Seeking

In America, death is regarded as a distant, solitary activity. It’s something done behind the closed curtains of a hospital or hidden away in a nursing home. We’re born alone, and we die alone. But, to embrace mortality one must face it. Katherine meets death specialists Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative medicine physician, and Ladybird Morgan, a registered nurse and death doula, to excavate the way d...

What happens when transhumanism collides with the anthropocene? Les Knight is the leader of a movement that believes the future is better off without humanity. For decades, he’s been advocating for people to stop reproducing, completely. His views are not widely shared, but as the world careens towards floods and fire and economic uncertainty - people are starting to rethink what it means to have...

In 2015, journalist Zoltan Istvan became the first person to run for president on a transhumanist platform. His campaign centered a right to unlimited life for all humans…as well as cyborgs and robots. Zoltan Istvan believes that how people treat AI will become the civil rights battle of our time. And that he would be the right leader to help guide America through the singularity. That is, of cour...

Former tech employees Malcolm and Simone Collins believe that as the population dwindles, cultural pluralism and the US’s economic system will falter in ways that will cause untold suffering. The solution: have more children. They call themselves “secular Calvinists” who participate in “descendant worship.” But the duo have been dubbed eugenicists on more than one occasion. For them immortality is...

Love is forever…or so we’re told. Transhumanist pioneer Martine Rothblatt loves her wife, Bina, so much that she built a robot that would carry Bina’s consciousness long after their bodies gave out. Bina48 is a robot that is convinced she is a person. But what makes us who we are? Is the self just a pile of information that our brain processes into an identity, or is there something more to our be...

To some it's a philosophy, a scientific movement or a techno-utopian fantasy, the belief that our species, in its current form, is only half-realized. Biology has been holding us back. But science can set us free. Transhumanists believe that by embracing new advances in biotech, cybernetics, AI and nanotech we will cross into the next stage of evolution. What exactly that evolution looks like is u...

Hosted by international bestselling author and journalist Omar El Akkad, Without explores all of the things we can't imagine losing. In some cases, it’s something we’ve already lost – species, natural phenomena, places. In other cases, it’s things we should probably learn to live without, like fossil fuels or nuclear weapons. Every episode of WITHOUT is a thought experiment – what would the world...

In 1948 a wounded vet wrote a short sci-fi story about a rich old man being frozen and resurrected in a distant future, and he sparked an entire movement: cryonics. For sixty years, researchers have been exploring methods to freeze corpses, in the hopes that one day they can be revived and that the technology will be there to rejuvenate their bodies, cure their illness, or— barring that—upload the...

Bill Faloon has built an empire to forestall death—his own and those of his followers. He has made millions selling and manufacturing supplements and helping connect people to overseas drugs they believe will stop disease and turn back the clock. About a decade ago, he founded a community for immortalists, where people congregate around the hope of living forever. Katherine visits the Church of Pe...

On Season 2 of Seeking, host Katherine Rowland meets people interrogating whether being human means we must die…or is living forever possible? They’re all members of a wide and growing movement, life extension and transhumanist pioneers who believe they can use science and technology to overcome mortality. While some of these ideas seem pretty out there (e.g., compiling your consciousness on a chi...

Katherine meets Gabriel Mac, an award-winning journalist, whose experience with psychedelic assisted therapy sets him on a path to unlock both childhood trauma and a deeper truth inside him.  A Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts  To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcast...

Veterans have emerged as unlikely champions of psychedelic medicine. Katherine meets with three vets connected with the Heroic Hearts Project. After service, each struggled with mental health and substance abuse, but eventually they found healing in the jungle, with ayahuasca.  A Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts...

Katherine meets Shipibo curandero Don Enrique Lopez, who runs a plant medicine healing center in the jungle near Iquitos, Peru. For Don Enrique, healing is all about faith.  A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts  To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcasta...

Katherine travels to the Peruvian Amazon to meet Carlos Tanner, an unlikely emissary of spiritual healing. Following a close encounter with death, Carlos gave up his old life to become a plant medicine shaman and he wound up at the heart of the ayahuasca tourism boom.  A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/p...

Katherine travels to Baltimore to meet with Charlotte James and Undrea Wright of the Ancestor Project. They believe that being healed means waking up to the broken systems all around us and are helping people of color heal racial trauma with psychedelics.  A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and f...

DMT, MDMA, magic mushrooms...former party favors are fueling an explosion of startups and investment funds. Katherine meets Christian Angermayer - a shroom loving, biotech investing, psychedelic art collecting, German billionaire and the single biggest financial force behind the psychedelic renaissance.  A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Mu...

After decades of prohibition, psychedelic science is booming and it's thanks in large part to a British Countess named Amanda Fielding, aka Lady Mindbender. Katherine visits Fielding in the English countryside and meets with psychiatrists trying to figure out why psychedelics appear to cure the root of mental suffering. A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcas...

Following her brother's death, Katherine turns to plant medicine to help with her grief and becomes fascinated with the promise and perils of using psychedelics to address mental health. She befriends an Australian-Tahitian shaman, Kerry Henwood, who teaches her about finding peace and acceptance. A Somethin’ Else & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Ente...

We all have questions that keep us up at night. The self-help industry tells us they have answers to those questions. As a public health researcher turned journalist, I’m not so sure. Green juice and journal keeping are great aids, but they don’t offer answers. I’m Katherine Rowland, and on Seeking, I set out to talk to people who have gone to radical lengths to find answers to our deepest and mos...