How Silicon Valley became the new Tír na nÓg

What full blooded young lad wouldn’t be taken with Niamh of the Golden Hair? Wasn’t Oisín only human when he said yes to the beautiful daughter of Manannán Mac Lir, the God of the Sea, particularly as she came with the extra quality of being the queen of Tír na nÓg? Oisín abandoned his mates in Na Fianna and his father Finn Mac Cumhaill – the man who created the Giant’s Causeway – for this red-haired stunner, heading for the Land of Eternal Youth. Three hundred years there passed like three and he returned to Ireland, feeling like a young fella, only to find that everyone was dead. When he dismounted his virile horse and touched Irish soil, he transformed into a wizened old man.

These Irish legends about the futility of wanting to live forever are thought to be thousands of years old, having been passed down orally for generations before being documented in the 18th century. Obviously, the legends never made it to Silicon Valley, where a movement, based on the notion that death is optional, is sweeping through the glittering halls of the technocracy.

An increasing amount of very rich men, having examined the progress of life expectancy of the past two centuries, are bewitched by the idea that we can live forever and that death is a choice more than a certainty. An entire sub-economy of vitamin pills, diets, self-help books, longevity weekends and genetic engineering initiatives have been spawned in this 21st-century version of Tír na nÓg.

At the centre of this movement is the modern day Oisín - a man called Bryan Johnson. Like many evangelicals, Johnson’s obsession is fascinating and risible in equal measure. His aim is to engineer immortality (or something close to it). In 2021 he publicly launched Blueprint, an obsessive anti-ageing regimen aimed at making his body function decades younger, subjecting himself to a rigorously measured lifestyle, a vegan diet, 100+ pills and supplements a day, strict sleep and exercise schedules, and constant medical tests overseen by a team of doctors. The goal is to reprogramme his body’s ageing process and prove that we might be the first generation that “don’t die”.

Johnson (47) is a tech entrepreneur turned longevity-evangelist whose career began in fintech. In 2007 he founded Braintree, a payment processing start-up that powered mobile transactions for online businesses. He then bought Venmo, a small peer-to-peer payments app, for about $26 million, which proved to be a steal. Venmo – not unlike Revolut - was an easy mobile money-transfer app that exploded in popularity, especially among young Americans. By 2013 its growing user base of tens of millions pushed revenue to more than $200 billion in 2021 alone, making it the talk of the digital finance world. Tech giant PayPal, Elon Musk’s original company, acquired Braintree and Venmo in 2013 for $800 million.

Now enormously wealthy, Johnson set about living forever. He spends a reported $2 million per year of his own money on this quest to stay youthful. The routine has earned him the nickname “the world’s most measured man”. He tracks everything in service of what he calls “optimal longevity”. He’s tried blood plasma transfusions (even using blood from his teenage son) and experimental gene therapies. According to Johnson, his biomarkers now indicate he’s ageing more slowly than normal and he claims that each calendar year only ages his body about 7½ months.

In recent years as the tech world became wealthier, more self-absorbed and, some might say, deluded, Johnson’s pet project has morphed into a fully-fledged “Don’t Die” community. He created a Don’t Die app in which users track a daily longevity score and has spawned online forums called Blueprint Discord, now numbering in the tens of thousands. He even hosts Don’t Die Summits, day-long events mixing wellness with almost evangelical fervour, driven by the genetic possibility that we can slow down and reverse the DNA triggers for ageing.

In early 2024 some 600 attendees paid $249–$599 each to attend a Los Angeles summit featuring biometric tests, complete with its own “longevity amusement park” of anti-ageing tech demos (VIP tickets at $1,499 included a private dinner with Johnson). At these summits, participants rave together in the morning at “biohacker dance parties” and test longevity gadgets, such as $500 red-light therapy masks and $125,000 hyperbaric oxygen chambers. It’s all designed to build a movement around Johnson’s core belief that ageing is a problem to be solved, not a fate to accept.

Like any prophet, Johnson is a branding genius and his public profile has skyrocketed. Earlier this year a glossy Netflix documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, showcased his daily routine, amplifying his message.

Johnson is not happening in a vacuum; he is part of a much larger economics of longevity business that is gaining momentum. Globally, anti-ageing and longevity is a multibillion-dollar industry. Anti-ageing products from supplements and skincare to wellness programmes already represent a $70+ billion market. (Colleen Rooney has just launched her own supplements range in Holland & Barrett, along with the ubiquitous Kourtney Kardashian.) The market is projected to double to $141 billion by 2034. We are getting old and will spend to stay healthy and young. There is serious money to be made.

Investors in Silicon Valley are bailing into the Don’t Die movement. In the past few years longevity biotech startups have sprung up, backed by loads of loot. Tech billionaires believe we can cure ageing at the cellular level. Google’s founders have backed Calico Labs (short for the California Life Company) to research life-extension. In 2022, Jeff Bezos (who else?) and other ultra-wealthy punters pitched $3 billion to launch Altos Labs, a company dedicated to cellular reprogramming therapies that hope to reverse ageing. Altos Labs has reported success extending the lifespans of mice via gene therapy.

Dozens of other firms, from start-ups to Big Pharma collaborations, are working on anti-ageing drugs, gene edits, stem cell therapies and senolytics (drugs that kill off zombie ageing cells). In 2021 more than $5 billion in venture capital flowed into longevity-related companies. The sector is creating “unicorn” valuations, For example, a company called Cambrian Bio, which develops drugs to slow age-related diseases, is valued at about $1.8 billion.

It is easy to be cynical and cite the Tír na nÓg example underscoring our futile fascination with prolonging life and avoiding death; on the other hand, average life spans have extended quite dramatically over the past century. Admittedly, as we get older, living a bit longer becomes more attractive and the phrase “60 is the new 40″ doesn’t seem that weird at my age.

Maybe if we can’t Live Forever, a tune that will be roared by 60-year-olds at the Oasis gigs in a few weeks’ time, our most decorous best bet might be to grow old gracefully. Fat chance.