The immortality bros: the new frontiers of health
The Slow Newscast
Alice Sandelson
4.6 • 894 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A city in Honduras is home to a start-up selling experimental gene therapies for $25,000 a dose. Now, those radical ideas are reaching the United States. What happens when biohacking leaves libertarian fringes… and reaches Capitol Hill?
Reporter: Patricia Clarke
Producer: Madeleine Parr
Sound design: Dominic Delargy
Artwork: Lola Williams
Executive Producer: Matt Russell
Editor: Jasper Corbett
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Observer. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, it's Matt and you're listening to the slow newscast from The Observer. |
| 0:15.0 | This week, The Price of Freedom. |
| 0:18.0 | For more than eight months, our technology reporter Patricia Clark has been investigating |
| 0:22.7 | tech entrepreneurs using themselves as human guinea picks, injecting themselves with experimental |
| 0:28.3 | treatments in experimental city nestled away in a tropical paradise. Since Patricia first reported |
| 0:35.2 | on these treatments, what once seemed like a fringe practice |
| 0:38.9 | is now finding its way to the steps of Capitol Hill. |
| 0:42.7 | It's a wild journey that ends in America, but starts at sea. |
| 0:46.3 | A few, all right. |
| 0:57.0 | A few miles off the coast of Thailand, a couple is toasting with champagne. |
| 1:04.0 | Because for the first time in their lives, they say they are truly free. |
| 1:09.0 | Small those out there who want to control people's lives through force, |
| 1:17.7 | here's my big finger to you. |
| 1:21.0 | You know where you can stick this. |
| 1:27.3 | Chad Elwitowski is a Bitcoin entrepreneur, and he's sitting alongside his partner, Supriny Tephtiet, or Nadia, as she calls herself. |
| 1:36.6 | The couple is lounging on the roof of their new home in the high seas, looking out across the vast expanse of the ocean back in March 2019. |
| 1:46.6 | It's a man-made island, an octagonal platform balanced on a 20-meter-high pillar, rising out of the ocean. |
| 1:56.2 | This structure is known as a sea stead, part experiment of engineering, part utopian dream. |
| 2:04.1 | Okay, I am currently in international waters where there are no laws other than the law of the sea. |
| 2:16.1 | Time to drop anchor. |
| 2:20.8 | There's just nothing out there. |
... |
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