Do you have an immortality project?

Next week: "Earth revolves around the Sun" shock horror youth cult probe.

Well in that case, yes we do have immortality porjects. I like the semi-Nietzschean 'post interview note', which seems out of place in an interview.

The word 'immortality' annoys me a little, in this kind of context. Long before the universe ends all books and paintings and music and political projects will be forgotten. Making them is never going to prolong your life to all eternity, so its not immortality, really. What's the difference between 70 years and 7000 years, fundamentally?

Is there a counterconcept to this I wonder

Less content

Cultural green living or w/e

Maybe Twitter is it

(these are the people you and your descendants will cheerfully work for in the lithium mines of the future)

"The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever"
https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”

I'm actually enjoying the writing here. Even if, as I read this passage again, the tenses are a little off.

Tolo offers me a little bowl of special chocolate, which had been “un-dutched,” stripped of heavy metals, and sourced only from regions with high polyphenol density. It tastes like a foot.

His "team of doctors" recommended "wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp"!? Who are these "doctors" and what published research are they consulting?

“Barzilai recalls that when Johnson showed up, the doctors present were concerned. “He looked sick. He was pale. I don’t know what he did with his face,” Dr. Barzilai says, adding that he was alarmed by Johnson’s lack of fat, which plays an important role in the body. “All these MDs, we all kind of agreed that he didn’t look so great

sorry, this is great:

“Johnson puts all of his biological measurements online—from his resting heart rate to his plaque index to images of his intestines taken with a “small bowel camera””

get this man on the Dick Cavett show, quick

You just know he must talk like Patrick Bateman.

Waaaaait wait wait wait wait...are we seriously all just gonna gloss over

sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections

Just........wut

I was hoping Elvis slyly inserted that part in

What's great about this dude (and all the others like him; he's just the one paying the most for PR/media placements at the moment) is that his multi-million-dollar war on death makes his "life" sound so utterly fucking joyless. Which is something I was thinking about the other week while perusing The Rock's Instagram. That dude spends like six hours a day lifting weights. He also posts videos of himself playing with his kids, which is much cooler IMO. But does he really enjoy his life? Between the hours of weight lifting and the extreme dietary restrictions he lives under, it seems like a nightmarish existence from the outside. And this other weirdo is even worse. He's built a "life" that seems more like torture, a life that no sane person would want to share with him, and yet he seems desperate to prolong it. IDGI.

woke mentality run amok. back when i was growing up we didn't get to decide which age we identify as

makes me think of this quote from Rob McElhenny, explaining how he suddenly got jacked for one of the later seasons of It's Always Sunny:

"I’m gonna break it down for you, because it’s actually quite simple, and anybody can do this. Anybody on the planet can do this. First thing’s first: if you have job—like a 9-5 job—quit that. Do you like food? Forget about that. Because you’re never going to enjoy anything you eat. Alcohol? Sorry. That’s out. So what you need to do—you have a chef, right? like a personal chef?—make sure the chef makes you a lot of chicken breast. And make sure you keep your caloric intake at a certain level. And as you go to your physician 2-3 times a week—just to monitor all your testosterone levels—because testosterone is important to building muscle. You’re good friends with the trainer from Magic Mike? Arin Babaian. So you want to give Arin a call. And you want to make sure he’s at your house and takes you to the gym at least twice a day, because you’re gonna want to do your muscle-building in the morning and then your cardio in the afternoon. Now, do you have a family? Like a significant other or kids? Yeah, forget about them. You’re not going to have time to deal with them.

"So that’s really all you have to do. And make sure you have a studio pay for the entire thing, because it could become exceptionally expensive. So, I think if you just do all those things, then you too can have an absolutely unrealistic body type, such as me."

Kumail Nanjiani getting super-jacked for that stupid Marvel movie was another one. He did interviews talking about how miserable it made him and the only possible response was, "Well, of course it did! Now shut up and go roll around in your pile of money."

That Johnson thing reminds of the main subject in the cryogenics episode of How To With John Wilson. Like, why does that guy want to be reborn?

How would you rate this quack against Gwyneth? I feel like her swampy shakes might be marginally tastier?

Lol this dude is going to die.

Like scientists could someday find a way to indefinitely keep your severed head preserved in some sort of nutrient bath but why would you want to be left just constantly staring at whatever the last person to handle your head had placed you in front of

Netflix, controlled by your eyes!

Or better, an internet connection w/ everything you want.

no m8 i don't can't help u

Kinda sorta tangential but: has there ever been any speculative fiction that posited the notion of like some big corporation buying up cryogenic storage facilities and hording all of the frozen people to maybe someday reanimate down the road as slave labor? Because that honestly doesn't seem like all that outlandish scenario (assuming our future ability to successfully unfreeze all those frozen folks).

And also just: the world is getting demonstrably worse/more uninhabitable. The next several decades are probably gonna be pretty rough. Why would you want to radically extend your existence on the earth at this point in time, particularly if it means you're doddering and ancient and incapable of fending for yourself?

This whole project just seems dystopian as eff. Humble yourself and prepare to die like every other organic being before you has died, ya knob.

Kinda sorta tangential but: has there ever been any speculative fiction that posited the notion of like some big corporation buying up cryogenic storage facilities and hording all of the frozen people to maybe someday reanimate down the road as slave labor? Because that honestly doesn't seem like all that outlandish scenario (assuming our future ability to successfully unfreeze all those frozen folks).

or you could just use people who are already alive as slave labor? i mean i think that's where that idea falls down, as far as i know right now we have more slave labor than ever without having to use cryogenic storage

And also just: the world is getting demonstrably worse/more uninhabitable. The next several decades are probably gonna be pretty rough. Why would you want to radically extend your existence on the earth at this point in time, particularly if it means you're doddering and ancient and incapable of fending for yourself?

― Prop Dramedy (Old Lunch)

because he's rich and isn't going to face any of those consequences. however shitty the world gets, he's going to be just fine.

and honestly, no matter how shitty the world is, i like being alive, and i intend to enjoy it as much as i can for as long as i can. bryan johnson, on the other hand, seems to value quantity over quality.

immensely entertaining article about a mentally ill person with way too much money. random snarky comments:

Tolo is known as “Blueprint XX.”

presumably because she is a LARGE GAMETE PRODUCER (god this sounds like something these two would actually _say_)

As Johnson, Tolo and I settle in to eat our “first meal” on his massive rust-colored couch, Johnson gestures to a bookshelf full of biographies: Ben Franklin, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Napoleon. “I have a relationship with the 25th century more than I have a relationship with the 21st century,” he says. “I don't really care what people in our time and place think of me. I really care about what the 25th century thinks.”

the 25th century:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeCb_abgig0

or you could just use people who are already alive as slave labor? i mean i think that's where that idea falls down, as far as i know right now we have more slave labor than ever without having to use cryogenic storage

I wasn't positing that they'd replace the existing slave laborers. It would just help fill out the ranks a little. And since they're presumably legally deceased (what is the legal status of the cryogenically-frozen, anyway?), there would be even fewer barriers in using them basically however you wanted. Particularly if you get at them in those early defrosting stages while they're still groggy and atrophied.

It isn't pleasant to put oneself in the diseased minds of our hypermoneyed sociopathic overlords but there is a non-zero chance that one or more of them have run the numbers on a scenario like this.

RichPeopleSicles

The kind of people who would get themselves frozen for a future life would make terrible slaves, I'd think.

He should eat his stool samples

This idea always makes me think of a Canadian filmmaker named Frank Cole, notorious for crossing the Sahara desert on camel. He was obsessed with overcoming death, daring it in one of the most lifeless places on earth. He was killed there in 2000, and his remains are nonetheless cryogenically preserved in the hope of resurrection, despite his corpse sitting in the desert for weeks before they were returned to his family.

what I love about this is that whatever happens to this dude in the future, there is a 100% chance it will be ironic.

the question is whether or not he's gonna outlive the Bad Luck Brian meme. because when he croaks he's gonna get a hell of a Bad Luck Brian meme

Even if he lives forever, it won't be what he hopes! See "Still Life" by Van der Graaf Generator for details.

Another strong childhood association with cryogenics is the Canadian soap opera Strange Paradise, featuring tragic billionaire Jean Paul Desmond who keeps his wife Erica in suspended animation in a dry-ice-shrouded metal tube in the dungeons of his castle.

The older I get, the better immortality sounds. I'm not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. I think I'd become a vampire if that were really an option.

his bowel movements are going into a time capsule

or crapsule, I guess

Like the Pharaos

Pharaohs*

The older I get, the better immortality sounds. I'm not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. I think I'd become a vampire if that were really an option.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

same but only because i really want to be goth but just can't make the look work for me

i want to see bryan johnson in 4000 years singing this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANsjT-_X60

i would be in for a Logan's Run end

only age 50 instead

Yeah, the world outside Logan’s dome sucks.

i would be in for a Logan's Run end

only age 50 instead

― real warm grandpa (Neanderthal)

fuck no, i'm just getting started here! three years? THREE YEARS?

only mandatory for me, everyone else can opt out