20 episodes
Seeking Sony Music Entertainment
-
- Health & Fitness
-
-
4.7 • 69 Ratings
-
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 most discomfiting questions.
On Season 1 of Seeking, we’re diving deep into the portal of psychedelics and plant medicine. Join me as we travel to Baltimore, the English countryside, and the Amazon jungle to meet the people behind the psychedelic renaissance. Through our journey we’ll explore what it means for these ancient practices to go global, who plant medicine can and should help, and something even more profound—what does it mean to heal?
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 chip and beaming it to the cosmos), it taps into a near universal feeling: a fear of the end. It makes you wonder, is it really so fringe after all?
Seeking is a Sony Music Entertainment production.
Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us at @sonypodcasts
To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
-
Live Forever | 1. The Church of Perpetual Life
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 Perpetual Life in Florida to uncover whether its members are putting their faith in science... or something else altogether.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Live Forever | 2. The Freezatoria
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 their consciousnesses to future robotic selves. It had always seemed like a fringe idea, unsupported by science and unlikely to ever be truly possible. Then, tech money got involved, and now the idea of awakening in a perfect future has started to shift into the mainstream.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Live Forever | 3. Is The Future Transhuman?
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 up for debate. This week, Katherine meets a pioneer of the movement, Natasha Vita-More, whose once science fiction-sounding visions of the future are inching closer to reality.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Live Forever | 4. A Robot In Love
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 being, something that can survive without us?
Katherine travels Vermont to meet and converse with Bina48, a robot pushing the boundaries of consciousness and who represents an attempt at digital immortality.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Live Forever | 5. The Descendants
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 not about holding on to what you have now, but instead about looking to what comes next. Namely, their children and their children’s children.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices -
Live Forever | 6. Run for the Hills
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 course, until the AI revolution actually began.
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 podcastadsales@sonymusic.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Customer Reviews
Mind engaging
Both seasons are so well investigated and considered from a spectrum of perspectives that the listener comes away with captivated interest and wanting these conversations to go on and on.
No fact checking? Just gullible?
Minutes into episode 4, “I used to kidnap and torture people for the CIA.” and the the episode just keeps going. Wait! What? Excuse me? No response to that? First question should be, “How long have you been telling people that lie?” Sorry, young Dre who know helps people on their trips, had a lackluster job in the military (if he was in at all).
One of a kind brilliance
This is an amazing podcast series that has been so informative, thought provoking and interesting. I look forward to each episode and can’t wait for season 2!