epigenetic "chronometer" was developed by Steve Horvath in 2013, but personalized epigenetic age tests for consumers only became popular a few years ago (participants in the Rejuvenation Olympics undergo such tests to track their progress). Epigenetic testing provides a rough idea of a person's chronological age if they are unaware of it (e.g., if there is no birth certificate).
More modern versions of the tests can determine not only chronological age, but also the degree of biological aging based on environmental and lifestyle factors. This data can be used to predict the likelihood of disease or death. Here's how it works: no two people age the same way. Biological age is different from chronological age: it's an attempt to capture often invisible differences in epigenetic gene expression, the state of a person's organs, their immune system, and more. For example, a 40-year-old with a long history of drinking and smoking may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, one Dutchman even complained that he should be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)
Such testing is not at all like an annual physical exam. Rather, it is a fancy procedure for those who have a few hundred dollars to spend on a home DNA test. The creators of such tests claim that knowing one's biological age encourages people to live a healthy lifestyle.
There are some encouraging facts that support the possibility of increasing human longevity. Even the transfusion of "young blood", although too reminiscent of vampire creepiness, has a proven scientific basis. Studies have shown that such a procedure in mice can have a regenerative effect on certain cells. The problem is that longevity startups often go too far with claims about what the new findings could mean for the future of human aging.
"I call the anti-aging industry the second oldest profession," Olshansky says. - "People were making the same claims 2,000 years ago about a magic elixir that would help you live longer and better. The only difference is that now the idea of the fountain of youth is being promoted by a lot of people with a lot of money to make even more.
Johnson, who made hundreds of millions after selling a payment platform he developed to eBay in 2013, is famous not only for what he invented, sold or developed, like many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but also for leading an unimaginably strict lifestyle. According to his website and numerous interviews, he constantly monitors 78 body metrics, from his BMI to the state of his brain's white matter. Johnson is often referred to as "the most measured man in history."
It's not just about being healthy. It's about ultra-precise optimization of body condition.
Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It's just not part of his life algorithm. "I was a real slave to myself, to passions, emotions and endless desires," he recalls in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That's not to say he never makes a misstep, but when it happens, Johnson calls it a "violation," as if he's committed a petty crime.
Johnson tops the list of Rejuvenation Olympics leaders. He created the game with Oliver Zolman, who leads Johnson's team of 30 doctors and other health experts, and TruDiagnostic, a Kentucky-based epigenetics lab that provides biological age test kits for Olympics participants to take. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive version ($499) provides more data on the results, including how habits such as smoking or drinking alcohol affected a person's rate of aging.
According to Hannah Went, TruDiagnostic's chief executive officer, the company hopes that over time, a wider range of consumers will become involved in epigenetic testing. But for now, their customers tend to be wealthy individuals who can devote time and money to anti-aging. To date, nearly 30,000 people have had their biological age measured in a lab, and just over 1,700 of them have agreed to submit their results to the Rejuvenation Olympics. Only the top 25 are published in a ranking on the home page of the website.
Lustgarten, a competitor, believes he will be in the top 10 the next time the leaderboard is updated. Like other longevity seekers, he constantly monitors his biomarkers and makes changes to his diet or exercise regimen as needed.
This is the most challenging ultramarathon in existence. The most dedicated members of the longevity community essentially spend their lives obsessively living. Lustgarten states: "I plan to run the marathon for at least the next 70 years."