There's a surge in interest in longevity right now — and I get why that sounds obvious. Of course everyone wants to live longer.*

Except, they don't.

I've traveled enough of this world to know that for millions of people, life isn't something they're desperate to extend. When you're poor, suffering, and without options, eternity isn't a dream — it's a threat. The afterlife isn't religion. It's the exit sign.

Then there's the rest of us. The ones who wake up genuinely believing tomorrow will be better than today. Who treat progress like it has no ceiling. Who live like life itself is a project we're still in the middle of.

That tension — between those who want out and those who never want to stop — is exactly why what I'm about to tell you matters.

Because we have a new player in the game trying to solve it.

And the story reads like something straight out of a sci-fi film.

Anyone remember The Island?

Great film. Touched on what it means to be human.

Clones grown in secret — kept alive, kept calm — until someone rich and powerful needed a spare part. We called it science fiction. Our homeboys over in Silicon Valley saw it as a business plan.

A headline caught my attention this past week — R3 Bio, a California startup, has been raising millions with many ambitions including one being considered to grow headless human bodies, engineered from birth with no consciousness, so their organs can be harvested on demand.

Can humans play god and achieve immortality?

•       Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones — MIT Technology Review’s deep investigation into R3 Bio and the world of body replacement cloning

•       A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing — Wired’s original report on R3 Bio’s public-facing pitch

•       A Startup Has Been Quietly Pitching Cloned Human Bodies to Transfer Your Brain Into — Futurism’s coverage of the broader implications

•       Blue Zones longevity claims validated by new research — New 2026 study confirming the science behind the world’s longest-living communities

•       Longevity Nutrition: What to Eat to Live Longer — Breakdown of the 2025 Lancet and Stanford studies on diet and biological aging

The startup just announced plans to grow brainless monkey bodies in a lab — “organ sacks” — as a step toward one day creating cloned human bodies you could harvest for spare parts.

I’ll let that sit for a second.

MIT Technology Review broke the full story last week, revealing that R3 Bio — a Richmond, California startup that had initially told Wired it was simply building a better alternative to animal testing — had actually been pitching something far more radical behind closed doors: full body replacement cloning. The idea is that a genetic copy of you could be grown without a brain, kept alive on life support, and one day used to supply you with fresh organs. Or, in the most extreme version, receive your brain entirely.

I’m not sharing this to pile on or to mock anyone. I actually understand the impulse. If you’ve watched someone you love get sick — really sick — you know that desperation isn’t a character flaw. It’s love looking for a door. I have a dear friend with a heart condition, young children, a heart would give him a new lease on life.

But here’s what strikes me every time I see a story like this: the sheer distance between where some of the smartest, most well-funded people in the world are looking for answers... and where the answers actually are.

Because while Silicon Valley is trying to engineer its way past death with cloned bodies and $70,000-per-ticket longevity conferences, (I’m actually a fan of Bryan Johnson) the longest-living people on earth are doing something radically different. They’re sleeping well. They’re eating real food. They’re moving their bodies. They’re deeply connected — to each other and to the ground beneath their feet.

And the science keeps backing them up.

A new study published in January 2026 validated what Blue Zones researchers have been saying for years — these communities where people routinely live past 100 aren’t statistical flukes. They’re real. And the patterns are consistent across cultures, continents, and centuries.

Here’s what those patterns look like:

Sleep. The centenarians in these communities aren’t grinding through the night. They rest. They follow natural light cycles. They eat early and wind down when the sun does. New research from the Salk Institute shows that even a consistent 10-hour eating window — basically, not eating late — boosts stem cell regeneration. No pills. No procedures. Just rhythm.

Real food. Not supplements. Not engineered nutrition. Food that came from the ground, prepared simply, eaten together. A 2025 analysis in The Lancet estimated that adopting Blue Zones eating habits at age 60 still adds an average of eight healthy years. A Stanford study that followed 2,000 adults for eight years found that those eating a primarily plant-based longevity diet aged biologically 31% slower. Thirty-one percent. From food.

Movement. Not necessarily CrossFit. Not necessarily a Peloton. Just... movement woven into the fabric of daily life. Walking to the market. Gardening. Carrying things. The longest-living people on earth don’t have gym memberships. They have lives that require them to move — naturally, consistently, without thinking about it.

Connection with others. This one might be the most underrated lever of all. Loneliness is now considered as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The people who live longest belong to something — a family, a faith community, a group of friends they’ve kept for decades. They eat together. They show up for each other. Purpose and belonging aren’t luxuries. They’re survival tools.

Connection with nature. Sunlight. Fresh air. Silence. Bare feet on dirt. It sounds almost too simple to matter, but the data says otherwise. Time in nature reduces cortisol, improves sleep, strengthens immune function, and lowers inflammation. The longest-living cultures don’t just visit nature on weekends. They live inside of it.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: a group of well-funded investors just estimated it would cost $40 million to produce a single proof-of-concept brainless human clone. Forty million dollars. For something that doesn’t exist, may never work, and even its own backers admit is “repulsive.”

Meanwhile, the interventions with the strongest evidence behind them cost almost nothing.

Go to bed earlier. Eat food your great-grandmother would recognize. Walk more. Call a friend — not text, call. Step outside and stand in the sun for ten minutes - as naked as you can (without someone calling the police).

I’m not anti-science and I’m definitely not anti-technology. We’re building Santerra with every tool the future gives us, including AI. But I keep returning to this conviction: the most transformative technology on earth is still a walk in the woods, a home-grown meal, and an honest conversation.

The R3 Bio story is worth reading — not because it’s the future, but because it reveals how far we’ll go to avoid the simple things that have always worked.

* * *

Here’s to the simple stuff — and the courage to trust it.

-Jared

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Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

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