How to Not Die in Silicon Valley

Blood boys. Cryogenic freezing. Living by the algorithm. Silicon Valley is known for a culture of health optimization, but some recent biohacking ventures are becoming more extreme–aimed not just at longevity but at beating death altogether. This week we talk about the Silicon Valley moguls obsessed with living forever and the radical measures they’re taking to do so.

You can follow Michael Calore on Mastodon at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Threads and @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: I would like to start by learning a little bit about your morning routines. What is the most Silicon Valley thing about your morning routine? Zoë, you go first.

Zoë Schiffer: Pretty much the first thing I do … It depends on where I am in my tech detox cycle. I either grab my phone and start furiously scrolling or I try and meditate. One of the two.

Lauren Goode: Do you use an app to meditate?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I use Insight Timer sometimes.

Michael Calore: That’s pretty Silicon Valley. Lauren, what about you?

Lauren Goode: I sometimes walk up the hill that I live on. That sounds like a song lyric, but sometimes I do that thing where I face east to try to get the natural sunlight as the day is rising, because that’s the thing that a lot of health and wellness gurus talk about. Not sure that’s Silicon Valley either, but I hear this on podcasts.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: What about you, Mike?

Michael Calore: I would say my sunrise alarm clock that glows at 6 am every morning. It just very slowly turns from dark orange to a soft sunlight tone. It’s really helpful when the time changes, because for me the sun always comes up at exactly the same time every morning, so it helps me optimize my morning.

Zoë Schiffer: You never oversleep?

Michael Calore: No, it always wakes me up. It’s amazing. I have hacked my brain into waking up with it.

Zoë Schiffer: You said “optimize” and “hack,” so you’re the most Silicon Valley of us all.

Michael Calore: This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.

Michael Calore: Today on the show, why are millionaires and billionaires in Silicon Valley so obsessed with living forever? We look at the CEOs and the venture capitalists going all in on the race to beat death. They’re hacking their bodies. They’re hacking their diets. They’re trying to look and feel younger and live longer. We ask, What does it mean for the rest of us? We are going to start today with one of the most overt Silicon Valley characters trying to beat death, and that is Bryan Johnson. Bryan with a y, Johnson with a j. Zoë, you’re the expert here, who is Bryan Johnson?

Zoë Schiffer: He’s certainly not a household name, but he is the most prominent player in this space right now. He grew up Mormon and founded the payments processing company Braintree. He ends up stepping down as CEO, but then Braintree goes on to be acquired by PayPal for like $800 million. Johnson walks away with about 3 to 400 million, so not bad. But this time period he realizes that he’s pretty unhealthy, and he takes stock of his life and feels like he’s depressed. He struggled with his weight as a kid too, and so he becomes pretty obsessed with health, wellness, fitness. Eventually this leads to an obsession with longevity, and specifically with living forever.

Bryan Johnson [archival audio]: In the 21st century. The only objective we have is, don’t die.

Zoë Schiffer: This leads us up to today, where he’s spending, he says, around $2 million a year on efforts to live forever. The efforts are slightly outlandish. A little crazy sounding. He’s doing blood plasma exchanges with his 17-year-old son, his blood boy. He’s taking around 100 supplements a day. He’s engaging in penis shock therapy, which is pretty much what it sounds like, unfortunately. It’s all bundled up into this blueprint plan, which he calls an algorithm that can take better care of his physique than he can himself. Mike, it could be yours for $333 a month plus a one-time sign-up fee. Not sponsored.

Lauren Goode: Zoë, I love how you said, “Penis shock therapy, exactly what it sounds like.” What is this? Why?

Zoë Schiffer: I’m so sorry to have to do this to you. He says he is trying to increase the time of his nighttime erections, and he also claims that it has worked and his dick feels 15 years younger. I guess we can take this word for it.

Lauren Goode: I think … Thanks for listening to this podcast, folks. We’re done.

Zoë Schiffer: We’re done.

Lauren Goode: … with this week’s episode.

Zoë Schiffer: We’re all going to go take a cold-ass shower.

Lauren Goode: I have to admit, in preparation for this episode, I went down the YouTube rabbit hole watching some of his videos. Zoë, I know you also stayed up very late one night reading his book, which is called Don’t Die, but I will say he knows how to capture an audience with these strange videos about his diet and his blood plasma exchanges and other bizarre therapies. He comes across as pretty disarming in these videos.

Bryan Johnson [archival audio]: The only thing we can play is don’t die, don’t kill each other, don’t ruin our biosphere, don’t ruin planet Earth, and don’t underestimate aligning with AI.

Lauren Goode: This is Bryan Johnson being interviewed on the podcast The Diary of a CEO.

Bryan Johnson [archival audio]: We have to figure out how all intelligence on this planet cooperates humans and the planet, artificial intelligence. It’s this big tapestry of goal alignment, of cooperation.

Lauren Goode: I think the big question we have is how much of this is bunk?

Michael Calore: Well, there’s a long history in Silicon Valley of trying to prolong life and biohack your way towards longevity and fitness, I guess, is probably the best to put it. But what are we talking about when we talk about quote-unquote Silicon Valley trying to live longer?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. This goes back long before Bryan Johnson. Like a lot of the trends that we see in the Valley, I think some of this stems from Google or Googlers. Google has been investing in anti-aging research since at least 2013. It started this secret project called Calico, that was once referred to as the Bell Labs of aging research. That research reportedly didn’t make much progress, but then Google also formed something called Verily, which was supposed to help our understanding and detection of diseases. Then there’s also Sergey Brin, who is one of the Google co-founders. He’s also personally obsessed with these topics because at one point he learned he has a genetic mutation that puts him at a higher risk for Parkinson’s disease. He also used to be married to Anne Wojcicki, the founder of 23andMe, which played a big part in his genetic testing process. But I think we should also just make a quick distinction as we’re talking about all of these trends, there’s a distinction between investors putting money into combating disease and then becoming obsessed with anti-aging and living forever because the two are related but aging is not considered a disease. It’s a natural process. Just to quickly go back to that earlier point, these people may also be cold plunging or taking human growth hormones or have quote, unquote, “blood boys,” but a lot of their financial interests lie in disease prevention.

Michael Calore: Right. OK. If we separate those two things into buckets, and we put the stuff that benefits society as a whole in one bucket, then we put all the stuff that is like, “I’m rich and I want to live forever” in the other bucket, what are we talking about in that bucket? What are some of the experiments and companies that we have our eyes on?

Zoë Schiffer: Well, it’s not really clear what the distinction is in a lot of these cases because some of these efforts are just so far-fetched that we haven’t even seen what bucket they fall into yet. I think Jeff Bezos is a good example here. He’s funding Altos Labs, the company pursuing biological reprogramming technology, which is a way to rejuvenate cells and could be used to extend the lives of humans eventually. That seems like one to keep our eyes on.

Lauren Goode: Then there’s also Peter Thiel, who I think is going to come up every so often on this podcast. Thiel is planning to use something called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, I had to write that down and I’m reading from it, to freeze his corpse after he dies so that he can be revived later on.

Michael Calore: Just like Walt Disney.

Lauren Goode: Did Disney do that?

Michael Calore: Yeah. Disney on ice.

Lauren Goode: Oh, my goodness.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God, Mike.

Michael Calore: No. It’s-

Lauren Goode: Once again, thank you for listening to this podcast.

Zoë Schiffer: We’re done. We are absolutely done.

Lauren Goode: This is the conclusion of this episode. There was this Mother Jones article that said that a field team from a contractor was going to swoop in and replace Thiel’s blood with anticoagulants and then chemicals. Then he was going to be packed in ice transferred and all this stuff, so this is firmly in the … Would you call it longevity if you’re dying, and then you’re-

Zoë Schiffer: I would call it a fucking national nightmare. Can you imagine anything scarier than having to live through one lifetime of Peter Thiel and then he dies and then he’s resurrected and come … Oh my God. At that point, certainly don’t resurrect me. I’ve lived through one, so I don’t want to do it again.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. This goes back to what Zoë said about some of these are very … They’re very outlandish. Some of these people are channeling their efforts into their offspring too, right? Zoë, talk about that?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It’s like if you yourself can’t live forever, then certainly your bloodline must live on. One of these people is Sam Altman, and this is an interesting investment. He’s poured money into a biotech company called Conception, which is basically trying to see if you can create human egg cells from stem cells. In theory, this would mean that two men would be able to procreate.

Lauren Goode: Right. Also, TBD within our new incoming administration as to whether or not such advanced reproductive options will be available to people.

Michael Calore: Right.

Lauren Goode: We should also talk about Orchid in that vein because that’s a company that’s been getting some attention here in Silicon Valley. In fact, at WIRED, we did a big interview with the founder of Orchid, Noor Siddiqui. She started this genetic testing company that has marketed the ability for customers to do some really advanced screening on embryos 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki has invested in the company, so has Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. Then reportedly Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, who is a former Neuralink executive who then became a parent to Elon Musk’s … How many children, Zoë? I believe three.

Zoë Schiffer: We believe three.

Lauren Goode: Apparently they used Orchid. That’s been a little bit controversial because of the level of testing that it does. Supposedly there’s the opportunity for it to do extensive testing on things like neurodevelopmental disorders, severe obesity, certain psychiatric conditions. The idea is wouldn’t it be great for parents to have access to more information about the health of their embryos, but it could devolve quickly into something that feels a lot like eugenics.

Michael Calore: Right.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It’s so interesting too because I feel like there’s such a assumption baked into that type of testing on what makes a good life. Not to get too esoteric on our podcast, but it really is this assumption that being quote, unquote, “Healthy and normal in a traditional sense,” is really important to lead the best life possible. I’m just not personally convinced that that’s the case.

Lauren Goode: What it also potentially does, since we’re talking about lifespan, means that you are in a sense dictating what the potential lifespan of your future child will be.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: You’re playing God.

Michael Calore: We have just gone over what all of the millionaires and the billionaires are doing, what they’re investing in, what they’re interested in. What about the scientists? Who are the scientists in Silicon Valley who are really at the forefront of this longevity movement?

Lauren Goode: Do you mean scientists or podcasters?

Zoë Schiffer: Lauren, how dare you?

Michael Calore: Am I guessing there’s some overlap here?

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Michael Calore: Is that what you’re saying?

Zoë Schiffer: Yes. We have come to the point in the episode where I gleefully get to talk about Andrew Huberman, who’s a neuroscientist turned podcast host, has a very popular podcast called the Huberman Lab podcast. Basically, his podcast focuses on wellness hacks, science-based wellness hacks. Things like cold plunges, different supplements to take, mindfulness techniques. Things that are intended to increase people’s overall well-being, and he’s become a celebrity in his own right and the subject of some reporting, which Lauren, I know you have some thoughts on.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. There was this feature article in New York Magazine earlier this year that had some revelations about Andrew Huberman’s personal life. Mostly that he was dating multiple women at once who were not aware of each other, and many of them felt harmed by that experience. He was also using very therapized language with them to show when an evolved man. He was. The most interesting part was that despite the fact that his podcast is called Huberman Lab and he is in fact a neuroscientist working at Stanford University, he was living in Southern California, and the article suggested that his lab might not even be a very active lab.

Michael Calore: Have all of these revelations changed how you feel about him?

Lauren Goode: There’s my opinion, and then I’ll just say that I think that his fans still really generally like Huberman.

Michael Calore: I see. OK.

Lauren Goode: But, yes. What do you make of it, Zoë? Because Zoë, I know that you were on the Huberman train for a while. You were cold plunging and stuff.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m not going to call you out for staring at the sun every morning, but I’ll say that’s classic Huberman right there.

Lauren Goode: That’s a classic Huberman.

Zoë Schiffer: For sure, face East. Does Andrew Huberman speak for touch grass? That’s a huge thing that he promotes. I did get on the train, and I really honestly liked his podcast. I’m also someone who does really like a good wellness hack. I have a cold plunge and a sauna in my backyard. Suffice to say that I am a Huberman head, if you will. I did stop listening to the podcast around the time the magazine article came out. It was a little hard to stomach after that.

Michael Calore: If you’re doing the Andrew Huberman stuff like cold plunges and facing east and taking care of yourself and actually maybe eating better, making better decisions around sleep, using technology or using biohacking methods to optimize those things, that’s not necessarily bad because those can grow into good habits. Those can be things that feel sustainable. It’s the other stuff that we have to be more critical about, like the efforts to live forever that do not feel sustainable.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. To Mike’s point, there’s also this interesting distinction on are you making small tweaks that might be uncomfortable in the moment? A cold plunge can be uncomfortable, but they make your current life more enjoyable. You have more energy right now. Or are you really delaying gratification altogether on the hopes that you can live forever? Because that, to me, doesn’t sound like a life I’d want to live. It is banking on this idea that he’ll live in perpetuity and maybe later he can have more fun.

Lauren Goode: I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we are not diluting ourselves either when we make these small tweaks to our lifestyles or our habits in order to try to live a healthier life. We’re not also thinking I’m going to live forever or I’m even going to live to be 100. We’re fully aware of the reality of where we’re headed, and we’re not such power mongers that we think we can control it.

Michael Calore: That’s, to me, why Bryan Johnson is so fascinating because part of his script is trying to make his day-to-day life better. But also part of his script is immortality, and he wants to live forever. It’s like he’s attacking the problem from both sides.

Lauren Goode: Didn’t he literally host dinners called Don’t Die?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. The dinners are a really interesting crossover between the tech elite and the Hollywood elite. Kim Kardashian was actually at one of the dinners recently, as was Andrew Huberman hilariously. At the dinners, in addition to talking about the outlandish longevity techniques that Bryan Johnson is trying, he also poses this question he says to his guests. The question is, “If you had access to an algorithm that could give you the best physical, mental, and spiritual health if your entire life, but in exchange for access to that algorithm you’d have to go to bed when it said, exercise when it said, presumably eat what it said. Would you say yes or no?” Then everyone goes around and gives their answer.

Lauren Goode: Would you say that is food for thought?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God.

Lauren Goode: OK. True story though-

Zoë Schiffer: We’ve had to edit this podcast so many times. Yet again –

Lauren Goode: True … There’s a whole other segment to come, folks. But true story, I know someone who went to one of those dinners. They said that afterwards they had to eat a cheeseburger.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh, because they weren’t satisfied with the dessert that’s made with half a Brazil nut? I’m shocked.

Lauren Goode: Yes. Yes. It’s like on those rare occasions maybe when one of us goes to a nice work dinner, and then you’re self-conscious during it or they’re feeding morsels that afterwards you go home and you’re like, “I really want McDonald’s.”

Michael Calore: OK. We need to take a break. But when we come back, we’re going to keep talking about why Silicon Valley is so obsessed with living forever, and we are going to ask each other the Don’t Die dinner question. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. All right. To get back into it, I want to pretend that the three of us are at one of Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die dinners. He turns to us with those everlasting blue eyes, and he asks, “If you had access to an algorithm that can give you the best physical, mental, and spiritual health of your life, but in exchange for access to the algorithm you would’ve to go to bed when it said, you would’ve to exercise the way that it said, you’d have to eat what it said. Would you say yes or would you say no?” Lauren?

Lauren Goode: I have a very serious follow-up question.

Michael Calore: What’s that?

Lauren Goode: Would this be the Threads algorithm?

Zoë Schiffer: Lauren, you just always have to sneak in shade for poor Threads.

Lauren Goode: No, because this is all about control. Right? It’s excessive control over a mind and body to achieve an outcome of quote, unquote, “Living forever,” which is not actually a guaranteed outcome. Also, it sounds like a miserable way to live your life.

Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Control is really interesting because, honestly, it was a big part of the critique around Andrew Huberman that was cited in the New York Magazine article. Basically the allegation was that he was trying to control the women that he dated. He was being pretty controlling of their behavior and what they did. It does seem like the mindset starts to spill over a little bit into other areas of your life and other people’s lives.

Lauren Goode: What do you think, Zoë? What are your thoughts on the algorithm guiding your life?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I’m with Lauren on this. I think there’s a lot of joy to be had in occasionally staying up too late, maybe imbibing a substance or two that will make you feel like trash the next day. That’s living. What about you, Mike?

Michael Calore: I’m fully on board with the both of you. I would say no. Absolutely not. But I feel like if you’re in that situation, you just said no, then the host and the other people around the table who feel the same way as the host would challenge you on it. You would have to come up with this idea of individuality being important, and I want to be able to make my own choices. I am an autonomous human being in the world, which is weird because you are accepting … By saying yes to that question by saying, “Yes, I’m surrendering to this algorithm that is going to optimize me,” you are basically reducing your ego in order to do so. Whereas if you are saying, “No, I want to make my own decisions. I want to be autonomous,” then you are expressing your ego. Your ego is expanding to fill that.

Lauren Goode: I don’t philosophically agree with that.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: I think that if you surrender yourself to what your body, some elements of your environment, what your life path holds for you, you’re not living according to an algorithm. Then I think that demonstrates less ego.

Michael Calore: Yeah. That’s interesting. That actually gets to the point that I’m trying to work to, which is that all of these efforts to extend your life and to live forever and to use your resources to better your own life feels like they are driven by ego. Can we talk about the ego of it all? Can we talk about what is it particularly about these folks and how they live their lives and why they want to live forever?

Lauren Goode: There’s no doubt that there’s ego behind this. I think that some of these entrepreneurs present what they’re doing as altruistic. Like, “If I can hack this or solve this for myself, then that’s better for humanity.” But why do they believe they are the people who should be able to live forever? We mentioned Anne Wojcicki and 23andMe earlier. I remembered that when I interviewed her for another podcast back in 2017 I asked her some version of this question. Like, “Why is Silicon Valley so obsessed with hacking death?” She said, “Look, I think the reality is just that death is the reality for us.” She acknowledged that some of her peers might be unhappy with that statement, but it seems pretty grounded in reality. She said, I am reading now, “What everyone can agree on is that there are genes and then there’s their environment. Your genes dictate a certain element, but you have huge variabilities in your environment.” If we can understand what variables are important, then maybe you can optimize those. But at the end of the day, we’re all going to die. It does, I think, go back to control. But maybe we should be focusing on somewhat reasonably controlling the things that we actually can, like certain elements of our environment and lifestyle, and then seek out advancements in treatments that help target certain diseases versus attempting to control whether or not you can freeze your body and revive yourself later on or live to be 150 years old.

Michael Calore: Right. Again, there’s that bridge between making yourself healthier in the day-to-day, and then actually trying to extend your life beyond what your genes and your environment would naturally dictate.

Lauren Goode: Yes. I think that there’s a certain hubris that comes with believing that a non-biologist could come along and solve something in a timeframe that also results in a good ROI for their investors.

Michael Calore: Yeah. I do feel like we need to talk about the fact that many of the people that we’re talking about are men who are in this camp of, “I want to live forever.” We went through the whole list in the first segment and it was all dudes, wasn’t it?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. There are women involved. I don’t want to erase them from this history because Anne Wojcicki, who Lauren was just talking about, is in a related space. Nicole Shanahan, an attorney and most recently RFK Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign, has been very interested in longevity efforts for years and years. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of Orchid, is another one of them. But yeah, the loudest people in the space and the ones engaging in the most outlandish experiments, they do seem to be predominantly men.

Lauren Goode: Well, there’s also Elizabeth Holmes, but we know how that turned out.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. The founder of Theranos, a medical diagnostic company that famously went under for fraud.

Lauren Goode: Yep. That’s where the move fast, break things ethos really goes wrong here. At the same time, that’s some of the point of Silicon Valley getting involved in health and disease prevention and longevity. Some of these entrepreneurs believe that they can speed up the drug development and testing process in a way that sometimes actually is positive.

Michael Calore: What happens when you bring the concept of altruism into this? This idea that people working to live longer can make an impact on the world for the better? Like you said earlier, we have people who are trying to live forever, and then people who are spending their money and their resources trying to come up with new medical technology that is going to improve life for millions of people.

Zoë Schiffer: I did notice that you left out the effective from altruism there, but it actually did make me think of that because one of the questions that effective altruists asked themselves when they’re not SBF asking, “How do I engage in widespread fraud?” Is, “Would this money that I’m going to put towards whatever, experiment, startup, you name it, be better spent on malaria nets, which is solving a very basic problem that affects a lot of people and it’s not necessarily sexy, but the solution is right there in front of us?” That’s the interesting thing because there are problems related to health and wellness and longevity that affect millions of people, like diabetes, but maybe it’s not as sexy to solve as trying to tackle longevity and living forever. That one seems to get a lot of the attention and a lot of the funding these days.

Michael Calore: It’s the moon shot.

Lauren Goode: It is.

Michael Calore: The Mars shot.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I have to say, guys, I really do love this episode. It has everything. We’re talking about blood boy injections, mosquito nets to prevent malaria, effective altruism, cryogenically freezing your body and waking yourself up centuries later. Bryan Johnson’s weird life hacks, which honestly, some of them sound intriguing to me. Maybe I should get a PRP treatment in my under-eye bags. What else? What are we missing?

Zoë Schiffer: For journalism. For journalism.

Lauren Goode: The manosphere. Don’t forget about the manosphere.

Michael Calore: There’s one big topic that we have not touched on yet.

Lauren Goode: Pronatalism? You’re going there, aren’t you? Please God, no.

Michael Calore: No. I was going to say AI, artificial intelligence.

Lauren Goode: Right. Right.

Michael Calore: Because-

Lauren Goode: Check that off the bingo card.

Michael Calore: … this is Silicon Valley, I’m sure all of these companies that we’ve talked about and all of these people who are pursuing these big problems are using artificial intelligence in some way. Right?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. This has a wide range too because there’s artificial intelligence to try to identify and target diseases, which seems like an incredibly valid use case for this amazing technology. Then I think there’s also the far end of the spectrum of people who are like, “I’m going to upload my brain to the cloud and create an AI version of it, and thereby extending my life. I shall live forever.” It is a little bit of main character syndrome to think that maybe your brain should be uploaded for people to access for all of eternity. My theory on that is we’re already uploading all of our brains to the internet. All of us. Every time we log in, make a keystroke, share something to social media. We’ve been doing it for decades now. There are already AI facsimiles of each of us.

Michael Calore: But is it all end-to-end encrypted including the metadata?

Lauren Goode: Probably not. Sadly.

Michael Calore: That’s a very good point. Who’s it all for? All these efforts to live longer, to preserve your life, to live to be over 100, who is it serving and for what purpose?

Zoë Schiffer: Right now, it seems like it’s about being the person who solves this unsolvable problem. Some of the solutions like figuring out how to grow an egg cell from stem cells could benefit many people, but if we’re talking about the longevity efforts it seems very clearly to at least mostly serve the individual engaging in those efforts for the moment.

Lauren Goode: I do think that there are a lot of smart people, well-resourced people who are probably making amazing efforts around targeting diseases, improving global maternal health, for example. A lot of health and wellness issues. I just think it’s the loud and bizarre ones. The outlandish ones tend to get the most attention.

Michael Calore: Yeah. And the most expensive ones. Maybe this is one of those scenarios where all of the technologies to extend your life 10 years cost $1 billion or $100 million right now per treatment, but in 50 years it’ll be $49.99. Go get a shot at the CVS, and you can live another 10 years.

Lauren Goode: CVS at that time is just one giant global pharmacy. There are no other pharmacies in the world. Good luck with that.

Michael Calore: Your shot is administered by a drone. May we all live long enough to see this future. We need to take another quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. We realized this whole conversation has been rather speculative and forward-looking. Some of it has been very silly. A lot of it may feel out of reach. But if you’re interested in this topic there is a lot of stuff out there that we can point you to, so we’re going to give you our recommendations for our favorite pieces of media, books, podcasts, et cetera, about longevity. Zoë?

Zoë Schiffer: OK. My first recommendation does fall within the manosphere Huberman universe, and it’s Outlive, which is a book by Peter Attia, who’s a physician and author who’s really focused on increasing your health span rather than just your lifespan. Honestly, I really did like a lot of the recommendations in his book primarily because they’re somewhat basic. Although he is encouraging people to eat a little healthier and work out more than we might be doing right now. It’s not unattainable for the masses. The other person, Jenny Odell, who wrote the book How to Do Nothing, which in my mind is the textbook on how to live a good life right now with the resources that we all have.

Lauren Goode: Those are both great recommendations.

Michael Calore: Those are. OK, Lauren. Your turn.

Lauren Goode: I’m going to recommend the Blue Zones. I know that this is anecdata or has been called as much and that we’re not all going to live to be 100. When … The Blue Zones focuses on centenarians. The dataset the researchers are looking at has traditionally been very small. Not many people around the world live to be 100 years old, but I still find it fascinating. I’m shocked by how frequently the Blue Zones still comes up in conversations even though this research has been going on now for over 15 years.

Michael Calore: What are some of the famous Blue Zones around the world?

Lauren Goode: Icaria, Greece is one of them. Sardinia, Italy. Okinawa, Japan. Nicoya, Costa Rica. Then-

Michael Calore: I want to live in all of those places.

Lauren Goode: … Loma Linda, California.

Zoë Schiffer: Is the idea that it’s about their diet or what-

Lauren Goode: Everything. Lifestyle. Community. Diet. Of course, these people grew up in a completely different era, pre-technology, but community is a big part of this too. Because there are consistencies in diet across the Blue Zones, but one thing that all of them share is constant movement and a sense of community.

Zoë Schiffer: We’re asking our bosses at Condé really directly, for journalism, please pay for Lauren’s under-eye treatment and send us all to Greece.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Zoë Schiffer: Or we won’t understand what we’re talking about.

Lauren Goode: We absolutely need to go to a Greek Island to record the next episode of the podcast.

Michael Calore: We need to make sure we form a solid community.

Lauren Goode: A community. Right. Which is clearly what Bryan Johnson is just trying to do with his Don’t Die dinners.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. Mike, what about you? What’s your recommendation for us today?

Michael Calore: Well, if you want to live forever, it’s very simple. You’ve got to go vegan. You got to stop eating the meat protein and start eating the plant protein.

Zoë Schiffer: Mike, we feel targeted. You know that we are legitimately circling around this. I’m trying to do it.

Lauren Goode: Zoë, you had vegan pizza the other night. You said it was pretty good.

Zoë Schiffer: I did. I did, and I read a really, really scary article written by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic about dairy farming, and it radicalized me for at least 24 hours. I was on oat milk. Thank you. I don’t want a prize.

Lauren Goode: Mike, how long have you been vegan for now?

Michael Calore: I don’t know. 800 years.

Lauren Goode: Nice. Our resident long-living man on this show.

Michael Calore: I’ve been fully vegan for about five years, and I’ve been vegetarian ever since I was a teenager. But look, as a lifelong adherence to a plant-based lifestyle, I know it does not work for everybody. That was more of a joke. What I’m actually going to recommend for all of our listeners is my favorite television program about immortality. It’s called True Blood. It’s an HBO show about vampires in the South.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s a documentary about the original blood boys.

Michael Calore: It’s fantastic.

Lauren Goode: True story. True story. No, it’s scripted.

Michael Calore: It’s campy, which is the best thing about it because it takes itself seriously most of the time, and then it does not. It is full of sex and violence and humor. It’s a lot of fun. Fantastic acting from all of the principal actors, and there are like a dozen people on the show who are really, really great. I highly recommend you go back and you watch True Blood. It was originally on television, what, 15 years ago? Something like that. It feels like forever ago.

Lauren Goode: You know what I love the most about this recommendation is that it enables me to carry one of my favorite phrases from our last podcast, Gadget Lab, onto this one, which is, “Love a good Skarsgård.”

Michael Calore: “Love a good Skarsgård.”

Lauren Goode: Longtime listeners will appreciate.

Michael Calore: This is the tall and handsome Alexander Skarsgård.

Lauren Goode: As a vampire. As a sexy vampire.

Michael Calore: As a vampire named Eric. Yeah. That’s what I got.

Lauren Goode: Thanks for breaking the mold, Mike.

Michael Calore: You’re welcome. All right, that is our show for today. We will be back next week with an episode that looks at Silicon Valley’s long relationship with libertarianism. Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions you can write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. We cannot wait to hear from you. Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Thanks also to executive producer, Stephanie Kariuki. Condé Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon. We will be back next week forevermore.