Speaker 1: For all of human history, literally since the very first
moments our ancestors looked up at the night sky and
realized they were alive, there has been exactly one absolute,
ironclad guarantee, just one death. Death. Yeah, it is the
great equalizer. I mean you think about the most powerful
figures in antiquity, emperors who commanded millions, Pharaohs who literally
bangersted their entire kingdoms to build these massive mountains of
stone in the desert.
Speaker 2: Well, just hoping to take their power with them.
Speaker 1: Exactly. They possessed all the wealth in the known world.
They had absolute dominion over the earth. But no matter
what they did, no matter what alchemists they hired, or
what gods they prayed to, they all eventually ran out
of time.
Speaker 2: You couldn't buy your way out of that final biological contract.
Speaker 1: No, it is the defining limitation of the human condition.
And I want you to sit with us for a second.
What if that guarantee is about to expire?
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate question, And frankly, it's the most
disruptive concept our speed cheese has ever had to confront.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. We are genuinely thrilled. You're here
with us today as we unravel what is rapidly becoming
well the most profound scientific and economic shift in modern
human history.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, right out of the gate, we
are not talking about living a bit healthier here. No,
we aren't discussing Mediterranean diets or optimizing your cardio routine
to eke out an extra five years of fragile old age.
We're talking about something fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: Entirely different, because, according to recent biotech investment reports and
these highly sensitive analyzes coming out of Silicon Valley, the
wealthiest people on the planet figures controlling billions in liquid capital,
are placing the largest financial bets in the history of
human enterprise.
Speaker 2: And they aren't putting this capital into a new app
ecosystem right, or faster microprocessors or even orbital colonies. They
are investing in.
Speaker 1: You, specifically in decoding the microscopic biological infrastructure that runs
inside your cells. They are beginning to treat death not
as this inevitable act of nature, but well as a
software bug.
Speaker 2: And in the world of technology, bugs can.
Speaker 1: Be patched exactly so the roadmap for today's thrilling threads is,
without exaggeration, going to bend your perception of reality. Our
mission today is to thoroughly unpack the massive convergence of
generative artificial intelligence and cutting edge biology.
Speaker 2: It's a massive collision of fields, it really is.
Speaker 1: We're going to trace the billions of dollars currently flowing
into these high security, heavily guarded biotech labs aimed at
a process called cellular reprogramming.
Speaker 2: And we are going to critically examine a timeline that
sounds like pure science fiction but is currently driving very serious,
multi billion dollar allocation strategies.
Speaker 1: Right we're looking at projections coming from prominent futurist timelines,
people who have accurately predicted tech trends for decades, and
they're now suggesting that human immortality, or at least the
complete neutralization of aging as a terminal disease, could begin
as soon as the year twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 2: That twenty twenty nine timeline is really the anchor of
this entire movement, and it's crucial to understand what that
date actually represents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's unpack that.
Speaker 2: Because when futurists look at twenty twenty nine, they aren't
suggesting that on a random Tuesday in that year, a
pharmaceutical company is going to release a magic pill that
instantly makes you an invincible immortal.
Speaker 1: Which is what people always assume, right.
Speaker 2: But it's much more nuanced than that, and mathematically much
more fascinating. They are talking about reaching a very specific,
statistically defined tipping point known as longevity escape velocity or LV.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to push back on that a little bit,
or at least get you to clarify it, because when
I first read about longevity escape velocity in the futurist
timelines we gathered for today's research, the math almost felt
like a sleight of hand.
Speaker 2: It can feel that way, yet.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a paradox. How does a human outrun
their own biological clock?
Speaker 2: Well, it does sound counterintuitive until you map out the
accelration of medical technology. Yeah, right now, as you and
I are speaking and as you are listening to this,
medical science is making incremental advancements. Currently, for every year
you manage to stay alive, the aggregate improvements in medical
technology pharmaceutical surgical techniques, they might add a month or
two to your overall statistical life expectancy.
Speaker 1: So you're still aging faster than the science is advancing.
Speaker 2: Exactly the grim reaper is walking faster than you are running.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Longevity escape velocity is the precise tipping point where the
rate of scientific discovery accelerates past the rate of human
biological decay. It's the moment where for every single year
you survive, science adds more than one full year to
your remaining lifespan.
Speaker 1: The curve inverts.
Speaker 2: The curve completely inverts.
Speaker 1: So if I'm tracking this correctly and translating this for
the listener, if you manage to reach that specific threshold
and you live entirely through the year twenty thirty, the
medical breakthroughs that are achieved during twenty thirty will add
hypothetically a year and three months to your overall life expectancy. Yes,
so by living for a year, you actually gained three
months of net future time.
Speaker 2: That is the exact mechanism. It's akin to earning compound
interest on a principal balance, but the currency is your life.
And if we connect this to the broader trajectory of
human evolution, it changes the entire calculus of existence. If
your life expectancy stops decreasing and begins incrementally increasing, aging
ceases to be a terminal condition.
Speaker 1: It becomes a chronic, manageable state.
Speaker 2: Precisely. Yeah, this is why the influx of capital isn't
just about traditional medicine. This is about crossing a fundamental threshold.
We're looking at an era where generative AI can design
complex molecular therapeutics in a matter.
Speaker 1: Of weeks, processes that historically took decades of blind trial
and error.
Speaker 2: Right, we are decoding the literal software of aging to
reboot the human operating system.
Speaker 1: But that raises a massive looming question for you, the listener.
If this threshold is crossed, what does society look like
when the fundamental define rule of biology is broken?
Speaker 2: Are we truly looking at the end of aging and
the utopian golden era for humanity?
Speaker 1: Or and I think we have to look at this
with a highly critical eye. Are we looking at the
dawn of a dystopian biological caste system where.
Speaker 2: The ultra wealthy achieve indefinite life spans and the rest
of the global population is left to face natural mortality.
Speaker 1: Exactly, But before we get to the philosophy, we need
to look at the underlying science that makes this even
theoretically possible. Let's look at the shifting paradigm of how
we view aging itself.
Speaker 2: To understand the modern pursuit of longevity, we first have
to understand why the medical consensus of the twentieth century
was fundamentally flawed.
Speaker 1: The card Junkyard fallacy.
Speaker 2: Yes, the card Junkyard fallacy. For generations, biology operated on
a model that we might describe as purely mechanical degradation.
It was an oxidative wear and tear model.
Speaker 1: Right, the idea that the human body is basically an
incredibly complex biological machine. Right, If you start out in
your twenties, your cells dividing perfectly, your metabolism is highly efficient.
But just through the act of living, metabolizing oxygen, getting
exposed to background radiation, dealing with physical stress, the parts
just wear down. The engine rusts, teleomeir shortened free radicals
cause cellular damage, and eventually the structural integrity of the
machine just fails. It goes to the junkyard. It was
viewed as an inevitable and tropic process. Entropy always wins.
Speaker 2: That was the accepted dogma. But the recent pivot heavily
driven by what's known as the information theory of aging,
a concept rigorously championed in recent biotech reports flips that
dogma completely on its.
Speaker 1: Head, which is fascinating.
Speaker 2: It really is. The information theory of aging proposes that
the core issue isn't that your biological hardware is physically
broken beyond repair. Okay, the youthful code, the pristine original
DNA instructions for how to build and maintain a perfectly healthy,
resilient version of you, is still fully intact inside your cells,
even if you are eight years old. The blueprint hasn't degraded.
Speaker 1: That is a staggering realization, the idea that an eighty
year old genome theoretically contains the exact same uncorrupted architectural
clans as a.
Speaker 2: Twenty year old genus exactly the same.
Speaker 1: So if the blueprint is flawless, why does the building
fall apart.
Speaker 2: Because of how that blueprint is red We have to
move past the idea of physical wear and tear and
look at the epigeno. The epigeno right, If your DNA
is the underlying genetic code, the epigenome is the control
system sitting on top of it. It's the series of
chemical tags like methylation marks that dictate which genes are
turned on and which are turned off.
Speaker 1: It tells a cell how to behave yes.
Speaker 2: When you are young. This epigenetic control system is pristine.
A skin cell knows exactly how to be a skin cell.
A heart cell knows precisely how to be a heart cell.
Speaker 1: But over time that control system loses its precise.
Speaker 2: Calibration through decades of cellular division, environmental exposure, stress, and
just the sheer complexity of sustaining life. The epigenome a
cumulum noise.
Speaker 1: It's an information loss problem.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a scratch CD.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love this analogy. Let's really expand on this.
Speaker 2: So your DNA is the music burned onto the compact disc.
Speaker 1: Right, the perfect symphony of a young, healthy you exactly
the data.
Speaker 2: The music itself is perfectly intact, but over the years,
the physical surface of the CD gets scratched.
Speaker 1: Those scratches are the epigenetic noise.
Speaker 2: Precisely so, when the laser in the CD player, which
represents your cell's machinery trying to read the DNA, hits
those scratches, the music skips, it distorts.
Speaker 1: The reader loses its place on the genome.
Speaker 2: And when that epigenetic noise becomes loud enough, a specialized
cell starts to lose its identity. It forgets its primary functions.
Speaker 1: So a skin cell stops producing collagen as efficiently because
the epigenetic instructions are muddled by the scratches.
Speaker 2: A neuron misfires. That loss of cellular identity brought on
by epigenetic noise is what manifests biologically is aging.
Speaker 1: So if we accept this information theory of age, it
completely alters the battleground. We aren't trying to fight physical
entropy by replacing worn out parts.
Speaker 2: No, we are trying to solve the data recovery problem.
Speaker 1: We just need to figure out how to polish the scratch,
how to reset those epigenetic tags so the cell can
read its original, youthful blueprint.
Speaker 2: Again. We need to debug the biological software.
Speaker 1: But the challenge there seems insurmountable. I mean, human biology
isn't a simple computer program. There are billions of chemical
interactions happening in a single cell every.
Speaker 2: Second, every single second.
Speaker 1: How do you even begin to debug something that complex?
Speaker 2: You can't, not with the human mind. Right, the sheer
volume of biological data, the multidimensional complexity of protein folding
and cellular signaling, it's entirely beyond the computational limits of
human cognition.
Speaker 1: Even if you had a team of the brightest scientists
working for a millennium, they couldn't manually track the molecular
interactions required to reset the epigenome.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the great catalyst of this entire
thrilling threads exploration.
Speaker 1: The convergence of jet AI and biology.
Speaker 2: Yes, we are witnessing the birth of software two point
zero in the pharmaceutical space.
Speaker 1: I think when most people hear generative AI, they think
of large language models, writing an essay or generating a
piece of digital art from a text.
Speaker 2: Product right chet GPT style exactly.
Speaker 1: But what we found in the biotech investment reports is
that the industry is using generative architectures to write biological code.
They're using AI to solve the math of life itself.
It's a literal cheat code for biology.
Speaker 2: A prime example detailed in recent tech industry analyzes is
Google deepminds alpha fol three.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that.
Speaker 2: To truly appreciate the magnitude of alpha fol three, you
have to understand the historical bottleneck of biology, which is
protein folding. Okay, Proteins are the fundamental workhourses of your body.
They dictate everything. But a protein's function is determined entirely
by its three dimensional shape.
Speaker 1: How it folds dictates whether it acts as a structural
component in your muscle, or an enzyme digesting your food,
or an antibody fighting of virs.
Speaker 2: Exactly and mapping that shape used to be a monumental,
agonizingly slow process.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, a researcher might spend years, sometimes
their entire academic career, using complex techniques like X ray
crystallography just to determine the three D structure of one
single protein.
Speaker 2: Decades of work for a single molecular structure. Wow, Alpha
fold three obliterated that bottleneck. It utilizes deep learning to
predict the structure of all of life's molecules DNA, RNA,
and crucially complex ligands in a matter of seconds.
Speaker 1: Ligans being the triggers right.
Speaker 2: Yes, ligands are essentially the trigger molecules, the keys that
bind to a protein receptor to change its behavior. Alpha
fol doesn't just map the lock, it can design the
perfect molecular key to fit into it.
Speaker 1: What used to take the global scientific community fifty years,
the machine now executes in a blink in seconds. The
compression of scientific time is what makes that twenty twenty
nine predictions suddenly feel less like huge ubris and more
like a mathematical inevitability. And this isn't just theoretical modeling
running on a server somewhere. The reports we reviewed highlight
real world applications that are happening right now. Look at
in Silico medicine.
Speaker 2: They are the poster child for this software two point
zero revolution. Right.
Speaker 1: Let's detail that because mind blowing in.
Speaker 2: Silico is a perfect case study of how AI bypasses
traditional pharmacology. The old world of drug discovery was highly inefficient.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to create a novel therapeutic, you were
looking at an average of six years of fumbling in
the dark, synthesizing compounds, testing them in vitro, failing, tweaking,
and failing again.
Speaker 2: And that's before you even had a viable candidate ready
for preclinical animal trials. It was incredibly expensive guesswork.
Speaker 1: But in Silico didn't do that. They pointed their AI
platform at a devastating, currently fatal condition called idiopathic pulmonary.
Speaker 2: Fibrosis, a terrible disease.
Speaker 1: Where the tissue deep in your lungs becomes thick and scarred,
and over time the patient simply suffocates. Instead of spending
six years guessing at compounds, and Silico tasked their AI
with two distinct problems.
Speaker 2: First, identify a novel biological target driving this fibrosis.
Speaker 1: And second, design a completely new molecule from scratch that
will perfectly bind to that target and halt the scarring.
Speaker 2: They asked the AI to invent a molecule that had
never existed in nature.
Speaker 1: And the generative model went from a blank screen to
a viable, optimized preclinical drug candidate in just eighteen.
Speaker 2: Months, from six years down to eighteen months.
Speaker 1: And my understanding is that they achieved this massive acceleration
through the use of digital twins. Can you elaborate on
the computational weight of that, because simulating biology sounds wildly
resourced intensive.
Speaker 2: It is intensely demanding, requiring massive compute power, but the
logic is sound. A digital twin in this context is
a highly accurate virtual simulation of human biological processes.
Speaker 1: So instead of testing a chemical on a live mouse
and then hoping it translates to a live human mup, the.
Speaker 2: Chemical interaction on a digital model of human tissue. You
can run millions of simulated experiments, testing countless molecular variations,
observing how they interact with the digital epigenome. In a
matter of hours.
Speaker 1: You are essentially running billions of years of simulated evolution
in a server room over a weekend. Exact, I want you,
the listener, to just imagine the implications of that. We
are moving toward reality where before any doctor prescribes you
a physical intervention, they can run a simulation on a
perfectly accurate digital twin of your own specific biology.
Speaker 2: Right, your personal digital twin.
Speaker 1: They can test a million variations of a longevity therapeutic
on your digital liver, your digital heart, to see precisely
how your unique genetic makeup will react without risking a
single physical side effect.
Speaker 2: It creates the ultimate risk free sandbox for biological experimentation.
We now have the AI tools to map the software
of human biology, and we have the processing power to
navigate it.
Speaker 1: But identifying the target and designing the mall is only
half the battle.
Speaker 2: Right actually taking that code, reaching into the physical, messy
reality of the human body and initiating a hardware reboot
that is an entirely different frontier.
Speaker 1: It requires moving from digital simulations to physical cellular reprogramming,
and that transition is currently being fueled by the largest
concentration of private capital in scientific history.
Speaker 2: Which brings us directly to section two of our thrilling
threads deep dive, the hardware reboot and the massive financial
bets being placed.
Speaker 1: But to understand why these billionaires are pouring billions into this,
we have to look at the foundational scientific breakthrough that
made them believe it was possible. We have to go
back to twenty twelve to a researcher named Shinya Yamanaka.
Speaker 2: Doctor Yamanaka's work is the bedrock of the modern longevity movement.
He discovered a specific combination of four proteins now universally
known in the biotech sector as the Yamanaka factors.
Speaker 1: And what he found fundamentally shattered the rules of biology.
Speaker 2: He demonstrated that these four transcriptions factors act as a
literal biological factory reset button from mammalian cells.
Speaker 1: The experiment he ran is just staggering to think about
from the literature. He took an old, highly differentiated specialized
skin cell from an adult mouse.
Speaker 2: A cell that had a locked in identity and a
degraded epigenetic state, lots of scratches on the CD right.
Speaker 1: He introduced these four proteins to that old skin cell,
and it didn't just get a little healthier, It completely
reversed its biological age.
Speaker 2: It wiped the epigenetic slate clean. The factor scrubbed away
all the accumulated noise.
Speaker 1: But more importantly, the cell entirely forgot its specialized identity.
Speaker 2: It ceased to be a skin cell. It reverted all
the way back to a pluripotent stem cell, a completely blank,
unassigned biological unit, indistinguishable from the cells found in an
early stage embryo.
Speaker 1: It proved definitively that biological aging is not a one
way street. The air of time at the cellular level
can be reversed. I want the listener to really intern
the gravity of that, the physical matter that makes up
your body can be chemically instructed to unage itself back
to the very moment of inception.
Speaker 2: That eureka moment in twenty twelve completely broke the dam.
Speaker 1: Because the immediate inevitable question was, if you can reset
a single isolated cell in a peatrie dish, can you
figure out how to reset the complex matrix of cells
that make up an entire human being.
Speaker 2: And the pursuit of that answer is what birthed Altos Labs.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Altos Labs because this is where the immense,
almost limitless wealth of Silicon Valley fully intersected with this
biological frontier.
Speaker 2: In January twenty twenty two, Altos launched out of stealth mode,
backed by a staggering three billion dollars in seed funding.
Speaker 1: Three billion. To contextualize that, three billion dollars is the
largest initial funding round in the history of the biotechnology industry.
It dwarfs traditional pharmaceutical.
Speaker 2: Startups, and it was heavily backed by tech titans, most
notably Jeff Bezos and Uri Milner.
Speaker 1: With three billion dollars, you aren't just renting lab space
and hiring a few promising postdocs. You are buying a
monopoly on global genius.
Speaker 2: They assembled what is essentially the scientific dream team. They
poached Halbarn, pulling him away from his role as chief
scientific officer at the pharmaceutical giant GSK.
Speaker 1: They brought in Rick Klausner, the former director of the
National Cancer Institute.
Speaker 2: And crucially, they secured doctor Yamanaka himself as an unpaid
senior scientific advisor.
Speaker 1: The concentration of talent is unprecedented, but it's their mission
statement that reveals the true paradigm shift. Altoslabs is very
careful to state that they are not a traditional medicine company.
Speaker 2: Right. They aren't interested in developing better status to manage cholesterol.
Speaker 1: Or new insulin formulations to manage diabetes. Their singular overarching
focus is the complete mastery of cellular rejuvenation programming.
Speaker 2: They want to control the biological clock itself.
Speaker 1: The theoretical goal is to take a failing organ let's
say a seventy year old human heart that has suffered
my cardiol infractions, is laden with scar tissue and is
struggling to maintain a viable ejection fraction, and.
Speaker 2: Expose that localized tissue to a perfectly calibrated cocktail of
reprogramming factors.
Speaker 1: The objective isn't to treat the symptoms of heart failure,
but to instruct those specific cardiac cells to epigenetically revert
back to how they functioned when the patient was twenty
five years old.
Speaker 2: It sounds miraculous, and the underlying math suggests it is possible.
But we have to introduce a massive dose of reality here.
This is the razor's edge of the science.
Speaker 1: This is the danger.
Speaker 2: The danger inherent in cellular reprogramming is monumental, and it's
a primary reason this isn't already in human trials. We
mentioned earlier that the Yamanaka factors make a cell forget
its age, but in doing so, they also make it
forget its identity.
Speaker 1: Right, and if you are an adult human, your cells
need their identities precisely.
Speaker 2: If you run that biological factory reset for even a
fraction of a second too long, the cell loses its
differentiation entirely. It drops back to a blank slate.
Speaker 1: If the cells in your heart forget how to be
cardiac tissue, your heart stops beating.
Speaker 2: If the cells in your vascular system forget how to
form blood vessels, you suffer catastrophic hemorrhaging. It causes massive
system wide cellular amnesia.
Speaker 1: And from what I read in the investment risk analyses,
the danger isn't just that the cells stop working. It's
what those blank slate cells start doing instead.
Speaker 2: Right, Because they don't just sit there.
Speaker 1: If you have a cluster of pluripotent stem cells, sitting
in an adult body with limitless potential to grow, but
no epigenetic instructions telling them what to grow and do.
They don't just sit there peacefully.
Speaker 2: They do what stem cells do best. They multiply, rapidly
and chaotically. In animal models, when in vivo reprogramming isn't
perfectly controlled, these reset cells rapidly develop into tarotomas.
Speaker 1: I have to be honest. Reading about tarotomas was pure
biological horror. It is grim for the listener who isn't familiar.
A teratoma is essentially a monster tumor. Because the reprogram
cells have the genetic blueprint to become anything, but no
active instructions, they just start chaotic random tissue generation.
Speaker 2: You end up with aggressive tumors made of bizarre conglomerates
of tissue.
Speaker 1: Bone, muscle, hair, follicles, and fully formed teeth growing inside
the chest, cavity or the liver.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate manifestation of biological chaos. You attempt
to cure the organism of aging, and instead you initiate rampant,
monstrous on coogenesis. You trigger cancer.
Speaker 1: This is the danger zone, the defining challenge for Altos
Labs in every other company in this space is how
to navigate this razor's edge? How do you extract the
youth restoring properties of the Yamanaka factors without unleashing the terratomas.
Speaker 2: The proposed solution, and this is where the precision of
AI modeling becomes absolutely critical, is a highly delicate process
called partial reprogramming.
Speaker 1: Right partial reprogramming.
Speaker 2: The scientists working on this describe it with a rather
poetic analogy. Instead of executing a full system reset, to
dip the cell into the fountain of youth and pull
it out right before it drowns.
Speaker 1: I love that visual So how does that work? In practice?
Speaker 2: The mechanism of partial reprogramming is essentially an epigenetic pulse.
Instead of bathing the target tissue in the Amanaka factors
continuously until the cells regress to a completely embryonic state,
you turn the factors on for a highly specific, strictly
regulated duration.
Speaker 1: Perhaps just a few days exactly just long enough to
polish the epigenetic noise, clear the scratches on the CD,
but short enough that the cell doesn't lose its memory.
Speaker 2: The transient pulse clears away the accumulated degradation, but stops
before the cell sheds its core identity. The cardiac cell
remains a cardiac cell. It simply begins to express its
genes with the efficiency and vitality of a young cardiac cell.
Speaker 1: And we know this isn't purely speculative because the successes
coming out of the animal trials are staggering. By utilizing
partial reprogramming techniques, researchers have successfully extended the overall lifespan
of projeric mice mice genetic engineered to age rapidly.
Speaker 2: But even more impressively, they have achieved localized rejuvenation.
Speaker 1: They have restored vision in older blind mice by reprogramming
the complex cells of the optic nerve, essentially regrown connections
that were thought to be permanently degraded. They've healed spinal cords.
Speaker 2: The data is robust, but translating a transient epigenetic pulse
from a highly controlled mouse model into a messy, infinitely
complex human physiology is the multi billion dollar hurdle.
Speaker 1: But if they do it, If Altos Labs and their
competitors can perfect in vivo partial reprogramming for humans, the
societal implications are almost impossible to fully map out.
Speaker 2: We are no longer talking about simply pushing the average
human lifespan closer to the theoretical maximum of one hundred and
twenty years. We are talking about fundamentally decoupling chronological age
from biological age.
Speaker 1: I want to paint a picture for you, the listener,
What does society look like when that happens. Imagine a
society where you have individuals who are chronologically nine or
one hundred years old, possessing a century of a crude wisdom,
emotional intelligence, and capital warre.
Speaker 2: But they're walking around in the pristine, biologically resilient bodies
of forty year olds.
Speaker 1: Exactly, they aren't frail, they don't suffer from cognitive decline.
They're playing competitive tennis, launching entirely new fifty year career arcs,
and participating in society with peak vitality. It shatters every
assumption we have about retirement, economic productivity, and generational turnover.
Speaker 2: It completely rewrites the social contract. But while the billionaires
funding ALTO slabs are content to build massive research campuses
and wait a decade or more for the FDA to
approve partial reprogramming therapeutics, there is a subculture of individuals
who flatly.
Speaker 1: Refuse to wait, which introduces a fascinating parallel track. In
this longevity race, we are seeing the rise of the
ultimate human guinea pigs and the birth of longevity as a.
Speaker 2: Service Section three of our discussion.
Speaker 1: This is where the science fiction intersects with extreme modern
day biohacking, because some people look at the twenty thirties
timeline and say, I might not make it that long.
I need to intervene right now.
Speaker 2: And the undisputed king of this extreme optimization movement is
a software entrepreneur named Brian Johnson.
Speaker 1: Based on the profiles and the investment reports, Johnson is
widely considered to be the most measured quantified human being
in history.
Speaker 2: Johnson represents an entirely different philosophy of longevity. He isn't
waiting for a magic genetic bullet to reset his biology.
He's a tech founder who sold his payment processing company
for roughly eight hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1: And rather than retiring to an island or buying sports franchises,
he decided to dedicate his vast personal wealth and his
own physical body to one singular, obsessive goal.
Speaker 2: Arresting the aging process through sheer algorithmic force.
Speaker 1: He currently spends upwards of two million dollars every single
year exclusively on maintaining and optimizing his biological systems. Two
million dollars a year on your own body.
Speaker 2: He calls this endeavor project blueprint, and I think calling
this a lifestyle or a health regimen is wildly inadequate.
Speaker 1: It's extreme.
Speaker 2: It is the application of strict machine logic to a
human organism. Yeah, the level of granule discipline he adheres
to is frankly unfathomable for an average person.
Speaker 1: Every single calorie is measured, He eats within a hyperspecific,
highly restricted time window. He sleeps alone in a heavily
modified environment engineered to maintain the exact optimal temperature for
maximizing deep sleep phases.
Speaker 2: He ingests over one hundred meticulously calibrated supplements and pharmaceuticals
every day, and.
Speaker 1: He undergoes constant invasive monitoring, tracking more than two thousand
specific biomarkers.
Speaker 2: His objective is distinct from the cellular reprogramming we discussed
with Altos. He isn't currently trying to genetically rewrite his
cells to make them younger. His stated goal is to
slow his biological rate of aging down to absolute zero.
Using perfect data driven maintenance.
Speaker 1: He wants to ensure that his forty seven year old
organs function with the exact same metabolic efficiency the lack
of inflammation as eighteen year old organs. He is trying
to perfectly preserve the hardware, and if.
Speaker 2: You analyze the clinical data his team publishes, the biometric
marker suggests that his regiment is highly effective by many
objective cardiovascular and metabolic measurements. His biological age is significantly
lower than his chronological age.
Speaker 1: He is essentially proving a concept. If you have infinite
financial resources, a dedicated team of clinicians, and absolute unwavering discipline,
you can manually override the standard decay cer of the
human body.
Speaker 2: But here is where Johnson's personal obsession pivots into a
highly controversial commercial enterprise.
Speaker 1: Right Because recently Johnson realized that the data he was
gathering shouldn't just be confined to his own body, he
decided to productize the blueprint.
Speaker 2: He transitioned from an experiment into an industry. He successfully
raised sixty million dollars from a roster of very high
profile influential.
Speaker 1: Investors, people with massive reach, indicating a desire to scale
this concept. And recently he launched what he calls the
Immortals Program.
Speaker 2: The Immortals Program.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a comic book, but it's a real
corporate offering. This is the purest definition of longevity as
a service, and the barrier to entry the price tag
is an astonishing one million dollars per year.
Speaker 2: It is positioned as an exclusive, white glove concierge service,
initially limited to a handful of ultra wealthy individuals.
Speaker 1: For that million dollars, they receive the exact bespoke, heavily monitored,
data driven optimization protocol that Johnson has pioneered.
Speaker 2: This development forces a deeply uncomfortable conversation about the future
of healthcare. We are actively witnessing the commercialization of extreme longevity.
Does extreme prohibitively expensive biological discipline equate to purchasing extra.
Speaker 1: Decades of life time travel for the rich right?
Speaker 2: And if it does, the ethical implications are staggering. We
are looking at a future where optimal health and potentially
immortality itself is heavily.
Speaker 1: Paywalt, I really want to throw this out to you
the listener, to chew on, how does the concept of
million dollar a year longevity sit with you.
Speaker 2: It's a tough pill to swallow.
Speaker 1: If you possessed absolute certainty that a clinical protocol existed,
a verifiable way to keep your body perfectly healthy, perfectly
vibrant indefinitely, but the cost of access was a million
dollars annually. How does that fundamentally change your perception of
wealth inequality?
Speaker 2: Throughout all of human history, the ultimate consolation for the
working class has been wealth. The rich eventually died just
like the rest of us.
Speaker 1: What happens to the social fabric when they don't? When
wealth literally buys time.
Speaker 2: It threatens to create a permanent biological divide, a speciation
event driven by economics.
Speaker 1: But it is important to note that not all the
major players injecting capital into the space share Johnson's extreme
algorithmic philosophy or his desire to productize intense daily regimens.
Speaker 2: No, there are highly influential pragmatists taking a slightly different,
perhaps more universally applicable approach Hit.
Speaker 1: Or Sam Altman, right, the CEO of Open AI. Altman's
involvement is fascinating because he approaches the problem with a
different set of parameters.
Speaker 2: He personally invested one hundred and eighty million dollars of
his own liquid wealth into a longevity startup called Retro.
Speaker 1: Biosciences, emptying his personal bank account for this. And what
stood out in the analyzes of Retro's strategy is that
Altman isn't publicly claiming he wants to live forever.
Speaker 2: At least that isn't the near term objective.
Speaker 1: His goal is highly specific, incredibly grounded, and arguably much
more relatable to the average person.
Speaker 2: Altman's stated objective for retro Biosciences is to reliably add
ten healthy years to the average human lifespan. He is
specifically targeting the degradation that occurs at the very end
of life.
Speaker 1: Think about the final decade. For most people in the
developed world today, it is rarely a period of vibrant activity.
Those years are often spent in nursing homes, struggling with cascading,
painful chronic diseases.
Speaker 2: Battling eurodegenerative conditions like dementia, and suffering a profound loss
of mobility and independence.
Speaker 1: Altman's thesis is, let's reclaim those final ten years. Let's
compress the period of morbidity so you live vibrantly until
the very end.
Speaker 2: And Retrobiosciences isn't trying to achieve that by selling expensive
supplement stacks. They are pouring that one hundred and eighty
million dollars into massive, high throughput laboratories dedicated to advancing
specific cellular therapies.
Speaker 1: Two of their major targets are plasma rejuvenation and induced autophogy.
Can we break down what those actually mean? Let's start
with autopogy.
Speaker 2: Patophagy is essentially your body's intrinsic cellular recycling system. The
word literally means self eating. Okay, Inside your cells, proteins
are constantly being manufactured and utilized. But occasionally these proteins misfold,
they become damaged.
Speaker 1: And as we age, our cells become less efficient at
clearing out this molecular garbage.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the misfolded proteins and metabolic waste accumulate, turning into
a sort of toxic cellular Sludge's terrible it is this
sludge triggers inflammation and drives the aging process. Retrobiosciences is
aggressively researching pharmacological ways to artificially stimulate this filtration.
Speaker 1: System to force the body to massively upregulate autophogy and
clear the toxic sledge out of our cells.
Speaker 2: It's like turning up the biological incinerator to burn off
the garbage.
Speaker 1: So zooming out. We are looking at a multi front
war against aging. On one flank, you have the extreme
optimizers like Johnson, proving that algorithmic discipline can slow the decay.
Speaker 2: On another flank, you have the reprogrammers like Bezos and
Altos labs trying to rewrite the epigenetic code.
Speaker 1: And in the middle pragmatists like alt men trying to
clean up the cellular environment. It is a modern day
Manhattan Project or a biological space race, but instead of
building rockets to escape the gravity of Earth, they are
building biological lifeboats to escape the gravity of mortality.
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal mobilization of capital and intellect, but
we have to introduce the friction here in section four
or of our deep dive.
Speaker 1: Yes, the Trojan horse.
Speaker 2: Because as much money as Silicon Valley pours into these labs,
biology remains stubbornly messy and unpredictable. When you attempt to
hot wire millions of years of evolutionary programming, the system
often crashes.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a crucial part of our analysis,
the failures, the bureaucratic roadblocks, and how these companies are
attempting to hack the regulatory system.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the failures, because the media narrative hasn't
always been one of inevitable triumph.
Speaker 1: No, some of the early highly publicized investments in this
space crashed and burned spectacularly. We need to look at
the transition from what the industry calls hardware one point
zho to the current software two point zero era.
Speaker 2: In the early days of the longevity boom, a lot
of capital flowed into companies like Unity Biotechnology. Their primary
scientific premise was targeting what they call zombie cells.
Speaker 1: The technical term is sinescent cells. These are cells that
have suffered damage, perhaps to their DNA, and to prevent
them celves from turning cancerous, they enter a state permanent arrest.
Speaker 2: They stopped dividing, but they refused to undergo apoptosis. They
refused to die. Instead, they just sit in the tissue,
secreting a highly inflammatory cocktail of chemicals that damages the
healthy cells around them.
Speaker 1: Unity's approach was to develop synolytics, drugs designed to aggressively
hunt down and kill off these zombie cells with blunt instruments.
Speaker 2: It sounds like a solid strategy clear out the toxic cells,
but their approach was essentially a blunt instrument. They tried
to develop small molecule drugs that would systemically wipe them.
Speaker 1: Out, and when they finally reached human clinical trials, particularly
for osteoarthritis and the knee, the drugs largely failed to
demonstrate significant efficacy. It just wasn't precise enough.
Speaker 2: And when those phase two trials failed, unity stock price plummeted.
The financial fallout was significant, but the media reaction was
even more telling.
Speaker 1: There was a palpable wave of skepticism across the mainstream press.
Speaker 2: You saw countless op eds and articles essentially mocking the effort.
The narrative was, see you can't cheat. The tech billionaires
wasted their money playing god and biology ie.
Speaker 1: But the analysis we were looking at suggests the media
completely misread the situation. They were judging the entire future
of longevity based on the failure of a hardware one
point zero blunt instrument.
Speaker 2: They entirely missed the massive tidal wave of software two
point zero that was building right behind it.
Speaker 1: Precisely while the skeptics were doing victory laps over the
failure of an early synalytic drug. Companies operating in the
software two point zero space, like in silico medicine, which
we discussed earlier, were quietly proving that the paradigm had
permanently shifted.
Speaker 2: They weren't relying on human guesswork to attack zombie cells.
They were using generitive AI to design completely novel, hyper
precise molecular interventions.
Speaker 1: That drug for pulmonary fibrosis, the one designed entirely by
AI from a blank screen. It didn't just work in
a digital simulation, it worked in animal models, and recently
it successfully advanced into phase two human clinical trials.
Speaker 2: This point cannot be overstad and artificial intelligence invented a
therapeutic molecule that had never previously existed in the universe,
and that molecule is actively being tested inside living, breathing
human patients right now.
Speaker 1: It is definitive, undeniable proof that machine intelligence can navigate
our biology far more effectively than human cognition can.
Speaker 2: But and this is the massive roadblock. Even with perfect
generative AI, and even with infinite Silicon Valley capital, there
is an enormous logistical and legal barrier standing between the
lab and the consumer.
Speaker 1: And it's not a scientific problem, it's a bureaucratic one.
The FDA, the.
Speaker 2: Food and Drug Administration, and equivalent regulatory bodies globally operate
on a very strict, historically entrenched framework of what constitutes
a disease.
Speaker 1: And under the current regulatory guidelines, the FDA explicitly does
not recognize aging as a disease. No.
Speaker 2: Aging is classified as a natural, inevitable biological process. Therefore, legally,
you cannot design a clinical trial or a plot for
regulatory approval for a drug whose stated purpose is to
cure aging.
Speaker 1: You certainly can't market a pill and put immortality on
the label. The FDA would shut you down before the
ink was dry.
Speaker 2: So if you are a biotech CEO and your AI
has just designed a breakthrough molecule that demonstrably reverses the
epigenetic clock and rejuvenate cellular tissue, but the federal government
says you cannot legally sell an anti aging drug, what
is your move?
Speaker 1: You use a hack, You deploy the industry's brilliant, incredibly
strategic loophole, the trojan horse.
Speaker 2: The trojan horse strategy is a masterpiece of regulatory navigation.
Speaker 1: So how does it work.
Speaker 2: If you possess a therapeutic that comprehensively rejuvenate sells, you
don't walk into the FDA headquarters and announce we have
discovered the fountain of youth. Instead, you apply to run
clinical trials for a highly specific, universally recognized disease that
happens to be a direct symptom of the aging process.
Speaker 1: Right, You approach the regulators and say, we have zero
interest in curing aging. However, we have developed a highly
effective treatment for ideopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or we.
Speaker 2: Have a novel therapeutic for age related macular degeneration or
chronic kidney failure or muscular frailty.
Speaker 1: Exactly. You target a localized catastrophic failure of age tissue,
and the FDA evaluates the drug purely on its clinical
efficacy for that specific localized disease.
Speaker 2: If your cellular rejuvenation therapeutic successfully clears the fibrosis in
the patient's lung by resetting those specific lung cells to
a younger, healthier epigenetic state, the FDA will approve it.
They will legally sanction it as a vital lung medication.
Speaker 1: But here's the mechanism of the trojan horse. Once a
drug has cleared safety trials and is legally approved for
the market for one specific condition, licensed physicians possess the
legal authority to prescribe that drug off label for entirely
different conditions.
Speaker 2: This is where the entire system gets bypassed.
Speaker 1: The drug gets its official FDA stamp of approval solely
for treating lungs. But the broader medical community, the longevity clinics,
the anti aging dot com they all read the scientific literature.
They know the drug is actually a systemic cellular age
reversal agent.
Speaker 2: So they immediately begin prescribing it off label to their patients.
To rejuvenate the cardiovascular system, to repair the liver, to
approve skin elasticity, to stave off cognitive decline.
Speaker 1: The anti aging miracle drug successfully sneaks into the global
medical supply chain, completely hidden inside the wooden horse of
a specific disease treatment.
Speaker 2: It is an elegant circumvention. The FDA's rigid structure can
slow the deployment of these therapeutics, but through off label prescribing,
it cannot stop them. The underlying generative science is advancing
too rapidly for twentieth century regulatory frameworks to contain.
Speaker 1: However, even utilizing the trojan horse strategy, the FDA approval
pipeline still requires years of multi phase clinical trials. And
if there is one universal truth about the ultra wealthy
individuals funding this research, it is that they are not
known for their.
Speaker 2: Patients, especially when the biological clock on their own mortality
is taking relentlessly.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a geopolitical reality that we have
to discuss the concept of offshore lifeboats.
Speaker 2: If you are a billionaire operating with a net worth
of fifty billion dollars and you know that technology exists
to reset your up a genome, you are not going
to sit in a waiting room filling out FDA paperwork
in Washington, DC while you're telemere shortened and your cells degrade.
Speaker 1: You are going to leverage your capital to bypass the
nation state entirely. The data indicates that massive amounts of
funding are flowing into building stud of the art biological
research and treatment facilities in offshore.
Speaker 2: Jurisdictions, places that simply do not ask as many regulatory questions.
They are actively constructing parallel sovereign medical systems.
Speaker 1: We are talking about jurisdictions in the Caribbean, special economic
zones in Central America, or advanced medical free zones in
places like you buy, where the regulatory red tape is thin,
highly flexible, or easily influenced by massive capital injection.
Speaker 2: Imagine the geopolitical implications of this.
Speaker 1: If a definitive breakthrough through in cellular reprogramming occurs tomorrow.
If Altaslab successfully develops the Yamanaka pulse for humans, but
the US government dictates that it requires a ten year
longitudinal safety study before it can be administered domestically, the
ultrawealthy will simply board their private jets.
Speaker 2: They will fly to these heavily fortified offshore longevity clinics,
receive the reprogramming treatments immediately, and return home biologically younger.
Speaker 1: We are looking at a future where biological sovereignty untethers
itself from traditional national boundaries. The laws of biology will
be dictated by the laws of capital.
Speaker 2: The scientific consensus is shifting rapidly. The question for the
individuals funding this research is no longer whether the biological
code can be hacked and rewritten. Genitive AI has already
proven that.
Speaker 1: It can The real pressing question is can you afford
a seat on the lifeboat before your time runs out?
Speaker 2: But before we get entirely swept away by the momentum
of the science, the AI models, and the billions of dollars,
We need to take a hard, deliberate pause.
Speaker 1: We need to wade into the deep end of the
moral implications. Because section five of our discussion today confronts
the ultimate unavoidable question. We have to examine the Musk
paradox and the philosophy of death itself.
Speaker 2: This is a vital pause because almost all of the
biotech investment literature, the futurist projections, and the capital flowing
into Silicon Valley, operates on one massive, unquestioned assumption that
death is inherently bad and living forever is inherently good.
Speaker 1: But just because human ingenuity can cheat death, does that
mean we absolutely should. There is a profound, deeply unsettling
dark side to immortality, one that rarely makes it into
the glossy optimistic pitch DEGs of longevity startups.
Speaker 2: It's an ethical dilemma that requires serious critical thinking. Elon
Musk articulated the specific danger perfectly, which is why it's
often referred to in these circles as the Musk paradox.
Speaker 1: Musk, despite his involvement in incredibly futuristic technologies, strongly argues
that it is fundamentally necessar for human beings to die.
Speaker 2: His rationale isn't religious, it's psychological and sociological. He points
out that human beings very rarely change their deeply entrenched minds.
Speaker 1: As people age. They don't typically evolve their core world views,
they solidify them.
Speaker 2: If people live indefinitely, society runs the very real risk
of becoming completely ossified, rigid, frozen in time.
Speaker 1: I want you listening right now to really envision the
dystopian reality of that. Imagine a world where the CEOs
who built the fossil fuel monopolies, the politicians who radical
new ideas simply cannot take root in a system where
the old guard never leaves the stage.
Speaker 2: From a purely evolutionary standpoint, Nature designed us with an
expiration date for a reason. Death, as brutal as it
is to the individual, is the ultimate mechanism of macro innovation.
Speaker 1: It sweeps the board clean, It forcibly, inevitably redistributes wealth,
power and influence. It mandates turnover allowing the next generation
to upgrade the species and adapt to new environments.
Speaker 2: If we use AI to suddenly conquer death, we might
accidentally assassinate human progress. We trade dynamic, chaotic, necessary evolution
for comfortable, endless stagnation.
Speaker 1: We risk turning human civilization into a global museum of people,
perfectly preserved, never changing, never making room for the new.
Do we want to be a museum? Does a healthy
society require an expiration date to function?
Speaker 2: It is a heavy, almost paralyzing philosophical argument. It forces
us to weigh the value of the individual against the
progress of the species.
Speaker 1: But, and this is where the conversation always inevitably turns
on its head. Philosophy is incredibly abstract. It is easy
to debate the intellectual merits of generational turnover and evolutionary
progress when you're sitting in a comfortable armchair, perfectly healthy.
Speaker 2: Exactly abstract. Philosophy evaporates entirely when the reality of death
enters your immediate personal orbit. When it is the hospital bed.
Speaker 1: Reality, when it is your mother's mind slowly fading away
from Alzheimer's, when it is your child facing a terminal diagnosis,
or when it is you sitting in a sterile doctor's office,
looking at a scan that tells you your time is up.
Speaker 2: In that moment, listening to the rhythmic, terrifying hum of
a heart monitor. Do you care about the broader sociological
need for innovation? Do you care about Max Planck's theories
on generational turnover?
Speaker 1: Or do you just desperately, with every fiber of your being,
want more time.
Speaker 2: The drive to survive is the most fundamental code written
into our biology, and if you look at the entire
sweeping scope of human history, it is defined by one
core unifying trait. We relentlessly rebel against our original design.
Speaker 1: Nature didn't give us wings or the biological capacity for flight,
so what did we do. We studied aerodynamics, We manipulated physics,
We build airplanes, and we touched the sky.
Speaker 2: Nature didn't build our bodies to survive the freezing temperatures
of winter, So we tained fire, We build heated shelters,
and we conquered the cold.
Speaker 1: Every major leap in human civilization has been a bold
refusal to accept our biological limitations.
Speaker 2: Seeing through that lens. Utilizing generative AI and cellular reprogramming
to conquer death isn't some unnatural, horrific aberration. It is
the natural, logical continuation of exactly who we are as
a species.
Speaker 1: It is the final ultimate rebellion against a universe that
constantly seeks to break us down through entropy. It is
humanity finally deciding that we possess the tools, the intelligence,
and the audacity to rewrite the hardest, most unforgiving rule
of all.
Speaker 2: It is, in a very real way, humanity finally deciding
to leave the cradle, the ultimate defiance of nature.
Speaker 1: It is a powerful framing. We have covered a massive
expanse of intellectual and scientific ground today in this thrilling
threads exploration.
Speaker 2: We began by tearing down the outdated mechanical car Junkyard
myth of aging, replacing it with the profound realization that
aging is simply epigenetic noise.
Speaker 1: Scratches on a perfectly encoded biological CD. We explored the
sheer world altering processing power of generative AI models like
Alpha fold three, acting as a literal cheak code for biology,
designing novel therapeutics in months rather than decades.
Speaker 2: We examined the staggering three billion dollar bets being placed
by titans like Jeff Bezos and altoslabs to master the
Yamanaka factors.
Speaker 1: Attempting to balance on the terrifying razor's edge between the
fountain of youth and the horror of terotomas and cellular amnesia.
We dove into Brian Johnson's extreme algorithmic quest to slow
aging to zero and the controversial reality of million dollar
immortality subscriptions.
Speaker 2: We unpack the brilliant trojan horse strategy that the biotech
industry will utilize to slip these eight reversal cures past
the rigid bureaucracy of the FDA and the geopolitical implications
of offshore biological lifeboats.
Speaker 1: And finally, we tangled with the immense weight of the
Musk paradox, the terrifying possibility that an immortal society might
inevitably devolve into a stagnant, frozen society incapable of progress.
Speaker 2: But before we wrap up today's analysis of these sources
and p I want to leave you with a final,
highly provocative thought, something that wasn't directly debated in the
investment reports or the futurist timelines, but that naturally inevitably
emerges from all this data. Let's hear it It is
a chilling question regarding the nature of human motivation itself.
If death is the only absolute boundary that gives our
time its scarcity and therefore it's intrinsic value, what happens
to human drive in an endless life?
Speaker 1: Think about your own life, how often we put things
off because we assume we have time, and how the
ticking clock forces us to eventually act.
Speaker 2: If you possess a guaranteed thousand years to finish a
creative project, or to mend a broken relationship, or to
simply look someone in the eye and say I love you,
do you ever actually get around to doing it?
Speaker 1: Does infinite time breed infinite procrastination without the shadow of
the picking plock? Do we lose the very urgency that
makes human life meaningful? That is incredibly heavy. A thousand
years to write the Great American novel so you just
decide to binge watch television for a century instead.
Speaker 2: Really makes you wonder if the harsh limitation of life
is the exact ingredient that gives it its flavor.
Speaker 1: So we want to know where you stand. We have
unspooled a lot of reality bending, paradigm shifting concepts today.
If the FDA miraculously approved a perfect, flawlessly safe cellular
reprogramming anti aging pill tomorrow, and you had the financial
means to afford it, would you take it?
Speaker 2: Would you willingly sign up for biological immortality? Or do
you fundamentally agree with Elon Musk that society and perhaps
the human soul itself, requires an expiration date in order
to truly evolve.
Speaker 1: It is undoubtedly the most important question our generation will
ever have to answer. And if the futurists are right
about longevity escape velocity, the year twenty twenty nine is
approaching incredibly fast. The choice is coming whether we are
ready for it or not.
Speaker 2: Leave us a comment and let us know your final verdict.
Would you take the pill?
Speaker 1: Thank you for unraveling these thrilling threads with us today.
It has been an absolute mind bender of a conversation,
traversing the bleeding edge of science and the deepest questions
of philosophy. Stay curious, keep critically questioning the absolute guarantees
in life, and we will see you next time, hopefully
forever