27. Next-Gen Billionaire Life Hacks: Discovering Unconventional Routines of Today's Success Icons

Have you ever wondered what the richest people on Earth actually do when they wake up?

I went looking, expecting green smoothies and 5 a.m. alarms. Instead I found a man who had his teenage son's blood pumped into his own veins, a billionaire who has already paid to be frozen after he dies, and a helmet that fires magnetic pulses through people's skulls.

Some of this is real medicine. Some of it is spectacularly expensive nonsense. All of it is happening right now, to real people, with real money.

The Man Who Borrowed His Son's Blood

Let's start with the strangest one.

Bryan Johnson sold his payments company for around 800 million dollars. Most people would buy an island. Johnson declared war on aging instead, and he now spends roughly two million dollars a year fighting it.

In 2023 he tried something that stopped the entire internet mid-scroll. Doctors drew blood from his 17-year-old son and separated out the plasma, the pale yellow liquid that makes up more than half of your blood. That plasma went into Johnson's veins. Johnson's own plasma, at the same time, went into his 70-year-old father.

Three generations of one family, swapping blood, in a single afternoon. More than thirty doctors signed off on it.

It was not a random idea. In laboratory experiments, elderly mice given young blood appeared to get sharper. Johnson wanted to know whether it worked on humans. He was not even the first to try selling the concept: a California company called Ambrosia charged 8,000 dollars a litre for young plasma starting in 2017, before shutting down in 2019 after a warning from the FDA.

Then Johnson checked his results. Blood tests, organ scans, brain imaging, wearable data, all of it.

Nothing. No benefit whatsoever. After six rounds, he stopped.

The Billionaire in the Freezer

Bryan Johnson is trying not to die. Peter Thiel has a backup plan for when he does.

Thiel co-founded PayPal and was the first major outside investor in Facebook. He has also signed up with a company called Alcor, which will cool his body far below freezing after his death and store it there, waiting for some future technology capable of bringing him back.

This is called cryonics, and the unsettling part is how real it is. The facility exists. The tanks exist. People are inside them right now. Some clients even choose to preserve only their head, on the logic that any civilization advanced enough to revive them could probably handle the rest.

Does it work? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever been revived. Not one person, not once, ever.

The Helmet That Zaps Your Brain

Picture a padded helmet lined with magnetic coils. You sit down, it switches on, and it fires magnetic pulses straight through your skull into your prefrontal cortex, the region sitting just behind your forehead that runs planning, focus, and self-control.

You feel a tapping sensation. Twenty minutes later you stand up and get on with your day.

This is real, and it is called deep transcranial magnetic stimulation. The American FDA has cleared it for depression and for OCD, mainly for patients who have already tried medication and therapy without enough relief. For some of those people, it has genuinely changed everything.

Now the part nobody saw coming. Private clinics for wealthy executives have started offering the same machine as a focus upgrade. Sharper concentration. Faster recovery from jet lag. Identical technology, completely different sales pitch.

The Glass Tube Full of Oxygen

You lie down inside a sealed glass tube. The door hisses shut. The pressure climbs to more than double what you feel standing outside, and the air you are breathing is pure oxygen.

Your blood soaks up far more of it than it ever could on an ordinary afternoon.

Justin Bieber has done this. So has Michael Phelps. So has a long queue of people who would very much prefer not to get older.

What is genuinely true: the FDA approves hyperbaric oxygen therapy for thirteen specific conditions. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Decompression sickness in divers, the illness sailors used to call the bends. Wounds that refuse to heal. Radiation injuries. For those, it saves lives.

What is not proven: almost everything else. Anti-aging, glowing skin, general energy. Bryan Johnson reported that oxygen sessions dropped one of his dementia-risk markers by 28 percent, but that figure came from his own equipment, measuring his own body, with nobody independently checking the numbers.

The Ice Bath

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and now runs the payments company Block. He begins his day by climbing into a tub of ice water.

Not a cool shower. Ice. He says the shock hands him "mental confidence" for whatever the day is about to throw at him, and thousands of people have copied him.

Here is something strange about the science. Search for the benefits of cold water and you will meet the same sentence everywhere: it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the calm "rest and digest" side of your body.

That is backwards.

Cold water slams the opposite pedal. It fires up the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight one, and floods you with noradrenaline. Your body sincerely believes something has gone wrong. The calm only arrives afterward, once it works out that you are fine.

Almost every one of those articles traces back to a single 2008 paper by a researcher named Nikolai Shevchuk, published in a journal called Medical Hypotheses. That title is the giveaway. A hypothesis is an idea worth testing, not a proven fact. Shevchuk himself wrote that far larger and stricter studies would be needed before anyone could be confident.

The Sleep Score

For about fifteen years, tech founders competed over who slept the least. Four hours. Three hours. Sleep when you're dead.

That contest is over, and it ended in a complete reversal. Sleep is now the flex.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Arianna Huffington all wear an Oura ring, a 300 dollar band that tracks your heart rate and body temperature overnight and hands you a score each morning, like a report card for being unconscious. More than two and a half million people have bought one. There are sleep hotels now. Sleep retreats. A global sleep industry worth over 500 billion dollars.

And here is the thing: of everything in this post, sleep has the strongest scientific evidence behind it by an enormous margin. It repairs your body, files away your memories, and steadies your mood. If you are studying for anything at all, sleep is not what you sacrifice to make study time. It is part of the studying.

Ten Days Without Speaking

Jack Dorsey again, because his routine keeps getting stranger.

Every so often he vanishes into a Vipassana retreat. Ten days. No talking. No phone. No books. No music. No eye contact with anyone. Just sitting and following your own breathing, for hours, day after day after day.

Ray Dalio, who built one of the largest investment funds on the planet, has credited meditation for decades of clear decisions.

You do not need ten days or a mountain. Two minutes of sitting still and paying attention to your breathing is a real version of the same practice. You are training the muscle that notices when your attention has wandered off, which happens to be the single most useful muscle you own inside a classroom.

So What Do You Do With All This?

Here is the funniest thing I found.

Strip away the freezers, the helmets, the glass tubes and the transfusions, and look at what these people actually agree on underneath. Sleep enough. Move your body. Sit quietly sometimes. Eat real food. Read.

That is your parents' advice. That is the advice you have been ignoring since you were seven years old. The richest people alive spent millions of dollars running experiments on their own bodies and landed right back on your mother's Tuesday night lecture.

The only difference is that the boring version cannot be sold. Nobody gets rich telling you to go to bed.

HOMEWORK

Choose only one prompt and write it on the comments section below.

Prompt 1. Which habit from this post would you actually try, and which one do you think is complete nonsense? Choose one of each and defend both choices in a paragraph.

Prompt 2. Invent a billionaire life hack for the year 2050. Explain how it works, what it promises, and how much it costs. Make it sound genuinely convincing. Then, in one final sentence, tell us honestly whether it would work.