Yes it’s easier to game LWC. I hope eventually it becomes big enough so that I can convince the company providing the test to cryptographically sign their output, so at least this editing concern is gone.
(Note phenotypic age only plays in 2025 season, the aging clock used changes every year.)
This forum keeps surprising me. BTW you were not only #1, but also the very first athlete ever : )
I hope you noticed you got the “Athlete Zero” badge? Hah 
Yes, I noticed lol! I’ll probably be submitting labs again when I’m no longer in a steep caloric deficit. When’s the cutoff for the end of this season again?
Dec 31 last blood sample to be taken and tested, you can still submit till around mid January because of that. BTW note I’m planning to disqualify partial and non-same day result, which might affect you slightly. As you recall it’s now best biomarker wins, but that turned out to be a bad decision based on the feedback that I received.
The setup is stupid. Everyone should probably be talking creatine, but that will raise creatinine levels significantly, especially those taking higher doses.
This is the problem with biomarkers they are affected by lots of things.
Surely the current season’s biological aging clock is imperfect and probably all future season’s clocks will be in some way, but if this is stupid then what does that tell you about throwing a ball into a basket? 
Your contest is a good thing, but I am not interested in gaming my own biomarkers for any particular algorithm.
It’s more exciting?
And pays a lot better.
For now. It’s still day one 
Article by Klaus Townsend on longevity competitions
Interview by Business Insider starting at 52:55
Below is a cleaned-up tidy transcript, followed by a summary and critique.
Host / Adam (“Nerra 73”):
Have you ever thought about not getting older over time? Not only that, but actually getting younger? Scientists have been working on aging ever since science existed. Today I’m bringing you three of the most successful people in the field of longevity: the top three in the Longevity World Cup. We have Wenzi in third place, Zdeněk/“Zanek” in second place, and Dr. Mike Lustgarten in first place. Welcome to the show.
Mike:
Thanks. By the way, Adam, you’re looking fitter. I know you lost some weight. Nice progress. I’m looking forward to seeing you climb the leaderboard.
Adam:
I hope you guys beat me. I want everybody to flourish. The new aging clock is going to change the game. I started the Longevity World Cup one year ago. Now over 100 athletes have registered, shared blood tests, and competed. The first season has concluded, and you three secured the top places. You’re the originals. The question is whether the OGs are still OGs 20 or 30 years from now. That’s the real test.
Mike:
That’s a really good point.
Adam:
There’s already a Hall of Fame on the front page, so your names are written in stone. Wenzi, you’re a mysterious person. Your biological age is 0.4 years old, but you don’t look like a baby. How come?
Wenzi:
My chronological age is pretty young, so that probably helps my PhenoAge. I know the model is supposed to be trained broadly, but my age probably helps. Four months, thankfully.
Adam:
Tell us about yourself.
Wenzi:
I’m 20. I’m a student studying neuroscience, physiology, and nutritional sciences. I’m passionate about health, wellness, longevity, performance, all that stuff. I’m a curious guy.
Adam:
Zdeněk, what about you?
Zdeněk:
I’m from the Czech Republic. I teach high school English. I’m interested in longevity and also cancer research, off-label drugs, and their applications for general health, longevity, and cancer. I’m also interested in the microbial burden hypothesis. I strongly believe it is closely related to longevity and maybe even the primary reason we are mortal. The idea is that microbial burden accumulates with age, and death lowers the burden at the species level. That’s one way to put longevity into an evolutionary context.
Adam:
So according to this theory, people die because they accumulate too many parasites and microbes over the years?
Zdeněk:
Yes—viruses, fungi, bacteria, parasites. They would otherwise pass that burden on and reduce group fitness.
Mike:
A couple of things. First, saying you “reverse” biological age is not quite right. “Reduce” is more technically accurate. Second, with Wenzi’s result, the PhenoAge training range was adults, not babies. So I don’t interpret that as “baby biomarkers.” I interpret it as: if you’re 20 and the model says effectively zero, then your biomarkers are about as youthful as they can be for your age. That doesn’t mean you literally have the biology of an infant.
Also, on the microbial burden theory: germ-free mice are not immortal. If you raise mice without a microbiome from birth, they still die. That means there are endogenous aging mechanisms independent of microbes.
And another point: Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity may be relevant here. Cells communicate through bioelectric signals. In cancer, cells can break away from the collective signal. Levin’s work suggests that restoring those signals may normalize cell behavior. To me, bioelectricity is one of the most interesting areas for rejuvenation.
Zdeněk:
But are those mice really germ-free? Maybe there are still intracellular microbes we cannot identify.
Mike:
Whole-genome sequencing and RNA approaches can identify microbial material. The germ-free model is quite robust.
Wenzi:
I actually do undergraduate microbiome research related to cancer risk. I also work with germ-free mice, and they’re pretty germ-free.
Adam:
Mike, who are you?
Mike:
Everybody knows me—I’m “Conquer Aging or Die” on YouTube. I’m the champion of the first year, I guess.
Adam:
Mike is a very respected scientist in the longevity field. You’re known for your extreme dedication to measuring everything you eat and running statistical correlations on n-of-1 experiments.
Mike:
In Brian Johnson’s defense, he’s improved over time. But one test after one intervention isn’t rigorous. You’d want repeated on/off cycles. Even statistical significance has limits because of false positives. If you run 100 comparisons, some will look significant by chance. The way to test whether a correlation is real is to manipulate the variable and see if the association strengthens or weakens over repeated tests. It’s not perfect. The challenge is optimizing across multiple biomarkers at once, not just one. You’re trying to find a local minimum across many variables.
I should also say: if there had been betting odds, I should have been the favorite. I measure eight times per year and have over 40 PhenoAge results over seven years. I’m basically the most experienced player in the game.
Adam:
There is no sport without betting. I’ve thought about implementing some kind of betting from the beginning.
Mike:
That could raise revenue. Lots of people may not want to participate but might still want to bet small amounts.
Zdeněk:
If there were betting, I’d get ultra-sensitive CRP testing and try to take first place.
Mike:
If your hs-CRP were measured more precisely, you might actually have won this year.
Wenzi:
I’ve never had measurable hs-CRP either when tested at higher sensitivity.
Wenzi:
Do you really think my biomarkers are just “expected for a 20-year-old”? PhenoAge is a mortality-risk model trained on adults. Doesn’t a result of four months suggest my risk profile is even better than the average healthy 20-year-old in the training data?
Mike:
Yes, probably better than the average 20-year-old—but it still doesn’t literally mean infant mortality risk. The lower end of the training range matters. My interpretation is that your biomarkers are about as youthful as they can physically get for your age. The real challenge is whether you can keep them there at 25, 30, and 35. That matters more than one test.
Wenzi:
I agree. The game is really about resisting age-related change.
Mike:
Exactly. Very few people think about it that way. A single test isn’t the same as an aging rate over years.
Zdeněk:
What do you think is the optimal white blood cell count?
Mike:
I find total white blood cell count less useful than the components. Neutrophils and monocytes tend to increase with aging; lymphocytes tend to decline. So I prefer to look at neutrophils, monocytes, and lymphocytes separately. Roughly, neutrophils around 2,000 to 3,000, lymphocytes around 2,000, and monocytes around 300 to 400 seem favorable from mortality data. That puts total white cells somewhere around 4,300, maybe even a bit lower. But distribution matters more than total.
Zdeněk:
Monocytes are my weak point. Any ideas on lowering them?
Mike:
For most people, the lowest-hanging fruit is body weight. But if you’re already lean, there’s something else going on. My advice: for a week before every blood test, track diet, supplements, sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, and timing of exercise. Then do that repeatedly. Over time you can look for correlations in your own data. Maybe it’s sleep, maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s something dietary. Your own data will tell you more than generic advice.
Zdeněk:
My lymphocytes are around 50%, neutrophils about 37–38%, monocytes 12–13%, total white cells around 4 to 5.
Mike:
That puts neutrophils near target, lymphocytes maybe a bit high but still reasonable, and monocytes slightly elevated but not catastrophically so. Maybe a modest increase in risk, not something dramatic.
Zdeněk:
AI told me that this profile can be typical for athletes.
Mike:
AI will give you general published patterns, but the large population datasets may point somewhat differently. Also, athlete studies are often small. You need to track your own case.
Wenzi:
I agree. Different people have very different rate-limiting steps. The best thing we can do now is embrace messy data and track ourselves.
Mike:
Yes, and aging is a moving target. Correlations that worked when you were 20 may not be the same at 30.
Adam:
We’re very close to having AI help with correlations, but I’m cautious. LLMs hallucinate, and if you can’t verify the math yourself, they can give literal rubbish.
Adam:
Everyone wants to know: what’s your secret?
Wenzi:
Physical activity is a big pillar. I’m a competitive track and field athlete in the short sprints. Sleep is another pillar. I use devices like Eight Sleep and Whoop and focus on sleep hygiene, temperature, winding down, dimming lights. Diet matters too—I track every gram of food. I eat a lot of greens, fish, plant protein, and some supplements. But I think the primary drivers are exercise, sleep, and not making bad choices.
Adam:
You’re 20. Are you having enough fun?
Wenzi:
This is fun. It’s fun to wake up feeling good, not wanting to scroll in bed, not feeling fatigued, learning the science, being disciplined, cooking, training. This genuinely interests me.
Mike:
I think there’s been a cultural shift. Some younger people are less into drinking and staying out late and more into feeling good. But the hard part is not just general lifestyle. The hard part is the next layer: precision exercise, precision nutrition, personalization.
Zdeněk:
For me it’s a system. I go to sleep early, wake up very early, exercise immediately, eat vegetables and fish, prepare my meals, listen to study summaries, and avoid partying, drinking, and smoking. Discipline is critical. You fall to the level of your system.
Mike:
Lifestyle is relatively straightforward conceptually. The more advanced level is figuring out what specifically is optimal for you. Most people don’t have the bandwidth for that yet.
Wenzi:
At the moment, to do that extra layer you have to be intrinsically curious and enjoy optimization.
Mike:
I see it like sports. There are elite players who are deep in it, then recreational players. Maybe this field grows in the same way.
Adam:
Mike, what’s your secret?
Mike:
The secret sauce is correlations. I’ve tested PhenoAge over 40 times across seven years, with eight blood tests per year. If you test enough, signal separates from noise. Then you can ask: is higher fat better or lower fat better, how much omega-3 is best, and so on. But even then, optimizing only PhenoAge is just one sliver of the picture. There are many other emerging biomarkers.
Daniel Allen (Business Insider):
I’m Daniel Allen from Business Insider and host of The Limit. I’m doing an episode on why it’s almost impossible to live past 115. Adam, when did this competition start, and why does it need to exist?
Adam:
It started one year ago. I believe competition might help us achieve longevity escape velocity, because people are crazy about competition.
Daniel:
When you say longevity escape velocity, do you mean literally not dying?
Adam:
Yes, literally not dying.
Daniel:
Why use PhenoAge?
Adam:
Biological aging clocks started with epigenetic clocks, but epigenetics is still unsettled. PhenoAge is blood-based, so people take it more seriously. But the competition’s clock will change over time.
Daniel:
How do you keep the competition fair?
Adam:
I speak to top participants, ask questions, sometimes ask for ID. The rules are soft, but people compete with their real face and identity.
Daniel:
What do winners get?
Adam:
Prize money funded through Bitcoin, around $4,000 split among the winners.
Daniel:
Mike, you reduced biological age by 22.1 years at chronological age 53. How does it feel?
Mike:
I should have been the favorite because I’ve been measuring these biomarkers for a decade and PhenoAge since 2018. I have the most experience.
Daniel:
Zdeněk, what’s hardest in your routine?
Zdeněk:
Honestly, discipline is not a problem for me. I’m very regimented.
Daniel:
Wenzi, you de-aged 20 years but you’re only 20. How do we make sense of that?
Wenzi:
The model doesn’t really work below 18. It doesn’t mean I’m literally zero years old. It means I’m healthier than even the healthiest young adults in the NHANES-based reference range.
Daniel:
What is the value of sharing information in this community?
Wenzi:
It’s huge. At the high level, interventions are very n-of-1. The basics generalize more, but advanced interventions often don’t transfer neatly from person to person.
Mike:
I’ve shared a lot publicly. Some things are behind a paywall because it’s part of my business, but I’m happy for anyone to beat me. I see this as collaboration.
Zdeněk:
My protocol is on Substack for free. I think this information should be shared freely.
Daniel:
I’m starting my own longevity journey, including full-body MRI and blood work, and I’m nervous. How should I think about that anxiety?
Mike:
Whether or not something shows up, they’ll probably give you general advice like eat less junk food, eat more vegetables, exercise. The deeper question is personalization. The best approach is repeated measurements plus tracking diet, exercise, sleep, and other inputs before each test. One test per year isn’t enough.
Daniel:
What biomarkers can change meaningfully in a few months?
Mike:
Body composition is an easy one: fat mass, visceral fat, lean mass. Those can change relatively quickly.
Wenzi:
Blood glucose, HbA1c, and fasting insulin can also move in a few months and reflect metabolic health pretty well.
Adam:
A full-body MRI found chronic nasal inflammation for me, which helped explain long-standing allergies. Sometimes you find something useful.
Daniel:
Rapid fire: if you were on a desert island and could bring one supplement or regimen item, what would it be?
Zdeněk:
Creatine.
Mike:
A clinical chemistry analyzer.
[laughter]
Wenzi:
Probably a good tent or sleeping bag. Diet and exercise would be covered; I’d want sleep protected.
Daniel:
What frontier science are you watching for radical life extension?
Adam:
Stem-cell therapies or gene therapies.
Zdeněk:
Cryonics deserves much more serious attention.
Wenzi:
More realistically, mTOR modulation with rapamycin, and also gut microbiome science.
Mike:
I’m skeptical of cryonics as a backup plan. My big bet is bioelectricity. Michael Levin’s work on planaria suggests bioelectric signaling may underlie regeneration and possibly rejuvenation. I think that could become a dominant rejuvenation field in decades to come.
Daniel:
What should a beginner spend per month on longevity?
Zdeněk:
Not more than $100, maybe $200 maximum.
Mike:
The basics matter most: don’t smoke, get lean, exercise, sleep, eat real food. A basic blood panel can also go a long way and isn’t that expensive.
Wenzi:
Supplements aren’t usually the big needle movers. Replacing bad habits with cooking and basic healthy eating can cost little or even save money. If I had to name one supplement, I’d say DHA/EPA for people who don’t eat fish.
Adam:
The sad reality is that the most effective interventions are still mostly free: eat well, sleep on time, exercise.
Daniel:
Final thought: you all focus heavily on measurement. What about wisdom, patience, spirituality, and life experience?
Zdeněk:
That matters a lot. I’m interested in Buddhism, Taoism, and texts like the Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita. Peace of mind is critical. Why live to 120 if you are constantly stressed and afraid of death?
Mike:
For me, wisdom comes through discovery—figuring things out, especially in my own data, and helping others do the same.
Wenzi:
I think wisdom can develop within science and health too. Also, social connection matters a lot for health and longevity.
Adam:
I probably spent too much of life thinking and not enough doing. My conclusion is: more doing, less thinking.
Daniel:
I’d push back on that. Whatever path got you here clearly mattered. We’ll see you in 100 years.
Adam:
Where do you see longevity as a sport in a few years?
Wenzi:
I don’t really think of it as a competition so much as us versus disease and death.
Mike:
Yes—less against each other, more against aging. It will grow, though maybe it remains niche.
Wenzi:
Wearables like Whoop and rings may broaden participation because they’re easy and continuous.
Zdeněk:
The competition should not become too complicated. It should use accessible biomarkers.
Adam:
Each year the featured clock will change. PhenoAge may remain as an amateur competition, but the pro competition will use newer clocks that I hope are progressively better. BoardsAge is one candidate because it may penalize athletes less.
Mike:
But every clock can be gamed. For example, creatine, vitamin D, cholesterol, SHBG—depending on the model, people may optimize the score rather than actual health.
Adam:
If there’s scientific debate, some number has to be chosen. Better to let AI choose it than me choose it arbitrarily.
Mike:
Maybe—but AI can miss studies and confidently give incomplete answers. We need to be careful. The problem is how to set caps without encouraging people to hack the metric rather than become healthier.
Daniel:
This was a great conversation. Thank you, everyone.
This discussion revolves around the Longevity World Cup, a competition in which participants try to lower their “biological age” using biomarkers, initially based on PhenoAge. The conversation brings together the founder/host Adam, the top three competitors, and later a journalist from Business Insider.
The main themes are:
Adam frames longevity as a sport. The premise is that competition may motivate people to optimize health and possibly accelerate progress toward radical life extension. The top three competitors are treated almost like elite athletes in a new discipline.
A major topic is how to interpret extremely low PhenoAge scores, especially in a 20-year-old contestant whose result mathematically comes out near zero. Mike argues that this does not mean the person has the biology of a baby; it means their biomarkers are about as favorable as the model can register within its adult training range. This is one of the most conceptually important parts of the discussion.
Mike’s central philosophy is that the path to better health lies in repeated testing, correlation analysis, and iterative self-experimentation. Rather than rely on one-off interventions, he argues for dense longitudinal tracking: blood tests, diet logs, sleep, HRV, exercise timing, and then examining what actually moves biomarkers over time.
Everyone agrees that basics matter: exercise, sleep, lean body composition, real food, no smoking, less junk. The more interesting disagreement is whether the future lies in these basics alone or in a more advanced layer of personalized precision optimization.
The group touches on several speculative or frontier ideas:
Toward the end, the conversation becomes more sophisticated. They discuss how aging clocks and biomarker-based scores can be gamed. Vitamin D, SHBG, creatine-related creatinine changes, cholesterol patterns, and other variables may improve a score without clearly improving underlying health. That leads to a good discussion of “metric hacking.”
The last part broadens the conversation beyond biomarkers. Zdeněk emphasizes peace of mind and philosophical traditions; Mike emphasizes discovery and scientific curiosity; Wenzi emphasizes social connection; Adam says he may have overvalued thinking relative to action.
One of the strongest parts is the insistence that a PhenoAge of near zero in a 20-year-old should not be read literally. That is a good and necessary correction. The discussion recognizes that aging clocks are statistical models built on specific populations and ranges, not direct measurements of ontological age.
Mike’s repeated point that one measurement is not enough is a serious strength. This is much better than the common biohacker pattern of “I tried X and one biomarker changed.” His insistence on repeated measures, reversibility, and testing correlations is one of the more scientifically mature parts of the conversation.
Another strong point is the recognition that improving one biomarker can worsen another. Real health optimization is not about one number. The “local minima” framing is clunky but conceptually useful: this is a multi-variable system.
The later discussion about vitamin D, SHBG, creatine, cholesterol, and scoring systems is genuinely insightful. Once you turn biomarkers into a competition, people will optimize the metric, not necessarily the biology. That is exactly what would happen.
The participants are surprisingly clear that basics still dominate: don’t smoke, exercise, sleep, avoid junk, stay lean, eat real food. That honesty improves the credibility of the discussion.
This is the biggest conceptual weakness. PhenoAge and similar clocks are often treated as “aging” measures, but they are better understood as risk-prediction composites. Lowering a score may reflect lower current risk or a more favorable biomarker profile, but it does not prove that the underlying aging process has been slowed, reversed, or “rejuvenated.”
This confusion appears several times:
Those phrases are rhetorically powerful but scientifically sloppy.
The conversation treats repeated self-tracking as a path to discovering personalized truths. That may sometimes help, but it also carries serious problems:
So while dense self-tracking can be useful, the implied confidence may exceed what the method can support.
A lot of the “optimal biomarker” thinking seems based on observational associations. But biomarkers like HDL, vitamin D, SHBG, albumin, white blood cells, and cholesterol are often entangled with disease states, frailty, inflammation, medication use, energy balance, and body composition. Observational minima do not automatically tell you what to target causally.
Some speculative topics are interesting, but the levels of evidence are very different:
The discussion sometimes places these on a similar imaginative plane without clearly marking the evidentiary hierarchy.
Turning longevity into a sport is clever socially, but it creates predictable distortions:
This is not a small problem; it goes to the core of whether the “sport” tracks actual health.
The most important idea in the whole discussion is this:
There is a huge difference between improving a biomarker score, lowering a mortality-risk model, and actually slowing the biological processes of aging.
The participants partly understand this, but they still drift between those categories. That tension is what makes the discussion interesting.
This is a lively and unusually thoughtful biohacking/longevity conversation. It is better than most content in the space because it:
Its weakness is that it still overstates what biomarker optimization can prove about aging itself. It is strongest when talking about measurement discipline and weakest when drifting into claims about true rejuvenation.
Overall: intellectually interesting, often self-aware, but still operating in a zone where rigorous risk modeling, self-experimentation, and anti-aging rhetoric are not fully disentangled.
If you want, I can also turn this into a more polished three-part format:
Scroll patrol? Car 54 where are you?
