Last night I started listening to The Immortals, a new podcast from BBC Radio 4 about Silicon Valley billionaires who to go great lengths to try to fight off aging and extend their lives as long as possible. I'm only through the first episode (but I'm already hooked!), which features 45 year old tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who believes the plasma of young people can help keep him youthful—he believes this so strongly that he's taken infusions of plasma from his 17-year-old son, and also given his own plasma to his father.
The Guardian recently published a piece about the podcast, which they describe as:
A fascinating and often terrifying new podcast delves into the lengths 'longevity superstars' will go to make 90 the new 50, from swapping blood with the young to designing the first 'post-humans.'
Here's another great excerpt from The Guardian:
"It took us ages to find somebody to talk to us," says technology reporter and psychologist Aleks Krotoski, who hosts the BBC Radio 4 series. "Strangely, people who take the blood of the young are a bit reserved … " But Johnson had just begun using an algorithm to prevent biological ageing, which sifts through all research on longevity to create the best treatment plan and he was using his own body as a petri dish for it. Doctors have told Johnson he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of an 18-year-old and he was up for talking about this. "He was very reserved at the beginning but then there was a moment," says Krotoski. "Suddenly I saw the geek in him: the delightfully obsessive, very clever [man]. He no longer felt 'other'; this was just his jam. If you follow him on Twitter, he's hilarious."
Johnson is just one of the extraordinary people Krotoski speaks to who are trying to defy death. It is a ludicrous, fascinating and at times terrifying investigation – one she started as part of her PhD in 2003. The dawn of the internet meant "it felt like all these sci-fi dreams could be made possible", including technological singularity – technology merging with humanity to create a "post-human existence". Ultimately, she says, this means "we shall be immortal beings". At the time, like everybody else, Krotoski wrote this off as "mad". Two decades later, though, the fringe idea is entering the mainstream: "It has become entrenched in Silicon Valley, particularly because technology has become so advanced in the last five years."
There are 10 episodes, each about 15 minutes long. About half are currently available without a subscription and the rest will eventually shift to free if you don't want to pay.
