UrbanUpdate

On a warm September evening in Garden Grove, California, about three miles south of Disneyland, a group of two hundred or so people gather in the Main Conference Hall at the Hilton to hear the good news: Humanity is baby steps away from vanquishing death.

How exactly this will be accomplished depends on who you ask. It could be through injecting plasma harvested from children. Or it could be through rapamycin, an antibiotic demonstrated in clinical trials to prolong the lifespan of dogs and rodents. Or it could be through what James Strole describes on the mainstage at RAADfest, an anti-aging and longevity conference, as “embracing the immortal mindset.”

Strole is a trim man in his early seventies with the tightened, hermetically sealed skin-to-skull look that people get after a lot of plastic surgery. A cartoonish bouffant of thick brown hair blooms improbably from his bony crown. Above him, a slide on the projector reads in bold-faced bright yellow print: “Death Means Business: Do We?”

“We already have the innate potential to be immortal and live an unlimited lifespan right now,” Strole says.

Like others here, Strole is an immortalist, a person who believes that science and technology will soon render death obsolete. Over the past decades, immortalists have touted the idea that, much like the coming of Christ, immortality is waiting, always with frustrating coyness, right around the corner. Hang on to your mortal coil a few years longer, and you too, could take a dip in the fountain of eternal youth.

This message is of palpable urgency to many of the attendees at RAADfest, which is put on by the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, one of the foremost advocacy groups for the study of immortality. The gathering particularly appeals to the seventies-and-up crowd, for whom the concept of eternal rest has a sort of potent proximity. Should they perish, though, no biggie. There’s always cryonics, which believers call the “ambulance to the future”—the process of preserving the body (and sometimes only the head) in subfreezing temperatures, to be happily (one hopes) reanimated at a later date.

If Bryan Johnson wants to achieve his goal, which is to have the penis and heart function of an 18-year-old, he’ll need to maintain erections for at least an hour longer per night, on average.

RAADfest’s opening keynote speaker—and a big reason why I am here—is Bryan Johnson, a wealthy tech entrepreneur who has lately become an object of media fixation, owing to his colorful Twitter presence, absorbing diet and fitness regimen, and the fact that he spends most of his time and money on his attempt to live forever. To do so, he has created “Blueprint,” an algorithm using data about Johnson’s various organs that recommends protocols for his health, diet, and fitness.

Johnson is a big deal for the immortalist community. He is a lot younger and richer than most of the other RAADfest presenters, and due to a series of recent articles in The New York Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Time Magazine, he is kind of famous. He gets recognized in public a lot. People say things like, “Yo, vampire bro! Can I get some of that blood?” Johnson loves this.

Johnson’s favorite words are “algorithm” and “AI,” used in the context of the phrase “We need to align with AI.” He says this a lot. He also loves talking about his penis. At night, he attaches a small jetpack-like device to his groin to track his erections. His penis is usually erect for two hours and 13 minutes. This is good but not great. If Johnson wants to achieve his goal, which is to have the penis and heart function of an 18-year-old, he’ll need to maintain erections for at least an hour longer, on average.

Johnson shares this fact with me inside the first three minutes of our conversation, when I meet him in a conference room before his Q&A on the mainstage. He is wearing white sneakers, jeans, and a black T-shirt with the words “DON’T DIE” written across his chest in white capital letters. Because he avoids UV rays, he is very, very pale.

At RAADfest, a lot of people tell me that whatever Johnson is doing must be working because, they say, he looks really young for a guy of 46. “Young” is not really the adjective I would use. Up close, Johnson looks less like a young man than a middle aged man attempting to attain a sort of prenatal vitality, which is to say, he looks a little strange. If anything, his waxy pallor and gaunt physique have a preserved, antiseptic quality that give him the impression of having recently been embalmed.

“Don’t Die” is Johnson’s mantra. It is also the primary tenet of a philosophy he came up with called “Zeroism.” For Johnson, longevity isn’t about health and wellness but “this larger philosophical thing.” Critics often say: If you spend your whole life attempting not to die, then you’re not really living, are you? Well, that’s kind of the point. “Right now, it’s not about living life,” he said. “It’s about being around for the most spectacular moment in the galaxy in billions of years.”

What is this momentous event? Unclear, but it has something to do with what Johnson describes as a singularity style supercomputer-blending-with-human-intelligence-style event. Also, aliens. Whatever it is, it’s probably going to be cool, and Johnson wants to see it for himself.

A lot of people at RAADfest would really, really love for Johnson to start some sort of physical community where they can all live together and Johnson can lead them in the quiet path of practicing Blueprint. You get the sense that Johnson is not really into this idea.

For one thing, he is busy. He is writing three books that deal with Zeroism and he is also the current subject of a documentary being produced by Chris Smith of Tiger King fame. Secondly, there’s the quest for immortality, which takes up just about all of Johnson’s time and often requires travel to countries unrestricted by FDA regulation. For instance, Honduras, where he is heading to shoot some stem cells into his buttocks. Plus, there’s the fact that being immortal requires a lot of rest. Johnson has to get to bed early, around 8 pm, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for any cozy late-night leadership sessions.

And Johnson is definitely not going to miss out on a good night’s rest. During his mainstage Q&A someone asks Johnson what his single most important recommendation is to maintain longevity. We all collectively lean forward in our seats, anticipating the kernel of secret knowledge that Johnson is about to divulge. What magical elixir/peptide/vitamin combo will spare us from death’s greedy grasp a while longer?

“Sleep,” Johnson says. Within the audience, the disappointment is palpable. Raised eyebrows, annoyed sighs. Sleep? The silver bullet is sleep?

To those seeking practical advice on how to extend their lifespan, “sleep” is the only clear-cut prescription that exists at RAADfest. Turns out the prophet Matthew was on to something when he wrote that “small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life.” None of the people at RAADfest can come to any sort of working agreement about what antidotes to death actually work. In fact, one immortalist’s solution to prolonging life can end up being the very thing that kills another.

This is the case at my table during the RAADfest dinner party Saturday night. A plump, curly haired woman, a rancher, divulges that she’s recently purchased a hyperbaric chamber. It’s amazing technology, she says. Extremely refreshing stuff. Across the table, a wizened, hobbitish little guy with cataract eyes, Ken, makes a mournful clicking sound that emerges from deep in the back of his throat.

Says Ken: “A hyperbaric chamber is what killed my friend.”

Ken then embarks on a long and meandering story about two friends, a couple, who would regularly sandwich themselves into a jumbo-sized hyperbaric chamber; the tale ends with one of them developing a cancerous growth. What Ken recommends instead is something called “vital air therapy,” which has not only healed Ken’s spine and supercharged his memory, but has given him the ability, at age 82, to make love twice a day to his wife, a prim and stylish older woman wearing a black beret and a slash of red lipstick who leaves early into this tale to inspect the contents of a nearby dessert table.

At the conference’s small, one-room expo, misleadingly called “RAADCity,” various life-extending cures are on offer, including the $1,200 Rapid Release Pro, which looks something like an industrialized Hitachi and can be used—I think?—to un-glycate muscles. There is BrainTap, a prominent RAADfest sponsor, which sells a $1,000 device that promotes “brain fitness” and looks like a pair of big, retro headphones attached to opaque white glasses.

Additionally, there is a booth called Everspan offering, for the promotional price of $1,349, something called plasmapheresis alongside a vitamin cocktail IV injection. Later I learn that plasmapheresis is the clinical term for the same process that’s used in plasma donation. Typically, you get paid to donate plasma. Here, they charge you to remove it. This discrepancy is no deterrent to Everspan’s customers.

“There’s this misnomer that old people like me are Count Dracula, squeezing the blood out of young people,” says Tom Casey, owner of the blood bank Spectrum Plasma. “I call it infinitely renewable regeneration. Good for them. Good for us.”

Plasma is a popular topic at RAADfest, and I hear, repeatedly and at great length, about rat plasma, marine plasma, pig plasma, horse plasma, and best of all, young fresh frozen plasma, or yFFP. yFFP is the good stuff, the really top-shelf plasma harvested from young people that you want to get your hands on—but probably can’t, due to a few annoying FDA regulations.

“It’s good, rich plasma,” says Kim, a woman I met in the hotel bar who, in addition to injecting plasma, regularly pays around $5,000 for three-milligram injections of infant stem cells. Behind black-rimmed glasses, her blue eyes are wide and luminous. “It comes from babies, infants. Infants are best.”

If this sounds a bit vampirically off-putting, you may be relieved to find that yFFP actually comes from people who are slightly older, between the ages of 18 and 25. And the vampire thing is something that the people at Spectrum Plasma, the Texas-based blood bank that delivers a presentation on the benefits of yFFP, are well aware of.

“There’s this misnomer that old people like me are Count Dracula, squeezing the blood out of young people,” Tom Casey, Spectrum Plasma’s tall, plain-spoken owner, tells me. Casey posits that plasma donation benefits the donor, because they'll simply regenerate it. (In the U.S regular plasma donation isn’t considered to have serious side effects other than short-term fatigue. It’s unclear if it’s beneficial to the donor.) “I call it infinitely renewable regeneration,” Casey says. “Good for them. Good for us. Everybody wins.”

Casey is, however, realistic about the shortcomings of yFFP: namely, that no matter how many liters you inject, it won’t make you immortal. “The thing is, you can slow down your rate of aging, but it’s a matter of physics. You’re not going to reverse your age.” Casey is bothered by the whole immortality mumbo jumbo. “It’s a lot of people propagating the myth of the magic molecule.”

Unlike the immortals, I generally consider myself to be on pretty good terms with death. In particular, the phrase “eternal rest” has always struck me as sort of appealing—who wouldn’t want to rest, eternally? It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to keep going and going like the energizer bunny, accumulating more money and more stuff and meeting more and more people. Seems like it would all get a little monotonous after a while.

What’s so great about living forever? Couldn’t death be even more interesting than immortality, especially if it turns out to be a launchpad for some new form of consciousness? And even if that’s not the case, doesn’t it sound nice to take a breather on the whole existence thing? Sentience, while interesting and occasionally rewarding, is also upsetting and deeply exhausting.

There’s also the possibility that clinging to immortality has a lot less to do with a genuine love for life than it has to do with a deep rooted fear of death. “These people are terrified of dying,” a man named Zack tells me in the lobby. Are they? To test this theory, I go about asking a lot of people a nosy question that, if asked in a context other than an immortality conference, would be incredibly rude. Point blank, I want to know, are you afraid to die?

“I know that I will live an indefinite lifespan,” says Neal VanDeRee, minister of the Church of Perpetual Life. “I'll be here in 400 years and you can come to my 500th birthday party, when that’s celebrated.”

Even here, people are a little shocked when I ask this question. Some say, yeah, actually they are afraid to die. “But I’m not afraid to live,” says one man. When I put this question to Neal VanDeRee, the owlish, sincere minister of the Church of Perpetual Life, he chuckles like I’ve said something extremely amusing. “I don’t fear death because I’m an immortalist,” he says. “My plan is not to die. My plan is to stay here for the duration.”

VanDeRee is so convinced that he will be successful in avoiding death that for years, he was what he calls a “cryo-crastinator,” that is, a person who procrastinates on signing up for cryonics. VanDeRee is certain that he will make it to what he calls “longevity escape velocity.” But some people will not be so lucky. For instance, there is a guy VanDeRee knows named Jim who is 84. “He really needs to sign up for cryonic suspension,” VanDeRee says. “I’m not sure about him. But I know for myself that I will live an indefinite lifespan. I'll be here in 400 years and you can come to my 500th birthday party, when that’s celebrated.”

One man turns the question back to me. What about you? he asks. Are you afraid to die? I tell him, no, not really. And then I tell him how I’ve generally imagined how I’ll go, which is a pretty bucolic vision: me, aged and tranquil, satisfied by a life well-lived, looking out onto a spectacular view of a forest from a bed of clean white linen.

Right, he says. You imagine death as happening in the far off future. But you can’t really vouch for what your future self might want. The real question is: Are you afraid to die right now?

Driving back home on the 405 from Garden Grove to my apartment in Santa Monica, I think about how weird it is that someday I’ll be dead. It’s pretty trippy to imagine the world without you there to witness it. Later on that same night, I have an extremely vivid dream. In it, I watch myself die. I’m rafting. I come over a rapid, fall out of the raft, hit my head on a rock, and then slowly watch myself drown.

I wake up twisted in the sheets, horrified. Turns out, death is really scary. So scary, in fact, that you might understand why someone would invest all their money and time into the idea that they can avoid it indefinitely, and why this might lead them to track their nighttime erections or shoot up a bunch of babies’ stem cells or get involved with a community that delivers the message that death is not for you. It might even make you understand how a person could plan to avoid death entirely. To stay here for the duration. I mean, death is not exactly penciled into my calendar, either.

Zoë Bernard is a Los Angeles–based journalist who writes about culture and tech. She formerly covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.

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