Title: Selling Eternal Life

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Matt: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz. I used to be a reporter here at WNYC, and today, I'm keeping the seat warm for Brian. Now we'll look at the industry forming around the quest for immortality. Avoiding death is a very human instinct. In prehistoric times, we ran away from the saber-toothed tiger. Now, we run a mile a day on the treadmill with the same overall goal of preserving our life in mind. The wealthiest among us have taken this endeavor to live longer lives much further.

Prominent billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, as well as those of lesser fame, are funding countless startups in biotech and AI that promise to increase our lifespans. Has the human body already reached its limits? That's the question New Yorker staff writer, Tad Friend, investigates in his new piece headlined, "How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It." He joins us now to talk about the longevity industry and what we might lose in the quest for immortality. Tad, welcome back to WNYC.

Tad: Thanks, Matt.

Matt: I love the headline of your piece, "How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It." Your piece is largely a profile of a man named Peter Diamandis. Why don't we start there? Who is Diamandis, and why did you choose him as our guide through this quest for immortality?

Tad: The reason I chose Peter is I think he's at the center of this sort of loose movement that has a number of different wings and phalanxes to it. He's in his mid-60s. He first achieved attention by starting the X Prize for commercial spaceflight, and he's always wanted to go to the moon. One of the reasons he wants to live a lot longer is to get to the moon himself and start a mining colony there. He's now doing an X Prize for healthspan, which is to encourage people to live longer, more healthfully, which is a little different than lifespan. Most of us think of lifespan and how long you live, but a lot of the scientists in the field are more interested in having you live a longer time healthily and enjoying your life, and then, as they say, die healthy.

He started that X Prize. He has some venture funds that are investing heavily in companies in the space. He has podcasts. He's doing an incredible array of things himself. He takes more than 50 supplements in the morning. He beams himself with three different red light devices when he wakes up, and he checks all his devices. He gets on the stationary bike to do his Zooms, and he's trying to optimize in every way. He's also, at the same time, flying around the world to give talks about it and burning the candle to both ends in a way that may shorten his life.

Matt: Wow. Let's go back for one moment and just talk about some of these biometrics that he collects from himself overnight. I was really struck by that, and I was struck by the three different red light therapy devices he uses in the morning, you wrote, for his skin, hair, and to kill mouth bacteria. The biometrics that he collects overnight, what are they, and what's the purpose of that?

Tad: Basically, the big one is just looking at his sleep score in the way that-- The people who follow Peter and the people in this space generally tend to be very slim, mid-50s to mid-60s men who have a certain amount of money. They all are just fingering their Oura Rings all the time and checking nervously to see how close the Grim Reaper is behind them. Peter does that. I sat in on a couple of conversations with his functional medicine doctors.

One of the other things that Peter did was, along with Tony Robbins and two doctors, start a concierge medicine longevity clinic called Fountain Life. The idea is that if you pay them $21,500 a year, they'll help you live longer and more healthily, and if you pay them $85,000 a year, you get into the platinum club and you live even longer, allegedly. It hasn't yet been quite proven, but that's the idea behind it.

The metrics he tests for, as I said, are mostly sleep. Also, then he's going to Fountain Life, and all the Fountain Life clients go there every three months to get a series of scans, a much more comprehensive battery of tests than your general practitioner would give you if you just went to see him or her. Then there's a lot of discussion with his doctor every few weeks or every month about which supplements they should be on, which ones don't seem to be working, so that they're constantly tweaking and saying, "Is the red light for my oral microbiome working? Do we need to tweak it? Do we need to check it?"

Peter, to his credit, is incredibly diligent about doing all these things and looking at the spreadsheet and trying to optimize in every way, but he's also very impatient. One of his friends said to me, "For someone who intends to live forever, Peter is incredibly impatient." He will throw everything he can at a physiological problem, such as hair loss, or he's worried about his gut microbiome and the overgrowth of bacteria in his small intestine, and they try a number of different things. Then if he can't beat it, he'll just move on to the next problem, which is a very human instinct.

Matt: This is what is known as biohacking, right? Is that what that is?

Tad: Yes. Biohacking, it's everything. In a way, you could argue that anyone who takes a Flintstones multivitamin is biohacking. They're trying to improve their body's health. The weird thing is about taking that Flintstones multivitamin, which seems like the simplest, easiest biohack you can imagine, just [unintelligible 00:06:18] with your breakfast cereal, popping a multivitamin. There's actually a study that shows that people who take a multivitamin, they did it over 12 years, 7 million people. Actually, people who took the multivitamin had a 4% increased chance of death in that period, which is a little bit alarming. This is the problem with biohacking, the reason that it's difficult.

Let me step back for one second. The basic things that biohackers do that work really well are the obvious things that your GP would also tell you to do. Get eight hours of sleep, exercise a certain amount, but not too much, eat healthfully, don't eat ultra-processed foods, and avoid stress. If you do those things, that's the way to increase your chances of living a longer, more healthy life.

The problem is once you start to get into specific things of taking a certain kind of supplement or doing intermittent fasting, which is generally great, but then also there are problems with intermittent fasting where you can increase your muscle loss, and you're also really cranky, and you're hungry, and your libido goes down. There's no sort of solution that anyone has discovered so far that is a perfect panacea, one-stop shopping, here's the God pill, take it, and everything works out.

The theory that Peter has and that many of the leaders in the field like Bryan Johnson and others have is that AI is going to really be the killer app, which is maybe a bad way of putting it, the non-killer app in this case, that will figure it out for us and say, "Okay, Matt, here's your genetics. Here's the pills you're willing to take. Here's a look at your epigenome." Now that we have all those things, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here's what you should be taking in the morning and here's your exercise regimen and here's what time you should be going to bed and so forth.

Matt: Tad, for a moment, while we get them back, listeners, we can take your calls and texts on the topic of living forever and the industry that's seeking to make this a reality. Have you taken any advice from a biohacking influencer like Bryan Johnson or made any other adjustments to your lifestyle in order to prolong your life? Maybe you've weighed the pros and cons of unhealthy habits and decided the indulgences are worth a shorter lifespan.

Do you use an Oura Ring, like Tad said, to collect your biometrics while you sleep? What do you make of the tech world's obsession with living forever? We can also take your questions about this with our guest, Tad Friend, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of In the Early Times: A Life Reframed. Call us or text us 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Tad, we got you back?

Tad: Yes.

Matt: Sorry to lose you [crosstalk]

Tad: Can you hear me, Matt?

Matt: Yes.

Tad: Okay.

Matt: You were talking about the use of AI, which you described in the piece as, you said, AI is going to be the best physician in the world.

Tad: That's what Peter says.

Matt: That's what Peter had said.

Tad: I think he and others, like Bryan Johnson and others in the field, are really pinning their hopes on AI, somehow magically figuring out what not only everyone should do, but each of us individually should do it. It seems like from what we know about the body and the way it falls apart, it falls apart in a slightly different way for everyone, which is why some people get diabetes and some people get Alzheimer's and some people have heart attacks. The AI would be able to look at your DNA and your epigenetics and all your latest physiological markers and say, "Actually, Matt or actually, Tad, here's what you individually should be doing to increase your chances of living forever."

Matt: It's these billionaires, these masters of the universe, who are the ones driving this. You point to Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman of OpenAI, who are both funding anti-aging research. What's the role of the billionaires in this space? How much money is pouring into this endeavor? Why is it them? There's a reason, right?

Tad: There's a reason. I think there are two somewhat different perspectives on this. There's the perspective of Peter and others is that billionaires are noble and selfless people who are putting their own bodies on the line by trying experimental treatments that, if they work, will end up being much cheaper and much safer for all of us eventually, but in the meantime could cause those billionaires to have adverse effects on their body.

Then there's perhaps the slightly more plausible argument that many of these billionaires are Silicon Valley titans who have made all this money, have all this power, and are pissed off that they're not going to live forever. Like, that didn't seem like part of the original deal. If you're going to be a master of the universe, you should be able to extend your life. It is true that already for reasons that are pretty obvious, I think, to everyone, the extremely rich tend to live on average at least a dozen years longer than the extremely poor. I don't think we need to go into the reasons why they're pretty self-evident in terms of health care, nutrition, and so forth.

They would like to extend their lead, and the belief is that, if we as a society spend all this money trying to extend the lives of, at first, the very rich, that will be good for society as a whole, because there's a school of thought, which Peter is a part of, that we will be able to extend our reach into our solar system and perhaps even beyond. We'll have colonies on the moon and on Mars. Humanity will expand. There'll be billions of other people throughout the solar system living here and there, and that, ultimately, we're in an effective altruism way, we're going to be increasing the reach of our species and making us harder to kill off.

Matt: We got a text from a listener. "I don't think this is a very worthwhile pursuit. They could be funding things like health care for the needy, for rural populations, but instead are destroying the foundations of our social order to the detriment of our society. Living in a dystopia is also not good for the rich." That's what one listener said. We have some callers on the line about the longevity industry. Larry in Brooklyn. Hi, Larry.

Larry: Hey, hi. Hey, my question, and I gave it to your screener is, let's say in the unlikely event these guys succeed in what they're trying to do and live healthy lives to 120 or 200 years or forever, what happens to society, as Mr. Friend just said, rich people already live a lot longer than poor people, when they see them living effectively nearly immortality? It seems to me that that would and should provoke violent disruptions in our society, and I would hope people would wake up to that fact.

Just to relate to what Mr. Friend just said, society isn't spending money on life extension. A very few people are spending money on themselves for life extension purposes. It's a very different thing. Anyway, that's my question. What does Mr. Friend foresee society becoming if these people succeed?

Matt: Thanks, Larry. Tad?

Tad: It's a great question, Larry. I actually asked Peter Diamandis that at one point, because even on a micro level, there's the question of, wouldn't Social Security run out in about six minutes if everyone was living a lot longer? There's that. Then there seems to me, you can look ahead and say, "If Vladimir Putin is in power for a century, or Jeff Bezos amasses $70 trillion, what's that going to look like for the rest of us?" I asked Peter about that. It seems like an obvious, no-brainer worry to have. Peter actually looked at it. He's a very optimistic person. He said, "Another way to look at that scenario is, what are the benefits of having power in a few people's hands?"

He has a fantasy of well-intentioned, benevolent, extremely rich and powerful people guiding humanity with pure intent and giving money to scientists to help lead us in the best path forward. How that would actually play out and how we would get there was left a little bit unaddressed. Peter's belief is that once AI leads us all to universal abundance, smart, benevolent people will help distribute the benefits so that everyone is fairly treated. Obviously, that requires even more hand-waving than the idea that AI is going to figure out how we're going to live longer.

Matt: Can we just zoom out a little bit in terms of how this longevity industry might affect the rest of us? What are the ways that researchers are tackling this problem of aging and death? What are some of the products on the market that regular folks are consuming right now to address this or to try to live longer, healthier lives?

Tad: First of all, let me just circle around to the point I made earlier. It seems pretty clear that right now, before AI has or has not figured out new ways forward, the biggest way to increase your health is, again, the stuff that seems somewhat intuitive, which is sleep, exercise, diet, reduce stress, have friends, all those things. By one calculation from the Cleveland Clinic or a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, that can get you more than 30 years more of health if you do all those things the right way.

He says you can get up to three or four years more by tweaking at the top with supplements. The main supplements that people take are things like NAD+ for sirtuins. A lot of people take different kinds of vitamins. They take various molecules like creatine, which helps build muscle if you're doing it in connection with a muscle-building strengthening program. Then people take nootropics for cognitive enhancement. Then there's a whole bunch of things like that Bryan Johnson does, he has done in the past, including stimulating his abdomen to create the effect of 20,000 sit-ups, which is a lot of sit-ups.

He's also rather famously shocked his penis for certain reasons that he understands and the rest of us may not. In fairness to Bryan, there is science behind the idea that if you have nighttime erections as a man, obviously a lot of this is aimed at men, since most of the biohackers are men, that it is an indication that you're generally in good health. If you don't have them, something is wrong, and you're on the way to the morgue. For most of us, it's any particular little thing you take in a pill is, at the moment, not going to be a cure-all.

Matt: Let's go back to the phones. Gene in Lido Beach. Hi, Gene.

Gene: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. You were zooming out. Just to zoom in, I'm 71, I'm pretty active cyclist. I run, I swim a little bit. I read the New York Times wellness section regularly and read a lot that I can about nutrition and exercise. I am amazed, as far as supplements go. I'm sure I'm not 100% right, but basically every supplement that I've ever read about that becomes this great trend that people are taking and it's going to have either a beneficial health effect or help you improve your exercise performance, unless it's a steroid or something, it's all snake oil.

I guess it's the human psyche or something that keeps us doing this. When I hear this guy whose name I don't remember, he's taking all these supplements or whatever, that totally discounts in my mind anything else he has to do with. Just quickly, I think Michael Pollan, when it came to nutrition, famously said, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." That's my philosophy. On exercise, keep moving, do it regularly and not too much. Anyhow, that's my take.

Matt: Got it, Gene. You don't even take a multivitamin?

Gene: No. Absolutely. The Times is great, the wellness section is great about reporting on, I think they call them mega studies, where they look at a whole bunch of studies. Time and time and time again, and I'm sure that your guest has more information than me, there seems to be no convincing evidence that supplements like that do anything to improve your health or performance in any way.

Matt: Thanks, Gene. Appreciate you calling. Tad, you and I are medical doctors. I don't think Gene is either. Is there any science that you came across that is conclusive of you take this in terms of supplements and pills, take this and it's proven it can extend your life, or it can give you a healthier, longer life?

Tad: The short answer is probably no. There are very promising results, often with different kinds of supplements and treatments in lab animals, particularly mice, but a scientist I spoke to years ago said so many times the mice have disappointed us because those results don't translate to humans. It turns out more than 85% of treatments that are effective in mice turn out not to work in humans. There are just too many differences between the way we are put together and the way mice are put together.

The one thing that didn't really go into in my piece, just for space reasons, but that is interesting in terms of a-- It's not really a supplement. It's not a nutraceutical. It's a medication, but it's a GLP-1 agonist, which are like Ozempic or Wegovy for diabetes or for weight loss, turn out to be arguably the first kind of pretty broadly successful longevity drug. They not only can take care of blood sugar and weight, but they seem to have a lot of knock-on effects of reducing addiction, increasing the time for people before dementia sets in, and generally being a tonic in various ways that scientists hadn't quite expected.

That said, they, like almost every other intervention, have downsides, which is you're not only losing fat when you lose weight, you're also losing muscle, and sometimes bone. The next generation of them will probably be paired with something that helps you keep your muscles together because that's important too. If it doesn't do you much good, if you lose all this weight and everything seems great, but then you have no muscle and you fall down and you break your hip and you go to the hospital and you die for that reason.

Matt: We've got a bunch of texts coming in. Let's see. Someone asked how this squares with Peter Thiel's apparent religious awakening going on about the antichrist at a recent talk. That actually makes me think of another question I had, something you touched on in your story, that this is not just about the body, this longevity, but also our consciousness. Some billionaires want to become digital entities. What is that?

Tad: What is that, indeed? This harks back to this guy named Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil, who was a futurist, who, a number of years ago, was saying humanity would eventually achieve something that's called the singularity, where we are a million times more powerful and smarter than we are now, obviously with the help of merging our brains with AI. On the way to that, there's a number of little bridges that he had in mind. Some of them involving organ replacement, swapping out your kidneys and your pancreas when it wears out, and then having nanobots, which are tiny little cell-sized paramedics that would zip around in your bloodstream, knowing where to go in your body to fix ailing tissues.

Then the next big one is uploading what's called your connectome, all the neurons and all their connections in your brain, to the cloud so that you would have essentially an emulated second Tad or Matt brain in the cloud. The idea is that we can already do it with a fruit fly. They've done this with a fruit fly. They showed at one of Peter Diamandis' conferences that I went to. An entrepreneur who's working on this problem showed that the fruit fly moving around in the cloud in a staccato, not very entirely lifelike way. We were told that the fruit fly knew enough to groom itself and to avoid bitter tastes, and how they were going to be bitter tastes in the cloud was a little bit unexplained.

The idea is you'd have some sort of digital experience in the cloud, although I guess with no one else up there at the moment, the first person who goes up. You would also, at the moment, if they were going to copy your connectome, you would have to be dead. They would have to, as they put it, pause you, copy you using a deli slicer, essentially, that cuts very fine, so they could copy all the tissues in your brain, and then use a brain autocomplete to imagine what your synapses would be firing and what you'd want to be thinking about and doing in the cloud.

It all sounds a little hand-wavy, but this is the idea that people have because our neurons, except for one area of our brain, don't replicate themselves. They just get old and wither and die. That is a big problem with living forever is that your body could perhaps live a longer time if AI helps figure it out, but your brain is pretty much going to give up the ghost at a certain point unless we figure out a way to back it up.

Matt: Tad, maybe this is too much of a philosophical question for a Monday morning, but why do we want to live forever? Is this just a innate human quest? Did you find yourself thinking about that as you were reporting the story?

Tad: I do. It's a great question. I think there's people who are very passionate on both sides of it. There's people who say human beings have a lifespan, our entire sense of ourselves in the universe, ethically or religiously or philosophically, is predicated on dying. As Wallace Stevens said, death is the mother of beauty, and the idea is that the fact that we know we're not going to be around to appreciate everything forever makes us appreciate it more while we're here.

On the other hand, our lifespan has basically doubled since 1900. No one's complaining about that. If the Peter Diamandis and others argue, if you could have 10 more years of really good health and felt robust and great and zippy, and you could see your children live for 10 years longer and see your grandchildren grow up a little bit more and have another second career, the thing you always wanted to do that, play the violin or become a skin doctor or try professional baseball at the age of 75, whatever.

Matt: That's what I was going to say, yes. Can I play shortstop for the Mets?

Tad: Yes, everyone wants to be a shortstop. There's going to be a lot of people in line for that job, but it doesn't sound so bad. If you just think about the thought experiment of, "I think I'm probably going to live to be 80, but if I could live to be 90 in good health, wouldn't that be great?" Then once you start moving the goalposts a little bit, then it's like, "Why stop?" That is a great question. There are people who are strongly passionately engaged on both sides of the thing.

What no one wants is what we have now, which is that 11 or 12 years of extremely bad health before people die. On average, being in a wheelchair, having dementia, being incontinent, being frail, being told by everyone else what to do because you're not capable of doing it for yourself. No one wants that.

Matt: No one wants that is right. Tad Friend's article is headlined "How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It." It's in The New Yorker. Tad, thanks so much for coming on the show and taking our calls today. Appreciate it.

Tad: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

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