Say Your Prayers, Eat Your Vitamins and You Can Live Forever

The chase for immortality from Hulk Hogan to Silicon Valley billionaires.

Feb 09, 2024

It seemed so simple when we were kids. Hulk Hogan, the 20th century proto-alpha male, would talk to millions of children each Sunday on USA Network’s All-American Wrestling and his message was simple:

To all my little Hulkamaniacs, say your prayers, take your vitamins and you will never go wrong.1

I’m 46. For the first 16 or 17 years of my life, I mainlined Flintstones chewables and attended church religiously2, and I didn’t look any better then than I do today. Bad genes3, a mother who smoked religiously4 and an overall lack of coordination were all contributors, as is/was my genuine dislike of being active.5

Hulk Hogan was the apex, the veritable pinnacle, of manhood during the 1980s and early 90s. For nearly 20 years, he embodied the spirit of all that was good and righteous. The muscles and blood vessels in his neck bulged like tree trunks, adding stress to the gold chain that suspended a crucifix between his pectorals. He was the late 20th century update to Muscular Christianity, the belief that your physical fitness brings you closer to God. It’s your patriotic and moral duty to attain aesthetic beauty and climb the mountain of masculinity in order to get closer to Christ. Hulk Hogan was an Adonis6 of a man, cut from a mythical cloth and destined to live with the rest of the gods for eternity on Mount Olympus.7

Of course, Hulk Hogan won’t live forever. His body is breaking down, as might happen to anyone in a contact sport. No one quite knows the long-term effects of repeated steroid use, though former NFL’er Lyle Alzado’s journey provides some clues. But, Hulk Hogan can’t live forever.

Not that others aren’t trying.

Anti-aging products represented a $37 billion global industry in 2021. We’ve been fighting wrinkles for decades with creams and pills. Now we’re developing embryonic stem cell treatments and editing cell mitochondria to reverse cell death and rebuild their function. Technology is evolving and, one of these days, someone just might figure out how to live forever.8

As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I was force-fed three major health campaigns:

Just say no to drugs
Have safe sex
Don’t smoke

A lot of money and time was spent on the first one to little avail. The morality police are still fighting back against contraception access in favor of abstinence education, even though contraception access is proven to work in reducing pregnancy and contracting STIs, including HIV.

It was pretty clear to us kids that inhaling anything that burns into your lungs wasn’t healthy. I didn’t need Mr. Snyder, my middle school health teacher, to explain that in weekslong detail. I could watch it at home, as my mother was a two-pack-a-day smoker.9

Digressing…those three campaigns were supposed to keep us safe and healthy, and lead us to long, healthy lives. But what happens when a long, healthy life isn’t enough?

The curious case of Bryan Johnson

I’m not a socialist, but I do think there’s plenty wrong with capitalism. For our narrow purposes, the stark wealth inequality in America is almost too great to understand. I don’t begrudge anyone success, but I have a hard time celebrating people who buy someone else’s idea, call it their own, and then get rich by selling that idea off.

Exhibit A: Bryan Johnson. Johnson paid his way through Brigham Young University by founding startups and working his ass off. Commendable. Laudable. Each step of the way, he took leaps to bigger spaces and places. VoIP phone service10. Real estate. Then he bought Venmo, the person-to-person app you use to pay your babysitter, for $26.2 million. A year later, he sold it (and his entire company) to PayPal for $800 million. A tidy little profit.

Today, his estimated worth is $400 million. It’s not Bezos or Musk, but neither you or I would refuse that sort of wealth. Like Musk, he built his wealth on top of the work of others, buying companies and ideas that already existed, watching them grow, and selling at the right time.

Johnson’s newest plan is to live forever. Really.

He’s created a life extension program called Blueprint, a regimen of therapies, medicinal and otherwise, aimed at prolonging his life. Here’s how Time magazine11 tells it:

Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it.

I’m not from the south, but I think I can get away with saying, “Bless his heart.”

Part of this regimen is brain training to eliminate impulsive desire, or what Johnson playfully calls the rascal mind. Open the cabinet and see that package of Oreo Cakesters staring back at you? Wake up in the middle of the night and want to have sex with your plus one? Have a beer with your friends? He sees this as “acts of violence” against the Blueprint. Eliminate the impulse to ingest needless sugar, interrupt sleep or consume empty calories, and you prolong life.

Upon waking at 4:30 a.m., he takes 33 different vitamins and supplements. At his 11 a.m. dinner, he pops 20 more. Along the way, he consumes 15 grams of dark chocolate, 30 mL of extra virgin olive oil12, 29 grams of pea protein and a bunch of other stuff I’m not bothering to research. Before bed, he takes 300 mcg of melatonin. Johnson allots himself 2,250 calories of food each day, much of which is vegetables or plant-based proteins. By day’s end, he will have popped more than 100 supplement pills.

In between, he completes an exercise routine of 35 different activities (varied by day). During the day, he wears a hat that shoots red light into his scalp for cell repair and a laser light mask to stimulate collagen growth. Three times a week, he stands in front of infrared light therapy walls, also for cell repair. At night, he sleeps with a device attached to his penis to monitor nighttime erections. Also from Time:

“I have, on average, two hours and 12 minutes each night of erection of a certain quality,” he says. “To be age 18, it would be three hours and 30 minutes.” Nighttime erections, he says, are “a biological age marker for your sexual function,” one that also has implications for cardiovascular fitness. The erection tracker looks like a little AirPods case with a turquoise strap, like a purse worn by a penis.

Johnson, who is 46, reports that he has slowed the aging process by an equivalent of 31 years. By his measure, his heart has an equivalent age of 37, his diaphragm is 18, but his left ear is 64.

Why? To what end is all of this worth it? What’s the point of living forever, if you don’t live? Neither Johnson or Time addresses that, but others do.

Peter Attia, a podcast host and physician, says it’s the next brass ring for the rich. “I think that the wealthier we become and the more unhappy we are, the more we have to search for meaning in this life.” Naturally, he offers his own longevity subscription program.

Our friends at The Guardian offer a blunter summary:

Life extensionists have become a fervent and increasingly vocal bunch. Famously, the community includes venture capitalists and Silicon Valley billionaires, non-gerontologists all, and nearly all men, who consider death undesirable and appear to have made so much money they require infinite life in which to spend it.

Wait. Are you telling me that the motivation could be greed? Stop. I don’t believe it.

Billionaires have stockpiled cash and continue to do so, but don’t want to share it with anyone. Plus, they’re bored with it. So, they seek immortality to spend it all while trying to find happiness.13

Historical pursuits of immortality

The Bible gives us our first story of life everlasting. You remember the story of Adam and Eve, right? Eat from the tree of life, not from the tree of knowledge “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”14 It was one hell of an apple, because Adam went on to live 930 years according to biblical record, which is obviously unimpeachable and the final word on the matter. By contrast, Abraham lived until 175 years old. The Bible is unclear on this matter but I doubt any of them wore penis purses to monitor their erections.

Unfortunately, 17th century doctors in England rooted much of their education in The Bible and theorized that if Adam could go for nine centuries and their contemporaries were lucky to hit 50 years, then we had devolved15 into smaller and weaker beings.16

Humans have been on a quest to outrun death for millenia. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, was so committed to living forever that he made discussion of death in his presence punishable by death. Qin, in his chase for immortality, bought into a magical potion cooked up by one of his subjects. It was mercury.

He drank mercury. Guess how he died?

Mercury poisoning.

In an effort to preserve her good looks, Diane de Poitiers, a 16th century French hottie, undertook her own regimen. She drank gold. Not surprisingly, it killed her.

Blood has been a popular treatment. Before The Vatican used children as recreational playthings, it extracted their blood for anti-aging purposes. The ironically-named Pope Innocent VIII had the blood of children injected into him. It didn’t work. A 17th century Hungarian royal named Elizabeth Bathory bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her skin from wrinkling, requiring the murder and bloodletting of 600+ women. She died at age 54, confined to her castle.

Shortsighted pursuits

Bryan Johnson working out. From Time.com.

Question: Does he look healthy? As a 46-year-old obese male, I know I don’t portray the picture of health but I’m not sure I would trade it to look like that so I could extend my life for decades.

(Doctors don’t think so: “He looked sick. He was pale. I don’t know what he did with his face. All these MDs, we all kind of agreed that he didn’t look so great.”)

Something the life extension crowd hasn’t figured out is age-related diseases. 1 in 9 people over the age of 65 will develop Alzheimer’s; your odds drop to 1 in 3 at age 85. Cancer? 77% of all cancers are diagnosed in people over the age of 55. Three-quarters of people with Parkinson’s are age 60 or older.

“The reality is that you’re adding time at the end of your life. You’re not getting two decades of being in your 20s,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post. “We’re really bad judges of our abilities and our own limitations.”

Ninety-five percent of adults age 60 or older have at least one chronic condition and almost 80% have two or more.17 Sure, supplements can provide support for arthritis and eating broccoli and lentils every day for dinner will likely resolve any heart conditions that aren’t genetically-related (see also Reggie Lewis and Hank Gathers, high performance athletes that didn’t do so well). We still don’t know what Covid actually did to our bodies. Skepticism is high on whether you can live forever.

“If you want immortality, you should go to a church,”
— Dr. Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

“Death is not optional; it’s written into our genes,”
— Dr. Pinchas Cohen, University of Southern California.

Nir Barzilai, who directs aging research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, put it more succinctly for the Time reporter: “Even if it works for him, how do you know it works for you?”

One fact Johnson hasn’t disclosed — at least that I can find — is whether he went underwent a genetic screening. Reversing the aging process seems like a difficult enough of a lift. Undoing genetic code, whether it’s the litany of cancer markers, ApOE4, or the dozens of other biomarkers written into your being, can be observed and tracked, but your risk doesn’t disappear because you eat broccoli and lentils or where a penis purse.

To what end?

Johnson has the financial resources for this endeavor and it seems no worse than ingesting mercury. Good luck to him. Jeff Bezos is on his own quest for immortality, purportedly so he can eventually buy everything and be the last one standing.

But all of this sacrifice is for what? Lasting longer so you can hold on to your money? Where’s the joy? Where’s the fun in having red light shot into your head and doing shots of your own private-label olive oil?

The purpose of life is to live and Johnson doesn’t seem like he’s doing much of it. It’s a lot of time, effort and money to live forever only to not live at all.

Memories are immortal…

Memories, not humans, live on. If you have a memory of a loved one or friend you want to share, I’m always looking for contributors to our Griever’s Digest. Drop me an email at jaredpaventi at gmail dot com to learn more.

Final thoughts on finality…

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself. Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

— George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma (1957)