July 28, 2026 • 52 mins
At the end of his longevity journey, Mangesh struggles to make sense of the growing belief that death can—or should—be optional. He spends time with death doula Alua Arthur, who explains how accepting mortality allows people to live with purpose, and meets a longevity researcher whose tidy economic models are complicated by a tragic loss in her own life. Then, as he weighs the optimism of young longevinauts with the fear of losing what makes us human, he confronts the question he’s really been asking all along.
- Watch Alua Arthur’s TED Talk and learn more about Going with Grace
- Check the Aevitas House events calendar
- Read Chloe Mango’s newsletter, Chloe’s Lab Notes
- Learn more about Starsuit, Owen Zoyt’s next-gen spacesuit
- Check out Bishoy Tadros’s books, podcast, and coaching
- Visit the Why Philanthropy Matters website and read Rhodri Davies’ essay on longevity
- Explore Raiany Romanni-Klein’s work on longevity, ethics, and economics
Special thanks to Azadi Records and Bliss Samsa for their beautiful tracks, and Botany for the score.
Episode collage art by Vahini Shori.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
He asked them.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Very lastic, don't get so much to get money gets
see us.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Prelude. The first time I heard A Love Supreme, I
was fifteen. I'd ordered it from BMG because my two
older cousins, these vinyl heads, said they like Coltrane, so
I put it in the mix on one of those
eight CDs for the price of one deals. I've listened
(00:58):
to it so many times since, over so many parts
of my life. Sometimes it's background, sometimes with focus, but
it always takes me back to high school. That's what
I'm remembering now, a sunny afternoon, lying on my bed.
The saxophone feels like this quiet call to prayer. The
(01:22):
rolling bass and piano and drums build this haze for
the horn to cut through. The notes aren't perfect, they
stretch across spaces that feel like they're grading, reaching for
something higher, and then falling and working their way back up.
The musicians start chanting A Love Supreme over and over,
(01:42):
adding to that haze, and you welcome being called into
that trance. I remember staring at the back of the album,
holding in my hands as I listened, reading over the
set list again and again, trying to puzzle out the
meaning for myself. Acknowledge resolution pursuance PSALM acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance, acknowledgment, resolution,
(02:16):
pursuance SI. I'm not religious, but something about that structure
always felt right. Chapter one Acknowledgment.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
The Gentleman in the elevator now is a Candid Star.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Decades ago, on a nineteen sixty two episode of Candid Camera,
the show ran an experiment illustrating group thing. These folks
who are entering.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The man with a white shirt, the lady with a trench.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Coat, as an unsuspecting man stands inside an elevator. Three
people step in one after another, but instead of turning
towards the doors, they all face the back like that's
a normal thing to do.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
And you'll see how this man.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
In the trench part.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I used to maintain this individuality.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
But a little by little.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
He looks at his watch, but.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
He's really making an excuse for turning.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Just a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
To the wall.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
By the end of the scene, the mark is folded
to the pure pressure and is fully facing the back
of the elevator. And it happens so quickly. Of course,
Candid Camera played the experiment for laughs, but It's based
on real studies designed by a Polish born Jewish psychologist
named Solomon Ash in the nineteen fifties. Ash's groundbreaking work
(04:02):
showed how pressure from a unanimous group can cause people
to conform to things they don't actually believe. I've been
thinking about that a lot recently, because at the beginning
of the show I was told that a significantly longer
life was possible.
Speaker 6 (04:22):
I believe it's easy for all of us, without much intervention,
to get over the age of ninety. If you get
to the age of ninety, I think, then in the
middle I'll find things that could extend me beyond ninety.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Then I slipped into a world where seemingly everyone I
talked to thought of death as this outdated assumption something
humans before as had only accepted because we lacked the
tools or imagination to challenge it.
Speaker 7 (04:50):
We want to make death optional.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Death is something we've been taught never to question, and
we don't know what a post death future is going
to look like.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Years.
Speaker 6 (05:00):
I believe that when you're twenty years old, you would
go to a longevity clinic and you'll get an infusion,
and basically it'll stunt your aging and you'll come every
year or so for another treatment. This the Peter Pan scenario.
You'll stay young, forever young.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Before long, I was questioning my position, wondering if I
was missing something like is radical life extension something I
should be working towards? Could life at one hundred twenty
five or one hundred and fifty be satisfying? What about longer?
But there's another part of Ash's psychology work that's perhaps
more important. If even one person breaks with that lockstep majority,
(05:47):
the pressure to conform decreases dramatically. And that's how I
felt like a man standing in an elevator full of
death denials, starting to question if I was facing the
right way. When the doors opened and in walked Ailea Arthur.
Speaker 8 (06:07):
I want to die at sunset. I want to watch
the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple
as they dive in tonight.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
I first heard Aloa through her ted talk, and I
was struck by the specificity of it, the way she
imagined the room where her life would end.
Speaker 8 (06:24):
I want to hear the wind fluttering through the leaves
and smell very faintly, not Tampa amber incense, but very faintly,
because scent can be tough on a dying body.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
But it wasn't just that Ailoa accepts her mortality that
felt radical to me. It was that she expects to
see direct her final moments, just like she encourages others
to do in her role as a death duela and
the founder of Going with Grace.
Speaker 7 (06:49):
An end of life planning training and support organization, and
we exist to support people as they consider their mortality,
no matter what they may need along the way.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Aila Arthur is tall and composed. She's got a warm
smile with a gap between her front teeth that's disarming,
and she's stylish. In her ted talk, she wears this
beautifully structured, bright orange dress. Today on this video call,
she's a little more casual. Can you tell us a
little bit about how you got into this work?
Speaker 7 (07:21):
About twelve years ago, I was practicing law and it
was not a good fit for me, and I took
a leave of absence where I ended up in Cuba.
And in Cuba, I met a fellow traveler who had
uterine cancer and we talked a lot about her life
and I started asking her questions about her death.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
At that point, Aloa was in what she calls a
deep depression, and she was trying to find a way forward.
Speaker 7 (07:46):
I'd felt, you know, hints of joy again. I could
feel like sunshine on my skin again. I'd done some dancing,
you know. I was starting to feel like myself a
little bit.
Speaker 6 (07:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (07:56):
And I was also still deeply searching for answer about
this big question about life that I thought everybody else
had figured out. And what I found was mortality. I'd
never even properly considered mortality in any real way. I've
never made the connection between people die and I will die,
(08:19):
and what do I want to do with my life
because I will die?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So many people I talked to said they hated this
fairy tale. They told me, you don't need death to
give life meaning. But Alou is saying something slightly different.
Recognizing that she would die someday brought her life into focus,
and it pushed her to reconsider what she wants from
her remaining years. It's a phenomena she sees with the
planners and the terminally ill patience she cares for. Your
(08:46):
missstatement at going with Grace is that you will support
people to answer a question, what must I do to
be at peace with myself so that I may live
presently and die gracefully. Have you had really interesting answers
about how people want to live.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Yeah, there's a bunch of really juicy ones, but they
all fall in the authenticity bucket, like what do I
need to do nor to be myself right now?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
To be fully myself?
Speaker 7 (09:12):
Sometimes it's about quitting jobs or leaving relationships or entering
into relationships, or coming out or moving or having a kid,
or talking about the regrets about having a kid, which
is so taboo that you're never supposed to say, but
people say it when talking about the immortality.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
You're always getting tea. I'll tell you what, this is
the most tea job.
Speaker 7 (09:36):
I think, maybe even more than a therapist.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
But I'm curious, like, how would our own society be
different if death were accepted as a natural or even
beautiful part of life. Do you feel like there's a
reluctance to accept death majorly?
Speaker 7 (09:52):
I think that we live still in like a death
phobic and death avoidant culture. I also live in Los Angeles,
and so it's maybe a little bit easier for me
to see. But our obsession with beauty and youth, and
also this obsession with longevity, I'll play into that I
think to be human also is to be fallible, to weaken,
(10:15):
to come apart, to not be this diamond strong substance.
My body is fragile and vulnerable, and that is one
of the capital t truths that folks either deny or
make them too uncomfortable to think about, and so they
try to fix with all types of hacks that just
(10:36):
don't really do anything about it. Yeah, death, death is period,
but also death is built into my body.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think about my dad's body, the way it unravels
and halted to a stop in just a few weeks,
the cruel and specific way death was built into it.
But what if your body didn't break down? What if
science came up with a way that you could live
a longer life and keep your health. I was curious
(11:17):
what Ailoa would say.
Speaker 7 (11:19):
If I could live long and healthy till nine hundred.
I wouldn't want that. That doesn't seem like a good time.
And so when folks are really obsessed with longevity, I
would also be really interested in watching them eat an
orange if they knew that it was going to be
the last time that they ate the orange. You know,
(11:42):
you bring so much more intention and pleasure to it,
knowing that this is finite, that.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
This is it.
Speaker 7 (11:48):
Then if you thought you had a million more to eat.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
In her ted talk, Aloa offers this image of her death.
Speaker 8 (11:57):
I want to die with all of my affairs in
order loved ones have nothing to worry about but their
grief after I die, I want to die empty, devoid
of all of the skill, gift, talent and light that
I carry in this body, and satiated, full of the
richness of this one unique human ribe. And when my
loved ones notice that I have released my last breath,
(12:21):
I want them to clap. I want them to clap
because I died well. But I died well only because
I lived well.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
I picture a boxer who's put every ounce of energy
and effort into trading blows, only to collapse with nothing
more to give. And I want that. I want to
give to my family, fully, to my work, to savor
the oranges in between, and be present for all of it.
(12:49):
And if I have a legacy, it isn't just about
shows or books or whatever. Because I'm forty seven, I've
had more salt than pepper in my hair for more
than a decade, but I still don't feel like a
grown up in our family. But that's why I want
to be someone who lifts the next generation of my
nephews and nieces up and champions their work, someone who
(13:11):
models that same generous behavior. I've been so lucky to
receive it from generations before me, a link in the chain.
After the whirlwind of San Francisco and hearing the ways
people expect to push off their death, talking to Aloa
(13:34):
makes me feel sane, or at least less alone, because
it's not that she's saying death is good or that
we should be grateful for it. She's saying there's an
ending coming, and if you want to die happy, it
helps to live with purpose, to spill every ounce of
yourself into this world. Until you've shared so much, there's
(13:57):
nothing left to do except be sated by the fact
that you've given everything. I have to keep reminding myself
to live like accounts and I can't waste time. Part
(14:38):
two resolution. Last week, as I was wrestling with my
thoughts about the show, Lizzy pointed out something obvious.
Speaker 8 (14:52):
What is the one thing that you haven't done since
all these ones?
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I don't know what, come on, I.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Wasn't explaining a.
Speaker 9 (15:03):
Quiz, Oh you haven't even gone to your doctor your GP.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It's true, and also so humiliating to admit, like I've
done blood tests and run them against biological clocks. I've
gone all the way to India to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
I've down supplements and green Morning potions, which who knows
if they do anything. And I've visited so many labs
and learned so many secrets. But I haven't gone to
(15:41):
my doctor despite my incredibly high blood pressure, something every practitioner,
from doctor primus to my dentist to my cousin's sonal flagged.
The saddest part is it isn't that I haven't tried.
After a decade of hunting for a doctor in New
York who I actually connected with, who is caring and
listens and spends time with you, the irony is other
(16:05):
people found him too, so he's always booked. When we
last communicated, he told me to take my blood pressure
every day for a month so we could have a
baseline to discuss and prescribe a dosage against. But when
I finally collected that data and snagged an appointment that
worked for his calendar, two months down the road. I
(16:26):
ended up having to travel for work on that day,
and then going to India, and then one thing after another.
It turns out making a show about taking care of
your body is not the same thing as taking care
of it. Often it's the opposite. Here's a list of
(16:49):
times I turned in drafts for the show. Episode one
eight thirty six am, an all nighter, Episode two two,
twenty four am, Episode three, three point fifty am, Episode
one four three twenty four am, Episode five five twenty
eight am. Those are all weekdays, so I was working
regular hours the next day. Just to show you health wise,
(17:11):
what happened. Four months into making the show, I'd lost
twenty pounds. In the last two months, I've gained back twelve.
My tennis friends are wondering where I got to or
why have stopped texting to hit. Maybe it all comes
down to a question I've been scared to address. Once
you admit your body is vulnerable, what do you actually
(17:32):
have to do?
Speaker 10 (17:34):
I have frozen blood samples, here's the magnet, and here's
a one hundred dollars bill, And he said, I.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Do try to optimize everything within my power.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
I absolutely believe that's in my control.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And I believe that over the past nine months, I've
met so many young longe evonauts, brilliant young people with huge,
ambitious ideas, and each one of them seems to have
a different answer for what to do with a vulnerable body.
So I've been listening.
Speaker 11 (18:00):
From twenty two to twenty five.
Speaker 10 (18:02):
I have frozen blood samples, and I have data of
how my plasma proteins have changed and also how my
immune cells have changed.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
That's Rob Squoian, founder of a Vita's House, the Longevity
bio Hacking House in San Francisco that NICOA. Poe had
lived in. Rob someone I adored, partially because he's such
a sincere guy, Like when he was in college he
spent time volunteering and assisted living homes just because he
liked spending time with seniors and had a real impact
(18:32):
on him.
Speaker 11 (18:34):
A lot of these people were still very sharp in
many ways, like their minds were indistinguishable from like kind
of the vitality and energy of a lot of my peers,
but there was this sort of very tragic discrepancy between
these things they were thinking about and exploring and their
physical health.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Rob understands just how vulnerable the body is, so he's
making sure his as well documented. Every few months, he
collects and stores his blood at a facility north of
San Francisco, where it sits in a liquid nitrogen tank,
waiting for tests that don't yet exist.
Speaker 11 (19:12):
There's currently not a lot available that you can do
for your longevity. So having this sort of personal biobank
of my own blood, I can get a lot more
information from the tests that are going to be around
in five to ten years.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
It's a message to his future self, reminding him this
is who we were. See if it helps.
Speaker 9 (19:39):
There's a lot of things I cannot control within my environment,
so I try to control everything I put inside my body.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Chloe Mango is also twenty five and worried about getting older.
She's a super curious fashion stylist and self described longevity
nerd who runs the Substack Chloe's Lab notes, and in it,
she illustrates everything by hand, a little bit of analog
in a world of health hacks and peptides. She lives
in New York, surrounded by exhaust, cigarette smoke, noise, stress,
(20:10):
and she's trying to figure out how to combat that
while pulling your family into the journey.
Speaker 9 (20:15):
I'm half Congalse and then half Russian. My family doesn't
come from science or medicine, so they understand, but they
don't fully get it. So they'll be like, eat this,
and I'm like, does it have any oil?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Did you fry it? For Chloe, everything is about policing
the inputs I do.
Speaker 9 (20:39):
Try to optimize everything that I do within my power,
within my control.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
And while she doesn't have the money to live the
way she wants doing the two million dollars a year
Brian Johnson treatments, she's doing what she can and starting
young in.
Speaker 9 (20:55):
Your twenties, that's what matters the most, because that's when
you're body starts accumulating oxidative stress, and your body starts
accumulating those years and years and years of you know,
negative things that you do to your body, whether that's smoking, drinking,
et cetera, so that when you get to forty, you
won't be in the position as Brian Johnson is. And
(21:18):
you know, imagine if you started when he was twenty,
what would he look like and how even better would
his body be.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Her philosophy is control what you can control. But not
everyone I met was trying to preserve the body. Some
were trying to add to it.
Speaker 10 (21:35):
Met up with this guy and said, here's the magnet
and here's a one hundred dollar bill, and he said, great,
come on back.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Owen ZOI is another one of these young futurists who
just left me smiling. We spend the afternoon and an
evening together walking around the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where he
showed me his office.
Speaker 10 (21:52):
I run a company called Starsuit. We make skin tight
compression garments for spacesuits and medical device.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 10 (22:00):
I've been working on this problem for about nine years.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Wait nine years. How old are you? I'm twenty three.
Owen's been working on making a better space suit since
he was fourteen. It started as a class project because
spacesuits are really bulky.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
It's like being inside of a bike tire, is what
it's usually compared to. Getting injuries from working inside spacesuits
is pretty common, and they're just heavy. Dude, these are
not the space suits that we were like meant to
bring into the Cosmos.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Also, Owen is trying to feel as much as he can.
He wants to amplify the experience of being alive, so
he put a magnet in his hand.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
I could like feel all of my nerves growing around
the magnet and like watch my brain, like learn to
interpret it as a new sense.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I wonder if I'm too quick to turn down things
that seem unnatural as my body continues to wear down,
I think I need to stay open. And then there's
Beshoi Padros.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Coaches would always say he's too slow.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Bishoi had leukemia as a child. Chemo saved his life,
but it also changed his body.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
The reason, and it's really hard to explain this to
a child, was really the chemo, you know, and it
crushed me. It killed me because again I was doing
everything right, but I was always the last guy on
those lines.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
But he was determined. He realized he had nothing to lose,
that he'd already been through the worst, and so he
started out at the back of the pack and a
spin class and just slowly worked his way up the leaderboard,
learning from all the better athletes around him, and years
later he became the first Egyptian to complete all seven
(24:01):
World marathon majors.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
I do know there are certain things that are outside
of my control, But do I believe that I can
take care of myself in a way where I'll be
able to preserve lifespan. I absolutely believe that's in my control.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
He show's way of dealing with that vulnerability has been
to push his body until it sings a different song.
So I have answers, role models younger than me, people
who have suggested ways forward, some obvious, some less. Can
(24:43):
storing my blood today help me tomorrow? I mean, if
you can take a skin cell from a monkey and
theoretically clone it, maybe taking ten minutes to collect my
forty seven year old blood can be helpful to a
future me. I don't know. I'm willing to throw space
Getty at the wall and away. I just wasn't nine
months ago. I loved the cry of therapy, frozen arm,
(25:06):
hair and all, and I've changed the way I eat.
I even started seeing a therapist to deal with stress.
But also, I don't really have to solve aging. I
just have to treat my body with more care and
be sure. I offered a reason that felt more useful
to me than optimization for its own sake. Another one
(25:26):
I've been thinking about a lot since the first episode. Really,
it was his answer to the same question we asked
almost everyone. If it's possible to live forever, would you
want to.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Only if my kids could live forever too.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Let's try it again. My family is my reason for
sticking around too. It's a reason to put in the work.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I don't have a timeline for what the appropriate lifespan
is for me, but I obviously want to feel good physically.
But I want to be alive so long as I
can be of service to those who need me.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
And so after nine months of not completing the assignment,
I pick up the phone and call my doctor. Part
(26:42):
three pursuance.
Speaker 12 (26:53):
If you look across BC, two greenland sharks will live
to be five hundred. Giant tortoises will live to be
two hundred. And it's not because they're going for a
daily run, right.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Rainie Romani Klein is a longevity researcher, and it's stunning
how much her name comes up in the space. And
one of the first things I realized as soon as
we started chatting is that she doesn't sound like anyone else.
Speaker 12 (27:18):
I grew up in rural Brazil. My dad's a garlic farmer.
We also try to grow coffee and beans and tomatoes
very unsuccessfully, but garlic finally worked. My mom also kind
of before her time, she would record books with her voice,
so that we would go to sleep listening to Dale
(27:39):
Carnegie and my personal development stuff. Really we must have
listened to How to Make Friends and Influence People about
one hundred times.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Those business books had an impact, and they infused her
with this candy enthusiasm about solving impossible problems. And even
though she's only thirty one, she has had a wild
academic career. She started by studying international relations, then folklore,
then a fellowship and existential risk at Stanford, and then
(28:11):
she decided that economics were actually the best way to
tell the story of aging, so she designed a PhD
in the quote Ethics, Science and Economics of Longevity.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The question that.
Speaker 12 (28:24):
Animates most of my work today is what does the
world look like in ten twenty fifty years if we
can therapeutically target aging, and conversely, what happens to our
economy into our population if we don't.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
But as she looks at work and productivity, she realizes
she can't really make a great economic argument for babies.
Speaker 12 (28:47):
Newborns don't work. They also temporarily remove their parents from
the workforce. They very predictably grow biologically old and chronically.
I oh, you know, I'm totally okay with having people
having more babies to them, but I don't understand the
economic argument for it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Her point is intentionally provocative, but Rainy's born to pick
with babies isn't so much about the cost or the
return on investment, but actually an argument about who we're
prioritizing as a society. She's bothered by the ways we
devalue older populations and talk about them as a burden.
(29:24):
Too many retirees, too much money spent on care.
Speaker 12 (29:29):
We have about fifty million people who are dying every
year from a disease of aging. That's a crazy pandemic, right.
I don't quite understand how the rest of the world
doesn't think of that as a pandemic.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And Raini thinks the problem is that we're content to
let old people go.
Speaker 12 (29:47):
We tend to think of ourselves as this fungible token,
like you can just, you know, increase birth rates if
what we want is more of working age adults. But
is it better to you know, create more humans from scratch,
or or should be maybe try to prioritize saving the
lives we already have.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
The way she tells it is most people don't reach
their peak earning years until their fifties.
Speaker 12 (30:10):
Economically speaking, older adults are far more valuable to the
economy than we've been making them out to be.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
By then, They've spent decades accruing all these skills, relationships,
and knowledge, and just as all of that experience begins
to compound the diseases of aging, take it away. Rainy
imagines a very different world where a person might be
eighty but still healthy enough to keep working or teaching
or caring for other people.
Speaker 12 (30:36):
And in that world, she says, we might see a
future where social security is flipped on its head. You know,
today we mostly subsidize the decline of older adults, and
in the future we might subsidize the development of young adults.
That would be I think, a much more exciting future
to look forward to, right, Because if you have someone
(30:58):
who is chronologically aged eighty but biologically fifty, and they're
able to remain in the workforce, and they're able to
maintain their position of power, we will have I think
a moral and even economic duty to subsidize younger adults
just entering the workforce with very little experience.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
It's one of the stranger proposals I've heard while making
this show, maybe because it's so unfamiliar and it feels
a little dystopic, like, do we really need an economic
argument to want to reduce suffering? How much work do
we have to put on people? We already live in
a world where plenty of eighty year olds can't retire
and have to work to support themselves, and plenty of
(31:40):
fifty year olds are living in poverty. When you bring
it down to the human level, it just gets a
lot messier and a lot less tenable, because people aren't data.
As we talked, Rainy showed me a visual model. She'd
built a slick interactive site. Adjust things like the rate
(32:01):
of aging, access to treatment, the health of things like
the brain or reproductive systems, and then watch the consequences
ripple across the economy. With a click of a button
or a shift of a slider, you could see how
many lives would be saved, how much illness would disappear,
how many people could remain independent and useful. Looking at
(32:22):
her screen, Rainy had taken something enormous and frightening and
made it more legible. It's a model for the future.
We could plan for adding meaningful years to the ends
of people's lives. It's just life doesn't always work that way.
Speaker 12 (32:39):
One of the biggest factors in how long you live
is how many miles you drive for work per day
to work. So, I actually lost my sister in a
car accident yep this year.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh my god.
Speaker 12 (32:57):
Yeah, she was my best friend the whole world.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I'm so sorry. Her sister was just thirty three. We
offered to stop the tape, but Rainy wants to keep
talking to finish making her argument for helping everyone live
healthier for longer. But it's hard to get past the
argument that our life is making death just is a
(33:36):
lot of longevity science depends on life unfolding in sequence,
and it tries to prevent those big four diseases cancer, diabetes,
cardiac events, and Alzheimer's from getting a foothold in your body.
But that same body still has to get in cars
or public transport, it has to cross intersections and encounter weather,
(33:57):
and it'll still run into unpredict circumstances both strange and banal,
the types of things that can end a story too quickly.
Of course, that doesn't mean our chances are equal. Some
people travel on safer roads, have better doctors, they can
afford the longevity treatments that most of us can't buy.
(34:21):
But also they can leave a dangerous neighborhood or never
even enter it. There's something I love about Rainie's Dale
Carnegie inspired optimism, the way she wants to tilt at
(34:41):
windmills and has figured out how to give governments an
economic incentive to invest in longevity, the only kind most
politicians respond to. I do believe Rainy wants to help
people because she wants to lessen suffering, to reduce that
pandemic of age induced diseases.
Speaker 12 (35:00):
These are technically solvable problems. We just need the resources,
and we have the resources.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
The thing is, while longevity might be solvable getting some
people to stay healthier longer, it also creates new problems
to solve, Like when people live for another twenty or
fifty years, does anyone ever leave the Supreme Court or Congress?
You see it with Putin and She and Mitch McConnell
(35:28):
and Dianne Feinstein. People in power don't tend to part
with it easily, especially when it's optional. But having people
live longer doesn't just bring up questions of power. It
also brings up questions of legacy.
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Philanspy used to be tied up with people trying to
find a way to continue their legacy beyond death. If
you don't need to do that anymore, because you can
literally just keep living. I mean, for one thing, to
people just stop giving. Do they not feel the need
to do that sort of thing because they can handle
their legacy themselves.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
And also that's Rodri Davis, the founder of Why Philanthropy Matters,
And he told me something else about the impact of
living longer, how it affects our sense of empathy.
Speaker 5 (36:15):
Assume that we do have this stuff, and people can
live to one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred
or whatever. Would a three hundred year old person really
care very much about the lives of people who were
in their twenties or living sort of normal lifespans. Would
there be that sense of empathy that is generally required
to drive people towards philanthropy.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
I've been thinking about that a lot recently. How people
used to live forever by putting their name on a
library or an institution, the Carnegie and the Rockefellers. And
if you're living to three hundred, with the possibility of
living more, would you really want to part with any
of your dough, but also the way our species seems
to be splitting, you might be disincentivized to give, especially
(36:59):
when you see others as lesser than or something beneath you.
Speaker 5 (37:04):
You know, I could see a situation in which they
did fundamentally see themselves as a different species or subspecies
or something, and it would actually be kind of difficult
to view that person as anything other than totally other
to you and your experience. And in that circumstance, I would,
you know, I'd be concerned that even if there was
(37:24):
a desire to help those people, it would almost be
in the same way that you know, we currently have
care for animals.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
The fact is, the great gains in human lifespan didn't
come from personalized medicine for the elite, and it wasn't
like the longevity movements of today, something only worthwhile if
some corporation can sell it to you. The big advances
in lifespan came from collective action. Vaccines and clean water
(37:57):
sewage systems and safer roads, pains against smoking, and public
investments that protected millions of people at once. Yes, there
were factions and roadblocks, but we got through those together.
We did something for all of us, and right now
that feels like an old fashioned idea. Part four psalm.
(39:10):
Looking back at the things I wrote while making the show,
the notes I scribbled, ideas I jotted down, the whole
thing feels like a whirlwind. And I'm still processing fifty
plus interviews, four countries, two oceans over nine months. People
welcomed me into their space, share their stories, sometimes joyous,
(39:32):
sometimes painful, experiences that shape their visions of the future.
There were people I felt connected to, even if I
didn't agree with them, And there were lessons I know
that because I can sense the shape of them. I
just need to articulate them for myself. But also, how
(40:01):
do you close a show where the ending won't be
written for one hundred years? When will we finally know
if these supposed miracles are real? Maybe it's easier to
leave my story unfinished too, the bits I'd hope to explore,
and the scribbles I'd written for myself but now belong
to you. When I visited the Vida's House, the residency
(40:35):
in San Francisco based around Longevity, I've been struck by
this framed collection of thirty five survey responses to one prompt,
I want to live forever. So I want to live forever,
so I can say the stocks.
Speaker 7 (40:50):
I want to live forever, so i can see every
flower on earth, so.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
I'm motivated by inspiration, not by fear. So I can
meet and love as many people as I can, so
that I can fall asleep in the Tassia's arms more
times than I can count. We Indians talk a lot
(41:32):
about reincarnation, concepts of karma and accepting the suffering of
this life to have a better one in the future.
But I've heard some people talk about reincarnation in terms
that aren't that literal. It isn't new lives, but instead
these little slivers of ourselves, passed down, glimmering vestiges of
our forebears, preserve for generations the way to believe will
(41:56):
continue to be here. I think about that kind of
inheritance and legacy a lot. Am I brave like my
ancestors who were kicked out of the community church for
educating their daughters? I wonder if I've done enough to
(42:19):
stand up for my own kid whose trends outside of
our little world? Am I willing to sacrifice for what's right?
My great grandfather watched his career stall and his opportunity
to be on the Supreme Court evaporate when he made
one of India's first rulings against the British. I don't
think I've inherited that strong a backbone. Am I a
(42:41):
black sheep like my dad? Someone who used to talk
about his fond memories of a youth well misspent? Am
I diabetes and depression? The twin gifts of my bloodline?
Am I? The mirror of my cousin. My age is
so much more brilliant than me, because I am haunted
by the way he took his life with a beam
(43:02):
in a rope? Am I anyone if the one thing
I truly sacrificed to build, that decade of poor health
and sleep, the life I deferred just so I could
(43:23):
have a magazine of my own that now only lives
this old articles and aislop. Does a life matter if
all the evidence this sand castle you so carefully crafted
has been washed away? Why is it that when I
go to goa, I keep returning to my grandfather's old
farmhouse or the ice cream factory, where the acres of
(43:47):
mango trees and rose gardens, all of which no longer
exist like it's my story waiting to happen again. A
few days after my dad passed, I got this voicemail
(44:09):
from one of my former hosts, the Bollywood Legend, on
a pump care.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Mangays, my friend, my friend, I am so sorry for
your loss.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
You know, it's.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Very strange. When I lost my father, I became brave
and I became.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Him.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
But you will always miss him, and he will always
be around you. In your habits, in.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Your day to day functioning, in the way you talk
to your children, you will see him. You will feel
him all around you. You will see that his habits
are your habits now. In fact, you will remember him
more now. And that is why I say that he
(45:04):
will always be around you.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Talking with Rogov, he mentioned that loneliness is as bad
for you as smoking, how prolonged isolation affects your body
like fifteen cigarettes a day. I'm struck by the idea
that loneliness isn't just a feeling. That the people we
keep close quite literally keep us alive. They're friends. I
wanted to share the show with beloved advisor who fell
(45:41):
tragically ill just as I was getting started. An old
college friend who backed out of our reunion because she
had cancer. Friends who've lost kids, who remind you that
not all good lives are long ones. But how can
you ask someone to listen to a show about living
forever when grief makes that premise feel obscene. When we
(46:10):
started the show, my producer Mary wondered, if our lives
online have conditioned us into yearning for an endless life.
There was a time when you get to the end
of Instagram and it would say you're all caught up.
Now we spend our nights staring into a blue light,
seduced by an infinite scroll. And I don't know if
that daily squandering, the vapid way in which we spend
(46:33):
our time makes us crave more of it, or if
we've just grown accustomed to the absence of an ending.
We debated what to call this show. Do we just
(46:54):
keep it as Skyline Drive? What about the Infinite Scroll?
Should it be called the Lunch Jevons plural or singular?
Or how to Live Forever? Or maybe it was only
ever one thing, just how to live A love Supreme.
(47:48):
Welove Supreme, I Love Supreme, I Love Supreme. Thank you
so much for listening to this season of Skyline. It
is much a privilege to get to make a show
for you, and I feel so grateful that you listened.
And also I'm so lucky that it's my job to
get to work with these wonderful talents, because this show
(48:11):
would not exist without them, Starting with my wife, Lizzie Jacobs,
my tireless cheerleader and our insanely talented showrunner editor EP
wrangler of voices. A fun fact about Lizzie, she will
never ever climb a tree with you, but she will
sit under it and will talk to you while you're
up there. Mark Lotto, the best story editor who not
(48:32):
only pushed the show to be so much better than
it deserved to be, but was also like, oh, a
musical number, I'll work with that. Super producer Mary Philip Sandy,
who is brilliant and funny and also the host of
the legendary indie podcast Let's Talk About Cats. She's the
only person I know who has ever asked a guest
what their cat's media diet is. Mark Steven Allen, thank you,
(48:54):
thank you for opening so many doors for us. Mark
was the science producer on the show. I don't know
how you can convinced people that they needed to have
a conversation with me, but I am eternally grateful. There
are not enough words to properly express my gratitude to
the folks who made this show sound so beautiful. Joe Plored,
We gave you an impossible assignment for this episode, and
(49:17):
I truly don't know how you made it sound so stunning. Also,
Casey and Anna, thank you so much. Bliss Samsa Zoti Records,
bot Me Pete Bauer. It is so rare that podcasts
and audio medium have beautiful songs and music in it,
and I feel so lucky that you lent me yours.
Thank you so much. Metro Bunshahi are Vox pop genius
(49:39):
who collected all those beautiful senior voices from episode three.
Also thank you to our last minute voice actors, my
nephew Will Cravis, is that your sag name? Zach Goodwin,
Sam Fillian, Megan Detrie, and my cousin aditya Buster who
has now appeared in not just one, but two seasons
of Skyline Drive. Also special thanks to my friend sand
(50:01):
Kola who left us an Easter egg in this episode.
This show is executive produced from iHeart, I'm My good friends,
Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel. Thank you for believing in
this little show from Kaleidoscope. We've got my co founder,
Ozwa Lishen, Julia Nutter our head of studio, Costas Linos.
I'm not gonna forget about you, Rachel Strom. It feels
(50:22):
unfair to have someone as good and wonderful as you
and also your trophy husband Rins in my corner. Thank you, truly,
you are both the best. Also, thank you so much
the kaleidoscoper is here who tolerate me on a daily basis.
Christy David, Dara Agne, Sheina Calypso al Viney. Thank you
(50:42):
for the beautiful collage art. I love that you came
out of retirement for this. There are so many of you.
I'm trying to wrap this up, but are you gonna
stop me from thanking the kiddos? I didn't think so.
So Thank you Henry Ruby, Reese, Liev, Julian Grendel, Lou Baby,
Leon Baby, how Maya, aroun Enzo and Pearl It Tour.
(51:03):
Also Bob Connell will carry Nikki, Jason, Jerry and the
rest of you at iHeart. Thank you to Shanta and Soub.
Also Donald Jones, who made us insta official as best friends.
John Pollock, who is not tagged in that post for
some reason, my family in India, my family and the States,
and just one last thank you to my Amma and
(51:24):
my dad Lolitamesh, who I thank my lucky stars for.
I'm Mongishtikatar. Thank you so much for listening. Working out
makes me feel young. He also told me that some
younger women have hit on you at the gym. No,
(51:49):
that wasn't exactly right.
Speaker 11 (51:52):
Well, hit on is a pretty strong.
Speaker 5 (51:56):
Shown.
Speaker 11 (51:57):
Okay, that's right.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
That's happened on two occasions.
He asked them.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Very lastic, don't get so much to get money gets
see us.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Prelude. The first time I heard A Love Supreme, I
was fifteen. I'd ordered it from BMG because my two
older cousins, these vinyl heads, said they like Coltrane, so
I put it in the mix on one of those
eight CDs for the price of one deals. I've listened
(00:58):
to it so many times since, over so many parts
of my life. Sometimes it's background, sometimes with focus, but
it always takes me back to high school. That's what
I'm remembering now, a sunny afternoon, lying on my bed.
The saxophone feels like this quiet call to prayer. The
(01:22):
rolling bass and piano and drums build this haze for
the horn to cut through. The notes aren't perfect, they
stretch across spaces that feel like they're grading, reaching for
something higher, and then falling and working their way back up.
The musicians start chanting A Love Supreme over and over,
(01:42):
adding to that haze, and you welcome being called into
that trance. I remember staring at the back of the album,
holding in my hands as I listened, reading over the
set list again and again, trying to puzzle out the
meaning for myself. Acknowledge resolution pursuance PSALM acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance, acknowledgment, resolution,
(02:16):
pursuance SI. I'm not religious, but something about that structure
always felt right. Chapter one Acknowledgment.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
The Gentleman in the elevator now is a Candid Star.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Decades ago, on a nineteen sixty two episode of Candid Camera,
the show ran an experiment illustrating group thing. These folks
who are entering.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
The man with a white shirt, the lady with a trench.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Coat, as an unsuspecting man stands inside an elevator. Three
people step in one after another, but instead of turning
towards the doors, they all face the back like that's
a normal thing to do.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
And you'll see how this man.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
In the trench part.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I used to maintain this individuality.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
But a little by little.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
He looks at his watch, but.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
He's really making an excuse for turning.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
Just a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
To the wall.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
By the end of the scene, the mark is folded
to the pure pressure and is fully facing the back
of the elevator. And it happens so quickly. Of course,
Candid Camera played the experiment for laughs, but It's based
on real studies designed by a Polish born Jewish psychologist
named Solomon Ash in the nineteen fifties. Ash's groundbreaking work
(04:02):
showed how pressure from a unanimous group can cause people
to conform to things they don't actually believe. I've been
thinking about that a lot recently, because at the beginning
of the show I was told that a significantly longer
life was possible.
Speaker 6 (04:22):
I believe it's easy for all of us, without much intervention,
to get over the age of ninety. If you get
to the age of ninety, I think, then in the
middle I'll find things that could extend me beyond ninety.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Then I slipped into a world where seemingly everyone I
talked to thought of death as this outdated assumption something
humans before as had only accepted because we lacked the
tools or imagination to challenge it.
Speaker 7 (04:50):
We want to make death optional.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
Death is something we've been taught never to question, and
we don't know what a post death future is going
to look like.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Years.
Speaker 6 (05:00):
I believe that when you're twenty years old, you would
go to a longevity clinic and you'll get an infusion,
and basically it'll stunt your aging and you'll come every
year or so for another treatment. This the Peter Pan scenario.
You'll stay young, forever young.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Before long, I was questioning my position, wondering if I
was missing something like is radical life extension something I
should be working towards? Could life at one hundred twenty
five or one hundred and fifty be satisfying? What about longer?
But there's another part of Ash's psychology work that's perhaps
more important. If even one person breaks with that lockstep majority,
(05:47):
the pressure to conform decreases dramatically. And that's how I
felt like a man standing in an elevator full of
death denials, starting to question if I was facing the
right way. When the doors opened and in walked Ailea Arthur.
Speaker 8 (06:07):
I want to die at sunset. I want to watch
the sky change and turn orange and pink and purple
as they dive in tonight.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
I first heard Aloa through her ted talk, and I
was struck by the specificity of it, the way she
imagined the room where her life would end.
Speaker 8 (06:24):
I want to hear the wind fluttering through the leaves
and smell very faintly, not Tampa amber incense, but very faintly,
because scent can be tough on a dying body.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
But it wasn't just that Ailoa accepts her mortality that
felt radical to me. It was that she expects to
see direct her final moments, just like she encourages others
to do in her role as a death duela and
the founder of Going with Grace.
Speaker 7 (06:49):
An end of life planning training and support organization, and
we exist to support people as they consider their mortality,
no matter what they may need along the way.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Aila Arthur is tall and composed. She's got a warm
smile with a gap between her front teeth that's disarming,
and she's stylish. In her ted talk, she wears this
beautifully structured, bright orange dress. Today on this video call,
she's a little more casual. Can you tell us a
little bit about how you got into this work?
Speaker 7 (07:21):
About twelve years ago, I was practicing law and it
was not a good fit for me, and I took
a leave of absence where I ended up in Cuba.
And in Cuba, I met a fellow traveler who had
uterine cancer and we talked a lot about her life
and I started asking her questions about her death.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
At that point, Aloa was in what she calls a
deep depression, and she was trying to find a way forward.
Speaker 7 (07:46):
I'd felt, you know, hints of joy again. I could
feel like sunshine on my skin again. I'd done some dancing,
you know. I was starting to feel like myself a
little bit.
Speaker 6 (07:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (07:56):
And I was also still deeply searching for answer about
this big question about life that I thought everybody else
had figured out. And what I found was mortality. I'd
never even properly considered mortality in any real way. I've
never made the connection between people die and I will die,
(08:19):
and what do I want to do with my life
because I will die?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So many people I talked to said they hated this
fairy tale. They told me, you don't need death to
give life meaning. But Alou is saying something slightly different.
Recognizing that she would die someday brought her life into focus,
and it pushed her to reconsider what she wants from
her remaining years. It's a phenomena she sees with the
planners and the terminally ill patience she cares for. Your
(08:46):
missstatement at going with Grace is that you will support
people to answer a question, what must I do to
be at peace with myself so that I may live
presently and die gracefully. Have you had really interesting answers
about how people want to live.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Yeah, there's a bunch of really juicy ones, but they
all fall in the authenticity bucket, like what do I
need to do nor to be myself right now?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
To be fully myself?
Speaker 7 (09:12):
Sometimes it's about quitting jobs or leaving relationships or entering
into relationships, or coming out or moving or having a kid,
or talking about the regrets about having a kid, which
is so taboo that you're never supposed to say, but
people say it when talking about the immortality.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
You're always getting tea. I'll tell you what, this is
the most tea job.
Speaker 7 (09:36):
I think, maybe even more than a therapist.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
But I'm curious, like, how would our own society be
different if death were accepted as a natural or even
beautiful part of life. Do you feel like there's a
reluctance to accept death majorly?
Speaker 7 (09:52):
I think that we live still in like a death
phobic and death avoidant culture. I also live in Los Angeles,
and so it's maybe a little bit easier for me
to see. But our obsession with beauty and youth, and
also this obsession with longevity, I'll play into that I
think to be human also is to be fallible, to weaken,
(10:15):
to come apart, to not be this diamond strong substance.
My body is fragile and vulnerable, and that is one
of the capital t truths that folks either deny or
make them too uncomfortable to think about, and so they
try to fix with all types of hacks that just
(10:36):
don't really do anything about it. Yeah, death, death is period,
but also death is built into my body.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think about my dad's body, the way it unravels
and halted to a stop in just a few weeks,
the cruel and specific way death was built into it.
But what if your body didn't break down? What if
science came up with a way that you could live
a longer life and keep your health. I was curious
(11:17):
what Ailoa would say.
Speaker 7 (11:19):
If I could live long and healthy till nine hundred.
I wouldn't want that. That doesn't seem like a good time.
And so when folks are really obsessed with longevity, I
would also be really interested in watching them eat an
orange if they knew that it was going to be
the last time that they ate the orange. You know,
(11:42):
you bring so much more intention and pleasure to it,
knowing that this is finite, that.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
This is it.
Speaker 7 (11:48):
Then if you thought you had a million more to eat.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
In her ted talk, Aloa offers this image of her death.
Speaker 8 (11:57):
I want to die with all of my affairs in
order loved ones have nothing to worry about but their
grief after I die, I want to die empty, devoid
of all of the skill, gift, talent and light that
I carry in this body, and satiated, full of the
richness of this one unique human ribe. And when my
loved ones notice that I have released my last breath,
(12:21):
I want them to clap. I want them to clap
because I died well. But I died well only because
I lived well.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
I picture a boxer who's put every ounce of energy
and effort into trading blows, only to collapse with nothing
more to give. And I want that. I want to
give to my family, fully, to my work, to savor
the oranges in between, and be present for all of it.
(12:49):
And if I have a legacy, it isn't just about
shows or books or whatever. Because I'm forty seven, I've
had more salt than pepper in my hair for more
than a decade, but I still don't feel like a
grown up in our family. But that's why I want
to be someone who lifts the next generation of my
nephews and nieces up and champions their work, someone who
(13:11):
models that same generous behavior. I've been so lucky to
receive it from generations before me, a link in the chain.
After the whirlwind of San Francisco and hearing the ways
people expect to push off their death, talking to Aloa
(13:34):
makes me feel sane, or at least less alone, because
it's not that she's saying death is good or that
we should be grateful for it. She's saying there's an
ending coming, and if you want to die happy, it
helps to live with purpose, to spill every ounce of
yourself into this world. Until you've shared so much, there's
(13:57):
nothing left to do except be sated by the fact
that you've given everything. I have to keep reminding myself
to live like accounts and I can't waste time. Part
(14:38):
two resolution. Last week, as I was wrestling with my
thoughts about the show, Lizzy pointed out something obvious.
Speaker 8 (14:52):
What is the one thing that you haven't done since
all these ones?
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I don't know what, come on, I.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Wasn't explaining a.
Speaker 9 (15:03):
Quiz, Oh you haven't even gone to your doctor your GP.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It's true, and also so humiliating to admit, like I've
done blood tests and run them against biological clocks. I've
gone all the way to India to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
I've down supplements and green Morning potions, which who knows
if they do anything. And I've visited so many labs
and learned so many secrets. But I haven't gone to
(15:41):
my doctor despite my incredibly high blood pressure, something every practitioner,
from doctor primus to my dentist to my cousin's sonal flagged.
The saddest part is it isn't that I haven't tried.
After a decade of hunting for a doctor in New
York who I actually connected with, who is caring and
listens and spends time with you, the irony is other
(16:05):
people found him too, so he's always booked. When we
last communicated, he told me to take my blood pressure
every day for a month so we could have a
baseline to discuss and prescribe a dosage against. But when
I finally collected that data and snagged an appointment that
worked for his calendar, two months down the road. I
(16:26):
ended up having to travel for work on that day,
and then going to India, and then one thing after another.
It turns out making a show about taking care of
your body is not the same thing as taking care
of it. Often it's the opposite. Here's a list of
(16:49):
times I turned in drafts for the show. Episode one
eight thirty six am, an all nighter, Episode two two,
twenty four am, Episode three, three point fifty am, Episode
one four three twenty four am, Episode five five twenty
eight am. Those are all weekdays, so I was working
regular hours the next day. Just to show you health wise,
(17:11):
what happened. Four months into making the show, I'd lost
twenty pounds. In the last two months, I've gained back twelve.
My tennis friends are wondering where I got to or
why have stopped texting to hit. Maybe it all comes
down to a question I've been scared to address. Once
you admit your body is vulnerable, what do you actually
(17:32):
have to do?
Speaker 10 (17:34):
I have frozen blood samples, here's the magnet, and here's
a one hundred dollars bill, And he said, I.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Do try to optimize everything within my power.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
I absolutely believe that's in my control.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And I believe that over the past nine months, I've
met so many young longe evonauts, brilliant young people with huge,
ambitious ideas, and each one of them seems to have
a different answer for what to do with a vulnerable body.
So I've been listening.
Speaker 11 (18:00):
From twenty two to twenty five.
Speaker 10 (18:02):
I have frozen blood samples, and I have data of
how my plasma proteins have changed and also how my
immune cells have changed.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
That's Rob Squoian, founder of a Vita's House, the Longevity
bio Hacking House in San Francisco that NICOA. Poe had
lived in. Rob someone I adored, partially because he's such
a sincere guy, Like when he was in college he
spent time volunteering and assisted living homes just because he
liked spending time with seniors and had a real impact
(18:32):
on him.
Speaker 11 (18:34):
A lot of these people were still very sharp in
many ways, like their minds were indistinguishable from like kind
of the vitality and energy of a lot of my peers,
but there was this sort of very tragic discrepancy between
these things they were thinking about and exploring and their
physical health.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Rob understands just how vulnerable the body is, so he's
making sure his as well documented. Every few months, he
collects and stores his blood at a facility north of
San Francisco, where it sits in a liquid nitrogen tank,
waiting for tests that don't yet exist.
Speaker 11 (19:12):
There's currently not a lot available that you can do
for your longevity. So having this sort of personal biobank
of my own blood, I can get a lot more
information from the tests that are going to be around
in five to ten years.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
It's a message to his future self, reminding him this
is who we were. See if it helps.
Speaker 9 (19:39):
There's a lot of things I cannot control within my environment,
so I try to control everything I put inside my body.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Chloe Mango is also twenty five and worried about getting older.
She's a super curious fashion stylist and self described longevity
nerd who runs the Substack Chloe's Lab notes, and in it,
she illustrates everything by hand, a little bit of analog
in a world of health hacks and peptides. She lives
in New York, surrounded by exhaust, cigarette smoke, noise, stress,
(20:10):
and she's trying to figure out how to combat that
while pulling your family into the journey.
Speaker 9 (20:15):
I'm half Congalse and then half Russian. My family doesn't
come from science or medicine, so they understand, but they
don't fully get it. So they'll be like, eat this,
and I'm like, does it have any oil?
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Did you fry it? For Chloe, everything is about policing
the inputs I do.
Speaker 9 (20:39):
Try to optimize everything that I do within my power,
within my control.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
And while she doesn't have the money to live the
way she wants doing the two million dollars a year
Brian Johnson treatments, she's doing what she can and starting
young in.
Speaker 9 (20:55):
Your twenties, that's what matters the most, because that's when
you're body starts accumulating oxidative stress, and your body starts
accumulating those years and years and years of you know,
negative things that you do to your body, whether that's smoking, drinking,
et cetera, so that when you get to forty, you
won't be in the position as Brian Johnson is. And
(21:18):
you know, imagine if you started when he was twenty,
what would he look like and how even better would
his body be.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Her philosophy is control what you can control. But not
everyone I met was trying to preserve the body. Some
were trying to add to it.
Speaker 10 (21:35):
Met up with this guy and said, here's the magnet
and here's a one hundred dollar bill, and he said, great,
come on back.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Owen ZOI is another one of these young futurists who
just left me smiling. We spend the afternoon and an
evening together walking around the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where he
showed me his office.
Speaker 10 (21:52):
I run a company called Starsuit. We make skin tight
compression garments for spacesuits and medical device.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 10 (22:00):
I've been working on this problem for about nine years.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Wait nine years. How old are you? I'm twenty three.
Owen's been working on making a better space suit since
he was fourteen. It started as a class project because
spacesuits are really bulky.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
It's like being inside of a bike tire, is what
it's usually compared to. Getting injuries from working inside spacesuits
is pretty common, and they're just heavy. Dude, these are
not the space suits that we were like meant to
bring into the Cosmos.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Also, Owen is trying to feel as much as he can.
He wants to amplify the experience of being alive, so
he put a magnet in his hand.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
I could like feel all of my nerves growing around
the magnet and like watch my brain, like learn to
interpret it as a new sense.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I wonder if I'm too quick to turn down things
that seem unnatural as my body continues to wear down,
I think I need to stay open. And then there's
Beshoi Padros.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Coaches would always say he's too slow.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Bishoi had leukemia as a child. Chemo saved his life,
but it also changed his body.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
The reason, and it's really hard to explain this to
a child, was really the chemo, you know, and it
crushed me. It killed me because again I was doing
everything right, but I was always the last guy on
those lines.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
But he was determined. He realized he had nothing to lose,
that he'd already been through the worst, and so he
started out at the back of the pack and a
spin class and just slowly worked his way up the leaderboard,
learning from all the better athletes around him, and years
later he became the first Egyptian to complete all seven
(24:01):
World marathon majors.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
I do know there are certain things that are outside
of my control, But do I believe that I can
take care of myself in a way where I'll be
able to preserve lifespan. I absolutely believe that's in my control.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
He show's way of dealing with that vulnerability has been
to push his body until it sings a different song.
So I have answers, role models younger than me, people
who have suggested ways forward, some obvious, some less. Can
(24:43):
storing my blood today help me tomorrow? I mean, if
you can take a skin cell from a monkey and
theoretically clone it, maybe taking ten minutes to collect my
forty seven year old blood can be helpful to a
future me. I don't know. I'm willing to throw space
Getty at the wall and away. I just wasn't nine
months ago. I loved the cry of therapy, frozen arm,
(25:06):
hair and all, and I've changed the way I eat.
I even started seeing a therapist to deal with stress.
But also, I don't really have to solve aging. I
just have to treat my body with more care and
be sure. I offered a reason that felt more useful
to me than optimization for its own sake. Another one
(25:26):
I've been thinking about a lot since the first episode. Really,
it was his answer to the same question we asked
almost everyone. If it's possible to live forever, would you
want to.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Only if my kids could live forever too.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Let's try it again. My family is my reason for
sticking around too. It's a reason to put in the work.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I don't have a timeline for what the appropriate lifespan
is for me, but I obviously want to feel good physically.
But I want to be alive so long as I
can be of service to those who need me.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
And so after nine months of not completing the assignment,
I pick up the phone and call my doctor. Part
(26:42):
three pursuance.
Speaker 12 (26:53):
If you look across BC, two greenland sharks will live
to be five hundred. Giant tortoises will live to be
two hundred. And it's not because they're going for a
daily run, right.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Rainie Romani Klein is a longevity researcher, and it's stunning
how much her name comes up in the space. And
one of the first things I realized as soon as
we started chatting is that she doesn't sound like anyone else.
Speaker 12 (27:18):
I grew up in rural Brazil. My dad's a garlic farmer.
We also try to grow coffee and beans and tomatoes
very unsuccessfully, but garlic finally worked. My mom also kind
of before her time, she would record books with her voice,
so that we would go to sleep listening to Dale
(27:39):
Carnegie and my personal development stuff. Really we must have
listened to How to Make Friends and Influence People about
one hundred times.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Those business books had an impact, and they infused her
with this candy enthusiasm about solving impossible problems. And even
though she's only thirty one, she has had a wild
academic career. She started by studying international relations, then folklore,
then a fellowship and existential risk at Stanford, and then
(28:11):
she decided that economics were actually the best way to
tell the story of aging, so she designed a PhD
in the quote Ethics, Science and Economics of Longevity.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
The question that.
Speaker 12 (28:24):
Animates most of my work today is what does the
world look like in ten twenty fifty years if we
can therapeutically target aging, and conversely, what happens to our
economy into our population if we don't.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
But as she looks at work and productivity, she realizes
she can't really make a great economic argument for babies.
Speaker 12 (28:47):
Newborns don't work. They also temporarily remove their parents from
the workforce. They very predictably grow biologically old and chronically.
I oh, you know, I'm totally okay with having people
having more babies to them, but I don't understand the
economic argument for it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Her point is intentionally provocative, but Rainy's born to pick
with babies isn't so much about the cost or the
return on investment, but actually an argument about who we're
prioritizing as a society. She's bothered by the ways we
devalue older populations and talk about them as a burden.
(29:24):
Too many retirees, too much money spent on care.
Speaker 12 (29:29):
We have about fifty million people who are dying every
year from a disease of aging. That's a crazy pandemic, right.
I don't quite understand how the rest of the world
doesn't think of that as a pandemic.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And Raini thinks the problem is that we're content to
let old people go.
Speaker 12 (29:47):
We tend to think of ourselves as this fungible token,
like you can just, you know, increase birth rates if
what we want is more of working age adults. But
is it better to you know, create more humans from scratch,
or or should be maybe try to prioritize saving the
lives we already have.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
The way she tells it is most people don't reach
their peak earning years until their fifties.
Speaker 12 (30:10):
Economically speaking, older adults are far more valuable to the
economy than we've been making them out to be.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
By then, They've spent decades accruing all these skills, relationships,
and knowledge, and just as all of that experience begins
to compound the diseases of aging, take it away. Rainy
imagines a very different world where a person might be
eighty but still healthy enough to keep working or teaching
or caring for other people.
Speaker 12 (30:36):
And in that world, she says, we might see a
future where social security is flipped on its head. You know,
today we mostly subsidize the decline of older adults, and
in the future we might subsidize the development of young adults.
That would be I think, a much more exciting future
to look forward to, right, Because if you have someone
(30:58):
who is chronologically aged eighty but biologically fifty, and they're
able to remain in the workforce, and they're able to
maintain their position of power, we will have I think
a moral and even economic duty to subsidize younger adults
just entering the workforce with very little experience.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
It's one of the stranger proposals I've heard while making
this show, maybe because it's so unfamiliar and it feels
a little dystopic, like, do we really need an economic
argument to want to reduce suffering? How much work do
we have to put on people? We already live in
a world where plenty of eighty year olds can't retire
and have to work to support themselves, and plenty of
(31:40):
fifty year olds are living in poverty. When you bring
it down to the human level, it just gets a
lot messier and a lot less tenable, because people aren't data.
As we talked, Rainy showed me a visual model. She'd
built a slick interactive site. Adjust things like the rate
(32:01):
of aging, access to treatment, the health of things like
the brain or reproductive systems, and then watch the consequences
ripple across the economy. With a click of a button
or a shift of a slider, you could see how
many lives would be saved, how much illness would disappear,
how many people could remain independent and useful. Looking at
(32:22):
her screen, Rainy had taken something enormous and frightening and
made it more legible. It's a model for the future.
We could plan for adding meaningful years to the ends
of people's lives. It's just life doesn't always work that way.
Speaker 12 (32:39):
One of the biggest factors in how long you live
is how many miles you drive for work per day
to work. So, I actually lost my sister in a
car accident yep this year.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh my god.
Speaker 12 (32:57):
Yeah, she was my best friend the whole world.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I'm so sorry. Her sister was just thirty three. We
offered to stop the tape, but Rainy wants to keep
talking to finish making her argument for helping everyone live
healthier for longer. But it's hard to get past the
argument that our life is making death just is a
(33:36):
lot of longevity science depends on life unfolding in sequence,
and it tries to prevent those big four diseases cancer, diabetes,
cardiac events, and Alzheimer's from getting a foothold in your body.
But that same body still has to get in cars
or public transport, it has to cross intersections and encounter weather,
(33:57):
and it'll still run into unpredict circumstances both strange and banal,
the types of things that can end a story too quickly.
Of course, that doesn't mean our chances are equal. Some
people travel on safer roads, have better doctors, they can
afford the longevity treatments that most of us can't buy.
(34:21):
But also they can leave a dangerous neighborhood or never
even enter it. There's something I love about Rainie's Dale
Carnegie inspired optimism, the way she wants to tilt at
(34:41):
windmills and has figured out how to give governments an
economic incentive to invest in longevity, the only kind most
politicians respond to. I do believe Rainy wants to help
people because she wants to lessen suffering, to reduce that
pandemic of age induced diseases.
Speaker 12 (35:00):
These are technically solvable problems. We just need the resources,
and we have the resources.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
The thing is, while longevity might be solvable getting some
people to stay healthier longer, it also creates new problems
to solve, Like when people live for another twenty or
fifty years, does anyone ever leave the Supreme Court or Congress?
You see it with Putin and She and Mitch McConnell
(35:28):
and Dianne Feinstein. People in power don't tend to part
with it easily, especially when it's optional. But having people
live longer doesn't just bring up questions of power. It
also brings up questions of legacy.
Speaker 5 (35:43):
Philanspy used to be tied up with people trying to
find a way to continue their legacy beyond death. If
you don't need to do that anymore, because you can
literally just keep living. I mean, for one thing, to
people just stop giving. Do they not feel the need
to do that sort of thing because they can handle
their legacy themselves.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
And also that's Rodri Davis, the founder of Why Philanthropy Matters,
And he told me something else about the impact of
living longer, how it affects our sense of empathy.
Speaker 5 (36:15):
Assume that we do have this stuff, and people can
live to one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred
or whatever. Would a three hundred year old person really
care very much about the lives of people who were
in their twenties or living sort of normal lifespans. Would
there be that sense of empathy that is generally required
to drive people towards philanthropy.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
I've been thinking about that a lot recently. How people
used to live forever by putting their name on a
library or an institution, the Carnegie and the Rockefellers. And
if you're living to three hundred, with the possibility of
living more, would you really want to part with any
of your dough, but also the way our species seems
to be splitting, you might be disincentivized to give, especially
(36:59):
when you see others as lesser than or something beneath you.
Speaker 5 (37:04):
You know, I could see a situation in which they
did fundamentally see themselves as a different species or subspecies
or something, and it would actually be kind of difficult
to view that person as anything other than totally other
to you and your experience. And in that circumstance, I would,
you know, I'd be concerned that even if there was
(37:24):
a desire to help those people, it would almost be
in the same way that you know, we currently have
care for animals.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
The fact is, the great gains in human lifespan didn't
come from personalized medicine for the elite, and it wasn't
like the longevity movements of today, something only worthwhile if
some corporation can sell it to you. The big advances
in lifespan came from collective action. Vaccines and clean water
(37:57):
sewage systems and safer roads, pains against smoking, and public
investments that protected millions of people at once. Yes, there
were factions and roadblocks, but we got through those together.
We did something for all of us, and right now
that feels like an old fashioned idea. Part four psalm.
(39:10):
Looking back at the things I wrote while making the show,
the notes I scribbled, ideas I jotted down, the whole
thing feels like a whirlwind. And I'm still processing fifty
plus interviews, four countries, two oceans over nine months. People
welcomed me into their space, share their stories, sometimes joyous,
(39:32):
sometimes painful, experiences that shape their visions of the future.
There were people I felt connected to, even if I
didn't agree with them, And there were lessons I know
that because I can sense the shape of them. I
just need to articulate them for myself. But also, how
(40:01):
do you close a show where the ending won't be
written for one hundred years? When will we finally know
if these supposed miracles are real? Maybe it's easier to
leave my story unfinished too, the bits I'd hope to explore,
and the scribbles I'd written for myself but now belong
to you. When I visited the Vida's House, the residency
(40:35):
in San Francisco based around Longevity, I've been struck by
this framed collection of thirty five survey responses to one prompt,
I want to live forever. So I want to live forever,
so I can say the stocks.
Speaker 7 (40:50):
I want to live forever, so i can see every
flower on earth, so.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
I'm motivated by inspiration, not by fear. So I can
meet and love as many people as I can, so
that I can fall asleep in the Tassia's arms more
times than I can count. We Indians talk a lot
(41:32):
about reincarnation, concepts of karma and accepting the suffering of
this life to have a better one in the future.
But I've heard some people talk about reincarnation in terms
that aren't that literal. It isn't new lives, but instead
these little slivers of ourselves, passed down, glimmering vestiges of
our forebears, preserve for generations the way to believe will
(41:56):
continue to be here. I think about that kind of
inheritance and legacy a lot. Am I brave like my
ancestors who were kicked out of the community church for
educating their daughters? I wonder if I've done enough to
(42:19):
stand up for my own kid whose trends outside of
our little world? Am I willing to sacrifice for what's right?
My great grandfather watched his career stall and his opportunity
to be on the Supreme Court evaporate when he made
one of India's first rulings against the British. I don't
think I've inherited that strong a backbone. Am I a
(42:41):
black sheep like my dad? Someone who used to talk
about his fond memories of a youth well misspent? Am
I diabetes and depression? The twin gifts of my bloodline?
Am I? The mirror of my cousin. My age is
so much more brilliant than me, because I am haunted
by the way he took his life with a beam
(43:02):
in a rope? Am I anyone if the one thing
I truly sacrificed to build, that decade of poor health
and sleep, the life I deferred just so I could
(43:23):
have a magazine of my own that now only lives
this old articles and aislop. Does a life matter if
all the evidence this sand castle you so carefully crafted
has been washed away? Why is it that when I
go to goa, I keep returning to my grandfather's old
farmhouse or the ice cream factory, where the acres of
(43:47):
mango trees and rose gardens, all of which no longer
exist like it's my story waiting to happen again. A
few days after my dad passed, I got this voicemail
(44:09):
from one of my former hosts, the Bollywood Legend, on
a pump care.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Mangays, my friend, my friend, I am so sorry for
your loss.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
You know, it's.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Very strange. When I lost my father, I became brave
and I became.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Him.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
But you will always miss him, and he will always
be around you. In your habits, in.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Your day to day functioning, in the way you talk
to your children, you will see him. You will feel
him all around you. You will see that his habits
are your habits now. In fact, you will remember him
more now. And that is why I say that he
(45:04):
will always be around you.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Talking with Rogov, he mentioned that loneliness is as bad
for you as smoking, how prolonged isolation affects your body
like fifteen cigarettes a day. I'm struck by the idea
that loneliness isn't just a feeling. That the people we
keep close quite literally keep us alive. They're friends. I
wanted to share the show with beloved advisor who fell
(45:41):
tragically ill just as I was getting started. An old
college friend who backed out of our reunion because she
had cancer. Friends who've lost kids, who remind you that
not all good lives are long ones. But how can
you ask someone to listen to a show about living
forever when grief makes that premise feel obscene. When we
(46:10):
started the show, my producer Mary wondered, if our lives
online have conditioned us into yearning for an endless life.
There was a time when you get to the end
of Instagram and it would say you're all caught up.
Now we spend our nights staring into a blue light,
seduced by an infinite scroll. And I don't know if
that daily squandering, the vapid way in which we spend
(46:33):
our time makes us crave more of it, or if
we've just grown accustomed to the absence of an ending.
We debated what to call this show. Do we just
(46:54):
keep it as Skyline Drive? What about the Infinite Scroll?
Should it be called the Lunch Jevons plural or singular?
Or how to Live Forever? Or maybe it was only
ever one thing, just how to live A love Supreme.
(47:48):
Welove Supreme, I Love Supreme, I Love Supreme. Thank you
so much for listening to this season of Skyline. It
is much a privilege to get to make a show
for you, and I feel so grateful that you listened.
And also I'm so lucky that it's my job to
get to work with these wonderful talents, because this show
(48:11):
would not exist without them, Starting with my wife, Lizzie Jacobs,
my tireless cheerleader and our insanely talented showrunner editor EP
wrangler of voices. A fun fact about Lizzie, she will
never ever climb a tree with you, but she will
sit under it and will talk to you while you're
up there. Mark Lotto, the best story editor who not
(48:32):
only pushed the show to be so much better than
it deserved to be, but was also like, oh, a
musical number, I'll work with that. Super producer Mary Philip Sandy,
who is brilliant and funny and also the host of
the legendary indie podcast Let's Talk About Cats. She's the
only person I know who has ever asked a guest
what their cat's media diet is. Mark Steven Allen, thank you,
(48:54):
thank you for opening so many doors for us. Mark
was the science producer on the show. I don't know
how you can convinced people that they needed to have
a conversation with me, but I am eternally grateful. There
are not enough words to properly express my gratitude to
the folks who made this show sound so beautiful. Joe Plored,
We gave you an impossible assignment for this episode, and
(49:17):
I truly don't know how you made it sound so stunning. Also,
Casey and Anna, thank you so much. Bliss Samsa Zoti Records,
bot Me Pete Bauer. It is so rare that podcasts
and audio medium have beautiful songs and music in it,
and I feel so lucky that you lent me yours.
Thank you so much. Metro Bunshahi are Vox pop genius
(49:39):
who collected all those beautiful senior voices from episode three.
Also thank you to our last minute voice actors, my
nephew Will Cravis, is that your sag name? Zach Goodwin,
Sam Fillian, Megan Detrie, and my cousin aditya Buster who
has now appeared in not just one, but two seasons
of Skyline Drive. Also special thanks to my friend sand
(50:01):
Kola who left us an Easter egg in this episode.
This show is executive produced from iHeart, I'm My good friends,
Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel. Thank you for believing in
this little show from Kaleidoscope. We've got my co founder,
Ozwa Lishen, Julia Nutter our head of studio, Costas Linos.
I'm not gonna forget about you, Rachel Strom. It feels
(50:22):
unfair to have someone as good and wonderful as you
and also your trophy husband Rins in my corner. Thank you, truly,
you are both the best. Also, thank you so much
the kaleidoscoper is here who tolerate me on a daily basis.
Christy David, Dara Agne, Sheina Calypso al Viney. Thank you
(50:42):
for the beautiful collage art. I love that you came
out of retirement for this. There are so many of you.
I'm trying to wrap this up, but are you gonna
stop me from thanking the kiddos? I didn't think so.
So Thank you Henry Ruby, Reese, Liev, Julian Grendel, Lou Baby,
Leon Baby, how Maya, aroun Enzo and Pearl It Tour.
(51:03):
Also Bob Connell will carry Nikki, Jason, Jerry and the
rest of you at iHeart. Thank you to Shanta and Soub.
Also Donald Jones, who made us insta official as best friends.
John Pollock, who is not tagged in that post for
some reason, my family in India, my family and the States,
and just one last thank you to my Amma and
(51:24):
my dad Lolitamesh, who I thank my lucky stars for.
I'm Mongishtikatar. Thank you so much for listening. Working out
makes me feel young. He also told me that some
younger women have hit on you at the gym. No,
(51:49):
that wasn't exactly right.
Speaker 11 (51:52):
Well, hit on is a pretty strong.
Speaker 5 (51:56):
Shown.
Speaker 11 (51:57):
Okay, that's right.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
That's happened on two occasions.
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