The Bootstrap Strategy: How I’ve Spent Fifty Years Trying to Outrun Aging

Outrun, outlift, outpunch, and outsmart... It's a whole of me effort.

In the first essay I described the spark: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old Midwest kid reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children and deciding he was going to live as long as humanly (or post-humanly) possible. That decision wasn’t a vague daydream. It became a governing strategy I’ve called The Bootstrap Strategy for nearly fifty years.

The core idea is simple: Keep yourself in the best possible physical and mental condition—without turning into an obsessive zealot—so you can take full advantage of every credible scientific and medical advance that comes along. The goal was never to discover the Fountain of Youth in one dramatic breakthrough. It was to stay healthy enough, long enough, that advances in longevity would start extending my remaining life faster than I was using it up.

I never expected overnight immortality. I just wanted to stay in the game.

The Logic of Bootstrapping

Think of it like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, except the “bootstraps” are incremental gains in healthspan that buy you time for the next wave of technology. Stay fit, manage inflammation, support cognition, avoid stupid risks—and position yourself to ride the accelerating curve of biotechnology, genomics, regenerative medicine, and (eventually) AI-driven breakthroughs.

This wasn’t a formal plan written on a napkin in 1975. It evolved from the same Heinleinian competence ethos that shaped the rest of my life. Specialization is for insects. I refused to specialize in decline. Instead, I treated my body and mind as systems I could monitor, maintain, and upgrade with whatever tools became available.

Over the decades that meant:

• Consistent strength training and movement (not fanatical bodybuilding, just enough to preserve muscle and mobility).

• Attention to diet, sleep, and stress without becoming a monk or a lab rat.

• Staying intellectually engaged—writing 28 novels, dozens of stories, running a Substack, writing a blog called Daily Pundit for more than 20 years, staying curious. Mental sharpness is non-negotiable.

• Aggressively adopting new interventions when the evidence looked solid: better supplements, off-label uses of existing drugs, tracking biomarkers, and adjusting as data improved.

The strategy is conservative in the best sense: bet on incremental, evidence-based gains while keeping a hopeful eye on exponential progress. I wasn’t waiting for the Singularity. I was trying to stay alive and functional long enough for it (or something like it) to matter to me.

The Singularity Hook

Vernor Vinge gave the idea intellectual muscle with his writings on the Technological Singularity—the point at which accelerating progress, especially superhuman AI, makes the future radically unpredictable and, in fact, unknowable. Ray Kurzweil popularized and refined it, tying it explicitly to longevity. Kurzweil’s concept of “longevity escape velocity” is almost exactly what I had been aiming for in practice: a tipping point where medical advances add more than one year of healthy life for every calendar year that passes.

I found these ideas enormously reinforcing. They gave a sturdy intellectual hook to the intuitive bootstrap approach I’d already been living. If technology was going to accelerate, my job was to stay on the runway long enough for the plane to arrive.

And now we’re hearing similar optimism from unexpected quarters. Elon Musk has said figuring out how to reverse aging is “highly likely” and that humans are “pre-programmed to die”—a program we can change once we understand it. In conversation with Peter Diamandis, Musk suggested longevity or semi-immortality is an “extremely solvable problem.” Whether or not the timeline matches the most optimistic forecasts, the direction of travel feels right. Biology is just another system we’re learning to engineer.

The Payoff So Far

My latest labs surprised even my physician. She looked at the numbers and said, half-jokingly, that I seemed to be growing physiologically younger. She said it as if the notion itself was slightly insane.

I just smiled. That had been the precise goal for half a century.

I’m 80 now, but I function closer to a fit 60. Energy, cognition, mobility, recovery—they’re all better than they have any right to be at my chronological age. I don’t claim perfection or invulnerability. I’ve had setbacks, made mistakes, and dealt with the ordinary wear-and-tear of decades. The Bootstrap Strategy never promised zero risk or perfect health. It promised a fighting chance to stay in the game.

What the Strategy Is Not

It’s not fanaticism. I enjoy life too much to turn existence into a sterile optimization project. You can keep your looksmaxers. I’m not going to become an agemaxer. Good food, good conversation, good books, time with family and friends—these aren’t distractions from the strategy; they’re part of what makes extra decades worth having.

It’s also not blind faith in any single guru, supplement, or protocol. I’ve followed the evidence as best I could, changed course when better data appeared, and remained skeptical of hype. The Heinlein influence again: competence includes intellectual honesty.

Looking Forward

We’re closer than ever to the kinds of breakthroughs that make “longevity escape velocity” plausible. AI is already accelerating drug discovery, personalized medicine, and our understanding of aging pathways. Regenerative therapies, senolytics, epigenetic reprogramming, and advanced diagnostics are moving from labs to clinics. Musk’s comments, Kurzweil’s timelines, and the general exponential trend in biotech all point the same direction.

My Bootstrap Strategy was always a bridge to that future. Stay healthy enough, informed enough, and engaged enough to grab the next rung when it appears.

I don’t know exactly when (or if) we’ll cross the threshold into radical life extension for those who want it. But I do know this: the boy who read Methuselah’s Children all those years ago is still here, still pulling on his bootstraps, and still betting that the future will be longer—and far more interesting—than the past.

In the next installment I’ll get more granular: specific habits, tracking methods, interventions I’ve used, what worked, what didn’t, and practical advice for anyone who wants to run their own version of the Bootstrap Strategy.

Until then—stay curious, stay capable, and keep pulling.