Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 523 - The Immortality Industry: Silicon Valley’s War on Death

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

What if aging isn’t inevitable...and death is a problem science might someday solve? From groundbreaking longevity research to Silicon Valley billionaires, rogue biohackers, young-blood transfusions, and multimillion-dollar anti-aging regimens, we explore the increasingly bizarre Immortality Industry and ask the ultimate question: could humans actually learn how to cheat death? Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 1993, a scientist in California changed a single gene and a single worm, and the worm lived twice as long. Up until that moment, aging as an area of scientific study was seen by almost everybody as a career dead end. Nobody took it seriously, and that's because for most of human history, the idea that aging could ever be slowed, reversed, even stopped was considered ludicrous, impossible even. A belief that some in Silicon Valley now insist is not true. following that 1993 discovery over the next 30 years in counting, the study of anti-aging has gone from a scientific dead end to a billion-dollar arms race, dragged there largely by three men. Your dad, my dad, and that guy who stands on that one really busy corner of that intersection downtown,

spinning that 70% off everything must go liquidation sale sign. No, the three guys are Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire behind PayPal and Palantir, who signed up to have his body frozen when, and if he ever dies. Aaron Treywick, the biohacking CEO with no medical background, another controversial figure who once injected an untested herpes therapy into himself in front of a live audience, and currently probably the most famous of the three in the longevity space, at least,

Brian Johnson, who spends millions of dollars each year trying not to die, who once had a bunch of his teenage son's blood plasma pumped into his body so he could basically share in his youth like some sort of vampire. Another controversial figure. Most in this space seem to be. So what happens when some of the richest people alive have decided that dying is optional? Can they achieve what medieval alchemists could not? Can they produce some elixir of immortality?

And if they can, would you actually even want to live forever? Today we are deep diving into the longevity movement from roundworms, naked mole rats, mummified pensioners, biohacking murder conspiracies, libertarian islands and the very real and very, very, expensive question at the heart of it all. Could it really be possible just to not die? Let's find out what the experts are saying today on another informative, interesting, and biotech edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck.

Well, happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins, a suckmaster, somebody who still has not even achieved senior consultant Mary Kay's status, so no pink Cadillac for me. and you're listening to Time Suck Hail Nimrod, Hail Lusufina Praise be to Good Boy Bojangles and Glory B to Triple M. Speaking of a musician, a beloved musician, recording this episode

The Day that Dolly Parton died, one of my favorite time suck topics, episode 435, what a beautiful soul. A lot of this episode is about getting the most you can out of this life, and has anyone ever gotten more out of life

than Dolly Parton did? I'm not sure they have. I hope wherever your soul, soul or energy or atoms are dolly that they are full of all the love you showed the world rest in fucking power dolly if there are stages on in worlds after this one i hope you're lighting one up right now also the september bad magic charity donation will go towards those affected by the spokane area wildfires uh worst fires in state history as far as structures burned recording in advance uh don't have the donation amount yet man roughly 900 structures lost damages currently

estimated as I record this at around a billion dollars. I hope any time suckers affected by the fires are doing okay all things considered. And now, let's nerd out. Before we get into our long, longevity timeline today, allow me to set the stage for it. There's a common misconception that people in the olden days used to be old by like the age of 30, dead by 35, as in dead from old age. That is what some people think. That is not true at all. Life expectancy is an average.

and because so many babies and young children used to die from illnesses or during childbirth back then, it would drag the life expectancy average way, way down, continued to keep it down until quite recently, as far as human history goes. But if somebody survived childhood, if they didn't die in battle, they could often live quite a long time and be healthy for a very long time. Basically, they could live as long and stay as healthy as long as the oldest humans alive today. The Greek poet, Hesiod. Yeah, I think Hesiod.

Hezied. Hesiod. I'm going to say Hesiod, wrote way back in the 7th century BCE, over 2,500 years ago, that a man should not marry until around the age of 30. Clearly, 30-year-olds were not seen as that old. Several centuries later in Rome, you had to be at least 39 or even 43 years old to take on top legal and government jobs, similar to, you know, how there are minimum age requirements for various U.S. political positions today. Pliny the elder, an administrator of the Roman Empire,

regularly wrote about people who made it to the age of 100 and beyond. from just one official census conducted in the eighth region of Italy. He recorded 54 people aged between 100 and 109, 14 age between 110 and 119, two motherfuckers aged between 125 and 120, and 4 motherfuckers, age between 130 and 139. Now, I'm not sure how accurate they were at tracking age. But clearly long before modern medicine, they had some very old folks. When it comes to claims verified by modern standards, the oldest person we have on record is a French woman born in 1875 who lived to the age of 122,

Jean Kalma. So, despite the average life expectancy getting better in the last century, some human beings growing pretty damn old is nothing new. Neither is the desire to live longer or outsmart death. One of the earliest, most famous examples that we know of of somebody trying to live forever is China's first emperor, Chin Shi Huang, who lived from 259 to 210 BC. this dude called both a great unifier and a great tyrant, was obsessed with immortality, like many rulers would be after him and probably many before him. He sent agents across the country in search of life extending elixirs.

He built himself this enormous and literally underground army of life-sized terracotta warriors that were intended to protect him in the afterlife. His mausoleum is wild. I would love to visit it someday. Estimates from back in 2007 were that the three pits containing his terracotta Army hold more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, 520 horses, 150 cavalry horses, life size, other non-military terracotta figures have since been found another nearby pits, including those of officials, acrobat, strongmen, and musicians.

It's estimated that it took around 700,000 workers to build all of that, all because one dude was certain he would live on, looking as he had here on earth and some other realm beyond this one that he seems to have intended to conquered. Truly one battle after another for that guy. Uh, the war never stopped, not even in death. Because for him, death was just a door to more life. At least that's mostly what he believed. He clearly wasn't 100% certain he would live on, um, you know, after this life, he was hoping he would stay here because he went in great lengths to keep living in this world. Ironically, his quest for eternal life likely killed him. He died at the age of 49 and historians believe that mercury poisoning

was the cause, that somebody had convinced the emperor that mercury had life. giving powers, and they were not correct. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving epic poem that we currently know of in existence in the world, the hero Gilgamesh declares, forget death and seek life. After his companion dies, he becomes consumed by a desperate quest to escape death altogether. But this episode, not about ancient emperors and magical elixirs. It's about humanity's modern biotech-based quest to defeat aging, the one happening right now in labs and in startups and in billionaires,

billioners bloodstreams around the world. In today's timeline, we're going to cover some of the earliest scientific discoveries suggesting that aging might be influenced or even controlled through science, lifestyle, or both from studying the world's longest living people today in so-called blue zones, including the wine-sipping centenarians of Sardinia. We will trace how the pursuit of longevity over recent years has become corporatized, commercialized, and increasingly fucking weird. We will meet some of the most bizarre figures in the longevity movement,

and the jackass-style stunts they pull to see whether any of it actually works. We will head down to a private city in Honduras, where you can test life-extending therapies that are not legal anywhere else on Earth. Let's jump in. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline. For most of the 20th century, the overwhelming majority of scientists, like the majority,

majority of everyone else over the course of human history, has viewed aging as inevitable. It's something that just happens, something that has always happened to all of us, to every living creature, right? You age. You're always aging. Since before the very moment you were born, and you keep on aging and aging and until you die. End of story. Finis. Lafon. Scientists, most everyone else thought of aging as unchangeable and out of control until very recently. then there was one molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco one of a few people

that didn't sit right with back in the early 90s. Her name was Cynthia Kenyon. Actually, her name still is. Believe it or not, Cynthia Kenyon, she hasn't changed it. She's alive. She's currently 74. She's an American molecular biologist, emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco,

vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs. After she graduated as a valedictorian in chemistry, and biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976, and following receiving her PhD from MIT in 1981, she grew more and more interested in aging biology as her career progressed. Aging was not, as crazy as this may sound, very well understood at the time. It was an area of research that had pretty much been left alone

by the entire scientific community. Dr. Kenyon, though, was intensely curious about animals and why they all aged at different rates. This stuff is fascinating. Like, for example, female, Greenland sharks reach sexual maturity around 150 years of age. Their pups are born alive after a gestation period of anywhere from eight to 18 years. That's fucking insane.

Motherfuckers don't hit puberty until the age of 150. So if you have ever thought some 145-year-old Greenland shark is sexy, well, you're a pito. We don't even know how long these guys live. Modern science hasn't been around long enough to properly test that. It's estimated they live up to around 500 years. That's fucking crazy. Longest known lifespan of any vertebrate. But not the creature with the longest lifespan on Earth.

The glass sponge is thought to be the longest living animal on earth with lifespans estimated between 10,000 and 15,000 years. Well, it's, yeah, it's kind. Well, I guess there's worms that are thought to live longer than that. I'll get to that later. But this is as far as animals go. But an ocean cohog clam. The clam of the New England clam chowder fame, it became the animal with the oldest scientifically verified age on earth, with researchers believing it settled on the ocean floor near Iceland about 507 years before it was discovered and died. Like Greenland sharks, this clam was found in very, very cold water.

And like most animals that live a very, very long time, it moved quite slowly. The Greenland shark is the slowest shark in the world, by the way. It cruises at an average speed of about 0.7 miles per hour. approximately the speed of a toddler walking. So maybe that's the key to a long life. Never be fast. Move slow. Talk slow.

Too slow. Learn slow. Speaking of long living, slow moving creatures. Turtles and tortoises have remarkably slow rates of aging and in captivity without the stress of finding food and avoiding predators. Some have incredibly shown signs that. they don't seem to be aging at all. Seriously. A 2022 study led by Rita De Silva, who conducted the research while at the University of Southern Denmark,

who is now a biologist at the Universidad de Porto and Portugal, looked at 52 species in captivity whose records were available in the Species 360 Zoological Information Management System, some software used by zoos to track data about animal husbandry. They found that about 75% of species showed zero or negligible aging rate. In some cases, there was a wide range of uncertainty around the rate of a species aging, but in others, the numbers were consistently around zero, meaning that these species probably age very slowly, or using their words, quote, not at all.

Seems impossible, right? I have a hard time wrapping my brain around this, but I guess according to the data, not impossible. Some of these consistent negligible agers included the Greek tortoise and the black marsh turtle, the al-dabra giant tortoise, showed a negligible aging rate and a particularly long average lifespan of 60 years or more in captivity. The Galapagos tortoise, one of the species studied by scientist Charles Darwin on his voyage to the islands of the same name in 1835, excuse me, also lives 60 years or more on average. So how are they barely aging or as crazy as this is to say not aging?

Recent research on turtle biology has suggested that turtles and tortoises are able to quickly kill off damaged cells and that they're They are unusually an extremely resistant to DNA damage that accumulates over time as cells divide. That protects individuals even as they enter extreme old age. Can studying this further, find a way to find some magical elixir that could give these creatures anti-aging abilities to us humans. Some think so. Humans and dogs actually share a common ancestor

that lived approximately 90 to 100 million years ago, a small shrew-like nocturnal mammal, living while dinosaurs still walk the earth, but now dogs only get around 12 years of life while humans get around 80. Why? Obviously, God hates dogs. It's about time somebody said it, right?

If God, you know, came down to Earth, the first thing he'd probably do is just fucking curb stomp, a dog. Mm-hmm. Stomp is fucking skull flat. We've already covered how our God here. Great and powerful Nimrod requires dog sacrifices. I'll stop.

I know that's sad. Sorry, I got the most annoying tickle in my throat now. It just came out of nowhere, and it's driving me fucking crazy. But these are the kind of questions. The questions before I started babbling on about God that intrigued and perplexed Dr. Kenyon to circle all this background to her.

She had a hunch as to the answer. Dr. Kenyon told a journalist for Time magazine, I also had this idea that maybe there were universal genes that controlled, or that controlled, excuse me, the rate of aging in all animals, like a thermostat for temperature, except this would be a thermostat for lifespan, turning it up or down,

could make animals age faster or slower. I thought that maybe every animal had a little dial like that, but evolution set this dial differently in different species. It was just a hypothesis, and we still don't know if it's true or not, but I think aspects of it might be true. That's fucking fascinating. I've got to say this topic has given me a rock-hard knowledge boner. I do love reading about this kind of shit.

Back in the 80s and into the 90s, Dr. Kenyon decided to investigate, and she did this during a time when it seemed that no one in a professional community was interested in this area of the world. study. When she would talk to her colleagues and other scientists about her hypothesis, no one was anywhere near as excited as she was. Aging couldn't possibly be related to some sort of genetic dial, they said. But rather, there were likely hundreds of different genes involved, each producing tiny effects that all cumulatively influenced aging. Everybody seemed to

offer an opinion on why Kenyon's theory just simply would not, could not work. But she stuck to her guns and charged ahead. And in 1993, she took a tiny roundworm from her guinea pig discovered that a single gene mutation doubled the worm's lifespan. And the worm didn't just live longer, but stayed youthful and healthy longer. She and her team replicated the results time and time again, changing the same gene over and over, creating more and more little worms who live longer, healthier, more youthful lives. Funny to think about how one would figure out if a round worm is still youthful or not, right? I picture them looking at the worms under a microscope, seeing these little youthful 90s

worms, you know, wearing grunge concert teas, Doc Martins, supporting trendy haircuts, wearing lots of silver jewelry, staying out super late, you know, a little roundworm nightclubs, trying to hook up with other little roundworms, et cetera. In all serious now, serious is, oh my God, in all seriousness now, come on. Cynthia Kenyon's discovery transformed the common belief around aging up until that point, and for the first time, aging did not look like an immovable fate, but rather like something that could be manipulated and adjusted, like a 16th century explorer Ponce de Leon's fabled fountain of youth might be real after all. Wasn't just in some Florida swamp either, but rather in a laboratory.

Before moving forward, actually, Ponce de Leon may have never sought such a thing, but rather other explorers after he died assigned that quest to him as a way of trying to make him look like a fool. By the late 1990s, for scientists, even with this new understanding that the aging process can be modified, at least in some creatures, a massive question remained. For us meat sacks and not roundworms in a lab, how much of our lifespan was the result of our lifestyle and controllable factors versus inherited genes that we couldn't do shit about? Is your lifespan predominantly decided by the choices you make throughout your life,

like your diet, exercise, and sleep habits, or was it decided before you were ever born by your family history of inherited disease? In the late 1990s, that question got its answer, and it was good news. for most of us. The answer came from a comprehensive, longitudinal Danish study of almost 3,000 twin pairs born between 1870 and 1900.

Probably could have just said twins. Twin pairs makes it sound weird. The Danish twin study found that only about 20% of how long the average person lives is dictated by our genes. The other 80% due to lifestyle, due to environment, accident, luck,

you know, etc. If you take care of yourself, make sure you always look both the ways before crossing the street. Don't die in some rams. random act of violence or freak accident, odds are you can live a pretty long time if you have good genes. But if your genetics are fucked, well, then you're kind of doomed. Sorry about that. Let's move on. The early 2000s marked a turning point for the longevity movement with the arrival of

Dan Butner, a rider and adventurer, known at the time mainly for his transcontinental record-setting bike rides. Excuse me, Butner became particularly interested in that Danish twin study, and he dedicated his life to finding and also fucking every single twin from that study, which sounds disturbing, especially when you consider that all of them were dead by the time the study's completion. But that also made his goal easier to attain since he didn't have to find, meet, and seduce anybody. He just needed to track down some addresses, you know, some cemetery addresses, and be able to dig quickly and quietly. He didn't, of course, dedicate his life to corpse fucking, not that I'm aware of. He did become fixated on that 80%.

how lifestyle choices factored into longevity. He wanted to know if lifestyle really was the key to a long life, then out there somewhere in the world, there must be people living in a way that nearly guarantees them a long life. As long as they'll get murdered, fall into a sinkhole, get struck by a meteor, abducted by aliens, ran over multiple times by a homicidal moped driver, smushed by a suicidal skydiver who refuses to pull their parachute cord,

hitting the temple by a foul ball and a little league baseball game, etc. Dan had heard that people in Okinawa, Japan, were living wildly long lives, but they were largely disease-free. So he traveled there with the expressed intention of finding and fucking Okinawa's 100 oldest residents, man or woman, married or single. Didn't matter to Dan. He just wanted to figure out if fucking a lot of 100-plus-year-old people would enlighten him somehow. You know, he wanted to fuck the secrets out of them, the secrets of a long life, or maybe be given their powers through exposure to their ancient bodily fluids. all fluids. He wanted to fuck them.

He wanted to be pissed on and shit on by them and to drink their blood. He was quickly arrested and he remains in prison to this day. I'm not sure why I'm even talking about it. No, he just wanted to fucking talk to them. Gosh dang!

Enough with the creepy sex stuff. It's a science episode. I'm trying to keep this show clean and family friendly, but a lot of you keep ruining that with your subliminal suggestions that you send me back into the past telepathically, obviously,

before you were able even hear this, you fucking dark wizards. For real. The average life expectancy at that time was 86 years for women, 78 years for men, for roughly two decades leading up to 2000. Okinawa held the highest per capita rate of centenarians in the world, and Dan found out some really interesting stuff

when he spoke with many of them. Spoke, that's it. He asked them, what was their secret to a long and healthy life? And over and over, they told him, shut the fuck up and get out of my house. No, they said something called Ikigai, which translates roughly to that which makes one life, one's life worth living. Older Okinawans tended to have a strong sense of purpose that may act as a buffer against stress

and diseases such as hypertension, aka high blood pressure. Many also belong to an Okinawan-styled Moai, this lifelong committed social support group, small circles of friends who meet regularly to share advice, emotional strength, physical and or financial help, acting as a safety net that supports health, happiness, and apparently longevity. Dan also found out that all of the 100-plus-year-old people he spoke with lived off a simple low-calorie diet that centered on Okinawan vegetables, tofu, miso soup, small portions of fish or meat, mostly fish, very little red meat. In addition, many Okinawans who grew up before World War II,

never formed habits of overeating. They continued to follow the traditional Confucian principle of Hara-Hachibo, that they'd been raised with. Only eating until one is about 80% full. So moderation, right? They practiced sensible moderation. They worked on living minimalist lives, simple, fresh, healthy food. They stayed active.

They poured into friendships, drank a lot of water, tried to get a good night, sleep every night, lived low stress, balanced lives, not too much work, but enough work to not worry too much about money. Dan Butner took his experience in Japan to National Geographic, to see if they were interested in supporting him,

to dig further into this topic, and they were. He was also able to get a research grant from the National Institute on Aging, and he started assembling a team of demographers and scientists to find out other areas full of a disproportionately amount of long-living people. Meanwhile, some other researchers had just discovered the same sort of thing going down on the large, rugged Italian island of Sardinia, where still today there is the largest percentage of men who live until 100 years or more, and an equal number of women lived that long as well

there are roughly 22 to 30 centenarians per 100,000 residents in the early 2000s a Sardinian physician named Johnny Pes discovered that in some villages in the mountains of central Sardinia people were living to 100 at rates nobody had ever documented before in the world nobody really took his findings seriously at first not until a Belgian demographer named Michel Poulon came across his findings The two of them then decided to investigate this together,

and they conducted research in Sardinia, interviewing the village residents and checking documents. Poulon used a blue marker, recorded in blue ink on a map, the villages where the centenarians lived, and that is how the term blue zone came to be. Simple as that. Just a blue pen and a blue marker. It was following that research that Dan Butner published his findings.

I keep on to call him fucking Butner. Dan Butner. Dan Butter. publishes findings in a November 2005 issue of National Geographic magazine that introduced more longevity hotspots including Okinawa and also Loma Linda, California, the only blue zone in the U.S. And the reason why it's the only blue zone in the U.S. is so fucking random. Loma Linda is a city of about 25,000 people in the endless sprawl of San Bernardino County, California,

just about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Why is this place a blue zone when no other community around it is? well because of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Seriously. Back around 2000, when this was being studied, roughly half of the residents were Seventh-day Adventists. They even had, they still have, a very big Adventist grocery store that does not sell meat encourages a super healthy low sugar, fresh fruit and vegetable, whole grain, and legume, organic diet.

They avoid alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, other drugs. They tend to grow a decent amount of food in their own gardens. they take the Sabbath very seriously as a day of, you know, truly to rest, to not work or engage in any stressful activity. They treat their bodies as temples. They stay active, you know, get good sleep. I didn't say that already. It's thought because of that they live anywhere from four to ten years longer than the rest of us Americans on average.

Refocusing on Dan Butner's 2005 findings. Here's what his research determined were the keys to longevity. Move naturally. Not what I expected, actually. the world's longest living people They don't lift weights or run marathons Or do CrossFit or Jazzercise or Zumba Or P90X

They just walk more and shit They incorporate a lot of incidental movement Into their daily routines They garden They grow their own vegetables Pick their own fruit Catch your own fish Or at least you know walk

Rather than drive to the market They dance Right they fucking move around They laugh They move their skinny little butts around And they live longer healthier lives Another key is to have purpose Part of what the Okinawans again

called Ikigai. And what the Nukoyans, who live on the Nukoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, another blue zone, called Plonde Vita, which literally translates from Spanish as life plan, but culturally is interpreted as soul's purpose, or basically the reason why I wake up in the morning. Apparently knowing your sense of purpose and being committed to it and fulfilled by it is worth up to seven extra years of life expectancy. Another key, unsurprisingly, less stress. people in blue zones experience stresses like everybody else of course

but but due to not falling for traps like the keeping up with the Joneses mentality they experience less of it not as concerned about status one of the many negative effects of chronic stress is inflammation chronic stress related with just about every major age related disease one of the main things that the world's longest lived people have in common is that they have routines and practices that reduce actively reduce stress For example, many Okinawans take a few moments each day to silently meditate and reflect upon their ancestors. Right?

How beautiful. Most Icarians, people from the blue zone of Icaria, a Greek island of about 8,000 people closer to mainland Turkey than to mainland Greece, well, they take a daily nap. And based on some YouTube videos, I watched of what life is like there from a local's point of view, they spend hours a day casually socializing with friends and family and cafes or each other's, homes. They greatly prioritize a very slow stop and smell the roses pace of life. They're not trying to make all of the money just enough to keep living the lives they want. The big message and video after video is if you come to visit, be prepared to slow down. You're not getting fast food.

You're going to get your food, good food, fresh food, eventually. Apparently the pace of life is so slow, a lot of tourists have a very difficult time adjusting to it. Before moving on, most most Icarians also view regular sex as part of the good and joy the now life, more than many people later in life. The Icaria, the later Icaria study, there was one published in 2011, still seeking to better understand the factors that contribute to longevity, revealed a high rate of sexual intercourse amongst elderly men. Roughly 80% of Icarian males between the ages of 65 and 100 still fucking on a regular basis. Hail Lucifina. Continue with the theme of blue zone inhabitants making efforts to reduce stress. Sardinians do happy hour.

It's happy hour, not some commercial discount event where you get half-priced well drinks or $5 off your fucking cheese sticks or chicken wings. It's a daily social ritual where locals gather in village squares or in homes at the end of the day to share local wine. Distress, connect, like meaningfully connect with friends and family. In Japan, there's the 80% rule. earlier where Okinawans, you know, followed that longstanding Confucian practice that encourages people to stop eating when they feel about 80% full. That 20% gap between not hungry and completely full may make a big difference as far as like losing weight and gaining it. Research on animals in recent decades suggests that calorie restriction may make cells more resilient to stressors.

Scientists think this may be because fewer calories slows metabolism can reduce the body's metabolic workload, but the exact reason why is still not fully understood. Also, as I touched on a bit, a plant-based diet, a common theme in blue zones. Beans, including fava beans, black soy, lentils, they're the cornerstone of most centenarian diets. Meat tends to be eaten sparingly, which is unfortunate. Moderate alcohol consumption also found throughout many, but not all blue zones. Key word being moderate, most blue zones, centenarians, were found to drink, one to two glasses a day, to drink socially with friends and or with food. And what they don't do is just get fucking blitzed on the weekend.

They don't like, nope, I'm not going to drink Monday through Thursday. And then Friday, I'm going to have all the fucking whiskey. I know people still doing that in their 50s. Finally, a strong sense of belonging to a community was connected to a longer life. All but five of the 263 centenarians interviewed in Butner and Poulon's initial study belonged to some faith-based community. it didn't matter what faith, but the findings concluded that attending some sort of faith-based service

four times a month could add four to 14 years of life expectancy. It's also a thought it could just be like, you know, gathering for any type of, you know, community didn't have to be religious, but just going to a, you know, community gathering place, you know, several times a month, every month, just consistently through the years.

It's super helpful. This belonging is found alongside a preference for strong social connections overall. Centinarians in the Blue Zones cherished and nurtured strong social connections more than the average meat sack, right? Kept their friends closer, kept more of them, kept their aging parents and grandparents nearby or at home, typically had a life partner, a very close relationship with their kids if they had them, which they tended to have. Following this initial study, Butener and Poulon would link up and partner together to sell books, cooking classes, speaking slots, but then soon Poulon started to take issue with how commercial everything was getting.

He worried about how blue zones were becoming like a brand And his concerns came to a head when Chanel Launched their product blue serum Marketed as an anti-aging facial This fucking cream Said it you know Drew on ingredients connected to blue zones Green coffee from Costa Rica

Olives from Sardinia Mastic from Greece Such a fucking ridiculous business move that I'm sure worked great Right just preposterous Thinking that like getting a facial With the same ingredients found in blue zones is going to help you live longer. No, it's the fucking lifestyle.

They're not even getting facials there. Eating the right shit day after day. Live it a certain way, embracing a different cultural outlook, you know, based less and making all the money you can and more and pouring into relationships and, you know, and getting good rest, staying hydrated. That's going to help you live longer more than some fucking serum. Butener really did not like the way Chanel was using the term either. Asked them to stop. When they didn't, he started legal proceedings. He asked Poulon to testify in support of his claims, but by that point, Poulon was just out.

He was so frustrated by the commercial side of things that he just ended the partnership and was done with his whole business. The year after Butener's National Geographic cover story, Shinha Yamanaka, a Japanese stem cell researcher and his team of scientists at Kyoto University in Japan, made a game-changing longevity discovery. And I'll share it right after today's first to two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads again, please send out to be a space lizard on Patreon. help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad-free, episodes three days early, and more. And now let's look at what Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese stem cell researcher and his team of scientists

at Kyoto University in Japan's game-changing longevity discovery was. When the team added just four proteins to a skin cell of a mouse, some of the cells underwent an unexpected transformation. They became young again. They turned into stem cells, almost identical to the kind found in an embryo. The stem cells, in turn, were capable of developing into any cell in the body. The experiment raised an obvious question.

Could the same results found in mice eventually perhaps be found with human cells? And the answer was not to be yes. Thanks to replicating these results with human cells the very next year, and then building on that research, Shinya Yamanaka would go on to win the 2012 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine alongside British developmental biologist John B. Gordon. While Yamanaka's work opened up the possibility that cells might be able to be reset, around the same time another kind of anti-aging research was also starting to get a lot of attention.

In 2008, the British multinational pharma drug giant Glaxo Smith-Kline announced it was, I think it's Glaxo Smith-Kline, actually, announced it was buying Sertis Pharmaceuticals for a cheap, not going to change anyone's lives, you know, cool, 720 million. Sturtis was famous for a promising new drug called S.R.T. 501, a modified version of a substance found in red wine, believed at the time to possibly possess borderline miraculous anti-aging properties. The people behind the purchase were hoping to develop a pill that could extend your life at least a decade, if not two, which of course would be worth billions and billions of dollars. The man behind the science was David Sinclair, an Australian-born geneticist at Harvard, and the main champion of the red wine compound res, rest. veritrol. He co-founded certis himself and published papers claiming resveratrol could switch on a longevity human enzyme called cert 1 and that when he fed resveratrol to yeast, worms, and fruit flies, they live longer. At the time, Forbes dubbed this the $40 billion drug. This enzyme is something that tricks your cells into starvation survival mode, where the cells then focus on self-repair. It tells cells to act like food is scarce. Instead of a growing, they switched to maintenance and repair, and that's the part that may help them last longer. After Sinclair patented his discovery, he co-founded searches pharmaceuticals, floated the company on the U.S. share market in 2007. After that $720 million purchase, I mentioned, clinical

trials got underway on resveratrol. In 2008, Sinclair showed the trial setup to the New York Times reported, Nicholas Wade, leading him through a mouse testing lab looked like some kind of tiny gym. One machine checked whether the rodents could keep the balance on a rotating bar. in other words a water maze designed to test memory by seeing whether the mice could remember visual cues and swim to a hidden platform. These trials unfortunately unraveled fast. In 2010, GSK suspended testing of SRT 501 after some patients developed kidney damage and by the end of the year the company had shut the trials down altogether. Some labs even started reporting that Sinclair's conclusions were wrong. Not fraud necessarily, but at least bad signs. The National Institute on Aging's Interventions Testing Program later ruled in both 2011 and 2013 that Resveratrol did not extend the lifespan of healthy mice.

None of that stopped David Sinclair, though. He kept going and succeeded in popularizing resveratrol as an anti-aging supplement, even as trials behind it were falling apart. We'll check in again with Sinclair later in the timeline. Right now, let's look into a 2010 story that would be referred to later as a troubling example of. of how badly longevity research can go off the rails. That year, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sojin Kato to congratulate him on living to 111, to honor him as Tokyo's oldest living man. But when they found his granddaughter, she told them that, quote, he doesn't want to see anybody.

When welfare officials then tried to meet with him, family members repeatedly chased them away. Authorities grew more and more suspicious. They sought an investigation by the police who then forced their way into the house, and there they discovered a mummified body line in his bed wearing underwear, pajamas, covered with the blanket. This dude had been dead a long fucking time for roughly three decades. And during those years, his family had fraudulently collected

more than $100,000 in pension payments. So they kept that grip going long past any reasonable amount of time. Fucking crazy. They would rather keep a corpse in the house than just, I don't know, budget better, work more. This and Davidson Clare's fail Resveratrol trials hurt the longevity movement. Both stories got a lot of media attention, and people worried that a lot of longevity drugs were bullshit, just like a lot of longevity claims

were bullshit. Because of this, the two things longevity field needed most were largely staying away. Top scientific talent and real investment money. Both of these had already been difficult to secure because aging was not, still is not, classified as a disease, and therefore there was no diagnosis to make and no government funding stream to tap into. But as we know now, anti-agent is a billion, billion, you know, like many billions dollar business. So how did we get from here, or excuse me, from there to here? The 2010s changed everything.

Even with the Sojin-Kato scandal and Sinclair's failed test, the next couple of years saw three major breakthroughs that would help bring anti-agent science away from perception of it being scientific fools gold and into being part of an area of mainstream and highly commercialized scientific study. Lots of money. The first was concordial. proof that biological immortality does not actually exclusively belong to the realm of science fiction that nature already does it. In 2012, British scientists at the University of Nottingham

discovered that a species of flatworm, this freshwater flatworm species, can overcome the process of aging to become potentially immortal. They do this by continually maintaining the telomeres, the protective ends of their DNA as they regenerate. It's fucking crazy, right? Some freshwater flower worms known as planarians are considered biologically immortal because they do not age. They don't actually die of old age. They can regrow their entire bodies from tiny cut pieces and clone themselves indefinitely. They can still die from disease, tervation, or predators. So they die, but they don't die from old age. They have special adult stem cells called neoblasts that make up a large part of their bodies and can turn into any type of cell.

And as these worms divide and regenerate, they maintain the protective ends of their DNA. again, those telomeres, meaning their cells, do not wear out or age, like, say, human cells do. This discovery gave researchers a glimpse of a future where human cells might age more slowly, or theoretically, not at all. There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.

It is an area which we call the twilight zone. Doesn't it feel fucking twilight zone-ish? This kind of stuff blows my mind, that there is some creature out there that just doesn't fucking die of old age. and through studying we could somehow adapt that ability to ourselves. The second big breakthrough shifted the goal away from slowing aging to trying to roll it back. In 2013, Spanish biologist Manuel Serrano and colleagues built on Shinya Yamanakas, earlier discovered that adult cells could potentially be reset to a younger state.

Serrano genetically engineered living mice to try and make them reset proteins inside their own bodies and it worked. the animal cells started to wind back towards a younger state, but there was a problem. The cells were pushed too far, almost back to an embryo-like state, and that caused tumors to grow in the mice that killed them. So obviously, this wasn't a practical treatment, but it was an important milestone. It showed that aging-related changes could be reversed inside of a living animal, not just in a lab dish. The third discovery fixed the, what is aging anyway's definition problem, at least on paper. in 2013 the Spanish molecular biologist Carlos Lopez Oteen and colleagues

published the hallmarks of aging laying out the main biological features of the aging process which for the first time gave the industry a shared map of exactly what to focus on basically you can't effectively treat a problem if you don't know exactly what the problem is but a map of course is not a cure nor does it translate directly to actual funding dollars

turning these aging hallmarks into actual treatments would take years deep pockets and a lot of collaborative work across the private and public sectors. And nobody was really game to do that for a time, which is why Google's next move mattered so much. In 2013, that was the year that the big money finally showed up in the longevity game.

But before we continue to move into the next phase of the longevity movement, or rather what some called the longevity circus, we need to pause and just briefly state exactly what the longevity movement's true focus is. The basic idea is that, that longevity advocates think mainstream medicine is fighting the wrong battle.

People working in the longevity space outside of regulated medical institutions say that instead of treating heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses one at a time, we need to focus on aging itself as the main problem that most of these diseases are essentially side effects of aging, as our DNA, you know, kind of breaks down.

And that we can, if we can slow down aging, you know, if we can delay or greatly reduce, you know, aging, then we can slow down or greatly reduce or eliminate many of these diseases as a big bonus. Okay, now back to the money. In 2013, Google became the first tech giant to plant a flag into the world of longevity with launch of Calico, the California Life Company. I mentioned them earlier when talking about research for Cynthia Kenyon, the current vice president of aging research at Calico, the woman who in 1993 took a tiny roundworm from a guinea pig, studied it, discovered that a single gene mutation would double the worm's lifespan. Calico,

was founded to study aging and all the diseases that come along with aging, including Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, you know, many others. Calico is one of the few spinouts from Google's so-called moonshot research program, which pump money into taking a crack at low percentage but high impact potential discoveries. They put Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech giant Genentech in charge, and with a $1 billion budget, Calico began studying mice, which have an average, lifespan of six years and naked mole rats with a lifespan of 30 years in order to map the aging process and extend their healthy lifespans. In addition, Gallico said to be tapping into Google's

huge cloud and data centers to sift through mountains of information and look for clues about where disease and aging began. With Google now on board and dumping a lot of money into the study of longevity and thus legitimizing in the eyes of a lot of other people and businesses with deep, deep pockets this field, the floodgates opened. More money poured in, which of course brought more big brains hoping to make important breakthroughs and get paid very handsomely for doing so. Following the launch of Calico came a serious push to find a drug that targets aging itself, and that led to the TAME study, which stands for targeting aging with metformin. Metformin, excuse me.

This was a series of nationwide clinical trials taken place over six years across research institutions across the U.S. to see whether or not a cheap diabetes drug called metformin could delay the diseases of aging. researchers already knew that a low dose of metformin extended the lifespan of middle-aged mice by about 5% helped delay age-related diseases so the tame studies came on top of earlier work showing that changing how animals use energy

can help them live longer the hope was that the same sort of thing could one day apply to people however tamed not quite receive enough funding to make the breakthroughs they felt you know were possible at least that's what they've claimed the mastermind behind it

near Barzilai I hope that if he could at least prove that one drug delays aging broadly, he could get the FDA to approve aging for a specific so-called indication, which would officially permit a drugs used to treat, prevent, or diagnose a particular disease or medical condition based on clinical trial data proving the benefits outweigh the risks. Get in the FDA to recognize aging itself as something doctors can actually treat, right, a disease basically, not just a fact of life, would, of course, be a massive leap forward for the It would just launch, you know, the approval of so many different trials.

Around the same time, another drug, Rapa Misen, which had been proven to extend lifespan and mice, started creeping into the anti-aging conversation. We'll explore that soon. Right now, to stay chronological in 2013 also, a UCLA scientist named Steve Horvath built the first biological age clock that measured how old your body is compared to your, like, literal age. basically just because people share a birthday. It doesn't mean they share that the, you know, the same biological age as how the thinking goes.

Like a lifelong smoker might be older for all intents and purposes, closer to death than somebody the same age who has never touched a cigarette. Horvath developed the first comprehensive analytical epigenetic clock. God damn, there's a lot of big words in this episode. Epigenetic. Referring to external modifications to DNA that turn genes on or off without changing the underlying genetic code. These changes act like cellular switchboards responding to age, environment, and lifestyle

to dictate how cells read blueprints. I feel like anybody who's ever gone to a high school or college reunion of like 10 or more years understands how much sense of bioclock or biological age means. Like I went to my 10-year high school reunion and I worked out pretty religiously between the ages of 18 and 28. I drank too much for a few years to be sure. Smoked about a half pack a day for a couple years, but also ran a bunch during those years. AID all right, did some form of cardio usually on top of running and then lifted wage consistently for most of those years.

And when I saw some former classmates who had not seen the inside of a gym since their last PE class of high school, people who have been smoking a pack or more cigarettes a day, drinking too much the whole 10 years, eating like shit that whole time, abusing pretty rough drugs like meth, it was fucking wild. How we did not look the same age at all. I mean, some classmates looked like they had not aged a day in a decade. Some, I felt like in a weird way almost looked younger. They were so healthy. But others looked like they showed up at the wrong reunion.

Some of those 28 years old, you know, 28-year-olds, they looked like they were like 40, easy. Just 10 years of rough living. Just abusing the fuck out of their bodies left them looking a good 20 years older than they were. Circling back to the mid-2010s again, there was some interesting and promising developments in the longevity movement, but regulated medicine and mainstream science, you know, move slowly. Clinical trials can take years, sometimes decades. Once the Silicon Valley money arrived, though, that brought people who had more cash than patients.

And things started to get pretty weird and entertaining pretty fast. Longevity research, no longer just a niche academic field who has become a playground for risk-taking billionaires who both wanted to live as long as possible and also make so much money off of others wanting to live as long as possible. It all really started in a big way at least with Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, a man who has just about everything except a way to escape death. A man who, as I record this, has an estimated net worth of approximately $27.1 to $32 billion, depending on market valuation. Born in West Germany, the 58-year-old moved to the U.S. as an infant before he started to attend grade school. His family moved to South Africa, South African occupied Namibia.

for six years before moving back to the U.S. when he was nine. Teal would end up going to Stanford, then working as a clerk, a securities lawyer, a speech writer, a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. From there, he founded Teal Capital Management in 1996 when he was 28. Then just two years later, when he was 30, co-founded PayPal. Then four years later, while he was PayPal as CEO, he sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion.

God damn. Went from a very rich young man to a very wealthy one. quickly then founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco, growing his and others' wealth tremendously, then launched a now very controversial Palantir a big data analysis company in 2003. He's been his chairman ever since in 2004. He became the first outside investor in Facebook, got a 10.2% stake for the bargain price of half a mill, sold out long ago, but if he had just never sold a single share,

his undiluted 10.2% stake in meta platforms, right, formerly Facebook, would theoretically now be worth that 500 million would now be worth, or excuse me, 500,000, would now be worth 143 billion. Pretty good return. Pretty decent return. We could easily do an entire episode about him, a very polarizing figure. He's been described as a libertarian or as a militarist, techno-libertarian, or as a conservative libertarian, a democracy skeptic authoritarian, a political. political theologian, and also by quite a few people as the Antichrist. In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote in the Libertarian Journal, Cato on board, I stand against confiscatory, confiscatory, like to confiscate, confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. That same here, he also famously wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, so that's fun, arguing that democratic expansion makes government collectivism

and taxes harder to stop. A March 2025 Bloomberg article labeled him the godfather of Doge. And his Palantir Technologies is very controversial, mainly because its powerful artificial intelligence and data integration software are deeply embedded in U.S. military, combat, domestic surveillance, ICE, immigration enforcement, critics worry about civil liberties, foreign tech dependence, and the political ideologies of its leadership.

Palantir's enhanced leads identification and targeting for enforcement, elite system is used in immigration enforcement operations for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics as its user guide states. According to investigation by 404-404 media, which obtained the guide, the app populates a map interface with targets for potential deportation, not only providing the location of targeted individuals, and a, quote, an address confidence score, but also allowing ICE officers to view additional information on potential targets, including names, photos, alien numbers, and date of birth. Basically, if you are worried about someday living in some kind of Orwellian surveillance state, then you should probably be worried about Palantir and Peter Thiel. And now I'll refocus on longevity. It just felt weird bringing up Peter Thiel and not saying anything about at least some of what makes him controversial,

kind of like, be kind of like bringing up Michael Jordan who just never mentioned that he played basketball. In 2014, Till announced on Bloomberg TV that he was taking HGH, human growth hormone, is part of a plan to try to live to the age of at least 120. He said, it helps maintain muscle mass, so you're much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis. Major medical institutions were skeptical of this claim. The Mayo Clinic warned that human growth hormone

also carries significant risks and that there is little evidence that helps healthy adults regain youth or energy. Jury is still out on HGH and HGH and HGH and precursors. Some swear by it, especially a lot of influencers in the strength sports and or bodybuilding space.

It has been clinically proven to reduce visceral fat. It has not been clinically proven to to increase much lean muscle mass, but a little bit. Most of it, though, tends to be water retention within muscles, makes your muscles look bigger as opposed to them actually being stronger and having more fibers. Places like the Mayo Clinic still advertise that there are few clinically proven benefits for HGH supplementation, but many proven risks. Like an increased likelihood of joint muscle and nerve pain,

swelling in the arms and legs, fluid retention. You know, same thing that's the cause of the swelling. Increased risk of high blood pressure. Excuse me, oh my God. Increased risk of high blood sugar. My body's not fucking cooperating. I feel great today. Just one of those weird things.

You sit down on a microphone. You're like, oh, I feel great. And then my sinus is like, hey, what if we drain constantly in the background the whole time you're talking? And then my chest is like, hey, how about we get weird air bubbles? Just the whole fucking time you're talking. Would that be fun for you? No.

Anyway, growth of certain cancerous tumors, abnormal bone and organ growth if taking a high doses. Maybe more studies down the road will prove the anecdotal fitness gains. Many of its users swear they have achieved thanks to it are real. Time will tell, right? Time will tell obviously with so much of this. Taking some HGH with just the beginning for Peter Thiel's fitness journey. In 2016, an ink magazine interview with Teal was published in which Teal expressed interest in something called paribiosis. which is technically a surgical laboratory technique

that physically connects two living organisms to establish a shared circulatory system. Think of a conjoined twin, but in like a fucking nightmare horror movie way. In this case, it's the experimental anti-aging process of infusing older bodies with the plasma or blood of young people. Basically getting a special blood transfusion

from a younger person. It's like just pretend you're a vampire and you want young blood. Teal's interest came from a series of experiments that found the muscles, brains, and organs of old mice, were partially rejuvenated when they shared the blood of a young mouse. The younger animals in return appeared to age if the transfusion was reversed.

According to Teal, this research pointed towards a biological fountain of youth. The closest thing science had discovered to an anti-aging panacea, some miracle elixir, some medieval alchemist dream, right, a single solution or remedy that can pretty much cure all diseases or solve all your problems. Snake oil, but real, snake oil that works. Research into paribiosis began in the same thing. the 1950s with some pretty fucking brutal experiments that you're not going to enjoy hearing about if you are not into animal testing. Like rats being cut open and there's circulatory systems being stitched together.

Like stitched to another rats circulatory system. Think World War II, Unit 731, you know, Dr. Joseph Mengula, torture porn shit, but with rats. That technique fell out of favor after the 1970s. Likely because a bunch of rats who survived the initial mutilation, would die later from a mysterious condition termed parabolic disease. Actually, is it that mysterious? This is a fatal circulatory complication

due to one animal, pumping more blood into another than it receives back. The recipient animal becomes overloaded with extra blood volume. The donor animal becomes anemic and weak and fucking dies. Or mismatches in immune cells can also cause the animal's bodies to reject one another's blood and they both die.

I mean, I think it's weird that they ever fucking survived in the first place being stitched together. Anyway, Teal saw this air. area as full of potential and one that was being held back by red tape. According to Teal, paribiosis is, quote, one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s, and then it got dropped altogether. I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely under explored.

It's fucking cut to a, cut to surveillance video footage of his basement where he has a bunch of fucking kids tied up and, you know, their bodies, their veins fucking cut out and pulled out of their bodies and tied to one another. Please, Mrs. Thiel, it hurts. We must make progress. children, like some real fucking adrenachrome, you know, Illuminati shit. Him saying that did lead to an explosion of headlines,

screaming about a Silicon Valley billionaire who wants to inject himself with the blood of children. People were alarmed. Some people. Others, I'm intrigued. Less than 100 miles from Silicon Valley in Monterey, California. Ambrosia, an anti-aging startup founded that same year, 2016, by Jesse Karmazin, launched a trial called

Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-related Biomarkers. The study enrolled Healthy adults, age 35 and older, who got a transfusion of blood plasma from donors who were under the age of 25 and then were monitored for biomarker changes linked to health and aging.

The study was patient-funded. The receiving participants who ranged in age from their late 30s through their 80s were required to pay $8,000 to take children's blood, or young people's blood. But some of them were children. Since Ambrosia could not directly hire those under 25, which under 25 group did include teens.

The FDA has rules that people can't be compensated for their blood. Well, the startup relied on donor facilities. This all sounded perfect for somebody like teal, risky, expensive, exactly the kind of thing, a billionaire with money to burn might think is being worth a gamble. This gamble, at least based on what we know publicly, not a good one, not as good as the Facebook stock gamble. while Dr. Carmesan would informally claim that his blood test measuring roughly 100 biomarkers showed really positive changes such as reduced levels of certain aging and disease-associated biomarkers along with subjective improvements in sleep, appearance, and memory for participants. No formal peer-reviewed scientific results were ever published,

and mainstream scientists and medical professionals heavily criticized a trial because it was not randomized, not blinded, not placebo-controlled, etc. Then a few years later, in February 2019, the, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a severe public warning stating that there was no proven clinical benefit to infusing young plasma for anti-aging, dementia, or other conditions. And they highlighted potential risks like potentially fatal, severe, allergic, or infectious reactions from doing this. Following the FDA's statement, Ambrosia immediately halted treatment and then shut down commercial operations altogether. But this was not Teal's only attempt to defy normal aging. He also signed up with the Arizona-based cryonics company Alcor, the world leader in cryonics, to be deep frozen, when or if he ever dies, according to Teal.

When it comes to death, quote, you can accept it, you can deny it, or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance. I prefer to fight it. Cryonics, I was fascinated by this shit when I read about it first as a kid. Is the practice of preserving a body for potential future reanimation after the person has been legally declared dead. It works, maybe. It theoretically is supposed to work. No one's ever been resurrected yet. By suspending the body an extremely cold liquid nitrogen to preserve it indefinitely.

Doing so halts the dying process as quickly as possible after lethal death. Giving future doctors the best possible chance of reviving the patient by repairing or replacing damaged tissues or even entire organs using advanced theoretical computer tech later. Sounds like science fiction. Might be. People have been freeze themselves since 1960s, though. Let me give you a brief history on cryonic science or the cryonic industry, I guess, while we're here since it's related to longevity and it's fucking weird. The first person to agree to be frozen was James Bedford, who in the mid-1960s was a retired psychology professor, dying of kidney cancer in Glendale, California.

He died in 1967, but years earlier, he decided that he'd wanted his body preserved by freezing for later, later potential revival. He'd left $4,200 for a steel capsule and a bunch of liquid nitrogen to keep his body frozen. And upon dying, his physician immediately began to pack his body in ice. Members of the Cryonic Society of California quickly arrived to help. I picture them wearing like aluminum foil-colored little weird alien-type outfits. We must help rephrase your body. Just like weird, like Star Trek type fans.

They spent about eight hours prepping his corpse for transport. it, sending out periodically for more ice, working to make sure the body was frozen solid. They also used artificial respiration and external heart massage to protect the brain from oxygen loss damage until it was frozen, then drained out the blood and replaced it with antifreeze solutions. That's odd. That part seems crazy, a little hard to undo later, but, you know, whatever. I'm not the cryonics expert. Professor Bedford's Popsicle Body was in flown to Phoenix where Edward Hope, a wig maker by trade.

So that sounds legit. waited with the capsule the professor had chosen and placed his remains in liquid nitrogen storage. Good, good, good. Get the wig guy on that. Underline all this was a hope that when cures for cancer are eventually discovered, Bedford's body can be thought out, cured, and restored to a healthy life. Even though he'll still be very old, and everyone he ever knew or loved will be dead, and he'll be living in a world very unfamiliar to him that he might loathe. How darkly funny in a way, if he is successfully brought back someday, like 20 years from now. But then a week after he's brought back, he's already thrown himself off of a fucking bridge because he didn't fully think through how traumatic this would be. Most doctors and scientists, according to a timepiece from 1967, thought his quest to be revived later was just madness.

Here's an excerpt from that article. The fact is that although some of the lower forms of life, such as bacteria, can survive freezing and thawing, no higher animal can, and certainly not man. Not even a single major human organ can be thus preserved. The National Naval Medical Center, the world's foremost freeze bank, stores only three types of tissue, corneas, skin, and bone marrow cells. Frozen red blood cells and sperm will also keep for months or years. It is not for want of trying that researchers have failed to preserve whole organs for a frozen kidney bank would be invaluable to the transplantation. Or transplantation. Basically, they thought there was no chance in hell that he will ever be unthought and revived.

In 1991, when Professor James Bedford's corpse was removed from storage to be evaluated, his body was found to be very well preserved, but with some freezer burn damage. You know, he had pretty badly discolored skin and, quote, frozen blood coming out of his mouth and nose. No mention of anti-freeze leaking out of him. If he ever does get reanimated, I bet he's not going to feel very good, you know, and he's going to look fucking rough. Oh, dating's going to be a real problem. In the 1980s, Cryonic Company started to freeze only people's.

heads, but not their bodies, based on the idea that our brains can be transplanted, supported by machines, or uploaded to computers in the future. So that's not creepy at all. Dr. Bedford remains, his remains are still frozen today. Maul Cryonix has never proven. It can bring anybody back. Like I mentioned, the idea has been strong enough to keep attracting believers in the years since Dr. Bedford, an estimated 700 plus people worldwide have been cryogenically preserved after death. And Peter Thiel will join their ranks if his attempts at longevity don't work. In recent years, he has kept experimenting,

donating millions into research aimed at reversing all human ailments, including the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit attempting to make 90, the new 50 by 2030. Ooh, they don't got much time. If they're close to that goal, they've stayed real quiet about it.

They haven't published any groundbreaking findings ever. Also in 2016, that was a big year for longevity, apparently. Other tech billionaires started to invest in anti-aging. And I'll dig into that right after the second of two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors.

Hope you heard some deals you liked. Now let's see what other tech billionaires started to, how they started to invest big and anti-aging in 2016. A Silicon Valley startup called Unity Biotechnology raised $116 million from investors, including Peter Thiel and Amazon's Jeff Bezos to create therapies that flush out

senescent cells, which are like the body's biological zombies, damaged, unable to divide, but still metabolically alive. These cells linger in the body infect healthy cells and can contribute to age-related decline. This company would go public in 2018,

reaching a market capitalization of $700 million before folding last year after a series of disappointing trials. A lot of money down the drain. And all that money being poured into anti-aging ventures that have resulted in nothing but a lot of wasted money in time

in many instances have rubbed some people the wrong way. In response to the founding of Calico, Google's longevity comes company I talked about earlier. Bill Gates of Microsoft wrote on Reddit, it seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. However, Bill, this is not just a movement for billionaires and private labs. The same urge of don't wait, hack your biology now has also spread amongst people with far less money and far less protection. Aaron Treywick became one of the most infamous faces of the fringe biohacking movement, and

Eventually, one of its most tragic. Aaron grew up in a middle-class family, lived in the tiny little 1,200-person-ish town of Elmore, Alabama, adopted the age of seven. There's not much we know about his biological family, although according to his adoptive mother, his parents had mental health struggles. Aaron's adoptive dad was a welder, his mom and nurse, who worked at a rehab facility. Growing up, Aaron was a smart kid, smart enough that he was a bully magnet, frequently beat up for being different. Right. Fear of the other. Such a primal thing. It's crazy how many people. people sadly never grow out of that. At home, Aaron's childhood was largely spent help and care for dying grandparents.

In later interviews, he would describe a clear memory that haunted him of his grandma hooked up to a ventilator and the hospital effectively telling the family, if you pay us, we can keep her alive longer. From an early age, Aaron hated aging and all that came with it. His adopted father would develop emphysema soon after his grandma got sick and his new great fear became having to watch him die. After school, Aaron studied at the nearby University of Montefiomerokee. to Valo via online courses, graduated with an interdisciplinary studies degree, while his

interest in life expectancy and longevity continued to grow. His hero was Dr. Jonas Sock, the scientists who had tested an early polio vaccine on himself, which tells you exactly where his head was. Aaron was drawn to the spectacle of self-experimentation. He admired those who he felt were brave and heroic enough to offer up their own bodies for the greater good, or more often than not, to try and get enhanced abilities before regulators gave them the go-ahead. These people were called biohackers, and they came from a wide range of backgrounds, varying from no formal scientific training to professional careers in molecular biology, tech, or medicine. One of the earliest high-profile biohacks came after former NASA scientist,

Josie Zainer, began selling basic gene editing kits from her garage, despite warnings from the FDA that selling unapproved gene therapy products was legal. Josie later injected herself on stage in front of an audience, pulling out a syringe, apparently containing DNA and other chemicals designed to trigger genetic change in the cells associated with dramatically increased muscle mass. Josie became the first person to use the revolutionary gene editing tool CRISPR to try and change their own genes. She does not seem to have figured out how to reverse the aging process, though, but she does look good for the age of 45. Doesn't seem to have hurt herself.

Biohacking started in the late 1980s as a do-it-yourself biology and practice and expanded into garage labs in the mid-2000s. Back then, biohacking defined as working outside of academia and the medical industry that made biohackers essentially guinea pigs who offered up their own bodies as labs injecting or implanting things inside of themselves to see if that would lead to a cure or better treatment nowadays biohacking mainly refers to optimizing everyday habits like sleep diets supplements measuring the results however in the late 2000s there was a real national security fear about biohacking for example what would happen if some bad actor got involved with biohacking and you know radical self-experimentation gave themselves something dangerous that was contagious

and spread of the general population. FBI took that risk seriously enough that in 2009, agents began to show up at biohacker conferences to warn participants and encourage a sort of neighborhood watch amongst legitimate biohackers, encourage them to flag, you know, if they heard about anything suspicious slash dangerous going on.

Can't have Vot industries forming, giving that compound, feed everybody, and creating superheroes, like on the boys. Refocusing on biohacker Aaron Treywick now, consume with prolonging human life and brilliant, like many other biohackers, he was offered a job by his lobbyist cousin, Edwina Rogers, and from there, drawn into Washington, D.C.,'s public health policy orbit.

Started to work at her nonprofit, the Global Health Ban Policy Institute, and in the span of only two years, Aaron went from a virtual unknown to a notorious personality in the biohacking community. In 2016, when he was either 26 or 27, he founded his own company, Ascendance Biomedical. Its goal was to develop and test new gene therapies without the expense and rigor of clinical trials, or the oversight of the FDA.

Aaron's model was to scout out establish DIY DIY biohackers who are already making progress on their own experiments and offer them funding, lab equipment, and distribution as long as they developed those therapies solely for his company.

He promised them equity and research funding. He would reach out to biohackers who wanted to run experiments and offer to buy whatever hardware or biological materials they said they needed. So he didn't do the actual science himself. He just brought together these freelance biologists, got them to run the experiment

and focused on raising funding and promoting results. And promote he did. Didn't take long before he was well known for risky attention-grabbing stunts, like the unregulated HIV gene therapy experiments that put ascendance on the map. Prior research had already identified a person with an unusual, naturally occurring resistance to HIV, and Aaron and his biohacker's plan was to find an HIV-positive person, give them the genetic instructions to produce that same antibody.

If that were to work, they would have discovered a cure for the HIV virus, and from there, right, possibly created a blueprint from which to fight, you know, other viruses off, potentially all viruses off. In statements and interviews, Aaron argued that governments and drug companies are incentivized to keep people sick, since a cured patient will stop buying medication. But he cared more about a cure than profits, he insisted, as he reached out to people who were HIV-positive, presenting them, excuse me, as candidates to test this therapy. In October of 2017, the company got to, gather volunteer, a computer programmer named Tristan Roberts, who agreed to inject himself

with the sentence's untested gene therapy to see if it would cure his HIV. A sentence live streamed the entire thing. Another reason why Aaron began to attract the IRA of both the biohacking community and regulators was his use of the C word. Cure. The following month in November of 2017, the FDA issued a statement making clear that selling gene therapy products intended for self-administration and DIY kits for self-administration was a legal. By now it was not just the biohacking community that was paying attention. Still, Aaron followed up his stunt in February of 2018. His team of biohackers had handed him in experimental herpes treatment, syringe, told him to find a place to test it, quiet and low key, as he still, you know,

it was still very much in the experimental phase. They made it clear the treatment was not likely a cure, not yet. In fact, it could have been years away from even being safe or anywhere close to being a solution, however, at body hacks, B-D-Y-H-A-X, this biohacking conference in Austin, Texas, Aaron blindsided his team and the crowd by taking the stage, dropping his pants, injecting the untested herpes gene therapy into his own leg, all while being live-streamed. Also announced that the company's technology could be used to address a panoply of genetic diseases, but that wasn't true. Tristan Roberts, for example, still had HIV.

Aaron Treywick still would have herpes. Your mom and your uncle would both still have HPV, herpes, and HIV. Right, how about that? Ascendance biomedical had cured nothing. Aaron's follows claims in theatrics upset a lot of other biohackers. Testing something so unproven, so publicly felt like a step too far, even for people working outside of, you know, regulated bodies.

A lot of people considered reckless by many other people thought Aaron was especially reckless and that what he was doing was discrediting the work of all of them. also a lot of people thought his Austin stunt was mostly about money and control many of the biohackers working for him began to accuse him of wanting to take their work and commercialize it for profit right his profit not theirs Aaron pushed back and says all he wanted to do was make therapies free and save for everybody his critics and asked well that was true why not make it open source right share all your information well he didn't have his response for that after his biohackers turned on him Aaron locked them out of his lab space which had previously been their lab space. So now he's pissing people off for all kinds of reasons. He kept the various people he worked with away from one another so he could control everything, try to take control of collaborators' inventions and push them out before they were fully tested, including this vibrating penile implant called the Lovetron 9,000. In exchange for funding it, Treywick wanted 75% of the profits

while offering its actual creator richly only five grand. And before moving on, I can't not talk about the Lovetron 9,000 penile implant. I mean, you didn't just expect me to gloss over that, did you? It doesn't seem that this thing ever actually made it to market. But it sounds pretty miraculous and genius in concept. In theory, you would have your penis amputated. That's the bad part. That's a tough part.

And then basically, you have this dildo base surgically implanted into your groin that will be connected to your nervous system through various wires so you can still feel the sensation of touch and have orgasms through one of the many high-tech dildo attachments you put on that base. The dildo base would also be attached to your balls. There'd be some little tubes down there, so actual sperm could go into the dildos and be shot out. You know, when you wanted sperm, shot out. You could also turn that feature off for some built-in birth control.

You could just have fun with it. You could preload your tubes with organic, like edible synthetic cum and different flavor profiles so that, you know, if your partner is down for a facial, they could have orange cream sickle or grape flavor. you could also choose from different attachments for different like vibrating sensations you could have a one that's kind of like a jackhammer like pumps back and forth you could have one with a camera on it

if you'd like to see the inside of your partner's anal cavity or mouth or vagina or if you just want like a different camera angle and porn if you have the funds you can even upgrade to specialized attachments that would allow you to do things like you know fuck your own butt that was there really had a lot of hope around that one

that a lot of people would want to buy the fuck-your-own-but-dil-dil-do. Just so much room for activities. And I'm so full of shit. No, the Lovtron 9,000, not nearly that exciting. According to an old 2018, the next web.com article, quote, the Lovetron 9,000 device will be inserted beneath the skin of the pelvis to enhance the shared experience of lovemaking, emanating a passionate vibration that connects you to your partner.

It'll provide a range of speeds and vibrations, which can be synced to your favorite music. The device is implanted in less than 50 minutes, ready to use, two, weeks after installation. Once installed, it'll offer a range of texture, speeds, and vibrations. Also has a special feature that sinks, yeah, the rhythmic vibrations, blah, blah, blah, to music. Uses a wireless inductive charger to provide power. It needs only 20 minutes to charge for 30 minutes of use. So it sounds kind of lame. Basically, it's just like a little vibration thing, a little pad. You just get stuck into your pelvis. It's not really a new dick. But it never ended up even doing that, because the company would quickly fold. After Traywick and Lee got into an argument about who should

get what from its sale. And then very quickly after that argument, Treywick died. Just two months after his Austin stunt, Aaron Treywick checked into a sensory deprivation float tank at a spa in Washington, D.C. His float session was scheduled to run for an hour, and when he did not emerge after that hour,

one of the spa's co-owners came to check on the room, found the door ajar, which was unusual, as clients tended to float naked, and would keep the door closed for privacy. The room was dark. As a spa worker lifted the lid off of Aaron's tank, the water had already drained out, was Aaron Treywigs' lifeless body.

Following Treywigs' death, everybody had a theory or an opinion. Biohackers were confused and wondered if he was actually dead or if this was another publicity stunt. David Ishi, a researcher for Treywigs' company, Ascendant's Biomedical, said his first thought on hearing the body had been found in a float tank was that Aaron faked it and ran off with his client's money.

Tristan Roberts, another biohacker who worked with his sentence. That guy with HIV thought the same. He thought maybe the body was a very convincing clone. Kelly Martin, who helped found descendants, had a darker theory. She pointed to Treywick's final video in which he hinted the company was on the verge of something revolutionary, a disruptive technology that would upend Big Pharma. Kelly asked, was Aaron Treywick murdered?

Did the Illuminati get in because he discovered a magical elixir, some kind of immortality device that would bankrupt every existing Big Pharma corporation in existence and bring the modern medical establishment to its knees? Well, the police stated They did not suspect foul play Which they would state if they'd been bought They listed the cause of death As drowning caused by self-induced

ketamine intoxication Edwina Rogers, Treywick's cousin Said and a police detective told her That he found a packet of ketamine in his pants pocket And she thinks it's likely he took the drug Lost consciousness in the tank and drowned His adoptive family had similar thoughts They believed that perhaps he slipped

After the session, fell back in Because of all the ketamine in his system you know, known ketamine user. If Traywick was the longevity movement's cautionary tale, all confidence and no data, the man who'd become the longevity movement's new and more well-known public face was the opposite, where Aaron trusted his gut,

Brian Johnson trusted numbers. While Traywick claimed he was trying to save everybody else, Johnson focused on something more personal, trying to save himself, from himself. Let's meet this interesting guy. Brian Johnson is your mom's new boyfriend. Don't fucking get mad of me! She's dating him.

You talk to her. No, he is the face of the don't die movement. But he didn't start out as somebody obsessed with wanting to live forever. Like Treywick, he actually was a guy who for a while wanted to have his life be over. Brian Johnson was born August 22nd, 1977 in Provo, Utah. grew up in a small Mormon community. His grandfather owned a farm with horses. I don't know if they fucked him.

I don't know if the horses, you know, would fuck them. I know how many, I know a lot of you want to know that. And I don't have those answers. Johnson and his four siblings spent most of their time. outdoors harvesting alfalfa and corn. Johnson served his Mormon mission in Ecuador, then went to Brigham Young University, like a good Mormon boy who goes pee-pee on the potty. I prays B. Started his first business in college when he was broken desperate, selling mobile phones as a way to pay for his tuition. He hired other university students to sell service plans and the phones

themselves. Johnson earned an average of about 300 bucks a commission on each sale. He was very entrepreneurial, started two other businesses while he was in his early 20s. InQuest, excuse me, a voiceover IP or internet protocol company. He co-founded with three other partners. Basically combined features of Vonage and Skype. Didn't last long. Folded in 2001 after that, he quickly joined his brother and another partner,

some partner with Deep Pockets, on a $70 million real estate venture. That's, you know, in that same year. That project did not meet sales goals, quickly folded. Like a lot of Mormons, like most, in fact, he also married young. In 2004, while still in his mid-20s,

his first kid was born, his son, as many babies are, his son was colicky. Now his nights were sleepless. He was burnt out, broke, trying to get another startup up and running to support his young family. He was exhausted. And as he tells it, he fell into a deep, deep depression that would last for roughly a decade. He said, I did not want an afterlife. I didn't want this life.

I didn't want consciousness at all. But despite being plagued with suicidal ideation, he did not stop working and pushing forward. He kept grinding, got an MBA from the University of Chicago, graduated from their booth school of business in 2007. That same year, founded another new company, a payments company called Braintree. And this time, jackpot.

Holy shit. Four years later in 2001, BrainTree ranked 47th on Inc. Magazine's annual list of 500 fastest growing companies. Good God. Very next year in 2012, Braintree acquired Venmo for 26.2 million. And the year after that,

in 2013, the combined company sold to PayPal for roughly 800 million. And Johnson Walker away with more than 300 million personally. Holy fuck. He had just turned 36. He was worth, well, whatever of the 300 million would be left after taxes, plus whatever his net worth already was at that time.

It was probably worth somewhere around 200 million, which means he could have put $100 million into the safest most conservative investment ever, right? Like stuff like bonds and money market accounts, guaranteed money, collected $4 million a year off a conservative 4% interest and just fucked around with the other 100 mil. but he wasn't just living the high life. He was depressed. He blew up his life, ended his marriage, walked away from the Mormon faith. His parents stopped talking to him. He lost access to the three

kids he and his wife had had together. He kept working too much. He would work until the point of exhaustion. Then in the evening, collapse into a binge eating leftover cookies, trays of brownies, anything within reach. He gained 50 pounds. He would wake up every day, feeling ashamed of himself, his sleep was suffering, his focus was suffering, self-esteem is, you know, plummeting despite the money. eventually desperate to be happy, he decided his mind was working against him and that his own decisions could not be trusted. So he fired himself.

Kind of. I think I get what he's saying, though. He said he stopped treating his own thoughts as an authority and started treating them as an unreliable bad manager of his own survival. And if his mind-making decisions was the problem, why let it stay in charge? So he replaced it.

He began stripping his wants, cravings, and impulses out of the equation entirely. In their place, he decided that his dick would be in charge. And for the next two years, he did nothing but fucking masturbate. No, he decided his body overall would be in charge. It would decide what was best for him now.

Basically, he demoted his conscious mind, promoted his body, which I know doesn't make total sense because you only have one brain that does literally all of the thinking and your body doesn't actually think at all. It's not like your liver has a brain.

But again, I think I understand what he's saying here. He got more logical and data-based and took his emotions out of the equation. He had hundreds of biomarkers analyzed and tracked obsessively. And he treated himself more like a robot than a human being.

He let data, dictate what he would eat, when he would sleep, how he would move, everything. His body's biometrical data generated the instructions. His job was to follow them. According to Brian Johnson, this was the real fight, not against death itself, but against the slow daily failures of self-control that lead us there. Brian said in the 2025 Netflix documentary about him, don't die, the man who wants to live forever, removing my mind has been the best thing I've ever done in my life.

He said he leaned further and further into this new approach, tracking data, adjusting variables, testing new health protocols, and his new and ongoing effort to push the limits of his own longevity. Soon he had redefined his life mission into a single punchy soundbite of don't die. Sounds like he took the same combination of work ethic and discipline and ability to hyper-focus on a singular goal that had led to so much success in the entrepreneurial world and then applied that towards the new goal of being the healthiest person he could possibly be. Does he have OCD? Sounds like he might, though that's never been revealed as far as some kind of diagnosis.

Now let's take a break from Brian. Briefly check back in on what Peter Thiel has been up to, kind of. Around the same period, Brian Johnson was getting started on his quest for longevity, interest in young donor blood plasma transfusions to older clients like the kind Peter Thiel took was spreading. And many more startups popped up between 2016 and 2019 following Ambrosia's lead. However, by 2019, the FDA had had enough. The government regulatory agency stepped in saying it was, quote, concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors. charging thousands of dollars for transfusions that are probably doing more harm than good.

The FDA stated that the practice should not be assumed to be safe or effective. Ambrosia stopped operations almost immediately after the FDA's announcement, as I mentioned earlier, when I got ahead of myself. But now in 2019, there were two other interventions making the trendy rounds around longevity circles. That year, Brian Johnson started dosing himself with rapamycin, a drug I briefly mentioned earlier. This drug best known for suppressing the immune system, to prevent transplant rejection, but now also had shown promise in extending the lifespan of mice. Again, could the same be true for humans? That's what the researchers wanted to, of course,

find out. Then came David Sinclair's book, Lifespan, published on September 10th, 2019, which outlined the benefits of metformin, a cheap diabetes drug we discussed earlier, that also extends the lifespan of mice. This book became a bestseller, helped push the drug into the mainstream. Dr. Daniel Berlardo, there we go, in Las Angeles-based cardiologists soon said she regularly fielded requests for off-label metformin from people who had read Lifespan and she had a message for them. Knock it off. Stop waste your money on supplements pushed by longevity influencers. What the fuck are you doing on TikTok? They're fucking scamming your stupid ass. She didn't say that last part, but it was strongly implied. She did say that at best it is money down the drain and at worst you're going to hurt yourself. Meanwhile, Brian Johnson now began to hire personal doctors, this big team. He built a team of more than 30 doctors and health experts. led by physician Oliver Zulman, dedicated to helping him figure out

how to greatly extend his lifespan so others could follow in his footsteps. Over the next few years, Brian would spend millions developing a life extension system that will become known as Project Blueprint. Between 2019 and 2023, spent more than $4 million on this project,

which outsources decisions about his body to a team of doctors who used data to design a very strict health regiment aimed at lowering his biological age. In 2023, time correspondent Charlotte Alter visited Brian, to report on what life looks like for somebody pursuing a goal to not die.

Each morning, Ryan said, he wakes up between 4.30 and 5 a.m. His bedroom is almost completely empty. No photos, no books, no TV, no glass of water on the nightstand, no phone charger, no phone, no clothes waiting to be put away, no towels, no mirror, no nothing

that could possibly distract him from his sleep. Sounds more like a fucking sad prison cell than a bedroom, but okay. While asleep, he will wear, small device on his fucking dick that measures his nocturnal erections not even kidding this time and then he'll check that date upon waking

according to Brian quote I have on average two hours and 12 minutes each night of erection of a certain quality so like you know half chub full chub to be age 18 it would be three hours and 30 minutes so that's his goal he wants to get

three and a half hours of nighttime boners that's a real quote anyone else thinks that a bow Boner tracker that you wear in your dick at night might be more distracting and harmful to your sleep than, I don't know, a glass of water on a nightstand. Yeah, me too.

I'm surprised by how much dick stuff there is in this topic. After going over boner data, Brian then weighs himself on a scale. They uses electrical impedance to measure his weight, body mass index, hydration level, body fat, something called pulse wave velocity, how fast the pressure wave moves through your arteries after each heartbeat.

Then he switches on his light therapy lamp, which mimics sunlight for two to three minutes to reset a circadian rhythm. After that, he takes an inner ear temperature to track changes in his body, then starts the day with two ferretin pills to boost his iron intake, along with vitamin C.

Then he takes so many other supplements. He'll take over 100 pills a day. He'll wash his face, use a wrinkle preventing cream, put on a laser light mask for five minutes, with red and blue lights designed to stimulate collagen growth and control blemishes.

At 6 a.m., his morning routine is almost complete, and he'll walk downstairs to really start his day. He'll use a little, vibrating device against the side of his nose to stimulate a nerve that apparently helps with your eyes creating tears because you gotta fucking open up your tear ducts if you want to live longer. For breakfast he'll make a green giant smoothie. A concoction containing chloralopausea powder with spermidine, amino acid complex, creatine, collagen peptides,

cocoa flavonols, cinnamon and more. Then he'll do a set of exercise designed to improve his grip strength. Not sure if that's a code for jerking off. Then he'll head into his home gym, which is decorated with Florida ceiling forest mural. So it's nice and peaceful. And he'll begin an hour long workout, you know, some weight training and stuff, cardio. After his workout, Johnson will eat a meal of steam vegetables and lentils that have been blended.

Oh, yum. He'll then go to work, working on his social media posts, investing strategies, longevity, research, you know, whatever. While working, he'll eat more healthy food and supplements early in the day, but stop eating by noon, beginning an 18-hour daily fast to lower his resting heart rate and optimized digestion. And some of this stuff is, like, changed over the years.

But this is, like, at one point in time. He'll stop working out by 7.30 p.m., hopefully earlier, take a short walk, then avoid screens or social media for the rest of the day, which will not be very long, because he hopes by 8 p.m., he'll be applying a multi-step evening skin care routine, including moisturizers, vitamin C, tritinowin, some prescription topical retinoid, derived from vitamin A, used to treat acne, reduce the appearance of fine wrinkles and sun damage. He'll wind down for bed with the gallo beinous. sleep by 8.30 in his cold, sterile, soulless fucking prison cell of a room. Also, as he recommends in a blog post, he is mindful of the following. Read a book 10 minutes before bed. In the 60 minutes before bed, do your hobby. Listen to a podcast. Read. Go for a walk. Listen to a walk. Journal. Journal. Meditate. Call a friend. Things that calm your mind.

Be mindful of stimulants like caffeine, which has a half-life of six hours. A cup of coffee at 4 p.m. leaves a half-a-cup of coffee in your system at 10 p.m. When you are trying to go to sleep. Use red and amber lights in the evening. Be-poop, bat, boop, beep-boop. Blue light is bad for sleep. You can get blue light blocking apps, glasses, and also turn red boat on your phone. No fights after 5 p.m.

Fight in the morning when you are well-rested. Beep, beep, boop. Fuck. I get wanting to live longer, but I'm not sure I'd want to live to 150 or 100 or fucking 50 which is lessening your away from me, if I had to follow

that strict-ass boring fucking regiment every day. Control your emotions like a robot. Not too much joy before bed. No anger after meals when you are digesting. Do not grunt too hard when you come. Keep your shoulder blades

protected while you jerk off. Make sure and eat no less than 23 green peas, but no more than 27 on odd days of the month. Do not ever think about the color red between 4.40 p.m. and 506 p.m. I'll stop. Is living in that sort of highly regimented way just fun for anybody? Is that an enjoyable life? Or is that a self-imposed, like, prison sense? Not a lot of room in Brian's plan for joy. Not a lot of room in his plan for spontaneity, live music, getting too high

from time to time, making memories with your kids, playing video games late, going out to a movie with your wife, getting some sex toys, getting freaky because you're both horny, staying up later because there's a meteor shower and you just think shooting stars are fucking magical and cool and on and on. In 2021, Johnson began posting his biological measurements online from his resting heart rate and plaque index

to images of his intestines taken with a small bowel camera and sharing YouTube videos about his exercise regimen in experimental therapy. He, I could fucking do a whole episode about him. He, they're, talk about TMI. I feel like I'm a TMI person. I've never seen a TMI person be like worse than Brian Johnson.

I mean, he'll talk about everything. I ate my wife's pussy and then analyze the taste of it. And she has the cleanest vagina. I mean, he literally will talk about you like that. His videos have drawn millions of views. And about 180,000 people signed up for his newsletter in the first five months. We'll check back in with his strange,

regimented anti-aging quest again soon. In early 2020, biotech startup, Altos Labs, launched with about $3 billion in funding from investigators, including Amazon founder, executive chairman,

former presidents, possible robot, CEO Jeff Bezos, world's richest human for several years, guy currently worth around $300 billion, likes to cosplay as a cowboy.

Another investor, Yuri Milner, Soviet-born, Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist, scientist, only worth about $9 billion. But,

What a fucking bum? What are you supposed to do with the $9 billion? Huh? Buy the most expensive fucking biggest yacht in the world. Get one of the most expensive private properties that's ever existed in the world and still have billions left over. Okay. Yeah, he'll be fine. Thanks largely to these two nerds.

Altos Labs launch as one of the best funded biotech startups ever. Its focus was on the Yamanata, excuse me, Yamonaka factors, a group of four specific proteins that can rewind adult body cells back into a young pluripotent pluripotent stem cell youthful state and yes this is the Yamanaka

as in Shinya Yamanaka the Japanese stem cell researcher who made a game-changing longevity discovery earlier Alto Slabs has Alto Slabs has now all I want to do is talking like a robot

which is so annoying I know they have a slightly different pitch than a lot of other longevity startups they're not pushing for immortality their goal is to extend health span in other words to help people stay healthier longer,

which is the goal of pretty much every human ever, ever to live. They would go on to study biological reprogramming, a technique meant to reset cells in the lab and possibly one day repair tissues and slow aging. That work again, focused on the Yamanaka factors, those proteins that can restore cells to a more useful state. To do that, cell biologist and entrepreneur, Richard D. Klausner, Dick K., co-founder,

and this co-founder and his backers lured dozens of top scientists and professors offering sports star kind of salaries of, you know, a million or more a year plus equity. And he put them to work on what the company called rejuvenation programming. Dick was the 11th director of the National Cancer Institute between 1995 and 2001, by the way,

where he managed the staff of about 5,000 people, annual budget of $4.5 million, worked as a liaison to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was the chief strategy advisor for U.S.Aid and so many other things. Just incredible resume. also joining altos was steve horvath developer of the biological clock won carlos uh ipasua spanish biologists who gained notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos who has predicted the human lifespans can be increased to uh increased by 50 years so top talent uh and of course top talent would now be working on this stuff uh because longevity was now a multi billion dollar industry now let's check back in with nocturnal boner boy brian johnson by twenty 23 the aptly named johnson had uh

data to show off that he considered encouraging. At 46 years old, he said his bones tested like a 30-year-olds, his heart like a 37-year-olds, though he was still far off his target of having a dick like an 18-year-old. On the basis of the data, Johnson said he had come to believe that death was optional. And then in fact, he personally planned to never do it. Totally. He said, quote, most people assume death is inevitable. We're just basically trying to prolong the time we have before we die until now.

I don't think there's been any time in history where Homo sapiens could save. with straight face that death may not be inevitable. He's a little bit nuts, right? Like at least a little bit? I don't hate him, but he's a little bit nuts. A lot of medical experts, not so sure. Pecans Cohen, the dean of gerontology at the University of Southern California,

came out and said that death is written into our genes and is not optional ever. He accepted living longer in the future was possible after all over the course of the 20th century, right, the life expectancy average rose, you know, considerably, but living forever, no way. according to Cohen, there's absolutely no technology right now that even suggests that we are heading that way. I wonder if that quote fucked up Brian's nighttime boners for a couple nights at least, right?

It's got to be harder to stay hard when people are pissed on your immortality parade like that. But is immortality what the longevity movement is even really about? Not everybody sees it as a literal quest for that, but some sure do. According to an article about Christianity in Silicon Valley, published the news website Quartz, faith could be playing a role Quote, traditional religion in the Bay Area is being replaced with another sort of faith, a belief in the power of technology

and science to save humanity. According to David Jim's researcher, a researcher in biogerentology at the University College London's Institute of Healthy Aging, it gives people a feeling of control. It's hubris from tech pro people. They think that because they've had so much success,

they could beat aging. Old Evening Wood Johnson would start to become a real lightning rod, in the longevity science community around this time. More experts and researchers began to be put off by his lack of interest in collaborating with scientists outside of his bubble of employees. According to Dr. Eric Verden,

the president and chief executive officer at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Quote, he professes to make everything transparent, but as a scientist, it's really impossible to understand the tools he is using to assess his age. Verden, not just skeptical of Johnson's claims

that he can achieve immortality, he's skeptical of his claims of age reversal altogether. He said, if you want immortality, you should go to a church. If I believed even a little bit that it would be possible, I would be excited,

but it's a pipe train. Well, that quote probably left Brian Knight-Ni for a whole month. Near Barzili, that researcher behind Tame, we talked about earlier, met Johnson in person

at a longevity retreat, said the doctors present, were concerned by how he looked. Way too people. pale, way too low in body fat. His main professional objection was that Johnson was taking over 100 vitamins and supplements all at once, some of which

may work against the others when normal research tests, you know, one thing at a time. So when you're taking all this shit all the time, it's hard to figure out what might be working. Speaking of Johnson, in the lead-up to April 3rd, 2023, Brian had a big ask for two members of his family.

He wanted their dicks. He wanted to surgically graft their dicks onto his dick and create a triple-headed super dick to see if that would push us nighttime boners to 18-year-old three and a half-hour levels

and he was willing to pay them each $5 million. I mean, it's a big ask but also, is it a fair price? I think it is. But, oh, you don't? You really, well, you think you can get more than $5 million for your dick?

Bullshit! Fucking prove it. You show me an official legal offer for you to sell your dick for more than $5 million, and I will stand corrected. And while I'm standing corrected, I'll have you suck my dick as proof that I'm sorry. Does that sound fair?

If I'm wrong, you can suck my dick as punishment so that we're even, all right? Don't overthink it. For real now. Brian has a 17-year-old son, Talmadge, and his 17-year-old father. He has a 17-year-old son and a 17-year-old dad. I don't even know how it's possible,

but that's what the, you know, article said, and I just take it for face value. No, he asked his 17-year-old son, Talmadge and his 70-year-old father, Richard Johnson, fuck yeah, bro, double dick, to take part in something for him. So his bargain did actually involve another dick, a double dick, the rare and beautiful Richard Johnson.

In early April, 2023, the three of these guys embarked on a trip to a medical spa called Resurgence Wellness in Arlington, Texas, where Brian will take his son's blood. Totally normal. A full liter of his blood was removed, a fifth of the blood in his entire body, That blood then separate into parts before the plasma is re-infused into Brian's blood.

Brian will then donate a leader of his blood and the plasma given to his 70-year-old father. And then no one will donate any blood to the 17-year-old. Ha-ha! Fucking idiot! You got had, you silly bitch. Daddy boner boy and Papa double-dick double-dick to you. And now you don't have enough blood. Now you're going to die young because your daddy vampire and pappy vampire have taken years off of your life.

This was part of a broader six-month series of monthly, plasma exchanges. Brian received from younger men. This is like fucking conspiracy lore, catnip. The only one he got from his son, though. As of 2023, this procedure is still scientifically unproven to help in humans. In mice, studies, again, if it suggested that sharing blood with younger animals can produce rejuvenating effects, but has not worked in people. In fact, it carries risks, as I think I mentioned, including dangerous immune reactions.

In July of 2020, Brian Johnson tweeted the response for the blood plasma swap. He wrote on X, but not really swap because his son didn't get anything. Discontinuing therapy completed six one-liter young plasma exchanges, one times a month, one with my son, evaluated biomarkers with biofluids, devices and imaging, no benefits detected. Young plasma exchange may be beneficial for biologically older populations of certain conditions. Does not, in my case, stack benefit on top of my existing interventions. Alternative methods of plasma exchange or young plasma fractions,

promise. My father's results still pending. Glory be to double dick daddy. Following the stunt, Brian Johnson went viral and his project blueprint was all over social media. Being talked about in places like an increased number of wellness clinics and gyms by 2023. The people on board, the longevity train were not just billionaires trying to outrun death. They were affluent young professionals. Also, people spending money they didn't really have to spend. And the market did what markets do. Built an entire economy on top of the fear of getting older. Members only wellness clubs like Remedy Place in New York started selling shit like, quote,

an extreme health makeover, lifestyle package complete with oxygen pods, infrared saunas, ivy vitamin drips for hundreds of dollars a month. And that's nothing compared to the Maui Four Seasons Resort's multi-day fountain of youth package with ozone and stem cell therapy for $44,000. Or equinoxes, $40,000 a year longevity membership built around your specific blood panel. stars like Sandra Bullock and Kate Blanchett have professed their love for the Hollywood EGF Epidermal Growth Factor Facial

aka the penis facial a $650 skin treatment that uses epidermal growth factors derived from the circumcised foreskins of Korean newborn babies That's what it says, specifically Korean. Blanchett shared that Sandra Bullock nicknamed it the penis facial because it has an enzyme that smells like cum.

What the fuck? And again, this is like a luminaic Illuminati fucking conspiracy catnip. Why Korean newborns? What's so special about their baby dicks? So much cock in the longevity game. The foreskins collected during circumcision and the stem cells are collected, you know, during circumcision.

And the stem cells are then harvested and distracted through a centrifuge in order to generate collagen and elastin, and then new cells are cloned in a lap. I mean, I guess that they're just going to throw away, you know, all that baby four skin, you know. it's good that it's being put to use you know waste not want not right I picture the first time researchers wanting to see if this would work really having an

uncomfortable conversation with like some Korean hospital administrator so so wait so what are you guys gonna do now with like all that baby four skin you know what do you do with it you just you just kind of throw it away you just are you going to like

are you use it or stuff you know oh why do I why do I ask well I just I was thinking about you know, waste. I just hate to see stuff go to waste. And I was thinking, there's got to be something we can do with all that extra baby cock skin, right? Just give it to me. Just give it to me, okay? Right? Just give me that baby dick, right? Give me that Korean baby dick. Come on. You ain't not, you're not even using that Korean baby dick. Come on now. Come on. Uh, biohacking, meetups and startups. We're taking off around the world now. Brian Johns remained at the center

of it all, according to Mithin, a company that reads clients' biomarkers and genetic, to predict future risk, people were more often than not sucking that baby four-skin dick. No, walking in and asking specifically for Korean baby dick. I can't stop thinking about Korean baby dick skin now.

The fuck is happening in this. They're asking for the blueprint. Johnson's protocol, which to my knowledge has not so far included Korean baby dick. Maybe Vietnamese baby dick? I don't know. Maybe Russian baby dick.

Who knows what kind of baby dick he might be munching on? I like that my mind added that he's eating it now. He's not even taking an injection. like gum. Just throwing a little... What's that?

What you chew on? Oh, just a little Vietnamese baby four skin. What? Researchers at conferences found audiences wanted to talk about Brian Johnson,

more than the actual science or actual science scientists associated with longevity. Johnson did not just make himself the face of longevity. By this point, he had turned it into a business. Alongside his research,

he was selling products like a $55-Longevity mix, a $42-shrum coffee alternative, something called nutty pudding, that supposedly doesn't even have come in it. A $35 bottle of olive oil called snake oil, perfect.

A cold pressed extra virgin olive oil made for longevity, which Brian Johnson says makes up to 15% of his diet. That feels like too high, right? If 15% of your diet is olive oil, that feels like a lot. Around the same time, OpenAI, Sam Altman, put $180 million of his own money into retro biosciences, a company hoping to extend 10 healthy extra years of life. But just like with Aaron Traywick, some people in the,

the movement were getting impatient with the slow pace of progress, you know, whether towards better health outcomes for everybody or towards the next billion dollar drug, regulations be damned, let's fucking go. And more did go. They started to go to places where they hoped rules, regulatory rules, would not reach them. In March of 2020, roughly 200 people from crypto, pharma, politics, and academia descended on the little European nation of Montenegro, where they stayed for up to two months at a pop, or two months at a time, in a pop-up temporary city called Zuzaloo.

Seriously, started by co-founder of the massive cryptocurrency platform Ethereum, this young Russian-Canadian computer programmer who does literally look like a fucking robot more than a human. Vitalik Boutarin, he is one of the most unusual appearing humans I've ever seen as far as his affect. I'm like, are you fucking, can I plug you in? Are you sure you're made of flesh and blood? Attendees move around in a, would move around in free golf buggy, summoned over WhatsApp, called themselves Zuzulans, the first citizens, as they saw it of a new citizen. civilization. They were united by a single belief that death is morally wrong and that humanity

has a duty to slow down or even reverse aging. A lot of attendees also there to brainstorm on how to create a sovereign state where people can legally experiment on themselves and probably others, you know, this is like, again, like some fucking Illuminati shit. According to sources, who spoke to decrypt digital media, somewhat even further arguing that a nation for would-be immortals might one day be necessary to protect such a rare population from security threats. while Zulu was just a temporary pop-up, a more permanent version was already up and running on a small island off the coast of Honduras

called Prospera. The charter city and Prospera, the charter city and economic zone on the island of Roatan has been described as a libertarian dream. It presents itself as the world's most ambitious experiment in self-governance, blending the feel of a Caribbean island with a futuristic tech hub,

with a bunch of palm trees and very few rules. Back in March of 2020, An ad went up on the Web3 platform mirror offering something strange. Access NFTs for a pholostatin gene therapy trial in Prospera, where there are very few laws regarding what you can adjust or inject into your body. The trial aimed to make the body produce more pholostatin, this type of gene therapy targeting muscle building and hopefully longevity. Falostatin is a naturally occurring protein that binds to and neutralizes specific signaling proteins in the body,

most notably myostatin and activen. Myelstatin acts as a molecular break to limit skeletal muscle growth. Falostatin blocks myostatin from reaching cellular receptors, allowing muscle tissue to grow beyond normal physiological limits, which sounds dangerous. The hope is that it can be used to combat age-related muscle loss and metabolic decline. Falostatin gene therapy trials have extended the median lifespan of, again, mice by approximately 32.5% while improving muscle mass, physical coordination, and glucose metabolism.

Could have work on humans. could it increase our lifespan by decades? Also increased the quality of our lives by decades as well, right? Of course, that's why people were fleeing to Prospera. These trials were not happening in a hospital or a university. The company behind the trial was mini-circle, who chose Prospera because Honduras' controversial laws regarding specialized semi-autonomous zones for employment

and economic development allow foreign business to set up these micronations. In this radical political experiment, private companies can take on the role of the state on their land, the partnership between the Honduran government and companies like MiniCircle is meant to make Honduras a medical innovation hotbed and a future hub for medical tourism where people will travel to foreign countries for therapeutic treatments and procedures. MiniCircle founded in 2019 by Mack Davis, short for Machiavelli Davis, this biohacker and gene therapy activist passionate about developing gene therapy for the masses. And Mac Davis, one of the biohackers who had worked at Ascendance, Treywick's biohacking company. Under the agreement with the Honduran government, companies like Mini Circle agreed to act as if they are their own local government

handling stuff like sewage and potholes, you know, white collar stuff while shit like murder and other serious crimes still handled by the Honduran government. The court for crimes handled by Prospera, an arbitration system ran by three retired judges in Arizona over the internet. It's very unusual. Prospera does not offer biotech things like labs or funding. The appeal is just, you know, almost zero. regulation. Permits move incredibly fast. Even Brian Johnson flew to prosper for some gene therapy in

23 not legal in the U.S., a drug that stimulates, you know, fallostat in production. Did it extend his life? No. No, there have been no clinical trials proving that fallostat and gene therapy extends human longevity. Many working in mainstream medicine doubt there ever will be. According to Robert Coton, a gene therapy specialist at UMass Boston, fallastatin would be far from his pick for a fountain of youth drug. He said that results that look promising in animals very rarely translate cleanly to humans. Just because something works in mice, that does not mean it's ever

going to work in humans, unfortunately. Still, others just agree with mainstream medical science. David Sinclair, for instance, that Australian-born geneticist at Harvard, the champion of that red wine compound Resveritrol, which is proven not to work, so far, has said that his own biological age is about a decade

younger than his chronological age, based on his own estimates, and animal research backing his work. Just because Because resveratrol was not the anti-aging miracle he hoped it would be. That doesn't mean he's given up. And in 2023, he was able to attract some pretty high-profile backers to a new startup called Talley Health, such as high-profile musicians John Legend and Chrissy Teakin, big-name actors like Pedro Pascal, Zach Ephron. With Tally Health, you get an at-home cheek swab kit that measures your DNA,

methylation, oh my God, methylation, chemical markers on your DNA that change with age and lifestyle. the test then calculates your tally age score, which shows how fast your body is aging compared to your actual calendar age. Based on that, the platform then provides customized health strategies based on your results to help improve your health span, the number of healthy years in your life,

by selling you a lot of supplements, basically. Not that different from a number of other vitamins and supplement companies. No one has a real problem with tally health, it seems. They haven't made any wild claims that I know of. But in early 2024, David Sinclair did take things a step too far for most, with another one of his companies.

Animal Biosciences. They issued a press release, quoting him as saying, a supplement had reversed aging and dogs, which was a no-go phrase in the industry. Considered by many experts to be a slippery phrase that scientists don't even agree on what it means or how to measure it.

The response was swift and harsh to the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, a group of about 60 scientists that Sinclair brought together and led was hit with a cascade of resignations by members, outraged by his claims. One scientist who quit, referred to Sinclair as a snake oil salesman.

Days later, the board pushed him to resign as president. He would insist it was just a misunderstanding, and the press release included an inaccurate quote, but he stepped down anyway. Sinclair told the Wall Street Journal, my lab's ideas and findings are typically ahead of the curve, which is why some peers might feel the research is overstated. I stand behind my track record as a trusted scientist

in one of the most competitive professions of all. Yeah, but David, you haven't proven fucking shit yet. Right? you have not clinically proven any longevity claims. No shortage of confidence, though. After Sinclair stepped down, Dr. Nier-Barsalai stepped up as the new president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research. He agreed that Sinclair's comment about the dog research and his commercial interest in animal bioscience crossed the line. He said the data is not good.

You're calling it the wrong thing and then you're selling it. The selling is a step too far. Yeah, agreed. That just makes you a snake oil salesman. Around this time, the other longevity. influencers started to abandon substances. They once shilled as miracle longevity drugs. In September of 2024,

Boner Boy, Brian Johnson announced he was dropping rapamycin from his stack, citing skin infections, high glucose levels, and an elevated resting heart rate. He wrote on X, with no other underlying causes identified, we suspected rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it entirely.

By 2024, the field of longevity had moved far beyond Steve Horvaths. 2,013 biological clock breakthrough. And age itself was now turned into a sport, literally. Brian Johnson launched the rejuvenation Olympics, where people compete not in strength or speed, but in how slowly the age. The key measure is called pace of aging.

In other words, how much biological aging happens in one calendar year. It is measured with the test developed by true diagnostic, and the kit costs between $229 and $499. In this competition, a lower number is better, for example, a pace of 0.8.5. means you're aging at about 85% of the normal rate or roughly 10 months of biological aging per calendar year. Currently, Brian has the best score of 0.503.

He's aging, you know, about six months for every 12 months, about half the rate. But others not working nearly as hard as him have not been that far behind. Interestingly, Julie Gibson-Clark, a 55-year-old recruiter, single mom, living in Phoenix, Arizona, was on top of the longevity leaderboard for a little while.

during the year without spending millions, thanks to an everyday regiment of walking, weightlifting, taking supplement powder, a pound of vegetables a day. She had a score of 0.665. She said, I'm just Joe Blow. I'm not a millionaire. What I'm doing is way more accessible to people and way simpler. Estonia's a seam lawn, a 29-year-old longevity coach who estimates he spends about $11,700 a year on his protocol, also hit number one for a little while. DJ Steve Aoki, biohacker Ben Greenfield, investor Peter Diamandis, also showed up on the absolute ranking, which is the top 25 competitors at various points in the year.

Researchers have warned the tests are far from perfect and can be swayed by ordinary health conditions and worry the competition might push people towards risky experimental methods that are dangerous. To that, Brian Johnson replied, well, life is a risk. Early this year, in 26, Brian launched a so-called Immortals program, more than 1,500 people applied

within the first 30 hours. Of the applicants, only three will be chosen. Each will have to pay a million dollars for access to the same kind of intensive longevity routine Johnson has followed for the past five years. Plus, a dedicated concierge team 24-7 will be available to them. Extensive testing, millions of biological data points,

constant tracking, skin care hair protocols, access to the latest therapies on the market, etc. He has, as of this recording, not announced who was chosen. Will they actually extend their lives? Ah, fucking no idea. Will it be worth the money? Based on previous failed experiments we've covered? Probably not. And you might be thinking,

what is the point of all these bizarre, unregulated, often expensive biohacking experiments of Blue Zone research from the early 2000s already more or less told us what to do as far as how to live longer? Well, even the Blue Zone results have come under scrutiny. Can we trust them? The trouble is studying people who live past 110

is making sure they actually did live that long. In 2026, so early this year, Oxford researcher Saul Justin Newman, who won a satirical Nobel Prize in 2024 for revealing that many of the oldest people may not be that old at all, but in fact, dead, published morbid, debunking modern longevity science.

In the book, Newman argues that extreme old age does not actually have much to do with good genes or clean living or small meals, but rather has everything to do with bad paperwork. Newman puts forth evidence that the record of some of the oldest people is full of holes. For example, one of many, many examples. Giron, Kimura, the world's oldest man when he died in 2013 at the age of 116,

said to have been born in a fishing village in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in April or March of 1897. His record suggests that he completed elementary school in either 1907 or maybe 1909 or maybe 1911, that he married his wife on one of three wildly different dates, that at some point he adopted his wife's surname, but also changed his first name. Clearly the paperwork on him, not rock solid. And it begs the question,

was he actually born in 1897? How old was he really? There was Gene Kalma, who as I mentioned earlier, was officially 122 when she died, making her the oldest verified person in history, but is that true? In 2018, researchers at the Moscow Center for Continuous, or continuous, excuse me, mathematical education,

argued that Gene may have actually been 99. very different age. They claimed her daughter may have assumed her identity to avoid inheritance taxes. Their conclusion came from reviewing documentary records of Jean's life and closely analyzing interviews

she gave and more. Was Gene Lyme? Jury is divided, but there are a ton of other examples like this of the world's oldest living people may not actually be that old or maybe not actually being that old. Further in his book, Newman makes the case

there are plenty of a super sentient... Oh my God, super centenarians who smoke, drink, and live a good life. Christian Mortensen, who held the record for the world's oldest man before Kimura, smoked for a full fucking century. Juan Vicente Perez, who died at the age of 114, drank this shit called fire water. Acquardiente. Every damn day.

120 proof, 60% alcohol. He credited the drink more than anything else for keeping him alive that long. Newman's point with all this is go enjoy your fucking life. You could run 100 marathons and still be dead by 50. Conversely, you could smoke a package. day and lived in 90. He also warns to not trust data presented by longevity enthusiasts.

Newman shows in his book how even a tiny amount of bad data can wreck everything we build on top of it, from public policy to medical research. Small errors or false records skew statistics, which then distort funding decisions, clinical guidelines, insurance numbers, and our general understanding of what actually works for

living longer. Take 100 people who are actually 40 years old but claim to be 50. If their stats are reported in a group of 100,000 people who really are 50, the fake 50-year-olds only make up just 0.1% of the real 50-year-old population, so at first it barely seems to matter. But younger people die more slowly. By the time the supposed 50-year-old group reaches their late 70s,

many of the real 50-year-olds in that original cohort are already dead, even more will be gone by the late 90s. So if a small number of older people lie about being younger, they can distort the statistics more and more dramatically as time goes on. They start out as a tiny part of the younger age group, but because they're actually older, they don't die off as fast as the real, you know, because they're actually younger, excuse me, they don't die off as fast as real people in the group, which makes the group look like it has more very old survivors than it really does. Following the discovery of Japan's Sogan Kato, the man who celebrated as a living centenarian until he was found mummified,

a subsequent investigation revealed hundreds of thousands of quote-unquote living Japanese residents had actually died or gone missing, is, and people just, you know, they're falsely reporting just to collect, you know, insurance money or pension money, rather, is the blue zone data bullshit? Or at least some of it bullshit. Looking at Okinawa,

according to Newman, it ranked first amongst Japanese prefectures and KFC consumption and last in seafood, sweet potatoes and greens, has Japan's highest average BMI, more than a third of its men's smoke. Around 2010, it reported twice

the centenarian rate of the rest of Japan, though. Okinawa also flattened by American bombing in World War II, which destroyed nearly all of its civil records. U.S. authorities rebuilt the registry by asking survivors their ages. Responses were often mistranslated due to language barriers in a different calendar. The post-war welfare system paid benefits by age, giving people financial incentive to revise their ages upward. If life expectancy, the estimates are wrong, everything built on them, as I mentioned earlier,

gets, you know, thrown off to. From how we fund Medicare and Social Security to how we price insurance and plan infrastructure for older adults. So there's, you know, data problems with a lot of this potentially. Also, uh, writing in the New Yorker in 2026, the physician Drew Kular talked about another problem about how the pursuit of longevity, like so much else in American life, has become this individual project. But how long you live is not just about your choices. It's shaped by the choices made by others around you, by health care access, environment, income, public health. The key to longevity is less about lifestyle hacks, more about the society people live in.

This is where a lot of criticism of longevity movement comes from. If the goal is really to extend human life, why is so much money going into expensive supplements, customized protocols, and personal optimization, rather than research that could help everybody, you know, societally. Tech journalist Kara Swisher raises this question in her Kara Swisher wants to live forever 2026 series. She argues that the problem with longevity movement

is how individualistic it is. If these tech bros truly cared, they would be funding, you know, MRNA vaccines and CRISPR or large-scale medical research, research that could help out everybody, stuff that could extend all of our lives as a group. Meanwhile, independent longevity researcher Andrew Steele points out that solving some of these challenges is well within the reach of the ultra wealthy if they choose to invest in it. Steele estimates that a properly powered rapamycin trial and healthy adults would cost somewhere

between $50 and $100 million. That's pocket change to the wealthiest people in this scene, but who is funding these trials, no one. According to this deal, longevity is simultaneously a wellness fad and potentially the greatest revolution in the history of medicine. Even with redirected funds and energy, long-term skeptics, still not sure it'll do much, though. Stuart J. O'Shanski, professor of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois in Chicago, does not think longevity trends will do much to increase the number of people reaching 100. As human life, he says, has a natural ceiling. His conclusion comes from demographic and mortality data from 19,

to 2019, which shows that while medicine has improved enormously during that time, the biggest gains in life expectancy had already happened before that, that the rate of improvement slowed down considerably, suggesting we may be running into a biological ceiling. In plain terms, medicine can keep people alive longer, but each extra year becomes much, much harder to achieve than the year before it. Like many experts mentioned in this episode, Noble Laureate, Venki Ramakrishkan, author of Why we die is also not convinced that current interventions will dramatically extend lifespan. To genuinely reverse aging, he says you'd have to continually repair every single system in your body

from your hearing to your nervous system, to your digestive system, to your brain, keep it all going for a very long period of time, right? That, you know, keeping your bones and your muscle strong and healthy, for example, doesn't really do much good longevity-wise if your brain is mush. So, is there anything here actually worth being excited about in the longevity movement? Well, as of right now, the summer of 2026, there is something currently to be excited about. It's not a supplement. Alejandro Soto Gutierrez grew up in Latin America where it was very hard for people with organ failure to get transplants. He lost his uncle to liver cirrhosis about 25 years ago, decided he wanted to do what he could to tackle organ transplant shortage.

And as of January of this year, he became part of a Carnegie Mellon-led team that has received up to $20.5 million for a project called Live, an attempt to 3D biopiopiopies. print a real functioning biological human liver entirely from human cells and structural proteins like collagen. The idea is that this biomanufactured liver will be able to be placed in patients for about two to four weeks while their own liver is basically given some time off to regenerate, meaning patients will not need a full transplant. Interestingly, the liver is the only internal human organ that can completely regenerate and regrow to its original size. Once the original liver has had enough vacation time to rest and recover, the printed liver is then naturally rejected and reabsorbed by the body.

The reason this is only happening now is because of a new bioprinting system built by Professor of Biomedical Engineering Adam Feinberg's lab at Carnegie Mellon. In the past, 3D printing cannot build tissue large or complex enough for transplantation. The printers cannot produce the thick tissues or organs with supply of blood vessels structures that would actually survive and function. However, now Feinberg's new bioprinting systems, quote, finally allow precise, stable printing at a scale that makes real organ-level fabrication possible, and that breakthrough is what captured our attention.

I mean, that is fucking wild. That's a real thing. Researchers think they can use the liver as a model to bioprint other organs as well, including the heart and pancreas. Over the next decades, Soto Gutierrez hopes to build factories that can literally build organs on demand. Cutting transplant waiting lists down to size, and that will help keep a lot of people alive a lot longer.

In the U.S. alone, roughly 6,000 people die every year while on official waiting list for organ transplants. There is no figures for worldwide numbers. This new tech is very promising, but it still isn't close to some kind of magic pill or elixir or injection. You know, we could take to extend our lives overall. You know, possibly indefinitely.

Will that ever be invented? Well, let's hop out of the timeline to talk about this just a little bit more. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. Before sharing some final thoughts, I want to first share some more longevity info I came across.

I just found interesting that doesn't neatly fit into the timeline. Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin, fucking pony boy, Russia's pony boy, strong guy. That real life evil bond villain, piece of shit. He has grown increasingly concerned about dying as he's getting older. He's in his early 70s now and has put a lot of Russian energy and money into longevity. Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key technologies, bioprinting or 3D printing live tissue, which we just talked about, and xenotransplantation or growing human organs inside of mini-pigs.

A porcine breed deemed genetically compatible to humans. Russian scientists working with government agencies claim to have bioprinted human cartilage tissue and a mouse thyroid gland with the aim of achieving full, usable organ, human organ replacement by 2030. A similar timeline has been discussed for growing human organs inside of pigs. It sucks to be one of those pigs. Will this tech extend Putin's life? I hope not. But it might.

Or maybe what Putin should really focus on if he really wants to live as long as possible is to fucking slow down, spend more time with a loved friend. 109-year-old Dorothy Bogus starts every day, same way, doing exercise in her kitchen. She plugs in an old boombox, hits play on the cha-cha slide, then she stands with a hand on the counter, swinging one leg, then the other back and forth, when DJ Casper, excuse me, ask how low she can go

she bends her knees, sinks her hips and shimmies laughing. Fuck yeah. Only 0.03% of Americans live into their hundreds. Dorothy is in an exclusive club, maybe in large part because her best friend is too. This is adorable. Velma Long just celebrated her 109th

birthday a few weeks ago by inviting Bodhis to go to church with her. Both wore sensible shoes on their birthdays this year, but Long's daughter says her mom was dancing in her heels on her 100th birthday. Both Long and Bogus have been involved. with their churches, neighborhoods, social clubs, and sororities. They stay very active.

Bojus learned to swim at the age of 69, which he says is her proudest accomplishment. Both Dorothy and Long have traveled extensively since retiring from careers in social work in the 70s. Dorothy Bogus has a list of the country she has visited on a wall in her basement, an alphabetical order from Argentina to Turkey, Long loved Bermuda, Montreal, and Hawaii the most. They've traveled a lot together. They keep their minds active, keep their bodies moving. moving, they eat in moderation, drink plenty of water, are surrounded by those they love who love them back, and they laugh a lot.

What they have never done is stress the fuck out over how long they're going to live and biohack. If they would have done that, possibly they would already be dead. Longevity fixation syndrome is not an official diagnosis, but some enthusiasts have become so obsessed with living longer that it has taken a toll on their mental health

and relationships and cutting, you know, fucking down their odds for a longer life. at Viavi Longivity Clinic The goal is to get clients to an average biological age of 15 years beneath their chronological age

which the company claims takes about three years typically. But they have noticed that for many of those taking excessive supplements stressing out over what else they should add,

worrying about what they might miss out on if something new comes around that they haven't heard of to help them live longer. Their biomarkers are getting worse. The problem is that

fixation causes an abnormal amount of stress says consulting clinic doctor, Sabine Deny. Stress steals energy like nothing else because stress is about survival now. Stress is the opposite of longevity. So how about that? The more obsessively somebody pursues health and wellness, the more they stress out or refining the perfect anti-aging regimen to follow, the more they may cancel out the benefits of the habits they are trying so hard to perfect.

Right? The irony. Also, if your every waking moment is spent wondering whether you are doing enough or not, whether you are doing the absolute best possible thing of that exact. moment to live longer. Is that even a life you would want to live forever? Dr. Denai says that, like others have said in the timeline, social connections seem to be one of the strongest independent predictors of health span we have. And it's the number one thing you can do to hack your longevity is not go to some wellness clinic. But hang out with your friends, good friends, right? Laugh a lot. Get off your screens. Just as the quality of your food may improve your health, the quality of your friends is just as important. Get rid of bad friends. Overprocessed friends,

he says. Stick with protein and fiber friends. I fucking love that. And now let's check back in with Brian Johnson real quick. Last fall at a dinner during an invitation-only retreat in Aspen, Colorado. This thing filled with a bunch of leaders in fields like foreign affairs, economics, and entertainment. Brian has asked, why do you want to live to 150 by oncologist and bioethicist, Dr. Ezekiel Zeke Emanuel, who served as a health policy advisor in the Obama administration,

a man who is a critic of the modern wellness industry. Now 68, Dr. Emanuel says he would be content to live to 75. So what was Brian's answer? Total silence. He didn't say anything, Dr. Emanuel, told a reporter later. That was the most interesting part of the evening. Such an important question for anyone jumping into the longevity game. Why?

Other than you're just afraid of dying? Why the fuck do you want to extend your life? From, say, 80 to 90 or 100 to 150 or more? what is it that you are hoping to do during those bonus years on the back end of 100? Read more books. Travel more, fuck more,

play more video games, spend more time with your grandkids, fucking more time complaining of arthritis, accumulate wealth, talk about how fucking brittle your bones are, play with your great grandkids, learn more languages. Also, what in your life

are you willing to sacrifice right now to get those extra years later? Are you willing to never eat your favorite foods? Are you willing to follow a very strict and structured daily routine full of a fuck ton of vitamins and supplements and, you know, sleep regimen, very strict workout schedule.

How obsessive over your daily routine are you willing to be? Do you really want to sacrifice what a lot of people consider to be fun now to get more back-end years when, let's be honest, even if you are healthy, you're still going to be old as fuck,

not going to be as strong and mobile and lucid as you are now? How many peptides do you want to take? And no peptide has been clinically proven to directly increase human lifespan, yet, by the way, in order to make it to 100 or 110 or whatever. personally i love longevity science i do hope they find some hack for those of us who want to live

long quality healthy lives you know it's a big world i'd love as much time as i can get to explore it you know if if if if if i can share that with my wife kids and friends uh if it's just going to be me living a long time and everybody else i love dies before me uh no thank you i would much rather just fall asleep one night and not wake back up i don't want to live a long and lonely life but but i do want to have uh the full use of my body and mind for as long as possible for however many years I've got. And if all this research does lead to the possibility of being able to run a six-minute mile at 110 or rep out 315 on the bench press at 110, you know, still have a mind as sharp

as ever then, still be able to dance and fuck and party and hike and travel with ease long past the age of 70 or 80, then yeah, it's fucking amazing. That's great. While I wait on, you know, some more miracle elixirs, I guess I'll focus on Plondevita and Ikega, you know, that which makes one's life worth living. I'll keep creating, which gives me a sense of purpose. I'll eat sensibly, which I already do now. Not because I'm trying to live forever, but because it just makes me feel better day to day now.

You know, I'll move more. I actually was conscious of that at this Gizfest, three-day psychedelic music festival I went to recently in Buena Vista, Colorado. I was dance my ass off to EDM stuff each night, which I normally would never do at a concert. I'd be too self-conscious. Maybe it helped that I was tripping on shrooms and acid, or one of the two every night. but also, you know, I just constantly was like, no, why do I care?

I should not be worried about what other people think. Get out there and move. It's good for you. It's healthy. It made me feel better, right? It's joyful. Been working lately more on not worrying about him, you know, feeling embarrassed about things.

I shouldn't feel embarrassed by, you know, worried about what judgmental old curmudgens might think. And instead, just loosen up and have fun. And it was fucking great. Had an amazing time. You know, it feels good. Less than stress. Might even help me live longer.

I've been trying to initiate sex more with Lindsay lately, even though we're, you know, tired and overworked still currently. And it feels good, right? Lower stress. It's free. My help us both live longer. I also full transparency. I do TRT.

I've done testosterone replacement therapy for several years now. My testosterone levels got really low, thanks to work in too many hours, too many weeks in a row. Feeling stressed out all the time, not sleeping enough. TRT helped me get my energy back, back in the gym more regularly, help my sex drive, help me sleep better. you know, nothing high dose, just enough to feel younger. And I don't care at all if anybody judges me for it, right? You're not me.

I like it. That's enough. I've also tried some peptides like Tessimorland to help reduce bad for your heart and other ailments, visceral fat. I've tried BPC 157 to help with inflammation on my shoulder and elbow. Why? Well, because I like to lift heavy weight still. I don't want to stop until my body gives out. Have they helped?

I think so. Is it placebo effect? I don't fucking care. I'm just glad I feel better. You know, that's the kind of longevity I want. You know, I just had a new personal bench press record a few weeks ago, even though I'm still working too much, and not getting probably enough sleep.

But I was able to set it at the age of 49, rep 315 for six reps. It's amazing for me. Deadlifted 495, cleanly for a couple reps. Another personal best. Do I expect or even care for you, you know, like, do I want you to be impressed? No, that's not why I'm saying this.

I don't care what any of you think about weightlifting. It's just, it's my own personal journey. It helps me feel young. clears my mind, and I love that new supplements can help me stay with it longer than I would be able to naturally. And so some of this stuff, you know, makes you feel better, helps you feel like you have better quality of life, makes you think you might live longer than fucking do it. Keep going, scientists. Keep fighting for breakthroughs. That will make the human experience a little brighter, a little younger, a little stronger, more enjoyable. If this is the only ride we ever get,

why not make the most of it? I mean, be careful, you know, do research into the side effects. and see what research is out there about this stuff, but also, you know, life is a gamble. And if you want to get on something early and, you know, if you're willing to accept the risks, then, okay, do the research you can and fucking have at it. Try and make this ride as enjoyable as you can. Time now for the takeaways.

Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, despite all the gains in the longevity movement, there is still not a single drug or, you know, invention of some sort, proven to extend the human lifespan. Damn it. But that doesn't mean the one isn't coming someday. Number two, Aaron Treywick was an untrained 28-year-old who became the face of biohacking

after injected an untested herpes treatment into his own leg on stage in front of an audience in Austin, Texas in February of 2018. That moment pushed the up until then secretive world of biohackers into the spotlight and also made them look like a bunch of reckless showmen. Number three, American medical experimentation regulation has not slowed or stopped longevity movement. It's just relocated it. In 2023, hundreds of longevity enthusiasts descended in Montenegro for two months to form a pop-up community called Zuzulu. Some were explicitly there to figure out how to build a sovereign state where you could run clinical trials and test therapies on willing participants without FDA approval.

Kind of like what's happening in Prospera. A private, semi-autonomous city of sorts on a Honduran island where biotech companies, can and have set up their own regulatory framework where they're able to pick from a menu of existing Honduran rules if they want and run trials that will be illegal to run just about anywhere else on earth. Number four, the data underneath a lot of current longevity study might unfortunately be garbage.

In 2010, Japanese officials went to congratulate a Tokyo man on turning 111, only to find a mummy who'd been dead for about 30 years, while his family continued to collect his pension. A subsequent investigation found hundreds of thousands of supposedly still living Japanese residents dead or missing, Oxford researcher Saul Justin Newman and others have made new claims that suggest that many of the world's

oldest people may in fact be much younger than they state due to bad paperwork, not good genes. And number five, new info just recently in July of 2026, boner boy Brian Johnson, the face of the longevity movement, shared some bad news on X

that he had been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis. In his own words, his stomach was basically eating itself. Autoimmune gastritis is a long term condition where the immune system attacks the cells in the stomach, which can raise the risk of stomach cancer, also reduces stomach acid and nutrient absorption, leading to iron and vitamin B12 deficiencies, which is going to fuck up his supplement regimen. Still, Johnson has not backed away from his longevity mission. Some have wondered if his unusual diet and lifestyle gave him

that condition, but he doesn't think so. He suggested the condition may be linked to what he ate as a kid and past stressors. Quote, as a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, gobbled down fast food. I became a young father of three began building a business. Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gain 40 pounds. Within a few years, I had fallen into a deep chronic depression. Now years later, he says he's paying the piper. What other developments might pop up later? Will he live until 150? Or will he have a heart attack next year and leave behind a corpse with an incredibly young biological age? And most importantly, how will this new condition affect his nocturnal erections?

Takeaways The immortality industry Silicon Valley's War on Death has been sucked I hope that was understandable. That was a lot of info and I was a little goofy. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping

making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic Lindsay Cummins doing so much to allow me to focus on this. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode designing merch for the store. New merch at badmagicproductions.com. Got a lot of stuff dropping for the upcoming 10-year anniversary of time suck.

Coming up real soon in mid-September. Thank you to Sophie. Oh my gosh, thank you to Laura Woods, not Sophie Evans. Almost gave the wrong credit for Laura's research this week. Also, thank you to the all-seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page, Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth. And everybody over on the Time Sucks subreddit and Bad Magic Subreddit. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker updates.

Get your Time Sucker updates. The first and only update this week, because it's a big and beautiful one, was sent into Bojangles at Timesug Podcast.com from an anonymous and fucking incredible, an inspirational sack, who sent a message in with the subject line of my dad and your dad in Vegas in the 80s. Lots of exclamation points, lots of questions marks. They wrote, hi, their time suck team. I hope that subject line got your attention. Oh, it did.

Please keep me anonymous, as I have been blessed to have a job as a civil servant, albeit with some history. I'm 45 and spent a great deal of time in the Las Vegas area when I was a kid. Unlike your tongue-to-cheek, tongue-and-cheek-running bit about your dad, I've often wondered if my dad actually was a serial killer. But I digress. I've been wanting to message for a long time, but like most things, my ideas just stay as ideas. I want to thank you for giving perspective for helping me stay positive,

even when it's very hard. There have been many episodes that have hit close to home. The suck on addiction really hit me in the fields, and I'm writing this to hopefully help anyone who may feel trapped by circumstance. I'm going to do my best to summarize a complicated and complex story. I was raised by the father of my baby's sister. She was born in Vegas in 86, and shortly after my parents split and divorced, I was five. The typical short stays at respective parent house, the situation ensued,

until one day I watched my mother beat my dad bloody with an axe handle, as he sat in the front seat of the car we were in. As best as I can remember, we were with my mom, and he showed up to take my younger brother and sister and I to the park. I remember an argument and him moving a railroad tie away from the side of the driveway to behind the car so we couldn't leave. After sitting in the passenger seat and engaging as kids, my mom materialized outside of the right of the car with a wooden implement, beat the shit out of my dad who never flinched or raised

a hand to her. Needless to say, the police came and it turned into a whole thing. Q foster homes, bouncing from strange house to strange house. Sometimes the three of us together, sometimes not. Eventually, dad got custody. I don't know if they, uh, mom and dad were supposed to share us, but that did not happen. From the, ages seven until 11, I don't remember being in the same home more than a few months. A few things about my dad. His high moral standard for abusing women did not extend to his children. As the oldest, and I remember, as the oldest, I remember getting the worst of it. Every type of abuse, except sexual, by him at least, physical beatings were the norm. Yeah, belts were how children

were disciplined then, but not to the extent of the spankings I got. Bruised and bloody can't sit for a few days without pain kind of spankings, being slapped in the face, hard, what he called eye open, which was being backhanded across the head or in the face when my behavior was deemed annoying enough for a surprise attack. Emotional. Of course, the abuse made it hard, but I was terrified to ask for basic necessities. Food was at a premium. That I mentioned, when we bounced around, we often didn't have our own place.

Imagine being young, like core memory, formative young, and being homeless. We lived on the streets in Las Vegas, Henderson and Boulder City. I remember walking, walking, walking, going to churches, getting vouchers, going to the food pantry, or staying at homeless shelters, and getting canned food. food. The vouchers were for hotel rooms. He would take the canned food, heated up in the bathtub, filled with water as hot as he could get it. We squatted in an abandoned trader house next to the dump in Boulder, eating raw hot dogs, bologna, vienna sausages until they got a space heater and strung a power cord over from the dump next door to use as a T-Moo grill. In addition to the hunger and

lax security, he was a drug addict who never hid his drug use from us kids. If he were occasionally fortunate enough to wrangle some wheels, I would get the awesome responsibility of sitting in the back seat on road trips with a notebook with buds being passed to me to clean the seeds and stems from them so he could load a bowl at the ripe age of eight many of the houses we stayed out were trap houses at 12 i learned he was not my dad and that he'd actually adopted my brother and i officially after the divorce when i was 13 we moved to Nebraska where i have lived since at 14 he started smoking weed with me at 15 we were doing meth together and i was also doing every other drug i could get my hands on he never drank but i started at uh but i started to at 11

and did so every chance I got. Always a new kid, always making friends just to leave them behind, constantly fighting, seeking bad attention from any adult that would give me any time. As the homeless kid, I would get sent home with notes from teachers telling my dad I needed to bathe. It's very hard to be cool when you're the new kid who stinks. He kicked my brother and I out when we were 16 and 15 respectively.

I was given a green light to do whatever I wanted. I was given every excuse and I took full advantage to dive deeper into drugs and alcohol. We were never reported as runaways, so I had to keep going to school to fly under the radar and risk getting picked up and taken back. I stayed on friends' couches until I felt like my welcome was worn out,

which usually looked like me drinking all the alcohol in the house or getting caught doing drugs in the house. So I would sleep in apartment stairwells, on bus stop benches, at the park, I was killing it. I got expelled a month before graduation. Everybody had gotten fed up with me, strung out on meth drinking whenever I could, pushing away anybody who cared.

Somehow I started a family. Girlfriend turned into wife, started having kids, became a construction worker, kept the same job for years, mortgage, car payment, two cats in the yard, the whole bit. Drunk every day. Hiding my drug use for my now ex-wife, blacking out multiple times a week, drinking at work all by the age of 24. I got picked up for a DUI and got sober and clean, and I have been since 2006. Oh man, 20 years, congrats. Fast forward to a couple years ago, at a contracting company of my own, but after years of working with my back for 20-plus years, in construction and made this job, my lovely current wife made a novel suggestion.

The local police department and our 25,000-ish population town was hiring. I applied and successfully jumped through every hoop placed in front of me. I was completely and entirely honest about my past and got hired on to the absolute best job I've ever had in 2024. I love what I do. If you're still reading this, I really want to express to anyone who may be struggling with their past, with their present, with themselves, with the people around. them, it can get better. I should have developed some sociopathy, become a serial killer,

died of an overdose, killed somebody driving in a blackout, killed myself. The list goes on, but that's not how life is turned out. I have a wonderful wife, children, and stepchildren that love me, and I love them. We had a baby three years ago, the most amazing little girl that hopefully never sees her dad drunk or high or yelling and screaming, throwing things, punching walls, or being absent. To those that matter, yes, you. You don't have to be a victim of circumstance. You can't can change the status quo. And you don't have to do it alone. Get help.

A.A. Save my life. I've made lifelong friends that I can tell anything to. I go to therapy. I take medication. It helps with some of the mental health issues I suffer from. Life is great. I genuinely want to help people. I love all your content, respect your worldview.

I can relate with some of your struggles. And I love the open, optimistic, and positive way you present the world. And I thank you for letting me share a part of my story. I really do apologize to link this message. I really hope it was linear enough to make sense. I feel like it was fucking better than my episode this week that way. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, damn, anonymous.

Man, I could not love your message more. Shit had me crying by myself in the Suck Dungeon. I mean, had my allergies. Fucked up and stuff. I've never met you, but I feel like I know you after reading that. And you're awesome. And I'm just so goddamn proud of you. Holy shit, you have made the best lemonade like hand squeezed,

deliciousness with just the right amount of ice and sugar on a hot summer's day with a big blue sky overhead. out of some rancid looking lemons. That is beyond impressive. Your story is like motivational speakerworthy. Seriously. And I love that you love being a cop. I bet you're fucking amazing at it.

You know, so protected because you know what it's like to not be protected, to be victimized, and so empathetic because you know what it's like to be a rock fucking bottom, to be fucking up and down in a hole.

I still get so mad when anybody says they just don't like cops, period. Like none of them. Blanket statement. Get the fuck out of here with that dumb fuck hot take. there is so much variety within almost every single field, right?

I want to be protected by somebody like you. And honestly, if I ever get arrested and taken to jail, again, I hope it's by a cop like you. We'll have a good laugh about it. How I should have left my drugs at home on the way to the station. But seriously, thank you for your story. Somebody out there needs to hear it. You know, it just might turn their life around. Might save their life.

And I love that you talk about being sober. I know I've talked about like druggies, but I do want to be clear on that. that it is not for everybody i just do not happen to have that addictive gene i i do not have that just uh maybe maybe for work which i'm working on uh but but for no not for not for substances and if i did i wouldn't act the way that i do um but yeah another another another factory another another factory another factory in longevity i think i'm just thinking of this right now uh the inspirational stories of others maybe some of the best medicine for the soul out there and thank you so much anonymous for sharing yours with us.

Hail Nimrod. Time suckers, I needed that. We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another bad magic productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review time suck if you haven't already. Please do spend more time with your friends this week. Please find quiet moments to slow down. De-stress.

If you can, please eat a healthy and tasty meal here and there. Move that body of yours. Find joy, laugh and love, enjoy the life. have as much as you possibly can whenever you can. It'll help you live longer, and it'll make it better while you are living, and keep on sucking. And now, how about we close this out with a timeless classic tune from The Immortal, Dolly Parton, whose name will never cease to be spoken and whose songs will never cease to be sung. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, please don't take my man. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene,

Jolene, just because you care. Your beauty is beyond compare with flaming locks of orphan hair with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green. Your smile is like a breath of spring, your voice is soft like summer rain and I cannot compete with you, Jolene. He talks about you in his sleep

and there's nothing I can do to keep from crying when he calls your name, Joanie.