Who wants to live forever? Tech bros, apparently. It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Only by living forever can they actually make use of the vast fortunes that they sit on like psychopathic dragons while the rest of the world dies. Then I guess they can all sit together on their Martian colonies, circlejerking each other until the end of time.
Some of them seem to take this pursuit more seriously than others, though. For Elon, it’s hair plugs and Peter Pan personality complex, for Bezos, it seems like your bog-standard mid-life crisis. But for Bryan Johnson, a venture capitalist and tech founder, most recently of Kernel, a “neuro-tech” company that creates brain-machine interfaces, it’s an obsession. And even though it’s one that obviously aligns with his professional interests, it’s… Pretty fucking wild.
And this, naturally, took me down a rabbit hole of rich fuckers expending vast resources and (ironically) significant chunks of time in the fruitless attempt to live forever. Turns out, it’s been going on pretty much forever.
Let’s explore.
Tale as Old as… Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is an epic poem written between 2100-1200 BC. Let’s think of Gilgamesh as your proto-tech bro. He’s big, he’s muscly, he’s rich (a King) and he has a stupidly oversized ego. It’s not until the death of his best friend (named Enkidu, which is really fun to say. Try it: “Enky-dooo!”) that he realises that that event probably means that he too must one day die. Appalled, he sets out on a mission to defeat death.
Spoiler: He doesn’t. Instead, he learns some valuable lessons about life, like that you should probably not worry so much about dying and enjoy your life and focus on things like the love from your family, friends and partner.
It’s a lesson we should all take to heart. And one that pretty much every rich megalomaniac to come would completely miss.
Emperor Qin and the Mercury Crazies
Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of what we would now call China was quite the character. If by “character”, we mean absolute mercury-soused nutbag obsessed with immortality and murder.
In his quest to live forever he:
Made finding the elixir of life the full-time job of countless scholars and alchemists. When they couldn’t find one, he burned all their books and then buried 450 of them alive. How’s that for a brain drain?
A guy named Xu Fu told him that the elixir was on a magical mountain on an island in the South China Sea where a thousand-year-old wizard type person was waiting to share it with the Emperor. All he had to do in return was send off 6,000 virgins by ship to find it. Which he did. They never returned, which is not really a surprise given Qin’s propensity for burying people who disappointed him alive. See above.
He made everyone else call him “Huangdi”, which essentially translates as God. I guess because he thought if he was God, he couldn’t die and if enough people said it, it might come true?
A meteor that fell to earth in China was inscribed (afterwards) with the words: “The First August Emperor will die and his land will be divided.” Qin was PISSED, because as we’ve established, he was very much onboard the “if you say it, it comes true” train. When no one came forward to claim responsibility for the inscription, he rounded up everyone who lived near where the meteor had crashed and had them imprisoned, then executed. Then he had the meteor set on fire and his musicians play him a little song about how immortal he was.
As mentioned, he took a curative tonic made of Mercury Sulphide. Any amount of Mercury Sulphide is too much Mercury Sulphide.
Once he conceded that immortality MIGHT be beyond his reach, he decided to just fuck it and become the god-ruler of the afterlife instead – complete with a kingdom and an army of Terracotta Warriors. So he got 700,000 slaves to carve his warriors and build his tomb, complete with (allegedly) rivers of mercury and a replica of the night sky. Then he had the tomb seeded with grass and trees so no one could find it. And to make extra sure, he ordered all the workers who made it to be sealed inside with him.
Tech Bros: Team Meat Puppet vs Team Robocorps
Successful tech bros seem to have a lot in common. A pathological desire to hoard more wealth than they will ever be able to spend. The ability to reframe people as collateral. Narcissistic tendencies often resulting in the flouting of international law. A strong distaste for paying taxes. And, apparently, the desire to live forever.
Once you start looking into this, it’s actually kind of bananas how many of them are pursuing this. From Google co-founder Sergey Brin (whose wife, Nicole Shanahan, is in the “longevity-related patent management business), to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (who has admitted, “Death makes me very angry”), to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who, along with Brin, is the co-founder of the “Breakthrough Prize” which offers $3 million to scholars who can help answer such fundamental questions as “What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases?”
Silicon Valley is awash with startups engaged in the modern day alchemy of trying to solve the problem of death. They’re divided into two rough groups, which Tad Friend, in his delightful New Yorker article called: The Meat Puppets and the Robocorps.
The Robocorps gang are believers in Kurzweil’s singularity hypothesis, which essentially posits that humans will achieve immortality by fusing with AI and eliminating the need for a physical body at all.
Then there are the Meat Puppets – people who believe that, with proper bio-hacking and care, you can force the body you have to either age slower or stop ageing altogether.
Unsurprisingly, the regimes they follow don’t tend to be a lot of fun – as perhaps the ultimate eternal tech bro goes to show.
Meet Eternal Tech Bro
This is Bryan Johnson. He’s an uber-wealthy tech-bro who spends an estimated $2 million plus PER YEAR trying to reverse ageing. It’s $2 million he could be using to enrich the lives of literally anyone else on this planet, or hell, even enjoying his own. But instead, this is what he does.
Johnson has a team of 30 doctors whose job is solely to give him the “brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.” Yes, rectum. Whatever he wants to do with that 18-year-old rectum is… like his business, I guess.
Dubbing his new life plan “Project Blueprint”, Johnson sticks to a strict regime. It goes a little something like this:
Upon waking, a cocktail of more than two dozen supplements.
Under 2,000 vegan calories a day, some of which is, according to Ashlee Vance, who interviewed him for Bloomberg, “a mound of vegetables that had been pureed into a grey-brown goop” which “felt and tasted like dirt.”
An hour of exercise every day with high intensity training three times per week.
A full night’s sleep at the same time every night after TWO HOURS nightly of wearing blue light-blocking glasses.
Wearing an erection-measuring device when he sleeps.
The application of multiple facial lotions and potions, alongside regular acid peels and laser therapies as well as “fat scaffolding procedures” where fat from an unknown donor is injected into his face. This has caused an allergic reaction at least once.
Dozens of medical procedures per month including MRIs, ultrasounds and colonoscopies (he has more than 33,000 images of his bowels. Possibly why he needs a new rectum?)
Gene therapy that he declines to comment on in any detail.
The verdict? He is at least as healthy as it is possible to be as a 45 year old. He has lowered his biological age by 5 years. Maybe.
“We have not achieved any remarkable results,” his doctor admits. “In Bryan, we have achieved small, but reasonable results.”
Here is his before and after.
Okay. Look. Is it me or does he look worse and also older in an uncanny valley, Twilight-ey kind of way? Also, in every picture I’ve always seen post… whatever this is, always kind of damp? Like a salamander?
I dunno, man. I’m not sure the above is what Mary Oliver had in mind when she asked “Tell me what it is you plan to do | with your one wild and precious life?” But if that Sisyphean nightmare of a daily schedule is what floats Eternal Tech Bros boat, then he is welcome to it.
I’ll probably just stick with sunscreen and peaceful acceptance of inevitable death, myself.
Bits and Bobs
Aside from this deep dive, this week has been all about:
Reading: Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley. I’m a gigantic fan of both Jane Austen and being at home, so this has been great.
Listening to: Waking Up by Sam Harris. The book, not the podcast. I had never read any Sam Harris before and had it recommended as someone who is interested in what the tagline says: spirituality without religion.
But I’m not sure how I feel about it or if I can recommend it. Leaning towards not. He has some interesting ideas but he seems to make big leaps between facts and his own ideas about what he would like those facts to mean.
Also doing: I have decided to try take up the guitar with all the free time that I have.
Also listening to: Hozier’s new album, Unreal Unearth. It’s no Wasteland Baby! But it is Hozier, so I’m in.
I prefer his folkier stuff, like this absolutely gorgeous rendering of one of my favourite folk songs, “The Parting Glass”:
That’s all for this week! Until next time. As always, subscribe, like, share if you are so inclined.
Lots of love,
'Damp, like a salamander' got me good! Haha