Putin's plan to live forever

0:00Noel King:How healthy is Vladimir Putin? Well, you know, he always projects this kind of image of a virile sort of strong man. He likes taking his shirt off. He hasn't done it in a while now, but he used to have his picture taken shirtless and, you know, jumping in ice lakes or, you know, sort of riding horses and whatnot. No one knows. I do investigative journalism and I speak a lot to Western spooks, you know, the CIA, people like that. And they've always said there's no truth to these claims that he's somehow ill or, you know, decrepit or whatever. But thanks to some new reporting from The Wall Street Journal, we do know that Putin is spending billions of dollars trying to extend his life, maybe even live forever.

0:44Noel King:And that in Russia, there's a long and fascinating history of people fiddling with human longevity. That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

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2:09Today, what does it mean? This is Today Explained.

2:21Noel King:Bojan Panczewski is The Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent. He recently wrote a much-linked-to article about Vladimir Putin's$26 billion quest for longevity. And it begins with this accidentally overheard conversation between Putin and another world leader. So there was an interesting moment last year in September. He was visiting Beijing and he got caught on a hot mic while having a little walk with Xi Jinping. Their words were inaudible, but their translator, still on mic, can be heard detailing parts of their conversation. Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted.

3:03The longer you live, the younger you become. And you can even achieve immortality. Xi Jinping seemed to be agreeing, by the way, and he was kind of nodding and giving his own kind of take on things. And I remember the media covered that a bit tongue-in-cheek, and it was like, oh, this is weird, kind of, they're shooting the breeze, these two old autocrats, you know, two dictators in their 70s, whatever.

3:25Noel King:Are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin best friends? Some have made films about it. sung about it, while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have been discussing it. But I actually knew he was being serious because he's quite serious about his issues and I had read previously about other stuff he's interested in in that domain. So I decided to kind of look up and see what he was talking about. And it turned out that he was actually talking about a state program. Part of what they're researching within that initiative is indeed organ replacement, exactly what he was talking about. So that$26 billion is money that is being spent on this longevity project.

4:11Noel King:And one of the things that it's being spent on, as you said, organ replacement. Where do the poor pigs fit in here? Tell me what happened. The mini pigs. Yeah, that's a bit creepy. Poor little mini pigs. So essentially there are two ways they're looking into to achieve this organ replacement for humans. One of them is 3D printing. It's called 3D bioprinting. It's a bit like, I think everyone by now has heard of 3D printing. Basically 3D printers are printing things. They can print a glass, they can print a glove, they can even print a whole house. and there are also 3D printers that print biological material, tissues, and the Russians are hoping even organs quite soon.

4:57So the idea is you print an organ in the lab and then you kind of implant it into a human being, like say lungs or liver or even the heart perhaps. That's the aspiration. The second thing is the mini peaks. They are genetically sort of close to humans in some ways. They're genetically modified, I think, as well. And they're growing organs in these mini pigs, and then they're implementing them, implanting them into human beings. It has to be said, this is already being done. I don't think people who get organs like that live long or, you know, for various reasons, the body rejects the organs or whatever.

5:38But it is a technique that is actually quite promising. It's not a fantasy. It's something that other countries are doing as well. I mean, China notably is doing this as well.

5:48Noel King:You also wrote that Vladimir Putin loves a reverse sauna. What is this? Yeah, he does. He does a cryo chamber. He loves a cryo chamber. That's what they call him. A cryo chamber is basically a room like a sauna, but the difference is it's the opposite of a sauna because it's extremely cold. I think it's minus 170 Fahrenheit, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, it's ridiculously good for inflammation, ridiculously good for any aches or pains. And my legs started to tingle. And I'm like, OK, this is a little bit what hypothermia feels like. What he does there, he kind of strips naked and walks in and stands there for a few minutes in that in that sort of horrible cold.

6:31I discussed this with the former chancellor of Austria, a guy called Sebastian Kurz, who visited Putin in the Kremlin. and then during the conversation, Putin just kind of brought up this thing and then talked about it for quite a while. And Kurz, who at the time was a young man, he was just over 30 years old. I think he was the world's youngest leader even. And then he was listening to this and he told me later, that was weird, you know. I didn't expect him to start talking. I don't understand why he mentioned that. He was kind of, you know, we were here to talk politics and things and then suddenly he started talking about health and longevity.

7:07and how you should use this reverse sauna. They're looking into how to slow down or even stop the actual aging process within the human cells. They're looking into peptides. Again, something very familiar. I think RFK Jr. is very big on peptides. I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself. Putin had one longevity guru who was a geriatric doctor. He was a very esteemed sort of professor of medicine. And that guy had been looking into peptides for many decades, even since back in the Soviet days. Whoa. So he was a peptide pioneer. And he was asked in an interview, you know, what about, you know, what is your research?

7:57How does it relate to Putin? And he said the idea is to preserve, to prolong the life of a leader who is so important to us that if he were to die, our country would be thrown into a crisis. So that's how he saw his mission. And he also said that people are actually programmed to live 120 years old. And he quoted the Bible as his source for that, the Old Testament. Sarah's lifetime, the span of Sarah's life, came to 127 years. The book of Genesis, Aaron was 123 years old when he died on Mount Hor. The book of Numbers, chapter 30. Moses was 120 years old when he died. His eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.

8:44The book of Deuteronomy, chapter 34, verse 7. So it was kind of interesting for a well-credentialed scientist, a professor even, to quote the Bible as a source of medical knowledge. But the thing is, he then died when he turned 77. So he didn't reach the age that he prescribed himself and that he, I guess, he was hoping Putin might reach. So then Putin had to find another longevity guru after the early demise of that guy. And then now he's got a guy who's much more focused on the mini peaks and the 3D printing.

9:24Noel King:I was genuinely impressed to learn that Vladimir Putin's daughter is involved in this. She is a legit scientist, yeah? She is a doctor, yeah. Her name is Maria Voronsova. She is an endocrinologist. She looks into glands and the sort of endocrine system of the human body. And she has received quite a substantial grant of money from one of these state programs to work on research related to longevity. So, Putin has recruited his own family members, he's recruited scientists he really trusts to work on this issue. So, it's very close to home for him. That really shows that it's something very, very important to him as a leader of a state.

10:15And as an autocratic leader, you know, it's not a real democracy, Russia. It's pretty much a military dictatorship nowadays. You know, he can commandeer the resources of state the way he likes it. And obviously he's decided this is a subject that merits a lot of research and a lot of funding and the input from people he really trusts, including his own daughter.

10:36Noel King:And to your point, Vladimir Putin is not the first Russian autocrat slash dictator to want to try to live forever, is he? Not at all. I was surprised to learn while researching my article that actually Russia is kind of the cradle of modern longevity science. going back to Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, he had a longevity guru himself. And that longevity guru organized what seems to be the world's first longevity conference back in the day. I think it was at the end of the 20s or the early 30s. It happened in Kiev, in today's Ukraine, then it was the Soviet Union. And that guy also claimed in his studies and his medical work that people will be living up to 140 years of age.

11:27And that guy too, unfortunately, died age 65. So it seems to be a trend among these longevity gurus that they don't really reach the biblical age. And I didn't include this in my article because I couldn't really find hard evidence for it. But there are some anecdotal sort of stories about Stalin being very angry about his longevity guru dying young. He didn't like the sound of that.

11:55Noel King:Bad look. All right, so Vladimir Putin is spending a lot of money, a lot of Russian money on this project. It may work. It likely will not work. But let's say it does work. Let's say there are some real advances here that come out of this project, scientific advances. Is Putin going to share? Will he share with Russia? Will he share it with the world? If Vladimir Putin were to find the source of eternal youth, I mean, obviously he'll be hogging it for himself first and for the members of his family or the elite. But eventually these things trickle down, you know. It's worth remembering that Putin is extremely concerned about the demographics of his country.

12:39And the demographics were awful to begin with. Life expectancy for a Russian male is 68 years. It's very, very low for an industrial nation. And so that's terrible. And on top of that, there is this extremely lethal war that he started and he's waging against Ukraine. And it's not going well for him or for anyone. There is a bit of a macabre irony that he's now trying to prolong the lifespan of a nation that he's dragged into this incredibly damaging and deadly war. And that he's trying to somehow undo something that he's done himself.

13:26Noel King:Bojan Panchevsky. He's The Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent. Coming up, revolutions, French and Russian, Dostoevsky, a cryptic futurologist. What on earth?

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17:30Noel King:That's ProtonVPN.com. In the first half of the show, we heard about Vladimir Putin's deep and profound interest in immortality. You wrote a story about how the quest for immortality in Russia does not start with Vladimir Putin. In fact, it goes back way, way, way earlier than him. Where does this all begin? Yeah, so it's not even just the quest for immortality in Russia. In fact, there's a whole movement right now that's called the transhumanism movement, right? And it's these guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Brian Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping who are thinking about how to use technological vectors to achieve immortality.

18:11But even though these guys come from lots of different kinds of backgrounds, they actually all have one patron saint. And it's this guy named Nikolai Fyodorov, who was an ascetic living in Russia in the 1860s.

18:28Now, the 1860s was kind of a wild time in the Russian Empire, right? This is when the Tsar had just liberated the serfs. They were instituting local governments. There was a lot of upheavals around what the future of the Russian Empire would look like. And there were a group of students who were reading a novel that was really interested in the questions of socialism, right? It's called What is to be Done. And a lot of them were looking for examples of this kind of socialist future. One of them, a young guy named Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson, actually ran into a real-life example of kind of the perfect man, the new Cincinnatus, when he was out teaching at a country school in Nizhny Novgorod.

19:10It was this guy, Nikolai Fyodorov, who was—he was actually the son, illegitimate son, of a big princely family. And he'd fallen sort of out of his charmed lifestyle when his father died and he was kicked off his family's estate. And he had gone from city to city, town to town, teaching in little schools. And all the while, he had been developing this kind of wild thesis, this wild idea of the future that he called the common task. And it wasn't about creating utopian communes or socialism in the future. It was instead this idea that humanity could, in fact, resurrect everyone who had ever lived and achieve immortality for those who are living now.

19:54and that we could all live together, both on the earth and in worlds beyond.

20:01Noel King:Okay, so young man interested in socialism goes out to the country, starts teaching, has a weird and interesting colleague. And the colleague's name is Fyodorov. You said he's living like an ascetic, so he's living very simply. What is this dude's deal? Why is he so compelling to the young teacher? So he has these ideas that take the kinds of energy and fervor that we were seeing in the French Revolution and taking them one step further, right? The French Revolution is all about, like, liberty and equality and brotherhood. And he says, we don't need liberty and equality if we have actual brotherhood, if we're actually taking care of one another.

20:42And he had this idea that at that moment, basically all of the technology of the world was being used for warfare. Anytime there was a leap forward in anything from like sewing to chemistry, governments were using this to find new ways to wage war. And he said, instead, what if we took, right, what if we took all of these efforts and all this energy and turn it instead towards this task of trying to figure out how to cheat death? There is not a single invention which the military are not bent on applying to warfare. Not a single discovery which they failed to turn to military purposes. So if it were made the duty of the armies to adapt everything now used in warfare for controlling natural forces, this duty would automatically become the common task of humanity as a whole.

21:32Nikolai Fyodorov, the philosophy of the common task. Every philosophy in the world sort of accepts death as an ineffable. And he instead was like, I don't think I can accept that. A better knowledge of physiology and psychology should make it possible to prevent the decomposition of corpses and achieve bodily immortality. I think there has to be a way that we can overcome this and that we can not only like live forever, but we can resurrect our ancestors and live with them. Now, of course, there was a problem with this, which is if you're resurrecting everyone who's ever lived, you're going to be living in like a sardine tin on the planet Earth.

22:12And so one of the things that Fyodorov was thinking about was how do we get off of the planet Earth and start populating other parts of the solar system so that everybody has enough space to live and live well. The resources of any planet, however great, are eventually limited. And consequently, an isolated world cannot maintain immortal beings.

22:37Noel King:Okay, so Fyodorov is this random, if very interesting man at a random country school. How do his ideas become ideas that everyone is aware of? Yeah, so he eventually moved to Moscow and he got a job at what's essentially the Russian State Library. And he was the worst writer. You cannot read his writings. In Russian, in translation, it is turgid, it is dry. So long as participation in knowledge does not embrace everyone, pure science will remain indifferent to struggle and depredation. But he became essentially kind of the Socrates of Moscow. And he had a little group of acolytes who would listen to his ideas and then translate them to other people, either orally or write them down.