Boyan Panchevsky

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.