The business of not dying
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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service with me, Thomas Mason. Today, how and why are Silicon Valley billionaires attempting to buy their way to a longer life? Life expectancy has gone up by about two and a half years a decade. So every day that you survive, your life expectancy goes up by five or six hours. That's PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now an investor in a firm trying to reverse ageing

at the cellular level. But he's not the only one. So are these billionaires just in it for themselves, or early investors in what could become a huge market? It could potentially be the biggest market opportunity ever, because this is something that affects everybody. Nobody wants to become less functional. And if the billionaire's experimental biotech eventually trickles down to help extend all of our lives...

Could it be good news for everyone? AI can help personalisation be more accessible for everyone and better for everyone too. But there's a warning the biggest leaps in life expectancy could already be behind us. It's been largely a result of saving children. The only gains that are left are now declines at older ages and that's where ageing gets in the way. Here's longevity the next growth industry. That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

Let's start with life expectancy. That's the average number of years a person can expect to live. It varies widely by country and by income. UN data suggests Hong Kong has the highest life expectancy at 86 years. And in Nigeria, where there's still significant poverty in places, it's just 54 years.

Over the past century, the average lifespan of a human has gone up sharply. And while there have been fluctuations like the COVID pandemic, it's expected to continue rising. Advances in public health have extended human life. But what if we could slow the aging process itself? Go against the numbers. As a species, we accept our inevitable decay, decline and death.

A trailer there for the Netflix documentary Don't Die. Starring the US entrepreneur Brian Johnson, it shot the idea of biohacking right up in the public consciousness.

Already a buzzword in the wellness industry, biohacking involves making lifestyle changes in areas like sleep, stress, exercise and diet. The goal is to improve health and slow ageing, and the methods are experimental. Some are extreme. And

And while scientists are still studying the risks, several billionaires are backing the longevity business. Without getting overly scientific, Amazon's Jeff Bezos has invested in Altos Labs, which is aiming to put us back into a more youthful state through breakthroughs in partial cellular reprogramming.

OpenAI's Sam Altman believes our cells can be tricked into self-eating, where they break down and recycle components like damaged proteins. He's a backer of Retro Biosciences, which has a mission to extend human health span, that's our number of years of good health, by a decade.

And by funding biomedical research, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg hopes a mix of advanced diagnostics and genetic engineering will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the year 2100.

So why are these billionaires doing it? I asked crypto founder and entrepreneur Andrew Masanto, who's created companies now worth billions of dollars. A keen biohacker himself, he's starting to invest in the space. I think that once you have...

lot of the different parts of life not figured out but you know handled whether it's a small amount of wealth or a large amount of wealth then you become really focused on the other areas of life which could contribute to a better experience and that has to do with things like health relationships etc and so as technology improves there

There are more and more possibilities for both the improvement of your day-to-day health, but also the longevity of your life. Andrew Misanto believes there are some interesting business opportunities where biotech meets artificial intelligence. If you think about the ways in which technology could go, yes, it can make things more efficient, but it can also help health to improve.

For example, with AI integrating all of the information together, at some point we might have, you know, a health AI that we can ask questions to about longevity and can aggregate what works on your dysfunctions may not work for my dysfunctions. And it takes time.

some sort of personalization to figure that out. Are you investing in some of the companies building some of these experimentations? Yeah, I am. But there's a long path to liquidity, especially if you're investing in very early stage technologies. So for example, there's no shortage of projects that need money for clinical trials. It's going to take a while.

The 42-year-old told me his big focus for now was getting the very best food into his body. So really biomimicry, even extending beyond organic to the quality of soil or grass-fed, grass-finished beef or produce or things which have high nutrient density. So yeah, do you feel like when you combine all these things, you've potentially reduced your biological age by how much?

Yeah, so the glycan age and the IOLO results say that my genetic age is one said 20 years old, one said 24. The one that Brian Johnson uses, I think it's roughly on point, but it said 38 last time and 42. So I think I'm doing pretty well, but it really depends what test you use. So I don't know if any of these actually make that much difference. I think it's more in your experience of life and how you feel. I've got a lot of energy. I feel phenomenal.

Discussing which of the many biomarker tests are of any use at all is the sort of thing biohackers love to debate, whether in Andrew Masanto's private longevity Facebook group, 24,000 members, or at one of his more select New York dinner parties of scientists and investors. And speaking of community, what even conventional scientists seem to agree on is the importance of maintaining social ties as we grow older.

We're then to track down some biohackers socialising. Bizarrely, it turns out there's a don't die app.

As I log on, I spot a promising meet-up on a Saturday evening in North London. My name's Tim Cook. I'm 56 and I'm in pretty good shape. Just to be clear, our South African host is not to be confused with the guy who runs Apple. We've been hosting the Don't Die London crew here and served the new geek food version of Brian Johnson's diet, super nutty and super veggie.

We run events and we're building this new food business, Geek Food, which is all about longevity food that tastes good that you would want to have. You've created a kitchen in your home. We've built a first, it's essentially a test commercial kitchen to prove the concept. And then assuming all is good, we'll work on what the next iteration of that will be.

Tim then leads us out for a tour of his industrial kitchen. Oh, this is fun. Yeah, so this is dry ingredients. We're going to invent a super milk, like hemp and macadamia milk. Are you going to get milk out of those nuts? Yeah, it's quite easy to make, actually. We brought in the pomegranate juicer from Germany. Yeah, we fresh-pressed the pomegranate juice to go in there. We get wild, organic blueberries, organic sour cherries...

I put some of the biohacker's claims to a public health professor at the University of Illinois, S.J. Olshansky. How much longer it might make us live, we don't know. And anyone who does put a number to it that's higher than 122, which is the world record for human longevity, is making it up out of thin air. So I'm not a big fan of pseudoscience. That's not how science should be done. You can't just add up the benefits associated with healthier lifestyles

and come up with a lifespan estimate for an individual that exceeds 100 or 120 or 150. I'm not a big fan of people making up numbers. It happens all the time. One of the people I meet at the Don't Die event in London is Ines Swan. She's 32, from Sweden, and has a very personal reason for her interest in living longer. I'm really, really passionate about this. I've been a so-called biohacker or a longevity enthusiast for the last 12 years.

It started from a skin cancer diagnosis when I was 20. And that led me on to understanding that if I don't have my health, I have nothing. And now I've been working at the top longevity clinics in the country with some of the most prominent doctors around the world, helping wealthy people improve their health, and

and with all the things that I've learned over the years I'm trying to make it accessible for everyday people so that we know exactly what we need to do and how to prioritize our time and money to get the best health return on investment. Ines says that early shock of skin cancer which she suspects was related to sun exposure as a child rather than ever attempting to get a

tan set her on a very different path. I then started researching more about why is it that the sun causes skin cancer. There's so many systems in your body that affect one single system and then it just started consuming me. I realised that this is really where I can make a big difference because sooner or later everyone will go through what I've gone through. Half of us will experience cancer at some point in our lives.

That mission connected Ines with the crypto entrepreneur I spoke to earlier, Andrew Masanto. She's now advising him on his daily health practices. Working with ultra-high net worth individuals, I oversee everything.

every single aspect of their lifestyles. For my clients like Andrew, it's about freeing up his time as much as possible so that when the doctors tell him or guide him, he doesn't have to think about how to implement it because it's already built into the system via me. This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Thomas Mason and today I'm finding out why billionaires are investing in living longer.

So what do these so-called biohackers actually do? One big focus is supplements, with bold claims about their anti-aging properties. Here's Brian Johnson on YouTube explaining why he takes so many. We've designed a protocol for sleep and exercise and diet and also 111 supplements. So we have a protocol put in place, we do a whole bunch of measurements, we look at the data and we determine whether it's appropriate to continue.

Could taking so many pills and powders not only be cumbersome and expensive, but actually harmful in large doses? There's official guidance out there. The independent non-profit US National Institute of Medicine sets upper limits for many vitamins and minerals to avoid negative effects, while England's National Health Service has published daily recommended intakes that says most people should get the nutrients they need from a varied and balanced diet.

I asked Professor Olshansky for his take on supplements. You're getting this confluence of aging science and aging biology mixed with some of the pseudoscience that's out there that people are trying to sell products without the evidence to support it, including Brian Johnson, who are making claims that aren't supported by science yet. Yeah, if you start taking supplements, they go from

Ones that you or I might take, like a multivitamin pill to something a lot more advanced or with bigger claims. Do you think there are some supplements you would take yourself? No.

There are no supplements that have been documented to extend life. Unless we can find a way to slow the ageing of the brain, we are going to run into a foundational limit. Most nutritional supplements just give people expensive urine. But that's certainly not preventing a lot of people from trying. Market intelligence firm Straits Research suggests the global market for nutritional supplements

is already worth more than $500 billion a year and will exceed $800 billion by 2033. I asked Ines Swan, who we heard from earlier, where she stood on this issue. I take almost 50 supplements a day. That's a long, long list. Some supplements are very expensive. I always try to find supplements that have multiple ingredients so that I can take as few tablets as possible because your stomach feels very upset if you take 50 pills, let's be honest.

Cambridge-educated neuroscientist Roy Bartel-Tavener styles himself as the British Brian Johnson, with a pragmatic twist. 80-20 approach, 80% of the effects with 20% of the effort, the core of what's absolutely needed and most effective. Roy qualified as a medical doctor too, mainly, he says, so people would start taking his biohacking claims more seriously.

And he's also started up a site selling personalised supplements, so he's in the business of getting other people to start taking them. What, I ask, might he suggest to me, a broadcast journalist of relatively modest means who's starting to sprout the odd grey hair? Hello. Yes, hello. I suppose when I think about things I'd like to improve about my health, I'd like to be able to lose some weight.

gain more muscle and get more easily to sleep. Focus on the top three with the most evidence. Creatine can really lead to improvements in strength. If you want to be gaining muscle, you need to be eating more protein. And one that ties in with a few of the other benefits is ashwagandha because that drops your cortisol. That results in more muscle gain and better body composition in terms of where the fat is.

Then we'll go into the sleep. Definitely don't want to be deficient in magnesium, which can happen if we're drinking and things. We want to be taking glycine before bed that leads to faster sleep onset.

And then the ashwagandha also helps. Many of the supplements suggested here have not been regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, and the science isn't clear on their effects. How much cash are we talking for all that? So we could probably get you off to a good start with everything that I've just suggested, for relatively little money, actually. I mean, if you want to start including some of the slightly more exotic things, then we might be talking around £100 a month, which is around, probably around $120 a month.

$120-$130 a month, that's pretty extravagant for most of us. Although do the math, and it's just 0.8% of Brian Johnson's claimed $167,000 monthly interventions.

How do these numbers compare with the total potable addressable market? I mean, it could potentially be the biggest market opportunity ever, right? Because this is something that affects everybody. Nobody wants to become less functional. Some estimates from the Longevity Vision Fund...

They worked something out like an 8 to 12 trillion global market by 2030. That's including diagnostics and treatment and a lot of health care. And along with her multi-millionaire backer in her swan spots an investment opportunity. My long-term ambition, and I have the support from my client too, is to start micro-investing in start-up

that come from Cambridge and Oxford. I'm quite involved in that scene so that over a long period of time, I can make a huge impact on the biotech scene in the next 10 years. So yeah, watch out, Peter Thiel.

There's a lot of speculation. I don't think these billionaires are going to make it to 100, let alone 150 or 200. I think those numbers are all made up out of thin air. But do they have the potential to accelerate aging science? Yes. And at that level, I like what they're doing and their involvement. And I believe that they're going to succeed. A rare note of consensus there between the billionaires and the public health establishment.

So is this a promising area for both science and business? The billionaires argue their advances will become humanity's advances, trickling down to the rest of us. We've already seen new jobs created in this area, and new businesses too, even if most agree longevity as an asset class is still highly speculative.

What, of course, we don't know is who'll be proven right. But the billionaires hope, and maybe some of us do too, that if we can only stick around long enough, we might just find out. What we do know, though, is that's it for this episode from me, Thomas Mason. Hear more episodes by searching for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.