The Men Trying to Live Forever

“In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection.” Tad Friend on the biohackers who are working to make death optional. Plus:

• Is this the end of climate-change regulation?
• The perfectionism epidemic
• The world’s greatest autograph collection, rediscovered

Hannah Jocelyn 
Newsletter editor

Peter Diamandis is willing to try nearly anything to extend his life. A leader in the biohacking movement, he consumes a hundred and fifty grams of protein and five packs of pills every day, uses three red-light-therapy devices at a time, and dabbles in therapeutic plasma exchange, spending more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. Diamandis—who is also a writer, podcaster, and the co-founder of a longevity clinic that markets itself “like a country club for precision diagnostics”—has built a network known to its constituents as the Peterverse. For a piece in this week’s issue, Tad Friend explores the Peterverse, which is, he writes, “largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes.”

Like Diamandis, many of these adherents take upward of fifty supplements a day, measure every conceivable bodily metric, and perfuse themselves with “young blood” plasma. They are deeply committed, sometimes competitively so, to living longer lives. “There’s a reason there’s a rejuvenation-olympics leaderboard online,” Friend told me when we spoke about his piece. (The omnipresent Bryan Johnson, who heads the “Don’t Die” movement, is currently in the lead.) As Friend explained, “Human beings, and particularly men, it seems, are hardwired to outdo one another: How far can I go? How far can I push it?”

Diamandis believes that, with the help of artificial intelligence, the (mostly) men who mean to live forever might be able to push their life spans to the absolute limit—depending on how you define “live.” Will it involve ever more vigorous tracking and optimizing? What about uploading your brain to the cloud as your body disintegrates and becomes irrelevant? Because, eventually, the body will break down. “There are so many things that go wrong, so many cascades of problems,” Friend said. “You can’t be mopping up over here when there’s a leaky pipe over there; things just wear down. At some point you need a new refrigerator.”

But Diamandis doesn’t seem to worry too much about the mess. Friend calls him “an emissary from the realms of possibility.” In other words, he’s an optimist with a quasi-religious confidence in artificial intelligence. “He believes that A.I. is going to bring in enormous abundance. That it will be the world’s best physician. And maybe that’s true.” Friend had his own blood drawn and tested (his biological age is clocking in at slightly below his actual age), and joined Diamandis at a recent conference, where the biohacker reminded his audience that “the two biggest wealth-creation opportunities are A.I. and longevity.” He intends to maximize both. “Humanity is great at taking any tool in two directions at once,” Friend told me, “for human benefit and also for power, gain, divisiveness, and, you know, malarky.”

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Nineteen years ago, a Supreme Court ruling gave rise to the “endangerment finding,” which has formed the basis of federal limits on carbon pollution ever since. Now the Trump Administration wants to overturn the Court’s decision, or perhaps just violate it. The move, Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “combines pandering to the fossil-fuel industry with another of the Administration’s favorite activities: flouting science.” Read the story »

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Last week’s jobs numbers, reported on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed weaker than expected hiring for July, and, in bigger news, revised the numbers for May and June down by more than two hundred and fifty thousand. Later in the day, Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the B.L.S., and later claimed, citing no clear evidence, that the numbers had been manipulated to damage him politically.

How bad are the latest figures on the economy? “Taking the last three months as a whole, employment growth has been weaker than in any comparable period since the COVID-19 pandemic,” our economics columnist John Cassidy writes in his latest piece. He notes one likely cause: Trump’s tariff chaos, which has injected uncertainty into all aspects of the economy and tied the hands of potential employers.

Beyond the employment data, there are other signs of trouble. Figures reported last week show the G.D.P. expanding at a rate of 1.3 per cent during the past six months, compared with 2.8 per cent in 2024. “That’s a big drop,” Cassidy writes. And numbers show that the rate of inflation edged up 2.6 per cent in June, from 2.4 per cent in May—moving away from the Federal Reserve’s stated target of two per cent. A rise in prices combined with a slowdown in the economy raises the spectre of stagflation, which is a far cry from Trump’s recent claims that “tariffs are making our Country ‘BOOM.’ ”

• Today’s Crossword Puzzle: What a vole is but a mole is not—six letters.
• Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
• Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.

P.S. The New York Post is launching a California paper. How will the Big Apple’s “most dastardly, least self-conscious daily” fare on the West Coast? 🗞️