The life expectancy in many countries has been going down over the past couple of years, but that hasn’t stopped some people from having great expectations about their life expectancy. And when you want to extend your life, getting up into the 120s or so, you call a tailor. Or at least a former tailor who felt he was well-suited to run a place known as Longevity House. Courtney Shea takes you inside the world of cryotherapy, biocharging, and fecal transplants—all wrapped up in a setting that is to die for. The Death Cheaters. “The price tag, $100,000 for a lifetime membership, was staggering. The promise, even more so: a chance to live longer, possibly to 120 years old. And not just longer but better, free from chronic illness and cognitive decline, by which standard six figures starts to sound like a bargain. In the weeks that followed, word spread about the upstart’s hefty entry fee and astonishing 120-year claim, prompting mean tweets and guffaws at the elitism. All of it was predictable, according to Michael Nguyen, the man behind the venture. ‘There’s always going to be a certain amount of resistance when you’re leading the charge,’ he says. Nguyen is not a doctor or health professional. He has no certifications in the wellness field, which he says is a good thing: ‘I come at all of this with a different lens. I can ask the right questions.'” (Like, “Where’s your checkbook?”)

+ Life extension is quite popular among tech billionaires. But many of them see natural death as a secondary concern. The primary threat is the collapse of the society they helped create. This has created a bunker mentality which, when paired with enough dough, can lead to a pretty sweet bunker. Douglas Rushkoff on the super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. “These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch … More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where ‘winning’ means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.”