DEE WILSON CONSULTING

By Dee Wilson

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The August 11 issue of The New Yorker contains an interesting and occasionally humorous article, "Live Long and Prosper: The quest to extend the human life span and get rich doing it," by Tad Friend. This article is a lengthy profile of Peter Diamandis, a wealthy entrepreneur with a degree in aerospace engineering from MIT, as well as a medical degree from Harvard which, according to Friend, was given him after he promised the dean of the medical school not to practice medicine.  

 

Diamandis, along with two other doctors and the motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, owns a clinic, issues a newsletter, maintains two podcasts, publishes books on the future and how to extend your life span and has venture funds devoted to AI and biotech, along with an annual conference, Abundance360  "which showcases advances in nanotechnology and brain- computer interfaces; and a semi- annual Platinum Trip where, for seventy thousand dollars apiece, people get to meet eminent longevity scientists, invest in their experimental therapies and secure those therapies for personal use." 

 

Diamandis' network of enterprises, "known to its constituents as Peterverse" (not a misprint) caters to billionaires who already live on average a dozen years longer than low income persons in the U.S., according to Friend. Diamandis' wealthy followers intend to greatly increase this difference. Theirs is not a social justice movement.  However, the longevity industry has expanded far beyond Diamandis' enterprises, and includes watches that track vital signs and biomarker "clocks" that measure one's aging. Some true believers take dozens of supplements ( as many as 60-80 daily), utilize electromagnetic frequency beds, limit food intake to an exact number of calories ( e.g., 1977), undergo high frequency stimulation of the abdomen "to stimulate the effect of twenty thousand sit ups."  One enthusiast publishes his biomarkers online, "everything from body-mass index to a total duration of nighttime erections  (three hours and thirty six minutes at one recent climacteric)."  

 

Diamandis is an optimist who expects life changing scientific breakthroughs in the near future. He has speculated that AI could double the human life span in five to ten years. Friend comments that the life span of Americans has almost doubled since 1900, a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. However, Friend discusses the medical mysteries that confront longevity researchers. For example, "the authors of a seminal paper on Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such as signs of impaired self regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, cellular senescence ... and stem cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks are "strongly related," they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently." Short version: causes of the aging process remain poorly understood. 

 

Friend comments that every few years a new discovery appears for a limited time to dramatically alter the aging process, e.g., taking supplements to "preserve genomic integrity integrity, maintaining our telomeres, the protective caps on DNA strands which shrink as we age, perfusing our veins with "young blood,"  and taking Rapamycin ... Yet interventions which arrest one hallmark of aging often accelerate others." For example, Rapamycin, Friend asserts, "inhibits the senescent cells that cause inflammation... But having too few senescent cells is dangerous, because senescence helps block tumors." The body must balance the risk of atrophy ( cells failing to replicate properly) and cancer ( cells replicating too frequently). Caloric restriction provides some of the benefits of Rapamycin but can also shrink muscle mass, lower your libido and suppress neuronal function, Friend asserts. "The latest promising idea is to revert normal cells to a state known as "induced pluripotent stem cells, a process that has extended life span in mice, "but taking it too far produces teratomas, tumors filled with teeth and hair."  

 

Friend describes Diamandis' daily routine: "rises each morning at five thirty, and assesses his overnight biometrics, gathered by an Oura ring, an Apple watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then, as he meditates, he employs three red- light- therapy devices: one for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria.    

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Along with a Ka'Chava shake he continues the first of five daily pill packs: this includes a GLP-1 agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement.  After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedaling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at a hundred and fifty grams, one gram for each pound he weighs. This daily regime resembles a monastic discipline, and it's only the morning!  He undergoes quarterly tests at his clinic which cost $21,500 a year plus about another $500 for supplements and additional tests.  

 

For clients who want more than to climb mountains in their seventies, "there's Epic, an eighty five thousand dollar program that includes an exercise coach and a nutritionist, stem cell "re-education" and treatments such as therapeutic plasma exchange, in which plasma is filtered from your blood and replaced with albumin and antibodies from healthy donors."  Diamandis charges $250,000 for a speech abroad, $100,000 for one on the East Coast and $70,000 for a talk near his home in Santa Monica, Friend states.  

 

Diamandis' ideas seem like a model of sanity and emotional balance compared to those of his friend, Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near (2006),  "who predicted decades ago that aging would be "dramatically slowed" by 2029, "the same year that computers would achieve consciousness." Kurzweil has speculated that "personalized immune therapies and organ replacements would propel us nearly to escape velocity. The rest would be done by nanobots - cell sized paramedics that zip through our blood stream repairing aging tissues - and the ability to upload our emulated brains." And: "After our intelligence merges with AI in the cloud, we will become digital entities a million times more intelligent than mere humans. This will happen in 2045, a moment called the Singularity," Friend states. 

 

Diamandis and others in his movement less visionary than Kurzweil live with the anxiety that they may die or become incapacitated just before the scientific breakthrough that will extend life for those who can afford it by hundreds of years or more. From the perspective of billionaires, there is no basis for concern re the effects of increased longevity on population, given the costs of the fountain of youth, and no guilt re their pursuit of virtual immortality as they are pioneers seeking a brave new world that may eventually be open to all in a new heavens and new earth, or perhaps on another planet in which the Peterverse and their peers can be safe.