THE IMMORTALISTS OF HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA
On a humid morning in the summer of 2019, I stepped out of my Airbnb rental apartment in Hollywood, Florida, with a great sense of purpose. But as I reached the curb, I found a dead possum staring back at me, legs in the air, eyes wide and tongue protruding, a look of shock on its tiny face. Flies buzzed around the corpse as the rising temperature hastened its decomposition. It must have been there for a few days now. Usually I’d have walked by, attempting to avoid the smell and sight of the poor creature, but that day I paused and contemplated the finality and inevitably of death. I’d always believed that, like the possum, we were all on a preordained trip to the metaphorical gutter. But on that weekend I was about to meet a group of people who thought the exact opposite, the immortalist congregation of the Church of Perpetual Life.
The church itself towers over the untidy rows of bungalows lining the streets of its quiet residential block in an otherwise nondescript neighborhood. Each month, the giant, bulky building hosts this crowd of unconventional worshippers, who don’t gather to celebrate a god but instead an idea—that everyone should live forever. Followers of the church believe they can achieve immortality by surviving to a point in the future when technology and medicine are advanced enough to save them from death indefinitely. They meet to discuss the best ways to reach that golden age, taking inspiration from scientific breakthroughs, wellness practices, and plans to reanimate themselves should death catch up with them.
The community, unsurprisingly to outsiders at least, attracts a large number of eccentrics, both in the congregation and the leadership. All of them are regularly wheeled out for TV and print interviews, in which a fair amount of mockery seeps through the page or screen. It’s easy to see why: their declaration of impending immortality goes against everything we know about biology and science in general. But it’s worth remembering that they are far from the only group seeking to live forever. Every Sunday in the United States, tens of millions of devoted followers gather to worship some form of deity in the hope they will achieve a kind of everlasting life. Yet they largely escape the kind of mockery the immortalists endure, despite the Church of Perpetual Life’s version of eternal bliss sounding far more appealing than the judgement-heavy utopias offered as bait for a lifetime of religious service.
But when you’re chasing eternity in this life, rather than the next, it’s easy for detractors to accuse you of being deluded or, even worse, fraudulent. Selling immortality is an old trick. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, medieval knights, and many others since have all pursued some form of the elixir of life, a potion or medicine which can grant the drinker an unnaturally long existence. And many have fallen victim to con men and scam artists, eager to exploit humanity’s weakness for a superpower of dubious worth. In many ways, the immortalists of Florida are just another of those groups pursuing an unlikely and elusive dream. But this is the age of the computer, and science is now advancing at a pace previously thought impossible. Medicine has extended the average life expectancy significantly in the past century, and scientists now turn their expertise to more extreme measures to stop people from dying. For the first time ever, immortalists may actually have hope.
Each immortalist has their own personal tool kit for defeating death. Over time, as new technologies have been developed, that kit has expanded. Initially, their best hope was cryonics, the practice of freezing people after they die with the hope of bringing them back to life at a later date. Cryonics has a brilliantly bizarre history and remains a fringe science, denounced as nonsense by some but promoted as an effective Plan B by others. More recently, immortalists have looked to breakthroughs in the understanding of the human body for inspiration. They follow rigid diets, take a long list of supplements, and sometimes dip their toes in experimental treatments with little chance of success. Most follow science like a religion, desperately searching through published research for any sign of any means of extending their lives. This takes them into some cutting-edge areas of medical technology, including gene therapies and editing, nanotechnology, stem cell therapy, and more speculative areas like brain interfacing and mind uploading. In each of these fields, researchers and scientists come under pressure from the immortalists, who want to see their work fully operational and used in humans as soon as possible. I set out to find if there was a Holy Grail buried among this research, or if the immortalists, including those in Florida, had just fallen for one of the oldest scams in human history.
Philosophers, prophets, scientists, and salespeople have proclaimed immortality to be within our grasp since the dawn of time, but now there’s a chance they could be right. If a cure to death is found, groups like the Church of Perpetual Life will be the first to volunteer to take the elixir in whatever form it is offered, and no matter how costly it proves to be. I couldn’t wait to meet them.
• • •
I arranged to meet Neal VanDeRee, the pastor of the Church of Perpetual Life, the day before the start of their monthly meet-up. The weather that week in Hollywood was hot and sticky, and every few hours a storm would roll in, bringing a hefty downpour. In the past, the sturdy church building was used as a place of shelter for the locals when these storms became hazardous. The church’s role as a safe haven from nature’s wrath fit well with the message it was preaching: that its members could outlast disease, old age, and any other ailments inhibiting immortality.
When I arrived at the church in the late afternoon, VanDeRee’s assistant Josh greeted me at the door. He was in his mid-twenties and looked sweaty and stressed. He explained he was setting up the church for the events of the next few days but could take time to show me around while we waited for his boss. When we first entered the building, I was a little disappointed. The first room looked like a community center, furnished with long tables and plastic chairs. The real place of worship was upstairs, and when Josh took me up there, I was happy to see it was closer to what I expected.
Like a regular church, there were pews, an altar, and a stand from which to give sermons. The decor looked remarkably like a Christian establishment, with crosses everywhere. I then spotted a sign informing the congregation that no women were allowed to sit in the front row and immediately worried about what kind of eternal future these people were planning. Josh, perhaps noticing my confusion, told me the church was rented by a nondenominational Christian group most of the time, and the Perpetual Life crowd only used it once a month. It was his job to transform it from Christianity to immortalism.
On this particular weekend, the church was hosting a special event, beyond the scope of its usual monthly meetings. The First Annual Cryonics Symposium was taking place, during which the practice of freezing corpses to be reanimated at a later date would be discussed at great length. The three-day conference was sure to draw a bigger crowd than the average service, and people had traveled from all over the world to be there.
The church was founded in 2013 by Bill Faloon, a well-known and outspoken immortalist among the transhumanist movement; Saul Kent, a key figure in the world of cryonics; and VanDeRee himself. They chose Hollywood because it was central to South Florida, close to both Miami and Boca Raton, and an easy drive from Palm Beach. There are also two international airports nearby, which makes it easier for global followers to jet in for a service.
Hollywood itself was founded in the 1920s by a man named Joseph Young,[1] who envisioned his “dream city” in Florida. He built hotels and a casino in an effort to make it the Atlantic City of the South, and the city became a popular destination for northern industrialists and celebrities. But Hollywood’s location meant it was battered by hurricanes and other major weather events fairly frequently over the years. Over time, the city lost its luxurious appeal, but did manage to lure in the church, one of transhumanism’s most curious attractions.
Transhumanism is the larger umbrella belief group within which immortalism sits. The philosophical movement argues for the enhancement of the human condition. This can be achieved through subtle acts like wearing glasses or working out but sometimes gets quite extreme. More outlandish wings of transhumanism include advocating dangerous experiments to make the human body physically more capable and merging with computers to improve the human mind. And then there is immortalism, the branch that prophesizes humans who are so advanced they can choose when they die, and perhaps takes transhumanism further than any other area.
Most immortalists subscribe to the theory of biological immortality. This means they can live for as long as they choose in their current bodies, providing a grand piano doesn’t fall on their head, for example. But for others, this doesn’t go far enough. Americans have a one in six chance of dying from heart disease, one in seven chance of succumbing to cancer, and one in twenty-seven chance of chronic lower respiratory disease ushering in their downfall, according to National Safety Council statistics from 2019.[2] Biological immunity would remove those threats, but others would remain. For example, there is a one in 107 chance of dying in a motor vehicle crash, while your chances of dying from a gun assault in the United States are just one in 289. The particularly positive immortalists believe they can ensure they live on, despite such calamities, through various means such as augmenting their bodies or backing up their minds.
Transhumanism and immortality have largely been in the news because billionaires, presumably bored of ways to flaunt their wealth, are relentlessly pursuing the goal of everlasting life. The usual suspects in this quest are Silicon Valley tech magnates. Peter Thiel is perhaps one of the most well-known and notorious. Faloon might not be a Silicon Valley billionaire, but he raised the money to buy the building in Hollywood and tasked VanDeRee to officiate the church. Together with a host of volunteers, the pair run the community. The website lists two other leaders, both of whom are dead.[3] The first is the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who died in 2008. Clarke was best known for cowriting the screenplay of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most influential science fiction films ever. He was a prolific author of nonfiction and novels, often on the topic of space travel and exploration. The Church of Perpetual Life lists him as one of their prophets and describes him as a futurist of “uncanny ability.” The other prophet listed on the church’s leadership team is the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. (Federov will make a spectacular appearance in a later chapter.)
These older inspirations underline the fact that the immortalists of Florida are hardly the first to chase eternal life. There are plenty of stories from fiction and real-life history that detail humanity’s desperate struggle against death. Immortality features heavily in one of the earliest forms of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story of a mortal demigod King of Uruk thought to have been written between 2150 and 1400 BCE. In the grandiose tale, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu dies unexpectedly, and the titular hero begins to fear his own mortality. He embarks on a long and perilous journey to find Utnapishtim, the only known immortal in the world, to find his secret to living forever. When he finally hunts down the immortal, whose backstory is remarkably similar to Noah’s in the Old Testament, Utnapishtim tells him that “there is no permanence” and attempts to dissuade him from the idea:
Do we build a house to stand forever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?…When the Anunnaki, the judges, come together, and Mammetun the mother of destinies, together they decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose.[4]
Gilgamesh refuses to let the idea drop, so Utnapishtim challenges him: if he can stay awake for six days and seven nights, he will tell him the secret to immortality. Gilgamesh fails the test, but Utnapishtim’s wife persuades her husband not to let him leave empty-handed. He tells Gilgamesh of a plant in the sea that can restore youth. The hero wastes no time obtaining the plant and plans to test it on an elderly person when he returns to Uruk. But when he is bathing, a serpent steals the plant and escapes by shedding its skin.
Gilgamesh goes home to Uruk with nothing to show for his journey, but he does appear to have learned his lesson. Throughout the story Gilgamesh is told how he should react to his friend’s death: to live his normal, mortal life.
There are other similar tales from ancient history, including that of Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor of a united China. By 221 BCE, Qin had conquered all the Chinese states, organized the building of the Great Wall of China, and commissioned the life-size Terracotta Army to guard the city-sized mausoleum he built. But toward the end of his life, despite such a long list of achievements, he began to crave a few more years and became fascinated by the concept of immortality.[5] As one of the most powerful men in the world, he presented a lucrative opportunity to tricksters, who were keen to sell him phony cures to death, and Qin is said to have fallen prey to many schemes. He sent Xu Fu, the court sorcerer, to find a supposed thousand-year-old magician who lived atop the mythological Penglai Mountain. Xu Fu took hundreds of young men and women with him and never returned. Some believed they were too scared to face Qin without the secret to immortality, but other legends suggest Xu Fu took them to the island now known as Japan and colonized it. Qin, meanwhile, decided ingesting mercury would grant him immortality. He died of mercury poisoning.
Immortalists candidly acknowledge these cautionary tales and agree the concept is prone to attracting fraudsters. But they are not put off. At the church on that stifling Thursday afternoon of my visit, dead Chinese emperors appeared to be the last thing on Josh’s mind as he raced around trying to get the space ready for the activities to come. Furniture needed to be moved, leaflets laid out, and the entire building made ready for the incoming crowds. Josh seemed relieved when his boss arrived and he was able to pass me off.
VanDeRee, tall, slim, and in his late fifties, offered me a firm handshake and within two minutes of talking declared his intent to live until he’s at least three hundred years old. He followed this by giving me a testing glare, as if daring me to mock him, query his sanity, or shout all sorts of questions directly into his face. I suggested that we instead we go for dinner at a salad bar restaurant five minutes away. When we arrived, VanDeRee piled mountainous amounts of salad onto his plate, including an extraordinary number of peas. So many peas, in fact, I began to wonder if there was a link between them and immortality. When I asked VanDeRee, it turned out he was practicing intermittent fasting, a diet where people forego eating for large amounts of time in an effort to become healthier. He also liked peas a lot. Fasting is widely used in the immortalist community and has been linked with life extension. In 2018, a group of researchers from the National Institute of Aging (NIA), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana found that increased time between meals lengthened the lives of male mice compared to mice who ate more frequently.[6] The study showed that this benefit was seen regardless of what the mice ate or what calories they consumed.
This type of study is typical of those which inspire the immortalists. It’s all part of a plan to survive until that crucial time when technology will enable them to live forever. Not long into my conversation with VanDeRee, he told me immortalists have a phrase for that watershed moment. “There are things that you can do right now to ensure that you live to be 150, and if you can live to be 150 then you can catch the age-reversal escape velocity, the escape velocity for longevity,” explained VanDeRee. “In a hundred and some years from now, when you’re 150, medical technology will be up there, and then you’re going to shoot for three hundred and then five hundred and then one thousand. Then it goes on exponentially, until we have hit essentially an immortalist phase for humanity where we can then decide if we want to die or not.” For immortalists, escape velocity has become similar to judgement day in religions; it is the moment when all their long-held beliefs are proven accurate and they reach the point when they no longer have to die.
VanDeRee is a soft-spoken man who displays genuine care toward whoever he is talking to. When he’s not hosting events at the Church of Perpetual Life, he works in real estate as a broker and an auctioneer, a job he had long before he founded the church. He lives in Venice on Florida’s Gulf Coast, frequently traveling across to the opposite side of the state to Hollywood. During the two hours we spoke that evening, the topic meandered from immortalism to my own personal history, to his hopes for the future and back again. At no point did I feel he was trying to recruit me to the immortalist way of viewing the world, but his warmth, positivity, and optimism drew me in regardless. One of the themes that came up often was his worry and pity for those who will die in the future, a fate he sees as avoidable.
“Right now, we’re forced, we have to die,” he said. “There’s no way to escape it for everybody in this room except me. I know I’m going to live for five hundred, one thousand, ten thousand years. I don’t see an end to my life, but there are so many people that don’t seem to care about age reversal. They don’t seem to care about the fact that we have a real chance at reversing aging and living forever. And it boggles my mind. I can do a speech to three hundred people. Maybe one of them gets it, maybe one of them has a glimmer of thought in their eye: ‘Maybe that could be me.’ ”
VanDeRee is genuinely baffled as to why more people don’t seek eternal life. He believes that skepticism of the idea comes from pretenders in the past and naysayers in the present.
“Peer pressure and humanity seems to tamp it down and say, ‘Oh no, you can’t do that. That’s not good. That’s not right,’ for whatever reason,” he said. “I think some of it has to do with people thinking that a hundred years ago we had snake oil salesmen say if you take this elixir, it’ll give you vibrance and youth, and they sell them the snake oil and then they don’t live. You’d probably die from it. There’s always the worry that they’re going to do something that all of society is going to laugh at them about, the peer pressure. They’re going to laugh at them for taking the tonic that can make them potentially live forever. And yet here’s peer pressure, saying, ‘Well, you shouldn’t think about living forever. You should do this, that, or the other thing instead. It’s more important than you personally living for a thousand years,’ and yet if good people can live for five hundred, one thousand, ten thousand years, those good people can turn this planet around, can make this planet a cleaner, better place. And that’s really what this is about. Creating heaven on earth and not leaving it.”
VanDeRee’s frustration toward people who do not choose the path of immortality is also born out of not being able to save more people close to him. He got into the immortalist world in his early thirties when he was diagnosed with a disease that he was told was going to kill him. He preferred not to name or talk about the disease itself, but at that time he began exploring cryonics, the process of freezing and preserving a body so it can be reanimated in the future. He wasn’t just researching for himself, but also for his father, who was born in 1917 and “saw more horses than cars.” After becoming convinced of the idea, he tried to persuade his father to accept cryonics. But VanDeRee said as the fifth child of seven kids, the “jury was rigged,” and neither his father nor mother signed up to have their bodies preserved.
This was the first time I saw the sadness, not just the optimism, which motivated VanDeRee to seek out immortality. He told me if he had a time machine he would go back and try and convince his parents again, and this time save them from death.
This is an important motivating factor for all immortalists. In my conversations and in public profiles of the more well-known eternal life seekers, their desire to live forever comes from having to confront their own mortality at some stage, either because they have experienced sickness or have been in danger of dying themselves, or because they have had to deal with the death of someone close to them. To immortalists like VanDeRee, death is a tragic and unnecessary waste, and even if he couldn’t save his parents, he remained determined to save himself. “I looked at cryonics and I said, okay, well this is an option, but right now I need to study these other things to get rid of the disease and be healthy and do what I can. And I stayed in with things. And then Aubrey de Grey gave a talk at the Orlando Science Center. So I went to the talk, and I brought a couple of people with me,” recalled VanDeRee of the event held in the spring of 2008.
If the Church of Perpetual Life were to elect a living prophet today, there’s a strong possibility Aubrey de Grey would be top of the list. He’s a British scientist who is renowned in the field of age reversal, and perhaps the most influential of the current crop of demigod-like figures leading the immortalist movement. After VanDeRee listened to de Grey’s talk, he stayed in contact with him. Later on, the British scientist introduced him to Bill Faloon, and together they built the church which VanDeRee leads today.
VanDeRee’s personal history made him the perfect clergyman for the church, an establishment which follows much of the same structure as any other religious institution. For any church or religion establishing itself in 2012, there’s a tried-and-tested playbook to follow, and the Church of Perpetual Life doesn’t stray too far from it. There have been articles written in the past speculating the church was formed simply for tax purposes, and even some attendees I spoke to over the weekend suggested that to be true. There are significant tax incentives to declaring your organization a church in the United States, and there’s no doubt that this had an impact on the decision. But I suspected that by creating a quasi-religion, the organizers were infusing scientific speculation with a thick layer of mysticism, a tactic that has succeeded in spreading a message that is still gathering congregations around the world today.
By tapping into the politics, mythology, and spiritualism of organized religion, this branch of immortalism succeeded in drawing much attention to its cause and has raised significant amounts of money. Donations are first applied to running the church itself, but VanDeRee said when members of the church learn of longevity projects, research that focuses on extending life, they give money or help in other ways, either by volunteering or as test subjects.
VanDeRee believes their time has finally come. “There are some amazing things happening right now. We have for the first time in human history a real chance for age reversal and life extension,” he said. “For the first time we have a scientific real chance at immortality. And so that’s what we’re working on. It’s going to revolutionize humanity.”
As officiator of the church, VanDeRee hosts the monthly gatherings and also keeps his congregation informed of any scientific breakthroughs that can give them hope. Despite being kept busy selling real estate, he still finds time to send emails to the group when a particular piece of news, or scientific paper, is worthy of passing on. For example, in December 2019, VanDeRee sent an email inviting people to the latest gathering of immortalists but also sharing news of George Church’s work at Harvard University using the gene editing tool CRISPR to try and make humans immune to viruses, disease, and aging.[7] This is just one scientific area that legitimizes the claims of the church.
In the same month, the congregation was sent an article from Medical News Today that heralded the anti-aging properties of a drug called rapamycin on human skin.[8] The drug was discovered in the soil of Easter Island half a century ago and gets its name from the native term for the island—Rapa Nui. It is said to be able to repress the human immune system and prevent cell replication. VanDeRee brought up many similar studies when we met, and it was somewhat jarring to hear so many scientific papers quoted in the style of an American preacher.
At the end of our meal, I told VanDeRee I looked forward to the weekend’s events, and we went our separate ways: he returned to the church to continue the preparations, and I went back to my Airbnb to deal with the smell of a rotting possum.
I next saw the Church’s officiator at the drinks reception held at a nearby Holiday Inn the next evening, where event attendees had the chance to network and meet old friends prior to the start of the event. Here I was introduced to a community stranger than I could ever imagine.
Meeting VanDeRee was one thing—he was the welcoming face of the movement—but these were hardened believers. As I sipped a drink and lingered uncomfortably by the buffet, I noticed almost all of them had something in common—they were old. One or two younger faces were dotted among the crowd, but I guessed the average age of an attendee was way over fifty. These were the people striving to reach the escape velocity age VanDeRee talked about, and they knew it was touch and go whether they’d survive long enough to make it.
I tried to speak to some of the younger people in the crowd. One utterly confused me when he told me he was making a documentary and threatened to film me, leering over me with his smartphone. Another, a man in his thirties named Diego, was a lot easier to talk to. He was a health enthusiast who had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, losing friends and family in the process. His old religion had preached about a form of everlasting life on Earth, and Diego was there to see what the Church of Perpetual Life had to offer. He wasn’t convinced by some of the arguments he had been hearing but wanted to see if he could pick up any tips on staying healthier for longer.
Much of the elderly crowd were wearing the same bands around their wrists that I noticed VanDeRee sported at dinner the previous day. This was not a particularly fashionable piece of jewelry, but a calling card for those who are signed up to be cryogenically preserved after death. The band lists the details of the facility where the body must be taken, and the account details for when they get there. Small details like this make the whole group seem a lot more cultish, and it’s easy to feel out of place in their presence. The immortalists are a deeply optimistic group of people, but I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that their optimism was misplaced. Advances in medical technologies bring great hope of better, healthier lives, but with a broken health care system and a world of accelerating inequality, would many of the attendees truly be able to reap the benefits? The topics of conversation varied from new diets to supplement doses. But the main topic of discussion on the weekend I visited the Church of Perpetual Life was cryonics. Companies traveled from as far away as Russia to discuss the latest advances in this experimental and controversial field and gave polished and professional talks, showing slides packed with medical advice, technical details, and scientific procedures.
Prior to the event, my thoughts on cryonics probably fell in line with the majority of the population—it all sounded a little weird. The idea of having my body stored in a frozen cylinder after I died was not the problem; after all, we all end up in either a box in the ground or burned to ashes anyway. But the thought of waking up at some point in a strange and mysterious future was disconcerting. It was with these hesitations that I delved into the history of cryonics. The industry is a lot older than most people may think. Its origin story spans decades and, as you’d expect with such a strange topic, features plenty of eccentric and fascinating characters.