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