Victoria Song
Senior reporter at The Verge, where she covers wearables, fitness tech and health gadgets, and writes the Optimizer newsletter.
“I don't think health age is necessarily an evil thing, you know, but I am sick of how if it's younger, it's better.”
Tech News Weekly (Audio) · September 2026
Context
Song has been writing about the 'health age' scores that wearables now report. She is reacting to Bryan Johnson's claim that an alien couldn't tell him apart from his teenage son, and asks why a lower number should always count as a win when it throws out lived experience.
Transcript
…a holistic thing. So it can be a snapshot. It can tell you areas of the life of your life where you maybe need to put a little more effort, but it's not, it's not like a whole picture that you should be like, haha, I'm younger than my chronological age, whatever. Like, yeah, that's not, that's not.
…but there was a part where you talked about the guy who's, oh, yeah, there it is. Uh, Brian Johnson's post about aliens not being able to tell him apart from his teenage son. What does that kind of culture do to the rest of us normal humans who are just uh looking at our smartwatch for some info?
…know, like I thought of it more as like, uh, what are we trying to say here? Like, he looks pretty decent for his age, but you're not 18. Like, your life experiences are completely different. So, I just, it was just very striking to me to be like, Why are you discounting the experience that you have and the things that have gotten you there? Like, it's not better to be 18 than 49 per se. Like, I don't think health age is necessarily an evil thing, you know, but I am sick of how if it's younger, it's better. And if it's older, you should feel what way about it. Like, I shouldn't feel what way about the fact that, you know, I downloaded the deaf beta of iOS 27 and it said that my health age is like 0.3 years higher than my actual age. And that's because I haven't been taking as much movement. I haven't taken been taking as many daily steps because I'm going to all these tech events in September and…
true.
Sure. And that would be good for me. That's not a bad thing for me, right? It's just sort of like, it's not the whole picture because my metabolism is a part of the picture. And that's an invasive metric where I have to get a blood test to kind of measure that out. It's not taking into…
It's only one part of the picture. It's one