The Immortals – Ep 1: Dracula

Intrigue

BBC

True Crime, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Over the last 100 years, we’ve seen global life expectancy double. Could it happen again? Technology reporter and psychologist Aleks Krotoski explores the frontiers of the extreme longevity pioneers. They've made their money in Silicon Valley. And with their technology solutions - PayPal, Facebook, cryptocurrencies - they've ushered in the world that we live in today, with all its unintended consequences. Some of them now want to solve the "problem" of aging, or even death, and they are making bigger strides than we may think. Can they? Should they? Bryan Johnson is a technology success story. In 2013, he sold his company to PayPal for $400 million, and now spends his time - and $2m annually - on the search for eternal life. He believes he has found the secret - or, at least, can find it in the thousands of scientific articles he and his team sift through for their protocol of treatments. The most unusual of which is infusing Bryan’s veins with the plasma of young people. Has he discovered the fountain of youth? A Pillowfort production for BBC Radio 4 New episodes released Mondays. If you're in the UK, listen to the full series of Intrigue: The Immortals first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3WEQS5W

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts
0:06.0	You're about to listen to Intrigue The Immortals.
0:09.0	Episodes will be released weekly, but if you're in the UK,
0:12.0	the full series is available now, first on BBC Sounds.
0:17.0	What if I told you that death may not be inevitable?
0:23.0	Crazy idea, right?
0:25.0	Well, there was a kinda life cycle to some crazy ideas.
0:29.0	They start way out there, but within a couple of decades,
0:32.0	they are so much part of the furniture that we hardly even noticed them.
0:37.0	I'm talking about technology ideas, solving problems that we didn't know we had.
0:44.0	Everyone will have a computer in their pocket or on their wrist.
0:48.0	Remember how ridiculous that one sounded only two decades ago?
0:52.0	Then gifted scientists and upstart entrepreneurs disrupted things,
0:57.0	taking huge risks, forcing massive change,
1:00.0	determined that nothing would stop them.
1:03.0	We were so beguiled or befuddled that we hardly noticed quite how pervasive the idea
1:10.0	and the technology was becoming.
1:13.0	Until boom, it bumps up against something big like friendship or skills or democracy.
1:19.0	And suddenly, we see the unintended consequences and the missed opportunities
1:24.0	that we had to influence or question the way that idea and that technology developed.
1:32.0	Well, there is another really big idea emerging now.
1:38.0	The next big thing, which you have probably never heard of.
	...

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