When I tell my mother that I’m heading to an island accessible only by speedboat to join 11 founders on a biohacking retreat, she tells me to share my location with her in case someone traps me there to harvest my youthful blood. She’s half joking, but when many people think of longevity, that is the image conjured: extreme health hacks with questionable ethics, reserved for the uber rich.
On ‘The Island’, an eight-bedroom luxury holiday home in the middle of a lake in the Oxfordshire countryside, there are thankfully no sacrificial blood transfusions on the agenda — despite retreat co-organiser Haz Hubble using the slogan “we’re going all Bryan Johnson in this bitch” as advertisement on LinkedIn. Instead, there’s a programme of early morning yoga, energising watersports and a medical diagnostics test that screens blood for 17 markers including thyroid function, inflammation and micronutrients.
“People see longevity in two ways,” says Seven Jacobs, retreat co-host and founder of experience design company The Urban Reset which was founded earlier this year, who chats to me as the group eat breakfast together. “It’s either live longer, or never die. People are motivated by a fear of death and it needs to shift towards a focus on living better — what’s the point of living forever if you feel terrible?”
The founders — all of whom were under the age of 40, with the majority in their 20s and early 30s — have paid between £450 and almost £800 to attend the four-day retreat, depending on their sleeping arrangements. “Entrepreneurs so rarely give themselves a chance to reset,” says Jacobs. “We wanted to take a break outside of our normal routines and noise, while focusing on how to live healthier lives when we go back into those routines, so we can enjoy our journeys and get even better results for ourselves and our businesses.”
But beneath the herbal teas piled up on the kitchen counter, the group breathwork sessions and the hot tub overlooking the lake, there is an underlying truth at the heart of this retreat: better health and longer lives has a price, and it’s not always just a financial one.
The price of health
“If you had an extra £400 to spend on your health, how would you spend it for the biggest health return on your investment?”
The group has gathered in the living room after breakfast, spreading out across the sofas and giant plush beanbags on the floor; most people are still in their pyjamas, and one rushes in a few minutes late having emerged from a morning Reiki session.
“I’d get an ice bath in my house,” says one founder, to murmurs of approval. Another, a cybersecurity founder in her mid-20s, says a padel subscription would be her priority, and a third recommends a farmers market in South London where you can buy organic vegetables at wholesale prices if you’re willing to get there between midnight and 4am.
Then, someone asks what age everyone would like to live to, if they could use tech to maintain a decent level of health and energy. The answers come at polar extremes: one says that he could happily die tomorrow if he felt he made the most of today; another follows up with “forever, until the universe ends.” Most people are somewhere in the middle — but the idea that longevity tech could give them a choice seems unanimously appealing.
While this hypothetical £400 could offer small perks, it soon becomes clear that accessing the most comprehensive life-lengthening tech requires significantly more wealth at your disposal.
“90% of financial services and advice serve the top 1%, and longevity is no different,” says Ines Swan, founder and leader at the first official UK community for Blueprint, the health optimisation protocol pioneered by Bryan Johnson.
She describes some of the procedures that have started to roll out across a clientele of premium clients in other countries, not just to extend life but also to control their lineage: stem cell therapies where the cells of young people are extracted, cleaned and injected to lengthen the lives of older customers; designer babies created from physically and intellectually ‘superior’ donors and minutely gene-edited to retain preferred characteristics; even research into whether it’s possible to transfer the brain and consciousness into a fresh new body.
“This is the realm of what rich people are accessing,” she says; “this is where we are heading. People think this is sci-fi, but the tech is here and this is happening, just for the people who can afford it.”
The group reacts with horror. “Maybe I don’t want to live as long as I thought, if that’s the future,” says one — the others laugh, but the sentiment seems shared.
Ethical dilemmas
With this revelation of dystopian science being tested around the world, the conversation inevitably turns to longevity guru Bryan Johnson. There are mixed opinions on the controversial figure — but Swan says his impact on longevity as an industry is undeniable: “as a poster boy, I’m forever grateful to him.”
A founder questions whether Johnson’s notorious ‘blood boy’ methods are a positive association with an already polarising industry — but the others seem united in their appreciation of the platform he represents. “He might have a negative effect on perception, but a massive impact on awareness” says one, and another agrees: “over time, awareness leads to acceptance.”
And the additional benefit of Johnson — and other ‘biospenders’ like him, who spend huge amounts of money on experimental treatments — is that they are ultimately funding research that will make longevity that is currently only available in a small number of locations around the globe more accessible over time, says Swan.
But accessibility doesn’t guarantee ethical usage — which is particularly a concern when treatments require potentially exploited donors, or when it involves designing babies to be genetically ‘superior’. “There are no guardrails in place right now,” says Swan. “When this technology becomes more accessible — and it will — we have to agree globally on what we think is ethical and use that to shape legislation.”
A healthy skepticism
For some founders, the retreat is part of an ongoing effort to prioritise longevity and preventative healthcare. “If I’m not feeling well or have a good sense of wellbeing, everything can fall apart very quickly with my startup. That’s happened to me many times and I’m trying to find the right balance,” says Tony Broderick, cofounder of early-stage DeFi platform startup Lucid Labs. He’s based in Barcelona, and flew into the UK specially for the retreat.
“A healthy man wants a million things but a sick man only wants one — I’ve experienced that myself, if I’ve got the flu or something then nothing else matters except feeling healthy. That has worked as a framework for me to try and do preventative care and generally look after myself,” he adds. The retreat was as much a learning opportunity as a way to switch off: “I wanted to get more insights into day-to-day health management and learning from other people’s experience.”
To this end, Broderick has already tried a couple of diagnostic blood tests to identify any potential emerging health issues — and when he leaves The Island, he’s headed straight to a kayaking retreat in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides to continue his streak of switching off. Next year, he’s hoping to travel to Turkey on a health tourism trip: “I’ll be doing very full, comprehensive diagnostics to check everything from brain scans to bloodwork — I see it as an investment,” he says.
”Founders struggle to find time for self care and we want to show them that it doesn’t take up loads of time,” says Mofiyin Onanuga, co-organiser of the retreat, and CEO of Hubble’s London Founder House, where a group of entrepreneurs have decided to move in together to maximise their company-building dedication and hold events for the founder community. “We had a nurse come to the Founder House once and people were doing their diagnostic blood tests while vibe coding.” She adds: “We hope to make the retreat an annual tradition, and next up for us is a fully functioning gym, sauna and ice bath in the house.”
But despite the longevity focus of this retreat, other founders in attendance aren’t all-in on the industry just yet.
“I think there’s a healthy level of skepticism,” one of the older founders, who owns an early-stage longevity startup himself, tells me as we sit beside the water and watch some of the others arranging themselves for a paddleboard race across the lake. He talks about a Reiki session he experienced the previous evening, where a practitioner works on clearing chakra blockages through gentle massage. I asked him if it worked. “No,” he replies with a chuckle. “I slept like a baby, but that was pretty much it.”
That’s not to say that the retreat hasn’t had an effect on its attendees, however. The cybersecurity founder — who initially only came on the retreat to support her friend Onanuga — says that she found real value in the week: “Sometimes you find yourself in unexpected places; I’ve had moments this week where I feel like I’ve had real growth and I think, why have I spent all this time at home journaling?!”
This is the third founder trip that the London Founder House has organised — the first two were ski trips, where a few of the retreat attendees first met — and Onanuga says bringing people together has been a highlight of the mission. “The focus is on community, and that’s really grown over the past year or so.”
“The best founders know it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Onanuga adds. “They want to perform at the top of their game for as long as possible, and health and wellness play a massive role in that. The kind of founders in our community are working 90-hour weeks, so we’ve made it a top priority to weave wellness into the way we live and work.”
We return to the house after the founders get tired of the cold water and they get ready for an evening of free time and yoga. Some take advantage of the hot tub and bound gleefully from the boat into the outdoor jacuzzi, a plate of freshly sliced watermelon resting on the side.
As one of the founders ferries me back to the mainland, I consider where longevity really lies in a young entrepreneur’s priority list. “Some might see it as a trend, but for us it’s a lifestyle,” says Onanuga. “More and more young founders are realising this and adopting sustainable change, there’s definitely a healthy element of competition keeping it alive.”
But while maximising the health return of investments is an increasing priority for the next generation of company-leaders, amongst the attendees of this retreat there remains skepticism about the extremities of this industry — and an awareness of what the trade-off would be for an obsession with extending lifespan through any means possible.
“[People obsessed with longevity] are just too scared to die,” one founder reflected, as the morning discussion in the living room drew to a close. “There’s no peace in that world.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/longevity-island-founder-retreat/
