July 15, 2026 • 35 mins
What's it like to feel your body age in minutes? And will this tech actually affect how long we live? Oz sits down with Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever, to find out.
This season, Mangesh dives into a world familiar to many Silicon Valley billionaires: longevity. He meets the scientists, entrepreneurs, biopunks, and researchers seeking ways to extend life itself — and speaks with the co-founder of a mysterious start-up, a company that sent the MIT Technology Review this statement: "Any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false."
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Silicon Valley and longevity. Is it a fad, an obsession,
a status symbol, or a valid technological pursuit and what
should the rest of us think about it? In the
newest season of the hit podcast Skyline Drive, How to
Live Forever, host Mangesh had to get A explores the
world of biohacking, longevity research, and the theories of what
(00:38):
it means to live a long life Well. Mangesh looks
into how it feels to have your body age in
mere minutes, interviews seniors living in Brooklyn, New York, and
investigates why living forever might not be an ideal situation
for everyone. You might also recognize his name because Mangesh
is my co founder at Kaleidoscope. We spend a lot
of time together and has been a on tech stuff
(01:00):
several times. Welcome back to the podcast, by guess, it's
so nice to be here us. So let's go back
to the first season of Skyline Drive because for somebody
who's interested in science and technology and skepticism, it had
a strange topic which was astrology.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, that's right. So astrology is one of those things
that you cannot escape as an Indian and so the
thing I said was, I don't believe in astrology, but
it keeps happening to me. And I noticed that in
this world. It was very difficult as a kid in
America to be able to talk about astrology and not
be laughed at. But you go to India and everything
is based on it, from like weddings to auspicious dates.
(01:40):
I mean, the time when India becomes a country is
based on an astrological time, and so like, it dictates
so many things. And I went to talk to astrologer
there and he showed me pictures of like the head
of the nuclear program in India, who follows it. Right,
It's just in the fabric of the nation. And so
what I wanted to do was create this romp through
astrology and show that way, whther or not you believe
(02:00):
in it, that it is existing around you and it's
pulling things.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Around you because all the people believe in it.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, and so like there were Major League Baseball managers
who use astrology to pick between two players. Reagan created
nuclear disarmament agreements based on astrology, and all of that
has had a profound impact on us, whether we believe
in astrology or not.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
In that podcast, something very strange and uncanny and sad
also happened.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Right. Yeah, So at the end of the first episode,
I went to meet this astrologer in Queen's and I
had this wonderful chat. He told me how Kaleidoscope was
going to be gangbusters and that are figures crossed if
he's right about that far. But you give me this wonderful,
wonderful reading, and in it there was just this very
(02:46):
very brief segment where he said something about my dad's
health and how it could go very very wrong this year.
And then about thirty minutes after the reading, I went
and had tea at a chai parlor in Jackson Heights
with my cousin, and during it I got a text
from my dad that said that he had just had
a test come back and that a metastatic cancer had
(03:08):
spread through his body. And what we found is, you know,
I just started this podcast, and ultimately three weeks.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Later he passed.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And three weeks later, Yeah, you know, I talked to
a science writer about this and she said, you know,
is astrology true. I think it's true the same way
poetry is true. Right, It's just a way to interpret
and understand things. And that's ultimately how I understood astrology
was this way for people to grieve to. You know,
in India, mental health is something that's still stigmatized, and
(03:39):
so it's much easier to go to an astrologer and
talk about your problems than it is to therapist.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I mean, I know we talked about it at the time,
as you know, as friends and co founders of business
and stuff, but I never already asked you in podcast
form before. I mean, what was a feeling in that moment?
Presumably the strologers said your father's health might not be
so good, and you thought, well, this is probably just
that kind of normal sprinkling of Sultan's sweet from these
(04:06):
types of experiences, right, or and then something so devastating
and you've got that call thirty minutes later, And what
was that feeling in that moment?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
It was profound, but more that I had something I
urgently had to take care of, you know. It was
less about the astrology of it and more about how
could this be happening, How could this be happening now?
And how do we fix it? And so that was
what preoccupied me. But I still don't believe in astrology,
(04:39):
but I believe astrology is a way to understand the universe.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
You also got a prediction about your own mortality in
season one.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Right, Yeah, Yeah, It's something I didn't really look at.
It's such a luxury in some ways to collect tape
from friends and relatives and experiences. And so when I
went back and looked at some tape and conversations with
my mom and some other things, I noticed that in
this reading from this astrologer, a different astrologer, he told
me that my life would possibly end at sixty. If
(05:10):
I'm lucky, I get till sixty four. And I think
a few things happened at the same time. One is
that I turned forty six, and forty six is one
of those ages where you really start to fill your age.
My hair had turned gray, I had more belly fat
than i'd had ever before. It's harder to lose weight.
And I noticed I was just more tired, My legs
(05:32):
were more creaky, et cetera. And this is actually a
you know, it's documented. It's a thing that forty six
and some age at sixty are percent This year is for.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
You, even if you haven't co found a business with me.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, I think two kids are more because of my grade,
but those two things happen at the same time. And honestly,
I'd been fascinated by longevity for a very long time.
Not because I've ever wanted to live forever, That's not
something that's been an interest of mine, but more that
(06:05):
every few years you get a magazine article that says,
this is the generation where the kids are going to
lift to two hundred. Yeah, and I'd seen that since
like twenty ten, twenty fourteen, two tho eighteen, And when
I was at iHeart before we started Kaleidoscope, I'd reached
out to a number of posts and said, why don't
we do this topic, Why don't we do like how
to live forever? Why don't we talk about the miracles
happening in medicine and the piece of new therapies, new ideas,
(06:30):
new technologies, all moving so quickly.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And because you're an editor, I mean you were running
the iHeart podcast studio and your editor in chief of Kaleidoscope,
so essentially this this story was coming up for you,
like what is this repeated thing about longevity? What's true
and what's not? And then listening back through the tape
from your first podcast, you thought, basically, I can go
on a new question and answer this myself rather than
assign it.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, and for me, it was important to do astrology
in a way where it wasn't for skeptic and it
wasn't for believers, it was for everyone. Right, how do
you treat a subject in a way that feels very
human and ultimately longevity is the same? Right? There are
people who are very, very skeptical, rightly so, because there's
(07:14):
so many hucksters marketing at you constantly. And then there
are people who are all in, you know, who try
to follow every element of Brian Johnson's regiment. And we
all live, we all have to We don't all have
to die, according to some of the people that I interviewed,
but we all have to think about death. And so
I figured it was a very human topic that was
(07:35):
fun to dive into.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Well, I noticed your hair getting gray in the course
of working together. But then I noticed, in the course
of working on this show you losing quite a lot
of weight, and you know, being even more than a
more of a demon than ever on the tennis court.
I mean, you were both investigating this subject but also
living it, right, I mean in the sense you were
(07:58):
trying to literally trying to live forever, but you took
seriously the premise of what if I took all of
these recommendations or some of these recommendations.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, And what any longevity doctor will tell you is
that the biggest things aren't the supplements or the therapies
you can do, or getting on an A D plus,
which I did and was interesting. But it's just diet
and exercise and making space for socializing and sleep. And
(08:28):
in the first part of this show, I was very
good about a lot of those things. As you work
to put out a show, it's not the best way
to stay on top of all of that. And so
I'm looking forward to the show being over and to
prioritizing some of that stuff. Again.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I mean, this is tech stuff, and most of what
we talk about on this show relates to Second Valley,
and you know, the power players and who's uphos down,
which companies are doing interesting things and one of the
technologies that really might change the future. And the longevity
story in the Silicon Valley story, to me almost two
sides of the same coin, right, So much of the
(09:08):
discourse about longevity comes from Silicon Valley and one of
the few things that you can't have if you're a trillionaire,
is is eternal life?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yet No, it's one of those things like if death
and taxes are the two things that are unavoidable, a
lot of these people have avoided taxes. Now death is
the only thing that be challenged.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I mean, talk about talk about the kind of what
longevity means Silicon Valley culture. I mean, maybe talk about
Brian Johnson. I mean, he comes up multiple times in
the podcast. I'm not sure if you interviewed him or not,
but for the sake of the audience, like who is
he and why is he such a kind of symbolic
character in this story.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, So Brian Johnson looms over the first couple episodes,
and I didn't talk to him. I did reach out
to his doctor and we sort of started to make
waves to speak to him, and then I didn't for
a couple of reasons. But Brian Johnson is a tech
founder who did very well, who decided to prioritize his health,
(10:12):
and he does insane regiments. He wakes up at four,
he takes hundreds of supplements and powders, He does every
single type of therapy. He is in bed by eight pm.
He's had his last meal, and I think, like two pm.
It's very, very regimented. And he's also doing everything all
at once. And what he's done that's really transformative is
(10:36):
that he has managed to seize on a movement that
tells people you don't have to die. And I think
that that's really the most radical thing he's done. He
started this conversation about longevity and about health and prioritizing health,
but really also about not giving up and not What
they'd say is like playing into this cultural narrative that
(10:59):
death gives your life meaning. And I think that when
you talk to some of these people in the space,
it's really fascinating because they say, well, what if AI
can make all decisions for us at some point and
we're living in some sort of singularity where it can
decide whether human life is worthwhile and you train it
on centuries of data and all of it is telling
(11:20):
you death is meaningful, Death gives life meaning. Won't it
make a choice that it should kill humanity? And Brian
Johnson is one of the people who believes this as well,
at least according to Adam Grease, who's a big deal
in Silicon Valley started the Vitalist Bay and Vitalism movement.
But what's also interesting about Brian Johnson is that a
lot of people won't say this on the record, but
(11:42):
they'll tell you what Brian Johnson is doing isn't science,
because science is about controls. It's about doing a lot
of tests and analyzing everything. And he's collected a lot
of data, but he's run so many variables at the
same time that it's impossible to know exactly what is
contributed to his help.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So let's talk about some of the some of the
life extending technologies, or at least technologies that you encountered
around aging and logevity. Since I've known you, you've been
interested in this suit that makes you feel because of
the experience of living in an older person's body. And
then finally, I think for this show, you've got to
You've got to put it on. Why has this been
(12:22):
something that's I feel like a lot of people have
like certain things that like tug at them in some way,
and I feel like the aging suit has been something
that's tugged at you for you know, almost ten years
that I've known you. Like, what makes you so fascinated
in that suit and what was the experience of trying
it on.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, well, one of the things is having grown up
as an editor in a way like I just don't
let go of ideas. I've also thought about how you
can knit a sweater for the Statue of Liberty for
a very long time and I don't think that's going
to happen for a show, but it is a funny idea.
The aging I actually learned about from Jonathan Strickland, who
(13:02):
used to be and one of the things he told me,
which I absolutely loved, And the reason it stuck with
me isn't that you just put on a suit and
feel like what it is to be eighty. It's that
it's so rare that technology makes you more empathetic. And
I think that's really what got me, is that, like
(13:24):
not just the idea of being scared straight and feeling
what ady could feel like, but also what does it
mean for other people? You know, you stand in line
at a Starbucks behind someone, or you're impatient at the
postal office with someone or wherever it is, right Like
I think about it with my mom and like how
she asked for little things and I'm you know, I'm busy,
(13:45):
I'm doing all these things, and you realize once you
put on this suit how quickly everything is difficult. And
for most people it is like it's like boiling a frog, right,
you're turning the temperature up slow, slowly, slowly, but this
is just throwing you in quickly. And it's at this
wonderful age lab in Mi t and the guy who
(14:08):
directs this Joe Coffin, and the reason he created this
suit was he was trying to figure out how to
make a car that was better for elderly people. And
so all the engineers and people at this auto agency
were together and they wore the suits and they played twister,
and then they started doing things around the office and
you realize that everything is labored, from like walking to
(14:30):
trying to use the screen is so hard. Like I
went to the coffee machine and tried to pick a
coffee and I just had to guess for the most
part and then be happy with whatever I selected.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Or you have you have like blood vision glasses, like
weights around your wrists, Like what's the thing?
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah, you have you have bungeies, weights, you're walking on
crocs that are on top of styrofoams, or your balance
isn't there. You have no peripheral vision, so you know,
I couldn't tell who was standing next to me for
the most part. And then walking downstairs or like sitting
on a stool, these the things that are so natural
for anyone in pretty good health. You need all these
(15:04):
reference points with your hands to make sure you stick
the landing. And it was just it was really eye
opening to me to see that walking around an office
could leave you winded, you know, or or the ways
that just reaching for a plate or squatting down was
a real chore.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
And part of the longevity crowd is in search of
being eighteen nineteen hundred years old, but not having the
experience of living that suit right.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, completely, And that's a huge part of it is
how do you strengthen your muscles? How do you keep
the body you have even though the numbers go up.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
One of the things I found most fascinating hearing you
talk about this story around the office is Frontier Tower.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah. So, Frontier Tower is this co working space that's
filled with really bright, idealistic young people who are invested
in the future. But it's not just co working space.
They also have social events. They have robot wars in
the basement and pet tide raves and all these things,
(16:11):
but they also have every floor is dedicated to a
different specialty. So like you might join, but you're joining
for the crypto floor. You might join, but you're joining
for the Maker's floor. You might join but you're joining
for the longevity floor, And so everyone kind of has
their specific interest, but then it all mixes pretty nicely.
And along with that, they also have an arts and
(16:31):
culture floor because they feel like they're this vertical village
in the middle of San Francisco and every civilization needs
a culture.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
What did you find on the Majevity floor.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
I think what was interesting to me was I had
thought that all of this type of community was happening
in prosper in Honduras, and so this exit community where
people it was like a libertarian paradise that has been
set up there. And instead what I found was people
(17:02):
did go there, and a lot of people from Frontier
Tower had been there, but they really found the nexus
of the Frontier and the money and the ideas to
be in San Francisco. And so on the Longevity floor
you had people who had created pop up communities. At Prosper,
you had investors, you had people who were in labs
(17:27):
creating all sorts of things, and they have a wet
lab at Frontier Tower where you can use Crisper and
other things like that. But there's also a medical clinic
on the Longevity Floor where you can use h Bot
therapy to have oxygen pumped into your body, and red
light therapy and various types of therapies that a doctor
in the back would prescribe and administered to you.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
And you tried them not there, somewhere else there, And
did you feel a difference from trying these things?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah? You know. I had heard so much about this
stuff being kind of like psychosomatic, right, like this idea
that you go in and you feel better, or you
think you feel better, and then you perform better at whatever.
And so I did the h BOT therapy and had
the oxygen sort of pumped into my system, and then
I did the cryotherapy and the red light therapy and
(18:19):
I dim back to back and the red light therapy
kind of feels like a sauna, but it's actually the
light activating year of mitochondria. And the cryo just puts
you in a really cold state, and I didn't feel
anything immediately after the h BOT the cryo, I felt
like euphorick after it when you step out, I mean
(18:39):
it was annoying to endure because I'm from Goa and
I don't like the cold and so like you know,
But when I stepped out, I felt so great. And
then the back and forth between the red light and
the the cryo, my body felt new and it felt
really great. And then that day into the next day,
I felt I didn't have my anxiety, I wasn't my
(19:00):
jaw and I slept incredibly. And the HPOT therapy, they
say one session doesn't do so much.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
A breathing ocean from a muskool.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, there was a mask and it's in a closed
off vault, so you feel like you're in a submarine
that's being filled with oxygen and it is ultimately sending
you thirty three feet below sea level essentially, and it's
stressing your body and pushing oxygen into various parts of it.
And the ways that people have seen at work is
(19:28):
like the Mayo Clinic uses it and they say, like
twelve sessions cumulatively will help you heal things like gangreen
or diabetic foot or various types of skin conditions, et cetera.
And people with autism use it too, and so like,
there have been proven effects of it. It's not clear
whether going in as a healthy person really is that beneficial.
(19:50):
But whatever it was, those three things between them. I
slept incredibly well that night, and then I came back
for the NAD drip.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And what is NAD so uh, it's an acronym. For
some kids, it's an acronym.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It's a drip that they administer, and people both swear
by it and some people say it's completely false. But
it was discovered by this guy, Lenny Guarantee, who started Elysium,
and he managed to transfer it from yeast into mice
into humans, and what he realized in yeast and mice
was that he could get them to live longer. It's
not clear whether NAD actually makes you live longer, partially
(20:31):
because it's hard to tell whether longevity drug is working
over the course of our life span, right, But it
does anecdotally make people more energetic. Chris guy Amali, who
you know, injects it because it relieves him of his
brain fog. He has got a small kid, lots of
people use it for that, and so I decided I
might as well try it right and in this clinic
(20:52):
in India, which is also fascinating because for so many
years growing up, India was decades behind what the US,
what was happening in the US, And here you have
exactly what's happening in the US happening there at a
fraction of the cost, which is really interesting. And people
from FC GOA and visiting athletes, they all go to
this clinic and go. But I did the NAD therapy
(21:14):
and the guys there said, I don't know if it
will work for you. Some people say the first drip
doesn't really work that well. But when the two doctors
did it, they said they played lights out cricket and
also had an incredible a badminton game, right like both
of them said this, and so I was pretty skeptical.
I did the drip. I went to sleep that night.
(21:35):
Then I played tennis the next day, and I have
I don't think I've played tennis that well since I
was like a teenager, Like it was unbelievable. I was
pushing a pro around the core and I played like
two days before and was average, And so I don't
know whether it works, but anecdotally it triggered something that
made me feel incredible on the core and sharp, And
(21:58):
I didn't have the mental thought.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You mentioned mice in the context of yeast mice, and
people only mentioned mice. Naked mole rats came into my head.
Do they come up in your podcast?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
They don't. I mean, there's a lot of incredible stuff
with animals, from like how we've learned and understood genetics
through blue whales, which are actually more synthetical with humans
than you might imagine two tortoises to naked mole rats.
But the thing that does come up is mice themselves.
And I went to this lab at MIT with this
(22:48):
doctor PSI, and when I walked into met her. She
runs basically the premiere neuroscience lab in the country. And
when you walk in, you see this little screen that's
got mice spreading around what seems like a tiny rave
and they're like strobe lights, and there's like what is
going on? And then when I asked her about it,
she said that they had come up with this non
(23:10):
invasive therapy that is in stage three trials right now. Basically,
if you flash lights and you have a pulsing feeling
at your skin. It can activate gamma waves in your
brain to reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer's. And the idea
that you could just put on a mask and enjoy
it for an hour with the stimulation and then be
(23:34):
relieved of some of the symptoms of Alzheimer's was just
remarkable to me.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The other thing that lab I believe that you encountered
was organoids.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah. One of the incredible things about doctor Ci is
that she has done something that might revolutionize personalized medicine
in that she can recreate your brain in the Petri dish,
and she can do it thousands of times, and she
basically uses six stem cells to create an organoid of
(24:05):
your brain. And then what they can do with that is,
particularly for Alzheimer's, they can manipulate it to see how
certain drugs and how certain therapeutics will affect it. And
so instead of using a patient as a labrat, they
can use these Petri dishes and then come up with specific,
a specific protocol for you. Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, this also has a more sci fi side, right,
all the more extreme versions of organoids and you know,
bodies with no heads and stuff like that. You encountered.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah. So when I started the show, in the very beginning,
I talk to someone who gave me this lead about
a pitch they had received about a company that was
doing something they call morally gray and it was hard
for people to invest did it and it sort of
intrigued me. I dug a little more and I heard
(25:05):
that it was about this group that was creating a
farm of human clones for organ donation.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
A farm of human I mean, this sounds like extremely dystopian.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, it does, and so that's kind of what I
was chasing. Initially. I was like asking around. More and
more people came forward. No one wanted to go on
the record, but they'd say like, oh, yeah, I'd seen
this deck or yeah I'd heard this. And then what's
funny is that I listened to a Tectonic podcast from
the Ft and they reported that someone in Singapore was
(25:38):
investing in this, that he was investing in this basically
creating a farm of clones. But the idea was that
the clones were created in such a way that their
brain function had been turned off. And the idea is
that like you could raise these clones that maybe didn't
have pain, didn't have feelings didn't have any sort of sentience,
(25:59):
but did have the bodies. And so that's why it's
kind of chasing. I couldn't quite find it. And then
we hear all these rumors. One of them was that
there was this like heiress that owned a mansion and
they were doing all sorts of health trials there and
that seemed unethical, and they were using words like eugenics
in a manner that didn't I didn't carry any baggage
(26:20):
to them, you know. And they were talking about germal
and editing and things like this, and so like there
are all these sort of scary versions of what's going on,
But ultimately we found our way to this woman named
Alice Gilman from AR three bio. And Alice has an
incredible story. She grew up in Kazakhstan, loves animals. Her
grandmother had fled the Holocaust by horseback and ended up
(26:42):
like with Shallon monks or something, and like, you know,
and she couldn't stand to watch her grandmother age. But
beyond that, her father had some sort of heart complication
where his life was at intense risk. And sometimes it's
reported as open heart surgery, sometimes it's a heart transplant
she said open heart surgery to me. And so she
was looking for any way to try to help her
(27:05):
dad live longer and ultimately other people. And so she
stumbles into a guy named John Schloendorn, and he's also
been in sort of the aging community for a while
and in the aging sciences, et cetera. And together they
were looking at doing something like this where they were
creating what they call an organ bag, which means a
(27:27):
body with no brain. And you know what's interesting is
that you talk to people in Silicon Valley about this
and no one's really phased by it. They're like, I
was phased by it the first time I heard it,
but the more I thought about it, like, the more
okay it seemed. And you hear Alice talk about it,
it's really interesting. When I talked to her, she was
(27:48):
on Puerto Rico trying to figure out how to scrape
skin cell to create clones of monkeys. To do this
with monkeys. The idea, as she presented it to me,
was that if you had all these organ bags, and
you take out the idea that these are animals, right,
if you're just thinking about them as these testable subjects,
and they don't have feelings, and they don't have brain function,
(28:08):
et cetera. You can hook up a ton of them
to a tower with AI, and as a pandemic comes,
you have all these testable subjects and you can test
all your hypothesis overnight, and you can figure out a
vaccine in two weeks. And that seemed to be the
promise of what they were selling, right, I.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Don't know about harvesting organs from these body bags.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And then I asked her about that. I said, like,
what about and she said, well, wouldn't it be great
if you know, a billionaire needed a heart and we
could do this for them, and we could clone them,
And then I had all these other organs to give
to other people. But the rumor i'd heard and the
one I ultimately was chasing because it evolved from organ
farms to full body replacement, which is, if a billionaire
(28:56):
or someone were to live to seventy or eighty and
their body starts malfunctioning on them, you can do what
Vladimir and Putin told she. You know, you can lift
to one hundred and fifty if you replace organs, Right,
I can just continually replace my heart like it's a
part of a car or something, and maybe that could work,
(29:17):
but the organ rejection and the issues are real. And
so the point that was being bandied about in Silicon
Valley was like, it's actually much easier to do one
surgical replacement and to put an old head on a
new body. And this has happened before. Actually in the
seventies at a Cleveland hospital, a neurosurgeon from Case Western
(29:41):
put heads on monkeys and transferred ahead to another monkey.
And the monkey could move its eyes. It showed that
it was hungry, It could like move certain aspects, but
it wasn't quite connected.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
If used the brain in the old head to the
spinal core of the new bodies.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Well yeah, and and it lived for maybe twelve days.
And they did this a number of times. But as
the sciences advanced, et cetera, like, there are people who
believe this should be possible. So you ask Alice about this,
and what she'll tell you is that, like, wouldn't you
want a new body? Wouldn't you let you know? Like,
and but what's funny is that I did this interview
(30:20):
in February. In March, Wired came out with the story
that talked about the kind of the mice and the
monkey part of it. And then the next day MIT
Tech Review came out with a fuller story of what
I'd heard. That they had given presentations to billionaires and
(30:40):
people who could afford a seventy thousand dollars ticket on
a seminar called full Body Replacement. And so if you
look at their site, it says they don't do anything
with primates, they don't do anything with like humans, that
the press has gotten it all wrong, et cetera. But
they've been documented circulating a pitch deck.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
To this effect. So that the show is called Skyline
Drive and the subtitle is how to Live Forever Beyond
full Body Replacement. I mean, what's the answer to that question.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I think that there are a lot of people who
are looking to live forever. And it's funny because I
don't always know what their reason is for it. It's
hard to determine sometimes when people say, like, oh, don't
you want to see space? Don't you want to be
in a new age of discovery? Don't you want to
But when you talk about specifics, it's not always clear
(31:32):
to me what they're thinking about. But I also think
that a lot of people that I talked to had
severe health problems and they're looking to extend their lives
as long as they can, and they're just starting to
enjoy their lives. There's a guy, Lawrence Ion, who's the
head I think of the Longevity Floor, and he spent
(31:54):
the first twelve years of his life on a back
looking at hospital ceilings, you know, and had these incredibly
painful bone tumors. And you could see why as he's
enjoying his life in his thirties for the first time,
he wants to extend it. And there are all sorts
of incredible medical marvels and discoveries that are about to
take place. There's a guy who's working on a brain
(32:17):
of theseus where he's actually working to replace dead brain
cells and overcome the blood brain barrier to basically come
out with a new, fully functioning brain continuously, and that's stunning.
There's a woman named Juliette Humor who also is ill
and was looking for a cure for herself, and she
realized that menstrual blood could be harvested for stem cells,
(32:40):
and this idea of this waste product that exists everywhere
that could have all these healing treatments. And she's figured
out how to turn it. Initially, the first product she's
making is a therapeutic cream which completely gets rid of scars,
and it's fascinating, But that isn't you know where she
wants to end. Where she wants to end is curing it.
And so I don't know if people live forever. I
(33:04):
do know that there's a whole group of people who
are in their twenties and thirties and are storing their
blood every six months and freezing it. And the whole
reason is that they want to have a longitudinal study
of themselves and have blood to test against as new
therapeutics come out.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Well, I'm going to ask you, Ashiy, what is the
median age of peak fascination with living forever?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
What do you say when I talk to people at
both these longevity clinics and a longevity doctor, they said,
people in their twenties who want to be the next
Brian Johnson and people in their eighties and nineties who
just want to extend their life.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Mengish, thank you. Just to close, all people take away
from the podcast when they listen to it, why should
they go and download and subscribe Skyline drive How to
Live Forever For their next listen.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
I think that there's so many things happening around and
as in terms of health and health science, and to
not be aware of your choices is something that would
be a mistake, and to be able to learn about
it through a fun adventure or a romp, I think
feels exciting.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Thank Gosh, thank you for tech stuff. I'm as voloshin.
(34:38):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Shina Ozaki.
It was executive produced by me and Julia Nutta for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelf iHeart Podcasts. Jack Instanly mixed this
episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote up theme song.
Silicon Valley and longevity. Is it a fad, an obsession,
a status symbol, or a valid technological pursuit and what
should the rest of us think about it? In the
newest season of the hit podcast Skyline Drive, How to
Live Forever, host Mangesh had to get A explores the
world of biohacking, longevity research, and the theories of what
(00:38):
it means to live a long life Well. Mangesh looks
into how it feels to have your body age in
mere minutes, interviews seniors living in Brooklyn, New York, and
investigates why living forever might not be an ideal situation
for everyone. You might also recognize his name because Mangesh
is my co founder at Kaleidoscope. We spend a lot
of time together and has been a on tech stuff
(01:00):
several times. Welcome back to the podcast, by guess, it's
so nice to be here us. So let's go back
to the first season of Skyline Drive because for somebody
who's interested in science and technology and skepticism, it had
a strange topic which was astrology.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, that's right. So astrology is one of those things
that you cannot escape as an Indian and so the
thing I said was, I don't believe in astrology, but
it keeps happening to me. And I noticed that in
this world. It was very difficult as a kid in
America to be able to talk about astrology and not
be laughed at. But you go to India and everything
is based on it, from like weddings to auspicious dates.
(01:40):
I mean, the time when India becomes a country is
based on an astrological time, and so like, it dictates
so many things. And I went to talk to astrologer
there and he showed me pictures of like the head
of the nuclear program in India, who follows it. Right,
It's just in the fabric of the nation. And so
what I wanted to do was create this romp through
astrology and show that way, whther or not you believe
(02:00):
in it, that it is existing around you and it's
pulling things.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Around you because all the people believe in it.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, and so like there were Major League Baseball managers
who use astrology to pick between two players. Reagan created
nuclear disarmament agreements based on astrology, and all of that
has had a profound impact on us, whether we believe
in astrology or not.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
In that podcast, something very strange and uncanny and sad
also happened.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Right. Yeah, So at the end of the first episode,
I went to meet this astrologer in Queen's and I
had this wonderful chat. He told me how Kaleidoscope was
going to be gangbusters and that are figures crossed if
he's right about that far. But you give me this wonderful,
wonderful reading, and in it there was just this very
(02:46):
very brief segment where he said something about my dad's
health and how it could go very very wrong this year.
And then about thirty minutes after the reading, I went
and had tea at a chai parlor in Jackson Heights
with my cousin, and during it I got a text
from my dad that said that he had just had
a test come back and that a metastatic cancer had
(03:08):
spread through his body. And what we found is, you know,
I just started this podcast, and ultimately three weeks.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Later he passed.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And three weeks later, Yeah, you know, I talked to
a science writer about this and she said, you know,
is astrology true. I think it's true the same way
poetry is true. Right, It's just a way to interpret
and understand things. And that's ultimately how I understood astrology
was this way for people to grieve to. You know,
in India, mental health is something that's still stigmatized, and
(03:39):
so it's much easier to go to an astrologer and
talk about your problems than it is to therapist.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I mean, I know we talked about it at the time,
as you know, as friends and co founders of business
and stuff, but I never already asked you in podcast
form before. I mean, what was a feeling in that moment?
Presumably the strologers said your father's health might not be
so good, and you thought, well, this is probably just
that kind of normal sprinkling of Sultan's sweet from these
(04:06):
types of experiences, right, or and then something so devastating
and you've got that call thirty minutes later, And what
was that feeling in that moment?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
It was profound, but more that I had something I
urgently had to take care of, you know. It was
less about the astrology of it and more about how
could this be happening, How could this be happening now?
And how do we fix it? And so that was
what preoccupied me. But I still don't believe in astrology,
(04:39):
but I believe astrology is a way to understand the universe.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
You also got a prediction about your own mortality in
season one.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Right, Yeah, Yeah, It's something I didn't really look at.
It's such a luxury in some ways to collect tape
from friends and relatives and experiences. And so when I
went back and looked at some tape and conversations with
my mom and some other things, I noticed that in
this reading from this astrologer, a different astrologer, he told
me that my life would possibly end at sixty. If
(05:10):
I'm lucky, I get till sixty four. And I think
a few things happened at the same time. One is
that I turned forty six, and forty six is one
of those ages where you really start to fill your age.
My hair had turned gray, I had more belly fat
than i'd had ever before. It's harder to lose weight.
And I noticed I was just more tired, My legs
(05:32):
were more creaky, et cetera. And this is actually a
you know, it's documented. It's a thing that forty six
and some age at sixty are percent This year is for.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
You, even if you haven't co found a business with me.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, I think two kids are more because of my grade,
but those two things happen at the same time. And honestly,
I'd been fascinated by longevity for a very long time.
Not because I've ever wanted to live forever, That's not
something that's been an interest of mine, but more that
(06:05):
every few years you get a magazine article that says,
this is the generation where the kids are going to
lift to two hundred. Yeah, and I'd seen that since
like twenty ten, twenty fourteen, two tho eighteen, And when
I was at iHeart before we started Kaleidoscope, I'd reached
out to a number of posts and said, why don't
we do this topic, Why don't we do like how
to live forever? Why don't we talk about the miracles
happening in medicine and the piece of new therapies, new ideas,
(06:30):
new technologies, all moving so quickly.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And because you're an editor, I mean you were running
the iHeart podcast studio and your editor in chief of Kaleidoscope,
so essentially this this story was coming up for you,
like what is this repeated thing about longevity? What's true
and what's not? And then listening back through the tape
from your first podcast, you thought, basically, I can go
on a new question and answer this myself rather than
assign it.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, and for me, it was important to do astrology
in a way where it wasn't for skeptic and it
wasn't for believers, it was for everyone. Right, how do
you treat a subject in a way that feels very
human and ultimately longevity is the same? Right? There are
people who are very, very skeptical, rightly so, because there's
(07:14):
so many hucksters marketing at you constantly. And then there
are people who are all in, you know, who try
to follow every element of Brian Johnson's regiment. And we
all live, we all have to We don't all have
to die, according to some of the people that I interviewed,
but we all have to think about death. And so
I figured it was a very human topic that was
(07:35):
fun to dive into.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Well, I noticed your hair getting gray in the course
of working together. But then I noticed, in the course
of working on this show you losing quite a lot
of weight, and you know, being even more than a
more of a demon than ever on the tennis court.
I mean, you were both investigating this subject but also
living it, right, I mean in the sense you were
(07:58):
trying to literally trying to live forever, but you took
seriously the premise of what if I took all of
these recommendations or some of these recommendations.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, And what any longevity doctor will tell you is
that the biggest things aren't the supplements or the therapies
you can do, or getting on an A D plus,
which I did and was interesting. But it's just diet
and exercise and making space for socializing and sleep. And
(08:28):
in the first part of this show, I was very
good about a lot of those things. As you work
to put out a show, it's not the best way
to stay on top of all of that. And so
I'm looking forward to the show being over and to
prioritizing some of that stuff. Again.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I mean, this is tech stuff, and most of what
we talk about on this show relates to Second Valley,
and you know, the power players and who's uphos down,
which companies are doing interesting things and one of the
technologies that really might change the future. And the longevity
story in the Silicon Valley story, to me almost two
sides of the same coin, right, So much of the
(09:08):
discourse about longevity comes from Silicon Valley and one of
the few things that you can't have if you're a trillionaire,
is is eternal life?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yet No, it's one of those things like if death
and taxes are the two things that are unavoidable, a
lot of these people have avoided taxes. Now death is
the only thing that be challenged.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I mean, talk about talk about the kind of what
longevity means Silicon Valley culture. I mean, maybe talk about
Brian Johnson. I mean, he comes up multiple times in
the podcast. I'm not sure if you interviewed him or not,
but for the sake of the audience, like who is
he and why is he such a kind of symbolic
character in this story.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, So Brian Johnson looms over the first couple episodes,
and I didn't talk to him. I did reach out
to his doctor and we sort of started to make
waves to speak to him, and then I didn't for
a couple of reasons. But Brian Johnson is a tech
founder who did very well, who decided to prioritize his health,
(10:12):
and he does insane regiments. He wakes up at four,
he takes hundreds of supplements and powders, He does every
single type of therapy. He is in bed by eight pm.
He's had his last meal, and I think, like two pm.
It's very, very regimented. And he's also doing everything all
at once. And what he's done that's really transformative is
(10:36):
that he has managed to seize on a movement that
tells people you don't have to die. And I think
that that's really the most radical thing he's done. He
started this conversation about longevity and about health and prioritizing health,
but really also about not giving up and not What
they'd say is like playing into this cultural narrative that
(10:59):
death gives your life meaning. And I think that when
you talk to some of these people in the space,
it's really fascinating because they say, well, what if AI
can make all decisions for us at some point and
we're living in some sort of singularity where it can
decide whether human life is worthwhile and you train it
on centuries of data and all of it is telling
(11:20):
you death is meaningful, Death gives life meaning. Won't it
make a choice that it should kill humanity? And Brian
Johnson is one of the people who believes this as well,
at least according to Adam Grease, who's a big deal
in Silicon Valley started the Vitalist Bay and Vitalism movement.
But what's also interesting about Brian Johnson is that a
lot of people won't say this on the record, but
(11:42):
they'll tell you what Brian Johnson is doing isn't science,
because science is about controls. It's about doing a lot
of tests and analyzing everything. And he's collected a lot
of data, but he's run so many variables at the
same time that it's impossible to know exactly what is
contributed to his help.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So let's talk about some of the some of the
life extending technologies, or at least technologies that you encountered
around aging and logevity. Since I've known you, you've been
interested in this suit that makes you feel because of
the experience of living in an older person's body. And
then finally, I think for this show, you've got to
You've got to put it on. Why has this been
(12:22):
something that's I feel like a lot of people have
like certain things that like tug at them in some way,
and I feel like the aging suit has been something
that's tugged at you for you know, almost ten years
that I've known you. Like, what makes you so fascinated
in that suit and what was the experience of trying
it on.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, well, one of the things is having grown up
as an editor in a way like I just don't
let go of ideas. I've also thought about how you
can knit a sweater for the Statue of Liberty for
a very long time and I don't think that's going
to happen for a show, but it is a funny idea.
The aging I actually learned about from Jonathan Strickland, who
(13:02):
used to be and one of the things he told me,
which I absolutely loved, And the reason it stuck with
me isn't that you just put on a suit and
feel like what it is to be eighty. It's that
it's so rare that technology makes you more empathetic. And
I think that's really what got me, is that, like
(13:24):
not just the idea of being scared straight and feeling
what ady could feel like, but also what does it
mean for other people? You know, you stand in line
at a Starbucks behind someone, or you're impatient at the
postal office with someone or wherever it is, right Like
I think about it with my mom and like how
she asked for little things and I'm you know, I'm busy,
(13:45):
I'm doing all these things, and you realize once you
put on this suit how quickly everything is difficult. And
for most people it is like it's like boiling a frog, right,
you're turning the temperature up slow, slowly, slowly, but this
is just throwing you in quickly. And it's at this
wonderful age lab in Mi t and the guy who
(14:08):
directs this Joe Coffin, and the reason he created this
suit was he was trying to figure out how to
make a car that was better for elderly people. And
so all the engineers and people at this auto agency
were together and they wore the suits and they played twister,
and then they started doing things around the office and
you realize that everything is labored, from like walking to
(14:30):
trying to use the screen is so hard. Like I
went to the coffee machine and tried to pick a
coffee and I just had to guess for the most
part and then be happy with whatever I selected.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Or you have you have like blood vision glasses, like
weights around your wrists, Like what's the thing?
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah, you have you have bungeies, weights, you're walking on
crocs that are on top of styrofoams, or your balance
isn't there. You have no peripheral vision, so you know,
I couldn't tell who was standing next to me for
the most part. And then walking downstairs or like sitting
on a stool, these the things that are so natural
for anyone in pretty good health. You need all these
(15:04):
reference points with your hands to make sure you stick
the landing. And it was just it was really eye
opening to me to see that walking around an office
could leave you winded, you know, or or the ways
that just reaching for a plate or squatting down was
a real chore.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
And part of the longevity crowd is in search of
being eighteen nineteen hundred years old, but not having the
experience of living that suit right.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, completely, And that's a huge part of it is
how do you strengthen your muscles? How do you keep
the body you have even though the numbers go up.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
One of the things I found most fascinating hearing you
talk about this story around the office is Frontier Tower.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah. So, Frontier Tower is this co working space that's
filled with really bright, idealistic young people who are invested
in the future. But it's not just co working space.
They also have social events. They have robot wars in
the basement and pet tide raves and all these things,
(16:11):
but they also have every floor is dedicated to a
different specialty. So like you might join, but you're joining
for the crypto floor. You might join, but you're joining
for the Maker's floor. You might join but you're joining
for the longevity floor, And so everyone kind of has
their specific interest, but then it all mixes pretty nicely.
And along with that, they also have an arts and
(16:31):
culture floor because they feel like they're this vertical village
in the middle of San Francisco and every civilization needs
a culture.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
What did you find on the Majevity floor.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
I think what was interesting to me was I had
thought that all of this type of community was happening
in prosper in Honduras, and so this exit community where
people it was like a libertarian paradise that has been
set up there. And instead what I found was people
(17:02):
did go there, and a lot of people from Frontier
Tower had been there, but they really found the nexus
of the Frontier and the money and the ideas to
be in San Francisco. And so on the Longevity floor
you had people who had created pop up communities. At Prosper,
you had investors, you had people who were in labs
(17:27):
creating all sorts of things, and they have a wet
lab at Frontier Tower where you can use Crisper and
other things like that. But there's also a medical clinic
on the Longevity Floor where you can use h Bot
therapy to have oxygen pumped into your body, and red
light therapy and various types of therapies that a doctor
in the back would prescribe and administered to you.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
And you tried them not there, somewhere else there, And
did you feel a difference from trying these things?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah? You know. I had heard so much about this
stuff being kind of like psychosomatic, right, like this idea
that you go in and you feel better, or you
think you feel better, and then you perform better at whatever.
And so I did the h BOT therapy and had
the oxygen sort of pumped into my system, and then
I did the cryotherapy and the red light therapy and
(18:19):
I dim back to back and the red light therapy
kind of feels like a sauna, but it's actually the
light activating year of mitochondria. And the cryo just puts
you in a really cold state, and I didn't feel
anything immediately after the h BOT the cryo, I felt
like euphorick after it when you step out, I mean
(18:39):
it was annoying to endure because I'm from Goa and
I don't like the cold and so like you know,
But when I stepped out, I felt so great. And
then the back and forth between the red light and
the the cryo, my body felt new and it felt
really great. And then that day into the next day,
I felt I didn't have my anxiety, I wasn't my
(19:00):
jaw and I slept incredibly. And the HPOT therapy, they
say one session doesn't do so much.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
A breathing ocean from a muskool.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, there was a mask and it's in a closed
off vault, so you feel like you're in a submarine
that's being filled with oxygen and it is ultimately sending
you thirty three feet below sea level essentially, and it's
stressing your body and pushing oxygen into various parts of it.
And the ways that people have seen at work is
(19:28):
like the Mayo Clinic uses it and they say, like
twelve sessions cumulatively will help you heal things like gangreen
or diabetic foot or various types of skin conditions, et cetera.
And people with autism use it too, and so like,
there have been proven effects of it. It's not clear
whether going in as a healthy person really is that beneficial.
(19:50):
But whatever it was, those three things between them. I
slept incredibly well that night, and then I came back
for the NAD drip.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And what is NAD so uh, it's an acronym. For
some kids, it's an acronym.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It's a drip that they administer, and people both swear
by it and some people say it's completely false. But
it was discovered by this guy, Lenny Guarantee, who started Elysium,
and he managed to transfer it from yeast into mice
into humans, and what he realized in yeast and mice
was that he could get them to live longer. It's
not clear whether NAD actually makes you live longer, partially
(20:31):
because it's hard to tell whether longevity drug is working
over the course of our life span, right, But it
does anecdotally make people more energetic. Chris guy Amali, who
you know, injects it because it relieves him of his
brain fog. He has got a small kid, lots of
people use it for that, and so I decided I
might as well try it right and in this clinic
(20:52):
in India, which is also fascinating because for so many
years growing up, India was decades behind what the US,
what was happening in the US, And here you have
exactly what's happening in the US happening there at a
fraction of the cost, which is really interesting. And people
from FC GOA and visiting athletes, they all go to
this clinic and go. But I did the NAD therapy
(21:14):
and the guys there said, I don't know if it
will work for you. Some people say the first drip
doesn't really work that well. But when the two doctors
did it, they said they played lights out cricket and
also had an incredible a badminton game, right like both
of them said this, and so I was pretty skeptical.
I did the drip. I went to sleep that night.
(21:35):
Then I played tennis the next day, and I have
I don't think I've played tennis that well since I
was like a teenager, Like it was unbelievable. I was
pushing a pro around the core and I played like
two days before and was average, And so I don't
know whether it works, but anecdotally it triggered something that
made me feel incredible on the core and sharp, And
(21:58):
I didn't have the mental thought.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You mentioned mice in the context of yeast mice, and
people only mentioned mice. Naked mole rats came into my head.
Do they come up in your podcast?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
They don't. I mean, there's a lot of incredible stuff
with animals, from like how we've learned and understood genetics
through blue whales, which are actually more synthetical with humans
than you might imagine two tortoises to naked mole rats.
But the thing that does come up is mice themselves.
And I went to this lab at MIT with this
(22:48):
doctor PSI, and when I walked into met her. She
runs basically the premiere neuroscience lab in the country. And
when you walk in, you see this little screen that's
got mice spreading around what seems like a tiny rave
and they're like strobe lights, and there's like what is
going on? And then when I asked her about it,
she said that they had come up with this non
(23:10):
invasive therapy that is in stage three trials right now. Basically,
if you flash lights and you have a pulsing feeling
at your skin. It can activate gamma waves in your
brain to reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer's. And the idea
that you could just put on a mask and enjoy
it for an hour with the stimulation and then be
(23:34):
relieved of some of the symptoms of Alzheimer's was just
remarkable to me.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
The other thing that lab I believe that you encountered
was organoids.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah. One of the incredible things about doctor Ci is
that she has done something that might revolutionize personalized medicine
in that she can recreate your brain in the Petri dish,
and she can do it thousands of times, and she
basically uses six stem cells to create an organoid of
(24:05):
your brain. And then what they can do with that is,
particularly for Alzheimer's, they can manipulate it to see how
certain drugs and how certain therapeutics will affect it. And
so instead of using a patient as a labrat, they
can use these Petri dishes and then come up with specific,
a specific protocol for you. Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, this also has a more sci fi side, right,
all the more extreme versions of organoids and you know,
bodies with no heads and stuff like that. You encountered.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah. So when I started the show, in the very beginning,
I talk to someone who gave me this lead about
a pitch they had received about a company that was
doing something they call morally gray and it was hard
for people to invest did it and it sort of
intrigued me. I dug a little more and I heard
(25:05):
that it was about this group that was creating a
farm of human clones for organ donation.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
A farm of human I mean, this sounds like extremely dystopian.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, it does, and so that's kind of what I
was chasing. Initially. I was like asking around. More and
more people came forward. No one wanted to go on
the record, but they'd say like, oh, yeah, I'd seen
this deck or yeah I'd heard this. And then what's
funny is that I listened to a Tectonic podcast from
the Ft and they reported that someone in Singapore was
(25:38):
investing in this, that he was investing in this basically
creating a farm of clones. But the idea was that
the clones were created in such a way that their
brain function had been turned off. And the idea is
that like you could raise these clones that maybe didn't
have pain, didn't have feelings didn't have any sort of sentience,
(25:59):
but did have the bodies. And so that's why it's
kind of chasing. I couldn't quite find it. And then
we hear all these rumors. One of them was that
there was this like heiress that owned a mansion and
they were doing all sorts of health trials there and
that seemed unethical, and they were using words like eugenics
in a manner that didn't I didn't carry any baggage
(26:20):
to them, you know. And they were talking about germal
and editing and things like this, and so like there
are all these sort of scary versions of what's going on,
But ultimately we found our way to this woman named
Alice Gilman from AR three bio. And Alice has an
incredible story. She grew up in Kazakhstan, loves animals. Her
grandmother had fled the Holocaust by horseback and ended up
(26:42):
like with Shallon monks or something, and like, you know,
and she couldn't stand to watch her grandmother age. But
beyond that, her father had some sort of heart complication
where his life was at intense risk. And sometimes it's
reported as open heart surgery, sometimes it's a heart transplant
she said open heart surgery to me. And so she
was looking for any way to try to help her
(27:05):
dad live longer and ultimately other people. And so she
stumbles into a guy named John Schloendorn, and he's also
been in sort of the aging community for a while
and in the aging sciences, et cetera. And together they
were looking at doing something like this where they were
creating what they call an organ bag, which means a
(27:27):
body with no brain. And you know what's interesting is
that you talk to people in Silicon Valley about this
and no one's really phased by it. They're like, I
was phased by it the first time I heard it,
but the more I thought about it, like, the more
okay it seemed. And you hear Alice talk about it,
it's really interesting. When I talked to her, she was
(27:48):
on Puerto Rico trying to figure out how to scrape
skin cell to create clones of monkeys. To do this
with monkeys. The idea, as she presented it to me,
was that if you had all these organ bags, and
you take out the idea that these are animals, right,
if you're just thinking about them as these testable subjects,
and they don't have feelings, and they don't have brain function,
(28:08):
et cetera. You can hook up a ton of them
to a tower with AI, and as a pandemic comes,
you have all these testable subjects and you can test
all your hypothesis overnight, and you can figure out a
vaccine in two weeks. And that seemed to be the
promise of what they were selling, right, I.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Don't know about harvesting organs from these body bags.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And then I asked her about that. I said, like,
what about and she said, well, wouldn't it be great
if you know, a billionaire needed a heart and we
could do this for them, and we could clone them,
And then I had all these other organs to give
to other people. But the rumor i'd heard and the
one I ultimately was chasing because it evolved from organ
farms to full body replacement, which is, if a billionaire
(28:56):
or someone were to live to seventy or eighty and
their body starts malfunctioning on them, you can do what
Vladimir and Putin told she. You know, you can lift
to one hundred and fifty if you replace organs, Right,
I can just continually replace my heart like it's a
part of a car or something, and maybe that could work,
(29:17):
but the organ rejection and the issues are real. And
so the point that was being bandied about in Silicon
Valley was like, it's actually much easier to do one
surgical replacement and to put an old head on a
new body. And this has happened before. Actually in the
seventies at a Cleveland hospital, a neurosurgeon from Case Western
(29:41):
put heads on monkeys and transferred ahead to another monkey.
And the monkey could move its eyes. It showed that
it was hungry, It could like move certain aspects, but
it wasn't quite connected.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
If used the brain in the old head to the
spinal core of the new bodies.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Well yeah, and and it lived for maybe twelve days.
And they did this a number of times. But as
the sciences advanced, et cetera, like, there are people who
believe this should be possible. So you ask Alice about this,
and what she'll tell you is that, like, wouldn't you
want a new body? Wouldn't you let you know? Like,
and but what's funny is that I did this interview
(30:20):
in February. In March, Wired came out with the story
that talked about the kind of the mice and the
monkey part of it. And then the next day MIT
Tech Review came out with a fuller story of what
I'd heard. That they had given presentations to billionaires and
(30:40):
people who could afford a seventy thousand dollars ticket on
a seminar called full Body Replacement. And so if you
look at their site, it says they don't do anything
with primates, they don't do anything with like humans, that
the press has gotten it all wrong, et cetera. But
they've been documented circulating a pitch deck.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
To this effect. So that the show is called Skyline
Drive and the subtitle is how to Live Forever Beyond
full Body Replacement. I mean, what's the answer to that question.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I think that there are a lot of people who
are looking to live forever. And it's funny because I
don't always know what their reason is for it. It's
hard to determine sometimes when people say, like, oh, don't
you want to see space? Don't you want to be
in a new age of discovery? Don't you want to
But when you talk about specifics, it's not always clear
(31:32):
to me what they're thinking about. But I also think
that a lot of people that I talked to had
severe health problems and they're looking to extend their lives
as long as they can, and they're just starting to
enjoy their lives. There's a guy, Lawrence Ion, who's the
head I think of the Longevity Floor, and he spent
(31:54):
the first twelve years of his life on a back
looking at hospital ceilings, you know, and had these incredibly
painful bone tumors. And you could see why as he's
enjoying his life in his thirties for the first time,
he wants to extend it. And there are all sorts
of incredible medical marvels and discoveries that are about to
take place. There's a guy who's working on a brain
(32:17):
of theseus where he's actually working to replace dead brain
cells and overcome the blood brain barrier to basically come
out with a new, fully functioning brain continuously, and that's stunning.
There's a woman named Juliette Humor who also is ill
and was looking for a cure for herself, and she
realized that menstrual blood could be harvested for stem cells,
(32:40):
and this idea of this waste product that exists everywhere
that could have all these healing treatments. And she's figured
out how to turn it. Initially, the first product she's
making is a therapeutic cream which completely gets rid of scars,
and it's fascinating, But that isn't you know where she
wants to end. Where she wants to end is curing it.
And so I don't know if people live forever. I
(33:04):
do know that there's a whole group of people who
are in their twenties and thirties and are storing their
blood every six months and freezing it. And the whole
reason is that they want to have a longitudinal study
of themselves and have blood to test against as new
therapeutics come out.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Well, I'm going to ask you, Ashiy, what is the
median age of peak fascination with living forever?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
What do you say when I talk to people at
both these longevity clinics and a longevity doctor, they said,
people in their twenties who want to be the next
Brian Johnson and people in their eighties and nineties who
just want to extend their life.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Mengish, thank you. Just to close, all people take away
from the podcast when they listen to it, why should
they go and download and subscribe Skyline drive How to
Live Forever For their next listen.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
I think that there's so many things happening around and
as in terms of health and health science, and to
not be aware of your choices is something that would
be a mistake, and to be able to learn about
it through a fun adventure or a romp, I think
feels exciting.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Thank Gosh, thank you for tech stuff. I'm as voloshin.
(34:38):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Shina Ozaki.
It was executive produced by me and Julia Nutta for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelf iHeart Podcasts. Jack Instanly mixed this
episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote up theme song.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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