Speaker 1: When I was in second and third grade, I was
Speaker 1: obsessed with mysteries Carmen San Diego, Encyclopedia Brown, Agatha Christie,
Speaker 1: and especially Sherlock Holmes. On Thursday nights, I would stay
Speaker 1: up late and snuggled under a blanket with my mom
Speaker 1: watching mystery on PBS. But as much as I wanted
Speaker 1: to solve all the neighborhood mysteries, I only ever cracked
Speaker 1: two of them. First, the case of the nine year
Speaker 1: old boxing champ. When a new kid moved to the
Speaker 1: cul de Sac and claimed he was a world boxing
Speaker 1: champ elementary school division, words spread fast across my neighborhood.
Speaker 1: The kid was tough, He talked back to his mom,
Speaker 1: he cursed, he spit, and he let it be known
Speaker 1: he could beat up anyone who wanted to fight. My
Speaker 1: neighbor dragged me along to see if it was true.
Speaker 1: But a few questions about where he trained, what international
Speaker 1: cities he traveled to, He had a hard time naming
Speaker 1: any and also just pointing out the fact that he
Speaker 1: had very soft hands quickly took the air out of
Speaker 1: the myth. Second, the case of the Secret Admirer. Some
Speaker 1: creep had signed all the Valentines to every girl in
Speaker 1: our third grade class from your secret Admirer. My friends
Speaker 1: Kristen and Sarah brought me the case. Our homeroom teacher,
Speaker 1: Missus DeLong, had even received a secret Admirer card, which
Speaker 1: was a total scandal. But after a little slew thing,
Speaker 1: I realized that the night before, when I was out
Speaker 1: playing basketball, my parents had called me in to sign Valentines,
Speaker 1: and then after a while it got sick of calling
Speaker 1: for me. My dad thought it would be funny to
Speaker 1: sign all the cards anonymously, like I was some love
Speaker 1: sick Casanova. It didn't take that long to solve the case,
Speaker 1: but I didn't let on. I pretended it was unsolvable,
Speaker 1: a mystery for the ages, and quickly shifted the conversation.
Speaker 1: Sometimes solving a case is worse than not solving it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the answer feels wrong, even when it's right. All
Speaker 1: that's to say, I think my work is often about
Speaker 1: solving mysteries. I like patching the hole in the story.
Speaker 1: I love hearing a curious fact or reading a line
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound right, and then poking around to get
Speaker 1: the full story. So in October of last year, as
Speaker 1: I was starting to gather leads for this show. I
Speaker 1: hopped on the phone with an investor to hear about
Speaker 1: what they'd been pitched in the longevity space, and as
Speaker 1: they walked me through new ideas for drugs and procedures,
Speaker 1: suddenly I heard a cloud of phrases that made me
Speaker 1: lean in.
Speaker 2: We didn't invest because it makes us too uncomfortable. It's
Speaker 2: pulled straight out of sci fi. They're brilliant, but their
Speaker 2: reputations are controversial.
Speaker 1: They want to remain anonymous, so I've had their tape
Speaker 1: replaced with an actor, by which I mean my cousin. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the investor tells me that in the.
Speaker 2: Pitch there's a line item that stands out. It's for
Speaker 2: buying property in South America.
Speaker 1: So then they asked why is real estate part of
Speaker 1: this pitch, and the answer it's.
Speaker 2: Because they're going to buy property to catch monkeys they
Speaker 2: can test on what.
Speaker 1: My mind is spinning trying to understand what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: And then I hear.
Speaker 2: This The goal is to clone humans and use them
Speaker 2: for human organ farms.
Speaker 1: And that's the moment I knew the game is afoot.
Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, I'm Monga's heat there. This
Speaker 1: is Skyline Drive How to Live Forever, Chapter one. Dear Leaders,
Speaker 1: as the present.
Speaker 3: Dish state, you.
Speaker 4: Americans do not eat what grows for free, like amazing,
Speaker 4: very tasty fruit lying on the end. In Russia, people
Speaker 4: gather things from the treats. I think Americans want to pay, definitely,
Speaker 4: this is amazing.
Speaker 1: I'm walking with Mikyle Rubin over to this little patch
Speaker 1: of grass on the Stanford campus, and he's right. We
Speaker 1: spot orange trees everywhere, and despite my love of citrus,
Speaker 1: it hadn't occurred to me to pick up any fruit
Speaker 1: off the ground. In spite of his scolding slash teasing me,
Speaker 1: I feel lucky to be here with Mikyle. He made
Speaker 1: his name at a publication called Prey Act, breaking stories
Speaker 1: about Russia's political corruption and the oligarchy.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 1: The guy is fearless.
Speaker 4: We specialize on prohibited topics in Russia. So our goal
Speaker 4: is to tell the stories that no one else would
Speaker 4: ever tell, which is mostly everything about lighting me Puicha actually.
Speaker 1: But Mikile is an exile here because us. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one.
Speaker 4: We got, let's say, a signal that we need to
Speaker 4: leave the country, which was very direct searchers by the police,
Speaker 4: questions by the police. Then we got this title of
Speaker 4: undesirable organization, which means prison, so very pretty direct signal
Speaker 4: that we need to leave the country. Since my exile
Speaker 4: started four years now, five years ago now, we changed
Speaker 4: places very often, countries places.
Speaker 1: So I really do feel like I'm in a mystery
Speaker 1: or maybe a paranoid conspiracy thriller. I'm chasing this rumor
Speaker 1: of human cloning, human organ farms. I'm meeting with an
Speaker 1: exile journalist under an orange tree at Stanford, and right
Speaker 1: now we're talking about a strange bit of tape that
Speaker 1: emerged on the internet last year. That's Chinese President Hi
Speaker 1: Jinping walking with Vladimir Putin during a military parade in Beijing.
Speaker 1: An essays stroll through the help of their translators, the
Speaker 1: two seventy two year olds are saying that seventy used
Speaker 1: to be considered ancient, but these days being seventy is
Speaker 1: like being a child. Then Putin suggests that maybe people
Speaker 1: will age backwards by replacing their organs and so essentially
Speaker 1: becoming immortal. She chuckles and ads it could be in
Speaker 1: this century humans might be able to live to one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years old. That exchange went viral, because
Speaker 1: of course it did. It's terrifying, But to Mikail.
Speaker 4: It wasn't surprised for me at all, as an investigative
Speaker 4: journalist who covers lead in the Putin for most part
Speaker 4: of his career, that he is definitely obsessed. I am
Speaker 4: using this word intentionally. He's obsessed with his health.
Speaker 1: All knows a lot about that. Among other things. He
Speaker 1: was the one who broke the story about Putin adding
Speaker 1: a bath bomb of antler blood extract to his top,
Speaker 1: a Siberian folk treatment for virility, which only amplified Putin's
Speaker 1: myth internationally.
Speaker 4: Like back at like fifteen years ago, they were published
Speaker 4: his photos half naked you riding a horse and swimming.
Speaker 4: It was important part of his image. What we understand
Speaker 4: now is that he wants to live for a very
Speaker 4: very long time, and we found some proofs for that.
Speaker 1: Mckail and his team also broke a story about contracts
Speaker 1: between the Russian President's office and hotels near his various
Speaker 1: homes and who was traveling with Putin along with when.
Speaker 4: So we find that every time Putin travels some way
Speaker 4: out of Moscow, there is a bunch of doctors traveling
Speaker 4: with him and who have to leave very close to
Speaker 4: his residences. Usually it is from four up to seven
Speaker 4: doctors traveling with him, but there were two times when
Speaker 4: Putin was visited by twelve doctors simultaneously.
Speaker 1: The reporters determined that Putin was likely treated for thyroid
Speaker 1: cancer in secret, and that he'd had hernia surgery too.
Speaker 1: Of course, this isn't the kind of thing the Kremlin confirms.
Speaker 1: If Putin disappeared for a few days, Mikael says, they'll
Speaker 1: release pre recorded tapes of meetings to make it seem
Speaker 1: like he's on the job as normal. How do you
Speaker 1: figure out someone like Putin's health.
Speaker 4: It is a prohibited topic in Russia, totally prohibited. This
Speaker 4: is a part of Putin's image. He's always healthy. They
Speaker 4: never tell that he's ill. Never.
Speaker 1: In late May of twenty twenty six, the Wall Street
Speaker 1: Journal released a story clarifying that Putin had earmarked twenty
Speaker 1: six billion dollars for a longevity initiative. Pudin's daughter, a
Speaker 1: pediatric endocrinologist who advises her father on genetics, and a
Speaker 1: physicist who led the USSR's nuclear research project were put
Speaker 1: In charge, and along with delivering new gene therapies for
Speaker 1: slowing cellular aging. The scientists have two key tasks, both
Speaker 1: dealing with organ transplants. The first to figure out how
Speaker 1: to three D print organs in a lab, the second
Speaker 1: using mini pigs as living incubators to grow and harvest organs.
Speaker 1: If everything goes to plan, Russia will basically have generated
Speaker 1: a body farm where fields of hearts and lungs and
Speaker 1: kidneys will either be printed on demand or plucked from
Speaker 1: a pig host to be implanted into a human. According
Speaker 1: to the journal, the hope is that between these two initiatives,
Speaker 1: people will be able to switch out body parts indefinitely.
Speaker 1: Putin has invested billions in the idea and is targeting
Speaker 1: a deadline that isn't as far off as you think,
Speaker 1: just four years, which happens to be before the country's
Speaker 1: next presidential election. Of course, all of this is being
Speaker 1: pitched as a state priority, a way to make Russians healthier.
Speaker 1: Right now, the life expectancy for the average Russian is
Speaker 1: seventy three, putting Russia at a dismal one hundred and
Speaker 1: nineteen out of two hundred and nine countries studied and
Speaker 1: for a new recruit to its military from the moment
Speaker 1: training starts to death in battle, their life expectancy averages
Speaker 1: only up to three weeks. But when this organ replacement
Speaker 1: therapy is ready, which Russian will be first in line.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you can guess.
Speaker 4: What I'm trying to say is that definitely this conversation
Speaker 4: with presidentcy wasn't something newte and unfortunately for Russia that
Speaker 4: his plan is also too for a very very long time.
Speaker 1: Chapter two, Library Science. I can't stop thinking about this
Speaker 1: dystopic vision for the future where if you have a
Speaker 1: good mechanic and a warehouse full of parts, you can
Speaker 1: keep a body running endlessly. I mean, I get the
Speaker 1: idea you might need a pacemaker or to replace a
Speaker 1: bum heart, but to just keep replacing parts forever. And
Speaker 1: it makes me wonder about the urban myths I heard
Speaker 1: in middle and high school of people going to a party,
Speaker 1: getting drugged and then waking up in bathtubs of ice
Speaker 1: without a kidney, which is why Lizzie and I ended
Speaker 1: up in a local public library on a chilly January day,
Speaker 1: sitting with a white hat hacker named Searchlight.
Speaker 6: Going on to Darknet used to be a lot easier
Speaker 6: because you could just go to a website and be like, look,
Speaker 6: this is who's advertising organs.
Speaker 1: Just so you know, that's not Searchlight's actual voice. Searchlight
Speaker 1: works as an elite cybersecurity consultant and studies at one
Speaker 1: of the country's most prestigious universities, and they only agreed
Speaker 1: to talk to me if we kept their voice and
Speaker 1: identity out of the show. It's near closing time, and
Speaker 1: while it's not exactly busy, I'm nervous about who might
Speaker 1: catch wind of what we're doing. The Searchlight tells us
Speaker 1: that the library is a convenient way to access the
Speaker 1: web without using your own IP address. They boot up
Speaker 1: the computer, clear it of the existing searches and credentials.
Speaker 6: If you ever want to take a photo of like this,
Speaker 6: just don't take a photo of me.
Speaker 1: They reassure us we won't actually be doing anything illegal,
Speaker 1: which is a welcome reminder. A Searchlight begins typing, I'm
Speaker 1: giddy to tour the dark web. I'm still thinking about
Speaker 1: Silk Road, the so called black market Amazon where organ
Speaker 1: trafficking was rumored to take place, but Searchlight says that
Speaker 1: that part of the net is filled with government agents
Speaker 1: running honeypot schemes on unsuspecting nubes and anyway, it's not
Speaker 1: where the action is these days. So we're going regular
Speaker 1: old surface web and searchlight starts by demonstrating how embarrassingly
Speaker 1: easy it is to find longevity drugs here on the internet.
Speaker 1: We all use how.
Speaker 3: Long to take? And did it seem surprising?
Speaker 1: How long a tike?
Speaker 6: It took? Under a minute, which is wow, this is
Speaker 6: so easy that why would you ever go through the
Speaker 6: effort of going through the dark web for any of
Speaker 6: these things?
Speaker 1: By current estimates, the shadow markets are a six trillion
Speaker 1: dollars a year economy. That includes money launcher and other
Speaker 1: illicit activity too, but it also includes what we're looking
Speaker 1: at right now, purchasing cancer drugs and anti virals for
Speaker 1: HIV and anabolic androgenic steroids.
Speaker 6: I'm assuming there's a lot of business incentives for why
Speaker 6: this is happening, and a lot of incentive for illicit
Speaker 6: pharmacies in other countries to be targeting the US market.
Speaker 1: I angle my body boxing out any nosy neighbors from
Speaker 1: being able to see the screen. I can't believe how
Speaker 1: brazen this marketplace is. And while we're not talking about
Speaker 1: purchasing organs. These are serious pharmaceuticals, things with real side effects,
Speaker 1: which are being recommended on dodgy sites as off label
Speaker 1: longevity meds search sites. Starts pecking at the keys again
Speaker 1: and we're transported to the world of longevity chatboards, the
Speaker 1: so called community helping a new class of initiates navigate
Speaker 1: their hunt for drugs. The boards point new longevionauts to
Speaker 1: which sites are most reliable, which services to use to
Speaker 1: drop ship the drugs, which banks are better for discrete
Speaker 1: international transfers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is super detailed. This person decided to say
Speaker 6: which regional facility their package arrived that and also when
Speaker 6: they paid for it, and also when it arrived to them,
Speaker 6: which is extremely detailed amount of information to put on
Speaker 6: the public Internet about your crimes. Whether this is a
Speaker 6: real name or not doesn't really matter. Essentially, if these
Speaker 6: people are not having some dark web conversation or secret telegrams,
Speaker 6: it's just on the Internet.
Speaker 1: One post we look at about how to order rapamycin
Speaker 1: has over fifty thousand views and hundreds of comments. Rapamycin
Speaker 1: is an immunosuppressant, especially helpful in preventing rejection after say
Speaker 1: a kidney transplant. While the drug has been much hyped
Speaker 1: in longevity circles, it has plenty of documented side effects,
Speaker 1: including mouth ulcers, wound healing issues, and disabling your immune system.
Speaker 1: Anti aging potential for humans, if any is still unclear,
Speaker 1: but at Searchlight points out, we don't really know anything
Speaker 1: about who has set up this forum and what their
Speaker 1: motives could be.
Speaker 6: Who is this person? No idea. If this person's a
Speaker 6: broker or supplier, then there's an incentive for them to
Speaker 6: lie right and tell the people that it's safe when
Speaker 6: it's not, and that's predatory.
Speaker 1: A long time ago, a writer friend of mine told
Speaker 1: me the story about getting in a minivan with a
Speaker 1: formulae one driver on some blocked off roads in New Jersey,
Speaker 1: a new supposed test track. The driver guns it, hurling
Speaker 1: the minivan around corners, and as the writer sweats and
Speaker 1: white knuckles the grab handles, the driver looks over and smirks,
Speaker 1: showing just how much control over this soccer mom vehicle
Speaker 1: he has. I'm reminded of that scene. A surflight whips
Speaker 1: the browser across the web. Click, click, click, A few
Speaker 1: keystrokes and something we're looking at discount injectables that stimulate
Speaker 1: bone marrow to make more red blood cells. A few
Speaker 1: more and we're racing to a site that claims to
Speaker 1: be quote the best Indian pharmaceutical supplier in the Philippines
Speaker 1: that also ships to the US. This is f one handling,
Speaker 1: not some web tourists working the wheel, and we skid
Speaker 1: past disclosures or lack of them on so many sites.
Speaker 1: When we tap the brakes, Searflight points out the market
Speaker 1: here is wider than just longebonouts. It's also filled with
Speaker 1: people with serious health conditions who've been abandoned by a
Speaker 1: broken healthcare system. People left scouring the internet for cheaper
Speaker 1: versions of the drugs they can't afford, for.
Speaker 6: People who actually need these medications and are going on
Speaker 6: these websites because they just can't afford them, because they're
Speaker 6: like five thousand dollars injection in the US. They're like,
Speaker 6: they're like really expensive. You can't blame them for going
Speaker 6: on these websites.
Speaker 1: And Searchlight tells me these chemicals are not made for
Speaker 1: people to take, They're for research only.
Speaker 6: It's still unsafe and it should be shut down.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of my dad, how at the end of
Speaker 1: his life when he knew things weren't going right. He'd
Speaker 1: ordered these ira Vedic tinctures that he thought could maybe
Speaker 1: heal him. It was this act of desperation, and I
Speaker 1: had no idea what he'd bought, or from where, or
Speaker 1: how he'd even research these supposed cures. But as much
Speaker 1: as I didn't want it to be true, I knew
Speaker 1: they weren't going to work.
Speaker 6: I think what it really says about the longevity situation
Speaker 6: is like this is being discussed openly. There is the
Speaker 6: opportunity to know, hey, these drugs are dangerous, Like there's
Speaker 6: guidance that can be and hasn't been put up by
Speaker 6: FDA saying these longevity drugs are off label and are
Speaker 6: dangerous to be using.
Speaker 1: My mind is reeling. For the same price as a
Speaker 1: dinner out, I can buy research grade drugs that cure
Speaker 1: major diseases on essentially an open market. It's barely harder
Speaker 1: than ordering sneakers off of eBay. But what about the
Speaker 1: people who aren't desperate? What about the prudence of the
Speaker 1: world who talk of switching out a bad heart or kidney,
Speaker 1: treating the human body like a Lego kit where you
Speaker 1: can just snap in new parts, or the whispers. I
Speaker 1: keep hearing of ultra elite longevity mansions, residences where New
Speaker 1: Zealand oil airs and their friends. The actual phrase one
Speaker 1: source used gream up longevity experiments they can fund without
Speaker 1: worry of ethics. So I go back to my original
Speaker 1: question and ask Searchlight, are people buying new livers and
Speaker 1: spare kidneys online?
Speaker 6: Well, there's a lot of conversation about replacing kidneys and
Speaker 6: things like that in the longevity community, but actually acting
Speaker 6: on that is extremely fringe. And not only do I
Speaker 6: not know anyone who's done that, I've never heard of
Speaker 6: anybody who's heard of anybody who's done that.
Speaker 1: For a minute, I feel relief, like an anxious parent
Speaker 1: looking out onto an ocean and not seeing any fins
Speaker 1: taking that is proof that the water is safe. Searchlight
Speaker 1: says that if we want to go hunting for organ sales,
Speaker 1: they could reboot the system and find a burner phone
Speaker 1: for us to use, but the various security measures would
Speaker 1: take more time than we have. The library is about
Speaker 1: to close. Besides, they explained to me, organ trafficking isn't
Speaker 1: just illegal, it also requires an incredible amount of coordination.
Speaker 6: For extreme cases. Let's do an organ transplant illegally. It
Speaker 6: requires a donor who's forced into donating organs, be trafficked
Speaker 6: to a safe house and then have organs removed, and
Speaker 6: then have a surgeon and a surgical feed are nearby
Speaker 6: implant them into the recipient, and all of that has
Speaker 6: to be coordinated by a broker.
Speaker 1: A searchlight walks me through this. I'm realizing how hard
Speaker 1: the recovery is, how easy it is for the body
Speaker 1: to reject a foreign organ. The medicines you need to
Speaker 1: override it. Even in the best circumstances. It is far
Speaker 1: from smooth.
Speaker 6: People who are primarily trying to get transplants on. Here
Speaker 6: are people who actually need them but are just going
Speaker 6: about it in extremely unethical ways that they just don't
Speaker 6: care about the people who they're trying to get things
Speaker 6: transplanted from.
Speaker 1: And it feels like there's desperation on both sides, from
Speaker 1: the person in dire need of a failing organ, but
Speaker 1: also from the person for whom their own internal organs
Speaker 1: maybe the most valuable things they have in or on.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, when inflation had gotten so bad
Speaker 1: that poverty was rampant, people were posting on telegram offering
Speaker 1: their livers, their bone marrow. According to Business Insider, someone
Speaker 1: even posted an offer to sell their testicles quote twenty
Speaker 1: five years old. Oh positive, I know searchlight can illuminate
Speaker 1: the darkest corridors of the Internet, places I'd never be
Speaker 1: able to find. Were all those rumors I'd heard from
Speaker 1: vcs about organ replacement just another kind of urban myth.
Speaker 1: Had we hit a dead end? I can't believe it.
Speaker 1: There has to be.
Speaker 5: A way Chapter three, Cracking the Faberge Egg.
Speaker 1: In any detective story, there are moments when the trail
Speaker 1: goes cold, when the pieces don't seem to fit, and
Speaker 1: there are always options. You can play a violin and
Speaker 1: hope for an inspired connection, or you can keep working
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, tracing acquaintances, looking for one name to daisy
Speaker 1: chain into the next. And in a community this small,
Speaker 1: there's a sense that the young scientists with the boldest,
Speaker 1: wildest ideas have all met each other, which is how
Speaker 1: three days into my trip to San Francisco, I find
Speaker 1: myself talking to Nicoa Poe.
Speaker 7: The people I valued the most actually weren't encouraging at all.
Speaker 7: They were just like, that's stupid entire thing, scrap.
Speaker 1: That's what helped me, oh a lot of things. A vegan,
Speaker 1: a former research assistant at Stanford an Army, National Guard Reserve,
Speaker 1: and a startup founder running his trials at the Buck Institute,
Speaker 1: a prestigious research institute devoted to longevity, where he's worked
Speaker 1: on a way to replace his brain. But as we
Speaker 1: sit in his office in Marin overlooking sweeping hills thick
Speaker 1: with fog, he tells me he doesn't want to replace
Speaker 1: his organs by transplant putin style. Instead, he's taking his
Speaker 1: inspiration from an old philosophical thought experiment. The Ship of Theseus.
Speaker 7: Theseus was this Greek explorer, right, and he goes on
Speaker 7: a journey and the mast of his ship break, so
Speaker 7: they replaced the mast. The board's break, so they replace
Speaker 7: the boards, and by the end of the journey they've
Speaker 7: replaced every single part of the ship with a new piece.
Speaker 7: But everybody still calls it Theseus's ship and the like.
Speaker 7: The philosophical question is if you completely play something piece
Speaker 7: by piece, is it still what it started to be?
Speaker 1: Nikoa has a theory about how you can replace your
Speaker 1: entire brain piece by piece and still retain your identity.
Speaker 1: And I want to know how he came to that belief.
Speaker 1: Nikoa grew up in Hawaii with the health conscious hippie mom.
Speaker 1: In college, he identifies two event horizons, and since he's
Speaker 1: quote not good at ai, he decides to lean into
Speaker 1: the other one, longevity. But even after studying biochemistry and
Speaker 1: molecular biology and moving to the West Coast to work
Speaker 1: in a Stanford lab, he wasn't satisfied.
Speaker 7: So one of my lab mates goes, well, you won't
Speaker 7: stop talking about immortality. Here's a house full of people
Speaker 7: that just do That's amaze. So then I applied and
Speaker 7: they gave me a very serious interview and they're like, yes, well,
Speaker 7: we'll see if you're good enough for the next cohort.
Speaker 7: I was like sweating, this is extremely serious. I'm going
Speaker 7: to be living with a whole bunch of biotech legends.
Speaker 7: And then I showed up and it was just like, oh,
Speaker 7: what's up, bro.
Speaker 1: But at Vida's house, whose stated mission is to create
Speaker 1: community and quote incubate the most promising moonshots at the
Speaker 1: intersections of biology and tech, was just what Nikoa needed.
Speaker 1: I was out of Vida's house the day before and
Speaker 1: had been charmed by the college off campus house feel
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 7: Our fridge had a whole bunch of different peptides in
Speaker 7: it on the side, and I was having space to
Speaker 7: store my hot sauce because there was like too many
Speaker 7: vials of Reddit, trude eyed and other tiny little peptide fragments.
Speaker 7: So that was fun.
Speaker 1: And he finds inspiration all around him that make some
Speaker 1: investors and fame researchers who drop by to give talks,
Speaker 1: and the like minded residents who lived there.
Speaker 7: Just having conversations and sharing my ideas with people and
Speaker 7: coming like, look, I have this precious faberget egg of
Speaker 7: an idea and I'm so proud of it. And then
Speaker 7: they smash it and they're like, ninety percent of this
Speaker 7: is garbage, and I go, okay, well I'll take this
Speaker 7: ten percent. Look I have another wife.
Speaker 1: Boom, Okay, well now I.
Speaker 7: Have twenty percent of a good idea and just refeeding
Speaker 7: that process.
Speaker 1: And that's on a CoA started Sundial Therapeutics, an early
Speaker 1: stage company focused on cellular brain replacement, whereas he likes
Speaker 1: to call it.
Speaker 7: The brain of theseus. Basically, what we do is we
Speaker 7: look for stem cells that can cross the blood brain
Speaker 7: barrier and home to sights of damage and injury in
Speaker 7: the brain and replace the dead and dying cells with
Speaker 7: new healthy cells, so you can slowly replace the brain
Speaker 7: over time. Every time one of the cells in your
Speaker 7: brain dies, we send a stem cell in there and
Speaker 7: it replaces it with a new, younger, healthy cell.
Speaker 1: What's fascinating about Nikoa is that he's actually tackling one
Speaker 1: of the hardest problems in biotech. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: coax stem cells into becoming skin or blood cells, or
Speaker 1: even say a liver, things that have a very straightforward purpose.
Speaker 1: It's another to get new cells across the blood brain
Speaker 1: barrier into the right part of the brain, not to
Speaker 1: mention doing it without disrupting the existing circuitry and the
Speaker 1: person inside. But Nikoa is a rising star, and his
Speaker 1: hope is that you can heal traumatic brain injuries and
Speaker 1: replace damaged cells without the need for surgery. But also
Speaker 1: he knows these advances take time because he knows just
Speaker 1: how complicated the body is.
Speaker 7: This is going to go on the record, right, so
Speaker 7: I'll check back in ten more years. But I don't
Speaker 7: think the predictions of curing all diseases using AI and
Speaker 7: synthetic biology in ten more years are going to play
Speaker 7: out in anywhere near the time span, because biology doesn't
Speaker 7: move at machine speeds.
Speaker 1: It's something I've been thinking about a lot, like there
Speaker 1: is so much optimism and hype in the space, but
Speaker 1: also there's a real tension between the people in the
Speaker 1: university labs who believe advances take decades, people like doctor
Speaker 1: Cy who is effectively replicating simplified brains in petri dishes,
Speaker 1: from the tech optimists, people who are certain that death
Speaker 1: with enough computing power is a very solvable problem.
Speaker 7: I think tech teaches you to be optimistic and biotech
Speaker 7: teaches you to be pessimistic. Here, when you're working with
Speaker 7: living systems, you get used to things taking twice as
Speaker 7: long and costing three times as much as you thought
Speaker 7: every single time.
Speaker 1: He's cautious about putting a neat timeline on biology, but
Speaker 1: also just look at the scale of his ambition. He's
Speaker 1: trying to replace an entire brain cell for cell, and
Speaker 1: despite his caveats, Nicoa's Brain of THESEUS project is moving
Speaker 1: at a surprisingly fast clip. He tells me that just
Speaker 1: this year.
Speaker 7: We're planning to launch our first pre clinical study in
Speaker 7: an animal model of Alzheimer's to see if they can
Speaker 7: actually reduce the burden of the disease.
Speaker 1: Of course, the bigger question I have is the original
Speaker 1: philosophical one. If you replace a brain sell by cell,
Speaker 1: and at the end of it you have a totally
Speaker 1: new brain, is that still you? Nikoa has a theory.
Speaker 7: My conjecture is, because of how the brain works, even
Speaker 7: if you replace every single cell in your brain over
Speaker 7: time with a different cell, you're not going to lose
Speaker 7: your identity because identity is encoded not in the individual neurons,
Speaker 7: but in the patterns of firing between them. And every
Speaker 7: time a new cell comes into your brain, it's trained
Speaker 7: by all of the neurons next to it in order
Speaker 7: to start behaving as part of your brain. So as
Speaker 7: you get this gradual replacement, the parts that are there
Speaker 7: train the new parts that are coming in, which train
Speaker 7: their replacements, which train their replacements, and you eventually get
Speaker 7: full replacement of your brain with healthy, er, younger sells,
Speaker 7: but you're still you.
Speaker 1: It's not an answer that would have occurred to me
Speaker 1: that despite replacing your entire brain, you still might be
Speaker 1: you at the end of it. And yet maybe that's
Speaker 1: just how humans work because I'm not the person I
Speaker 1: was as a kid, or even the person I was yesterday.
Speaker 1: I have experiences that continuously change me. Our brains are
Speaker 1: constantly changing. So maybe he's right. I don't know enough
Speaker 1: to know if it's optimism or wishful thinking or just true.
Speaker 1: I'm worried the trail has gone cold on the mystery.
Speaker 1: I'd initially set out to solve the one about the
Speaker 1: company making clones for organ farms, but before I go,
Speaker 1: I decide to take a wild swing. I asked Nicole
Speaker 1: if his brain, if theseus idea extends to the whole body,
Speaker 1: and whether Putin's supposed goal of continual organ replacement is possible.
Speaker 7: I don't think organ by organ is going to work
Speaker 7: just because the environment has such a big impact. Like
Speaker 7: you can take a day's zero embryonic cel but put
Speaker 7: it in an old organism and it'll rapidly age just
Speaker 7: because of all of the signals it's getting from the
Speaker 7: older organism. So you see this with organs. Even if
Speaker 7: you take an organ from a younger person, like a
Speaker 7: kidney from a younger person, and put it into an
Speaker 7: older person, it'll degrade in function to match the older
Speaker 7: person's other kidney much more rapidly, just because it's in
Speaker 7: an older, more damaging environment.
Speaker 1: And then he says something i't expecting.
Speaker 7: So I think, to get big gains from replacement, doing
Speaker 7: as much replacement as possible, all at once.
Speaker 1: And with those words, I realize he knows what I
Speaker 1: want to know, because as I've been digging for clues
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley about the human cloning, about the organ replacement,
Speaker 1: I've heard shades of exactly this language, doing as much
Speaker 1: replacement as possible, all at once. So I asked Nicole
Speaker 1: about the company. I only have a vague description of
Speaker 1: if we're possibly talking about the same thing, and it
Speaker 1: feels like we are, So I ask if he can
Speaker 1: make an introduction for me, and he says he'll ask.
Speaker 7: They sometimes don't like going on the record, just because
Speaker 7: of the nature of what they do.
Speaker 1: And then about a month later, I hear from Alice
Speaker 1: Chapter four, Alice in monkey.
Speaker 8: Land, I had a phenomenal lamp wreck at the hotel
Speaker 8: that I'm staying at. I woke up at twelve, so
Speaker 8: I decided to make it a brunch and it was great,
Speaker 8: zero complaints.
Speaker 1: Alice Gilman won't tell me where she is exactly, and
Speaker 1: I can't really see her either. The room is dark
Speaker 1: and I can only make out her shadow next to
Speaker 1: the curtains billowing in the breeze, which adds to the mystique.
Speaker 1: Alice is the co founder of the startup ar three bio,
Speaker 1: and she's talking to me from a hotel somewhere in
Speaker 1: the vicinity of their newest workspace on one of the
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty three islands that make up Puerto Rico.
Speaker 8: You know, working on a science project in an island.
Speaker 8: People are like, what are you guys doing?
Speaker 1: But I've been chasing a shadow for five months, and
Speaker 1: I think I've finally found the person who belongs to
Speaker 1: Alice and her company are three Bio, seem to operate
Speaker 1: on that outermost ring where science kisses the impossible, and
Speaker 1: up until this point in mid February twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: her company has been in stealth mode, a phrase I
Speaker 1: keep hearing in Silicon Valley where people are very happy
Speaker 1: to talk about their work but also pretend like it's
Speaker 1: a secret. But those secrets have generated a lot of buzz.
Speaker 8: I think that we're just like entertainingly a company that
Speaker 8: is actually extremely boring, but a lot of people decided
Speaker 8: that we are radically crazy.
Speaker 1: As we talk, it's clear we're both walking on eggshells.
Speaker 1: This is what I think I know about Alice.
Speaker 6: One.
Speaker 1: He's connected for the Residency and incubator, associated with Sam Altman.
Speaker 1: She has spent time at Prospera, and she gives talks
Speaker 1: to Adam Greeese's longevity conference Vitalist Pay. Two. There are
Speaker 1: whispers about our three all over Silicon Valley, more than whispers,
Speaker 1: actually palpable excitement, but there is very little online. And three.
Speaker 1: She is not a scientist, She's an operator the COO.
Speaker 1: But as I begin to ask her take on radical
Speaker 1: life extension, she wants to start with the story of
Speaker 1: her grandmother, a woman with an epic biography.
Speaker 8: She escaped World War two, stole a horse from the
Speaker 8: Nazis and got her three year old sister on a
Speaker 8: horse across. She went from Germany to China basically over
Speaker 8: like five years in them, ended up with Shaolin monks.
Speaker 1: Alice grew up in Kazakhstan, spending time with her grandmother.
Speaker 1: This woman who should have died but instead fought to
Speaker 1: stay alive and now struggles in body she's in.
Speaker 8: I'm like sitting in front of this person who's like
Speaker 8: a legend, right, who's here playing with pills.
Speaker 1: Alice tells me she can't stomach the disconnect. Why should
Speaker 1: someone so full of life, so committed to life, have
Speaker 1: to suffer just because their body is older? More than aging,
Speaker 1: What terrifies Alice is death, because it wasn't so long
Speaker 1: ago that she remembers sitting and waiting for news about
Speaker 1: whether her father would live.
Speaker 8: My dad had a open heart surgery. I got very
Speaker 8: lucky my dad is still around. I made myself a
Speaker 8: point of I want to make sure my dad gets
Speaker 8: to live longer this decade. And I didn't find anything
Speaker 8: technologically that would guarantee that this decade, so I decided
Speaker 8: to help make it.
Speaker 1: The experience drove Alice into the longevity space. She began
Speaker 1: scouring for solutions scientists who might be able to help,
Speaker 1: and then she finds a way to John Schloendorn, a
Speaker 1: self proclaimed biological designer and PhD in molecular biology. He
Speaker 1: counts Peter Teele as a benefactor. Teal invested and reported
Speaker 1: one point five million dollars in one of Schlowendorn's previous startups.
Speaker 8: I ended up meeting John, who's sitting there in his
Speaker 8: little garage lab out in the middle of nowhere, and
Speaker 8: I talked to him for a few hours and realized
Speaker 8: that this guy can build things that no one can build.
Speaker 8: And I informed him that I now work with him.
Speaker 8: I've seen him do things in our lab that I'm
Speaker 8: afraid to name because I think they sound like miracles.
Speaker 1: Miracles. Whatever Alice saw convinced her that she and John
Speaker 1: together could offer new solutions to the world.
Speaker 8: We are making very strong statements and we can deliver
Speaker 8: the extraordinary evidence. Someone called us the right hemisphere and
Speaker 8: left hemisphere of real and musk.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 8: One of our investors is like, yeah, you guys are
Speaker 8: like a feeling musk was two separate people, and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 8: that's not a bad branding. We'll take it.
Speaker 1: She believes a partnership with John could be the ticket
Speaker 1: to saving her dad.
Speaker 8: So I'm like, wait, so could I grow him a
Speaker 8: new heart that will never develop heart disease because I
Speaker 8: genetically engineered it at like stage one?
Speaker 1: And so Alice is in Puerto Rico at a bougie
Speaker 1: hotel and near some type of monkey reserve. She wants
Speaker 1: to grow replacement organs for people, better ones that will
Speaker 1: never fall prey to disease like her dad's heart did
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 8: Tattoos are much more biologically damaging to the body than
Speaker 8: like an organ transplant, because you're like eternally inflaming your
Speaker 8: system forever, your body will be screaming in pain, right,
Speaker 8: and so that is somehow normal to eternally have your
Speaker 8: body screaming in pain, And like getting a heart transplant
Speaker 8: is not normal somehow, right, Like what how did we
Speaker 8: decide that?
Speaker 1: But to get there, she can't just start with humans.
Speaker 8: We have a few milestones that we're hoping to achieve.
Speaker 8: The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal
Speaker 8: testing by using skin stem cells. We take skin cells
Speaker 8: from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanoca
Speaker 8: miracles that result in fully grown organ systems.
Speaker 1: The Yamanaka factors are these seemingly miraculous proteins that won
Speaker 1: Shinya Yamanaka a Nobel prize. He and another scientist turned
Speaker 1: adult cells into fresh stem cells, which can then be
Speaker 1: reprogrammed to become any kind of cell. But what does
Speaker 1: she mean by an organ system? In the course of
Speaker 1: our conversation. She also calls these organ sacks.
Speaker 8: So it's just pretty much a heart, like lungs and
Speaker 8: everything that you would find in a body, but it's
Speaker 8: not technically alive because it's exclusively the organs, and they
Speaker 8: are kind of in this like little biological platform that
Speaker 8: you can test on and you can map out the
Speaker 8: cross organ interactions.
Speaker 1: The language feels almost purposefully oblique. It's quote not technically alive.
Speaker 1: It's everything quote you'd find in a body. It takes
Speaker 1: me a while to piece together what Alice is talking about, because,
Speaker 1: as Alice tells me, I.
Speaker 8: Try to not be scary to an average person.
Speaker 1: But what she's describing here, I finally figure out is
Speaker 1: a shell of a body. A layperson like me might
Speaker 1: call it as a clone. Alice and R three Bio
Speaker 1: have called this quote immunocompatible organs grown out of your
Speaker 1: skin cell, and the ones she's talking about as the
Speaker 1: future of biological testing come from scraping skin cells from
Speaker 1: a monkey. But the big difference, Alice claims, is that
Speaker 1: R three would grow these without any sentience, meaning they
Speaker 1: would use proprietary techniques to knock out the brain function
Speaker 1: from inception so that the creatures would have no memory,
Speaker 1: feel no pain, and have no consciousness, hence an organ sack.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious, how do you get organ sacks that
Speaker 1: grow but don't feel anything? So, like, do these organ
Speaker 1: sacks like have the stem of a brain?
Speaker 8: So the mice models can exist without any like like
Speaker 8: with like a very limited set of nervous systems. But
Speaker 8: then there are other constraints on the ability of like
Speaker 8: the organs to preserve themselves. So there's a way in
Speaker 8: which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less
Speaker 8: nervous system And then when you skew towards social acceptance,
Speaker 8: it looks better, but it's less scientifically feasible. Oh and
Speaker 8: so we are still like making observations about how that
Speaker 8: would work.
Speaker 1: Alice is saying, less sentient the organ sack, the more
Speaker 1: people are okay with it, but the science doesn't work
Speaker 1: as well. The more sentient the test subject, the better
Speaker 1: it works. But then it freaks everyone out and that
Speaker 1: doesn't solve the unanswered scientific question about whether the clone
Speaker 1: test subject would actually feel zero pain have zero sentience.
Speaker 1: But Alice wants me to know this is sci fi
Speaker 1: with a heart.
Speaker 8: I'm a big animal rights advocate, and I believe in
Speaker 8: making a better world, So I don't want to keep
Speaker 8: monkeys in cages, and there's an option to have them
Speaker 8: run around the island with bracelets on.
Speaker 1: On its website. Our three Bio says we do not
Speaker 1: work with live primates. Alice tells me the logic for
Speaker 1: her being in Puerto Rico is.
Speaker 8: We wanted monkey access, and there's a lot of monkeys
Speaker 8: here that we can after negotiating with local companies that
Speaker 8: are like supervising them, we can walk up to them
Speaker 8: get some of their skin cells.
Speaker 1: Wired magazine reported after our call that Gilman posted a
Speaker 1: job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico to quote
Speaker 1: implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births in
Speaker 1: non human primates. So I don't know, it seems like
Speaker 1: they might start working with live primates. And also, just
Speaker 1: to be clear, in today's world, with today's science, for
Speaker 1: that organ sack to exist, some poor being has to
Speaker 1: give birth to a brain dead offspring. But as Alice
Speaker 1: keeps reminding me, she doesn't want to put living animals
Speaker 1: in pain, and she doesn't see these organ sacks as
Speaker 1: real monkeys, so she feels the ethics check out.
Speaker 8: Hypothetically, so you imagine COVID hits. A bunch of AI
Speaker 8: lab scientists already generate a hypothesis for what would be
Speaker 8: a good vaccine and start infusing these little room cabinets
Speaker 8: with these organ stacks, and in two hours we already
Speaker 8: have reactions and they're like self recursive, so you can
Speaker 8: keep updating whatever you're infusing into their body and like
Speaker 8: check out what all the organ system reactions are creating.
Speaker 8: By the time the first scientist walks in at six am,
Speaker 8: you already have basically multiple proof of concepts for vaccines,
Speaker 8: and we could actually have a COVID vaccine in two weeks.
Speaker 1: The scene feels like pure science fiction. Cabinets full of
Speaker 1: allegedly non sentient monkey bodies hooked up to AI, ready
Speaker 1: to test for lightning fast medical advances. Instead of a
Speaker 1: year and change in lockdown. In Alice's world, complex vaccines
Speaker 1: are just a few weeks away. That image is overwhelming.
Speaker 1: You know that William Gibson quote, The future is already here,
Speaker 1: it's just not evenly distributed. Alice is forcing me to
Speaker 1: confront a sci fi present. I didn't know existed and
Speaker 1: now I'm trying to get my bearings.
Speaker 8: This could mean things like designer organs, and now we
Speaker 8: can have Olympic lungs, and we can have extremely healthy
Speaker 8: organs where your genetics actually you know, your whole liver
Speaker 8: is going to consist of like cells that are from
Speaker 8: the beginning program to not form any diseases.
Speaker 1: Vcs and scientists in Silicon Valley have also been telling
Speaker 1: me that when autonomous cars take over, car crashes will
Speaker 1: go down and the number of legitimate organs available for
Speaker 1: donation will decrease significantly. To keep humans alive, these organs
Speaker 1: will need to come from somewhere. So why not organ bags.
Speaker 8: Say we grew a set of human organs and say,
Speaker 8: like a rich person orders a heart, we still have
Speaker 8: all of the other organs. There is nothing stopping me
Speaker 8: from donating the rest of them to someone who needs
Speaker 8: them in a wait list of one hundred thousand people
Speaker 8: instead of a car accident or a suicide.
Speaker 1: Alice blames the media for making people feel scared of
Speaker 1: the future when there are solutions around the corner. Remember
Speaker 1: she's half an Elon Musk.
Speaker 8: People hating on billionaires for investing in anti aging makes
Speaker 8: people want to hide working on anti aging and like
Speaker 8: the whiplash you get just for working on something scientific
Speaker 8: because of the propaganda that people see that was filmed
Speaker 8: by people who were also potentially genuinely afraid of the future.
Speaker 8: I think is kind of a gap I'm noticing between
Speaker 8: the rest of the world and the Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: She feels compelled to keep pushing humanity forward because the
Speaker 1: way she sees it, there's limited downside.
Speaker 8: Worst case scenarios. I say, millions of lives, and to me,
Speaker 8: that is a be worth taking, regardless of any kinds
Speaker 8: of blows that are going to come our way.
Speaker 1: I noticed that whenever we start talking about ethics or feasibility,
Speaker 1: she sways the conversation to how much good R three
Speaker 1: is doing, or about not putting cute monkeys in pain,
Speaker 1: or the cows and Cowshwitz an animal rights term for
Speaker 1: factory farms.
Speaker 8: I live in a contextual world where just because we
Speaker 8: don't talk about a lot of things, that doesn't mean
Speaker 8: they're not happening.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm on the receiving end of debate tactics,
Speaker 1: though I don't know. I wasn't on the debate club,
Speaker 1: but I was on the high school newspaper, and I
Speaker 1: do know how to press gently for facts. So fifty
Speaker 1: five minutes into our call, I just decided to talk
Speaker 1: about it. This idea. I keep hearing this persistent rumor
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley that there are people, maybe r through bio,
Speaker 1: working to make nonsentient clones of people's bodies. So then
Speaker 1: when your body at seventy or eighty or whenever has
Speaker 1: outgrown its use, you can snap your head onto a
Speaker 1: younger version of yourself. The more I talked to people
Speaker 1: in San Francisco about it, the more I heard people say, like,
Speaker 1: transferring one organ just isn't efficient, and ultimately, like a
Speaker 1: surgical like cut for where where you replace a head
Speaker 1: on a new body is actually much much more efficient
Speaker 1: and you're not asking an organ to adapt to like
Speaker 1: the circumstances of a body.
Speaker 8: Well, if I was to join you in your Sciphi
Speaker 8: speculations of the future, as long as we can figure
Speaker 8: out surgical infrastructure, it would be I would take I
Speaker 8: would probably be open to living in a younger, healthier
Speaker 8: set of organs in the future, and I think that's
Speaker 8: a desirable thing to have in the world.
Speaker 1: She keeps bringing it up.
Speaker 8: Would you get a new body if you wouldn't a
Speaker 8: younger one?
Speaker 1: And then this about full body replacements. And I also
Speaker 1: think that, like as you pointed out earlier, the ways
Speaker 1: that we embrace change is very slow. Right, Like the
Speaker 1: idea of getting a heart transplant initially was so foreign.
Speaker 8: I think head transplants are definitely a scary way of
Speaker 8: thinking about the future. Right. It feels like either like
Speaker 8: it sounds like a lot of people are going to
Speaker 8: be taken advantage of, and this is something either only
Speaker 8: available to the ridge but also somehow very horrible and
Speaker 8: four people are going to be taken advantage of, and
Speaker 8: like it just creates an ick. And so that's one
Speaker 8: example of like, no, we're not doing that.
Speaker 1: By the way, the thing is, I can't say head
Speaker 1: transplants or what Alice is working towards. I can't say
Speaker 1: that a company in stealth mode whose chief operating officer
Speaker 1: tells me that it's working towards an organ sack of
Speaker 1: a monkey with aspirations of making an organ sack of
Speaker 1: a human might want to sell you a clone so
Speaker 1: you can avoid death by cutting off your head and
Speaker 1: implanting it on a younger you. But the MIT Technology
Speaker 1: Review did because when they released a story in late
Speaker 1: March this year, over a month after I chat with Alice,
Speaker 1: they found this.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 1: Last September, Alice and her co founder John Schlowandorn presented
Speaker 1: at Abundance Longevity, a seventy thousand dollars per ticket event
Speaker 1: in Boston, and while that presentation was meant to be confidential,
Speaker 1: the article alleges the agenda leaked the name of our
Speaker 1: three session quote full body replacement. Alice and I talked
Speaker 1: for an hour and forty five minutes, but now it's
Speaker 1: time for her to go.
Speaker 8: I think we covered a lot of it. I wish
Speaker 8: people knew the perspective of how hard it is sometimes
Speaker 8: to be guiding a company based on like a moral compass,
Speaker 8: like we would be triple funded if we were not
Speaker 8: making decisions with certain moralities attacked. And I hope people
Speaker 8: get really excited about things that will save hundreds of
Speaker 8: millions of people's lives and explore and how to scale that.
Speaker 8: And I love all these intelligences in the world, and
Speaker 8: I hope that we can make a world better for
Speaker 8: all forms of intelligences and people to live healthier longer
Speaker 8: lives and think about infrastructure in more efficient ways.
Speaker 1: Some important points here. Our three Bio rejected the claims
Speaker 1: in the MIT Technology Review, giving the following repudiation to
Speaker 1: the outlet quote, any allegations of intent or conspiracy to
Speaker 1: create human clones or human beings with brain damage are
Speaker 1: categorically false. Alice did share with me a piece she
Speaker 1: liked better. That article m wired with a quote about
Speaker 1: the veterinarian posting. It came out days before the MIT
Speaker 1: Tech Review piece. It still focuses on their work with
Speaker 1: monkey skin cells, organ sacks for testing and transplants, and
Speaker 1: it even quotes an our three Bio investor saying, quote,
Speaker 1: if we can create a non sentient, headless bodyoid for
Speaker 1: a human being, that will be a great source of organs. Also,
Speaker 1: the week before this episode came out, we did a
Speaker 1: fact check and call with Alice. She asked us if
Speaker 1: we could postpone the episode. We declined. She told us
Speaker 1: all of this is theoretical and just her opinion. She
Speaker 1: also wants us to know that our three BI isn't
Speaker 1: working on organ sacks quote for now period. What are
Speaker 1: they doing? She won't say, though she did start the
Speaker 1: fact check and call by letting us know r III
Speaker 1: is now quote a federal asset. For me, the whole
Speaker 1: thing is a head trip. I started this quest trying
Speaker 1: to track down a rumor. Who was this company that
Speaker 1: had pitched investors on funding a business with a dream
Speaker 1: of full body replacement. After a lot of digging, I
Speaker 1: think it's fair to say we found it, and I
Speaker 1: heard the way one of its co founders talks about
Speaker 1: the future. Here's what I can tell you. The technology
Speaker 1: is nowhere near close to the promise, at least not yet.
Speaker 1: There are so many milestones, and for right now, even
Speaker 1: the first ones, those organ sacks made from monkey skin
Speaker 1: cells are all theoretical. I still don't know how to
Speaker 1: answer Alice's question, wouldn't you want to live in a
Speaker 1: younger body? I don't even know how to live in
Speaker 1: a world where that is a question, because the answer
Speaker 1: is maybe, but not that way. Sherlock Holmes always sank
Speaker 1: back into an ui, what he called the dull routine
Speaker 1: of existence whenever a case ended. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: where I am feeling unsatisfied and a little creeped out,
Speaker 1: because I thought I was in a detective case, but
Speaker 1: I was really in a sci fi novel, and all
Speaker 1: I can think is what I always think when I'm lost.
Speaker 1: I just need to get home next time on how
Speaker 1: to live forever.
Speaker 3: What our ancestors were eating five hundred years ago may
Speaker 3: have worked really well for them, but then our biology
Speaker 3: was perturbed by two hundred years of trauma.
Speaker 1: Let's do the credit. Skyline Drive is a production of
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This show is hosted and written
Speaker 1: by Me Mongage Artigulu, but I could never do this alone.
Speaker 1: The show is story edited by Mark Lotto, who told
Speaker 1: me to indulge my inner Encyclopedia Brown for this one.
Speaker 1: Lizzie Jacobs, my partner in solving crimes, is the EP
Speaker 1: on the show. I also have massive, massive help from
Speaker 1: the only kid who loved Sherlock Holmes more than me,
Speaker 1: Mary Philip Sandy, and our international man of Mystery science
Speaker 1: producer Mark Stephen Allen. This episode was mixed by Casey
Speaker 1: Holford As who also worked on the first season of Skyline.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Casey, with beautiful music from Botany Bliss,
Speaker 1: Samsa and the Zadi Records. We are so lucky to
Speaker 1: have these tunes. If you want to hear more we
Speaker 1: made you mixtape. Just check out the show notes. This
Speaker 1: show is executive produced from My Heart, but my good
Speaker 1: friends Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel from Kaleidoscope. We've got
Speaker 1: my co founder Oswold Listen also cost Us Lina's cost us.
Speaker 1: How could you leave us for Greece? We are going
Speaker 1: to miss you enjoy so much. Julia Nutter Our head
Speaker 1: of studio, Rachel Strom our wonderful lawyer and friend who
Speaker 1: somehow reviewed this episode and made it to the front
Speaker 1: page of the Liberties Instagram that in itself is a mystery. Also,
Speaker 1: thank you to the team here, Christy David, Dara Agne,
Speaker 1: Sheina calypso El Viney for the beautiful collage art. There
Speaker 1: are so many of you. I also want to give
Speaker 1: a little special thanks to all the kiddos out there,
Speaker 1: Henry Ruby, Julian Brendel, lou Baby, leon Enzo and Pearl Etour.
Speaker 1: You guys make us so happy. All my friends at iHeart,
Speaker 1: including Bob Connell, Will, Carrie, Nikki, Jason, Jerry and Moore,
Speaker 1: also Shanta and Sarah, my family in India, my family
Speaker 1: in the States, my cousin Roshni and Rohan, who promoted
Speaker 1: us to first cousins because of Carmen San Diego. The
Speaker 1: very biggest thanks to Lucas Adams, founder and editor of
Speaker 1: The New York Review of Comics, and the person who
Speaker 1: introduced me to the Hot Rock and the wonderful Donald
Speaker 1: Westlake Mysteries books that made me smile wide. A very
Speaker 1: big thank you to my cousin and our family playwright
Speaker 1: Akshay Srivastov, and also to his dog Dimmy, just because
Speaker 1: he's also great. And thank you to our pal Natalia Fiddleholts,
Speaker 1: who also lent us her acting chops. Thank you so much, Natalia.
Speaker 1: Just one last thank you to my Amma and my
Speaker 1: dad Lalita and Omesha Ticular who let me stay up
Speaker 1: so late and ordered pizza and we would watch Mysteries
Speaker 1: together even though I had school the next day. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for listening