The immortality bros: The business of living forever
The Slow Newscast
Alice Sandelson
4.6 • 894 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The tech millionaire Bryan Johnson once went viral for infusing himself with a litre of his 17-year-old son’s blood plasma. That experiment failed, but it hasn’t distracted him from his life’s mission: reversing ageing.
Now, the self-declared professional guinea pig has travelled to a libertarian free zone on a remote Caribbean island, to receive experimental gene therapy administered by a company called Minicircle.
In the crypto city of Próspera, Roatán, the Honduran government grants Minicircle regulatory freedom for medical experiments that are banned by the FDA in the US.
This is the story of biohacking… on steroids. What happens when you build a privately run, for-profit nation state? And what happens when that state becomes a playground for experimental medicine?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You know, the secret to a successful ad is not necessarily a crisp, clear and glossy voice that interrupts your podcast. |
| 0:08.8 | You can advertise your business on TikTok starting with nothing but your phone. |
| 0:12.8 | TikTok means business. |
| 0:22.9 | Tortus Tartas Tautus Hello, I'm Claudia and you're listening to the slow newscasts from Tautus. |
| 0:31.2 | This week, my colleagues Patricia Clark and Bashar Cummings investigate what happens when crypto-libertarian millionaires meet the people hoping to re-engineer the human body. |
| 0:42.5 | Over to Patricia. |
| 0:46.5 | On an island off the coast of Honduras, under a glittering Caribbean blue sky, a man has arrived for a procedure that he says could change |
| 0:57.0 | the future of humanity. Humans have a 120-year ceiling and so far no one can punch through it. |
| 1:04.8 | This is a journey in search of the fountain of youth. His skin is pale, almost translucent against the glare of the sun. |
| 1:15.3 | In some shots, he hides under a heavy black umbrella. |
| 1:19.1 | And he's wearing a t-shirt with the name of his campaign, or his business, or really both. |
| 1:25.7 | Don't die, it reads, in all caps. |
| 1:29.8 | This is Brian Johnson, age 47. |
| 1:34.5 | Or, if you believe his years-long experiment on his own body, age unknown. |
| 1:40.4 | Because Brian Johnson has made it his life's mission to age backwards. |
| 1:45.8 | He has submitted himself to countless forms of optimizations and enhancements, protocols as he calls them. |
| 1:53.1 | All right, we're ready to go, crew. |
| 1:54.9 | Rich dude doing all this crazy stuff for his health, plus blood boy, plus measuring night hemorrhections, |
| 2:00.7 | plus penis rejuvenation |
| 2:01.9 | with shock therapy. Now in Honduras doing gene therapy, yeah, it's quite a stack. |
| 2:08.0 | And he's here on the island of Rutan to defy death. |
| 2:25.0 | This could be the most powerful anti-aging therapy I've ever received. |
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