Are we better off optimizing what we already know, or paying for what we don’t?
I’ve been sitting with that question recently and it started, of all places, with a LinkedIn comment thread.
Image by Loek Van Doorn, Corfu 2026.
Eric Verdin who runs the Buck Institute, reposted a note from Karl Pfleger, an investor who tracks the aging biotech pipeline at AgingBiotech.info. Pfleger’s argument, stripped down: Bryan Johnson is doing it wrong. Not the diet, not the sleep schedule, not the eleven-hundred-dollar-a-month protocol. Wrong allocation. Johnson has the money and the platform to fund the science that doesn’t exist yet, Pfleger wrote, and instead almost all of it goes toward buying what’s already available. A man with three, four decades of remaining lifespan is optimizing for what current biology already knows how to do, while the actual determinant of how those decades go gets a fraction of his attention and none of his capital.
I don’t think Pfleger is fully right. I also don’t think he’s fully wrong.
The optimization economy
Almost everything that reaches the longevity consumer right now is optimization.
Deeper biomarker panels. More frequent testing. Continuous glucose monitors on people who don’t have diabetes. The falling cost of a full-body MRI. This is not a criticism, it’s a description, and it’s mostly good news. Catching what’s already detectable, earlier, is real medicine. It will add years to a lot of lives by preventing the things that were always going to be preventable.
But optimization has a ceiling, and the ceiling is close. You cannot biomarker your way past biology that hasn’t been invented yet. Sleep better, eat better, catch cancer at stage one instead of stage three, and you’re still aging on the same curve everyone born in your decade is aging on. The curve itself doesn’t move. Optimization is compound interest on a principal that stays fixed.
The other kind of spending, the kind almost nobody’s personal longevity budget touches, is the kind that tries to move the curve. That’s not testing. That’s funding the science that decides what will even be possible to buy in twenty years.