A tech founder on why he wants to live forever
Wearable devices that track health metrics are becoming increasingly popular as part of the "biohacking" movement. But what are they really about?
Roger’s* mother was shocked when he told her what happens when women sleep over.
Dating and in his mid-thirties, Roger focuses on sleeping next to a partner in a way that will give him a good “Whoop” score. He places a body pillow between him and his sleepover partner, attaches his mouth tape, and regulates his temperature through a temperature-controlled mattress.
Whoop is a wearable device and app that people are using to track their REM cycles, heart rate variability, and overall sleep hygiene. There are sensors in the Eight Sleep mattress topper, connecting electricity and the heart. Every morning, Whoop users can wake up to a score with analytics about their sleep. Many Whoop users are in tech themselves with a penchant for data analysis (Roger runs a tech startup in the AI/Education space.)
Wearables like Whoop and Oura ring are becoming a daily part of life for a certain class of (usually wealthy) people who can afford various devices and treatments, or who want to increase their longevity or life spans.
Also known as “biohacking,” this movement to monitor one’s health for an optimized body manifests not just in the Whoop, but in regiments of hundreds of vitamins and supplements per day, diets supposedly tailored to genetic make-ups, ultraviolet lights, extra hydrogen in water, and extra oxygen in gyms. One couple featured in the Wall Street Journal for biohacking their house touted their “$65,000 light-therapy bed purported to provide training recovery and a $16,990 BioCharger machine that uses light, frequencies and harmonics, voltage and pulsed electromagnetic field technology to, its makers claim, promote cellular rejuvenation, enhance cellular health and revitalize the body.”
Roger doesn’t want to be quite at that level, but with Whoop he and his friends can actually see each other's “sleep scores,” and there is a leaderboard of sorts. Sometimes they compete together and raise a small fund, which is awarded to the highest scorer at the end of the month.
Roger knows his friends’ scores intimately. One of his friends just had a baby and now tracks lower sleep scores while awake with his newborn. Meanwhile, Roger can tell whether his co-founder has been out drinking, because his scores plummet when he has. Roger’s Eight Sleep can even detect some health scores of his partner sleeping in bed next to him.
But according to experts, focusing daily on health and biometric data can increase anxiety and disrupt natural habits that the body should be able to detect on its own, without the help of an app or leaderboard. When it comes to sleep, this specific phenomenon is called orthosomnia, which is the pursuit of perfect sleep as dictated by sleep tracker results (ironically, resulting in poor sleep). And beyond sleep, wearable tech and the constant surveillance of one’s health has also been recently linked to eating disorders and exacerbation of obsessive-compulsive disorders.
So does this obsession with longevity lead to connection or disconnection? What are people getting out of comparing their sleep scores with one another? Are there privacy implications when you track the score of the person sleeping next to you? Is the desire to experiment on and know one’s own body indicative of another desire?
We sat down with Roger to learn about what brought him to Whoop and wearables, and what his concerns are about wearables. Interestingly, it led to a conversation about death.
*Roger is an alias we used so he could speak openly about his experience.
AS: How did you first get into wearable devices? Have you always been into tracking your health like this?
R: During Covid, I had friends who would talk about their Whoop bracelets and Oura rings and show them off. It’s a natural conversation starter when you see someone's Oura ring, and the benefits are very clear. Sleeping more is good for your health, and knowing about your heart and oxygen levels are important. It feels objective.
Friends would also show how hard they worked to be healthy the day before, and they would get credit both within the app and within their social circles. I hadn't really been that much into my health before, but so many of my friends in their 30s were wearing their devices that I bought one.
I also bought my Dad a Whoop for Father's Day, and he now sends me screenshots when he gets high scores.
Some people brag, I suppose. But in a way it’s similar to “Oh my god my legs are so sore,” or “I squatted a lot.” It's not cool, but people who aren't cool do that anyway to show off.
Every morning I wake up and have a notification with a recovery score, from 1-100. My Eight Sleep bed and Whoop track how well I slept, my heart rate variability, and how deep my sleep was. All that said, the negatives are not as well-publicized. I haven't heard people articulating the cost, or how to use them in moderation. My stats are in my face now every time I open my phone. It feels very all or nothing.
AS: Right, like it feels primed to lead people to obsessively check. What are some examples of moderating or "all or nothing" that you’ve seen with yourself or others?
R: One time I was with my girlfriend in Seattle, and when we woke up one morning she asked how I slept. I went immediately to check my Whoop scores instead of feeling or intuiting my body naturally. Yes, I like seeing the scores, but I also want to be in touch with my body’s natural rhythms without a technological crutch.
I saw a friend who I was high school friends with wearing a Whoop, and I asked if we could be friends to share our scores. She said “honestly, I'm trying to be less competitive so I would prefer not to.” It’s clear that people are running into issues around what is a healthy way to use these trackers.
And sometimes I can see that my uncle exercised a certain number of times a month, which is totally benign. But that information leakage could be used against you. It's as intimate as sharing your location.
AS: Do you find it kills the romance at the beginning of things?
R: I think that the example of being a multimillionaire who affords to build a “biohacker” house is an outlier, or at least for my bubble. If you go on a great first date with a woman, and think she is awesome, you won't care that your score is going to be terrible, if you get five drinks and come home at 3 a.m. you’ll think to yourself that that was awesome, and you’ll be running on fumes and energy from that great date.
But after ten dates, you need to be in more of a routine. And that’s when your own needs become a greater priority, and when lack of sleep starts to become a problem.
For example, I know that sleeping at my girlfriend’s house is going to hurt my scores. Her blinds are not that dark, and I don't like her sheets. If she wants to fall asleep cuddling me, I need to turn away after ten to fifteen minutes to get my own sleep.
If I’m consistently not getting sleep because of a romantic partner, that feels like a short term benefit for long-term cost, the cost of my sleep and affiliated health.
AS: How do you weigh short-term to long-term? If you’re having a beautiful romantic adventure, for example, maybe that is what makes life worth living in the optimized body people are trying to attain?
But I also understand the other side, that you don’t want to be surviving on three hours of sleep a night in order to have a connection with someone. I guess it’s all subjective, what loss of sleep people are willing to have for love.
R: I do think that my interest in my sleep scores has led to better communication. Sleep matters to me, and I don’t want to be resentful of my partner if I’m not communicating.
One time, my girlfriend was over, and she wanted to sleep over. I tried to think about the healthiest way to manage, so I told her she could sleep over, but that I would need to put a pillow wall between us and mouth shades on.
When my Mom heard about it though, she said “I can't believe I raised a kid who is treating a girl like that.”
AS: Do you think you’re then hoping your current or future partner will come along on this health-tracking journey with you?
R: I hadn't thought about that. My girlfriend loves to see her results on my Eight Sleep bed. She wears an Oura ring and we’ve tried continuous glucose monitors together.
I like that she put a needle in her tricep to track her glucose with me. It signals her values in health.
But I also don’t require that of a partner or anything. If I have a girlfriend who loves to come on runs with me, that’s great. But maybe I go on the run and she reads a book, and then I come back and learn something about her book.
I don't ever meet someone who thinks these things are freaky. No one is against Oura ring or Whoop. The way I view it, if your hobby is running, no one is going to be like “I hate how my boyfriend is so athletic.” The same applies to a lot of scenarios with these wearable devices.
AS: Right, I don’t think it's necessarily “freaky," but at a certain point—as I think you’ve realized—it can become invasive. Do you think you're more into all of this tech because you also work in tech and in AI? Or is it now mainstream?
R: I think it's both. My friends across industries—finance, lawyers—use Oura rings and Whoops. If they're rich buy these devices at this level, they’re probably tracking it.
Bryan Johnson, the longevity pioneer, also makes me more open to it.
AS: I was thinking about Bryan Johnson and quest to reverse aging as you were talking. Tell us more?
R: I think that Bryan Johnson is doing the world a huge service. I think that he applies a scientific method in the way that growth hackers apply the same method in building a product.
I don't think how his body responds is congruent to how my body might respond to what he’s doing. But I want to live as long as possible, and I admire that he is testing himself for our benefit.
Bryan Johnson’s comms also appeal to the masses; he makes memes and leans into attention catching stunts like how many minutes he had a boner last night. That can of course be off-putting for some. I'm sure he's an imperfect human; I know there have been headlines about him divorcing his wife after she was diagnosed with cancer.
But I don't think he's ultimately trying to sell supplements or olive oil to get rich. Yes, he gets social status for being the immortality guy. But to me he appears as a great and thoughtful CEO, someone who I respect.
AS: Johnson’s movement is called the “don’t die” movement. Would you choose not to die?
R: I would choose not to die, yes.
That question has seemed so far out, and some people think it's romantic to have endings. But I can start to imagine ways of living forever with some combination of biology and technology, like what Neuralink is doing.
If I had a gun to my head right now and someone asked me, do you want to opt in to something new? Or do you want to opt out and go the same way as everyone else?
I would choose the exciting route. It's fascinating to be on the cusp of change, of humankind's possibility. Why not take the exciting route?
I suppose the downside is that you can't ever escape something terrible. I’ve been pretty fortunate to not ever want to leave Earth or to want to die. I haven’t had many things in my life that I have wanted to escape from. So it's hard to imagine.
AS: Thanks for being so open, Roger.
Hard Reset note: Just yesterday, Bryan Johnson announced he will be stepping back from his anti-aging startup to focus on AI.
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