← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:01]
Alex Honnold
I'm Alex Honnl, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:32]
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- [01:02]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Humanity has long dreamed about the idea of immortality and in 2026 many believe that dream could soon become a reality. The world's most powerful technologists and investors are are pouring billions into engineering immortality itself. For these modern day immortalists, aging is no longer an inevitability. It's a technical glitch that can be hacked, reversed or eradicated altogether. On today's episode, award winning broadcaster and academic Alex Rutoski speaks to host Carl Miller about the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are seeking to disrupt death. Let's join our host Carl Miller now with more.
- [01:49]
Carl Miller
Welcome to Intelligence Squared everyone. I'm Carl Miller and our guest today is Alex Krutosky. Dr. Alex Krotosky is an award winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She's written loads, she's presented loads. You may have heard her on BBC Radio 4 with the artificial Human and the Digital Human and on international television with the BBC World's the Virtual Revolution. She's held fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. And she teaches currently at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. And today I'm delighted to be speaking to Alex about her new book the An Investigation into the Moguls, the Effective altruists, the gero scientists, the entrepreneurs, and maybe the cults that are seeking to disrupt death. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Alex.
- [02:37]
Alex Krotosky
Oh Carl, thank you so much. It's always very disconcerting to Hear the stuff that I've done smushed into a really quick introduction. But thank you. Thank you very much. I'm beyond thrilled to be here.
- [02:50]
Carl Miller
Wonderful. Well, we're going to be talking, of course, about life and how to make it longer, Alex. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about death. So you end the book, But I wanted to begin this interview just. Just quite personally, don't you, talking about your own relationship with death. And. And it kind of felt like that was very much the kind of background that kind of drew you into this topic.
- [03:12]
Alex Krotosky
Yeah. So I have always been. I would sort of describe it as obsessed with death. I'd like to think of it in, you know, being obsessed with it in a healthy way. I did go through my goth phase when I was a teenager, of course, as hopefully we all do, because it's kind of a fun place to. To swim around in. But I remember. I remember in my undergrad, taking a course kind of randomly. It was on death studies, and I had been a psychologist. I was studying psychology. I was working in psychiatric hospitals at the time. And it was before I kind of narrowed down my interest in social psychology, sort of how people influence one another in groups. And I discovered this class, Death Studies. And it was the most interesting class, hands down, I have ever taken, because it was all about the psychological, the physiological, the social, the religious, the economic, the political aspects of death. And it really. It opened my eyes to such amazing aspects of how we build society around the end of life, how we build ideas about how we want to live, what a good life is, about what we want to. What we want to do with our lives, knowing that there is an ultimate end. All of this was theoretical until. Until I had a very difficult few years, ironically, immediately after my daughter was born. Within five years of her birth, if not four years of her birth, I lost my stepmother, my dad, my closest aunt, my closest uncle, my dearest grandmother, not to mention my dog, two dogs, excuse me, two dogs and a cat. Like, everybody died. And I started to kind of really feel death for the first time, rather than as a conceptual idea, more like a lived experience. And grief consumed me. And it was. I would say it was probably problematic grief. And I'm sure a lot of listeners out there have experience of or have heard about problematic grief, just being unable to pull yourself out of this extraordinary sort of obsession. And at that point, I think it became problematic. Thankfully, I was able to pull myself out of it. And off the back of that, what I tend to do If I'm going through a big emotion is I tend to externalize it. And I started to study some of these things that I'd learned in death studies way back in the day. I started to speak with death doulas and I started to meet people who worked in death. I started to develop relationships with people who worked in hospice. And I started to recognize again, rather than feeling the death inside of me, seeing the death as an extraordinary moment of opportunity and celebration, a place which I believe is inevitable and something that we don't know what's going to happen on the other side. But that really, that really was the genesis of this book. So that was in 2017. I actually originally discovered something to do with what this book became. And also the, the podcast for, for BBC Radio 4 became in 2021, which was Silicon Valley's obsession with trying to stop death. I had been a tech reporter for 20 plus years. And so the sort of, the combination of coming out of the grief, really kind of building an understanding, wanting to build something, and I thought, okay, I'm not afraid of it. I don't want to stop it. But here are people who are identical to people throughout history who are pushing it away. And they have so much money and so much hubris that they think that they can. What's going on here. And that's really, that's like the genesis of this idea.
- [07:21]
Carl Miller
And it's particularly Silicon Valley, its VCs, its technologists and engineers and that ecosystem that you focus on, isn't it?
- [07:30]
Alex Krotosky
Absolutely.
- [07:31]
Carl Miller
Why were you most interested in them? Because it seems like there's a bundle of different reasons. The political power, the financial power, maybe their ability to actually ultimately outrun death. It might be their engineering power as well. But it's both a new and an old thing, it seems in your book, Alex, where, you know, the story kind of begins in 1990, you know, with the Human Genome Project. But then also you tell us about Gilgamesh and actually this, you know, the human desire to somehow outrun the inevitable end of life seems to be almost as old as civilization itself.
- [08:07]
Alex Krotosky
It really is. But the thing that I found particularly interesting about Silicon Valley is as I mentioned, I've been a tech reporter. I've been looking at society and technology since 1999, if you can believe it. I've watched the, you know, the first dot com bubble. I've known so many of the people who have become the leaders of Silicon Valley, and I've watched them. But as a psychologist, specifically as a social psychologist, I'm Very interested in what is being built into technologies. And more specifically, now that we're living in a very digital world, you know, when I started we weren't, but now we really are. I've witnessed the, not just the financial power of this cohort, but also the social and political power of this cohort. They have historically, I'll just leave it at historically. Let's hope that they're learning. But they have historically transformed the world because they have not recognized the unintended consequences of their actions of the technologies that they are building. It's only relatively recently that they've included ethicists in their designs because ultimately they didn't realize that, you know, when they started a dating site at Harvard, it was going to affect democracy. Right. It was going to affect political economies. When somebody decided to, you know, throw together a modern day chatbot, they didn't realize that it was going to evolve into a mega, a megaphone that was actually going to start to crumble the notion of information and truth and information. They didn't realize these things. Now that we realize these things though, they cannot claim ignorance. And if they are hell bent on building technologies that they think are going to outrun death. Right. Well, I'm sure we can talk about that in a second. That they think are going to outrun death as well as populate whatever that next phase of humanity is, they sure as hell better be thinking about those unintended consequences. That was what I was looking for to see if they were. And unfortunately they're as myopic as they always have been. Those ethicists have been kind of pushed out of the large companies now. People aren't interested in thinking about the consequences. The bubble of the valley is so profound, like it's impermeable. And the ideas that ricochet around these spaces are simply reinforced about ultimately what humanity is and how they uniquely have the power to fix or correct or solve the problems of humanity. So yeah, I see these, these folks as not just technologists, but simply a powerful cohort that nobody is really trying to understand. Nobody's really trying to get their motivations, nobody's really trying to, to, to witness how they're embedding their ideas into their technologies. Because most people don't actually think of technologies as something that can have an ideology or can be embedded with a particular design that takes us through the world and you know, enforces a particular worldview. And you know, to become a kind of a modern day digital citizen, we have to recognize that these technologies are built by people what is it that those people think? And if they think that they can kick death's butt, if they think that they themselves are the most uniquely powerful people and can do this thing that, as you said, this, this profound, you know, transformation of humanity that people have been chasing since time immemorial, then who the hell are they and what is it that they think? So that was really what kind of connected me to Silicon Valley.
- [12:11]
Carl Miller
Well, we probably sit, both of us, Alex, on slightly more the curmudgeonly side of trying to pierce the Silicon Valley optimism, don't we? I mean, especially when it comes to. To their interest, or lack thereof, in unintended consequences that rarely seems to be present in any of the Silica Valley dialects that I ever hear. But absolutely. But let's talk about what they think, and let's begin actually with how they see human beings. So I found it absolutely fascinating the way that you write about actually, the kind of persistent technology metaphors that people have long applied to understand the human body. You've got steam and you've got electricity in the nervous system. And it now seems that information theory seems to be an incredibly important paradigm that technologists are applying to somehow bridge this gap between biology and their own world of engineering, 100%.
- [13:05]
Alex Krotosky
So information theory was developed in the 1950s as a mathematical theory by a theoretical mathematician named Claude Shannon. And the idea that Shannon devised is that information, whatever that is, right, can be reduced all the way down into what we would describe now as bits, right? Information or not information. And if you do that, the information goes out into the world, but it doesn't stay static, right? It is dynamically reduced in different ways. It bumps up against friction or it bumps up against, you know, if you want to think about concepts, it bumps up against other ideologies and it starts to be degraded, right? It suffers and struggles from absolute, ultimate devolving into chaos. And that's what's known as entropy. Now, this is something that has been very. This is something that has been embraced by the computer science community. And in fact, we have information theory to thank for a lot of the contemporary systems, the communication systems that we operate on. You know, it's it. It's the. The thinking behind the World Wide Web and the Internet itself, right? Reduce the entropy in order to ensure that the information that is sent from one place arrives in the other place without turning into a game of telephone, like we had when we were kids in the playground, where somebody whispers something and then, you know, as it sort of goes around the circle, it Devolves into chaos. So we actually do have a lot of. A lot of benefit for understanding information theory. Now. What has happened now is that technologists have become wedding to this idea of everything can be information. And we're seeing this. We're seeing this socially, right? We're seeing how relationships can be embedded as information. We're seeing how news and knowledge and language can be embedded as information. We're seeing how behavior is embedded as information. Now, all of this can be. But really, ultimately, you're only seeing part of the story. Now add to that that human beings, everything to do with our physiology can be seen as information and can be reduced into effectively these bits or, you know, these bytes, these ones and these zeros almost of binary code. And that's really kind of where you're seeing the, the motivation and the desire to unpick and to figure out the puzzle of humanity. If it's as simple. Elon Musk said at Davos just a few weeks ago, earlier, earlier in 2026, if it's that simple, then we should be able to figure it out, Throw more technology at it, throw more AI at it, and surely we'll be able to figure out the human body without, you know, without much hassle. And we who have created these technologies will ultimately have figured out human beings. I have a problem with that. I don't know if you can hear that in my voice. I have a real problem with that because, and funnily enough, this is something I'm teaching right now in my classes at nyu. There is a difference between behavior and the things that can be measured, because we have to. We observe those things that can be measured and what goes on inside our minds. Right? It's the difference between the brain, shall we say, and the mind. The mind is consciousness, the mind is thought, the mind is attitude. And what I know as a psychologist is that just because you do something doesn't necessarily mean that you think that's good or you know, or you think it's bad. It means that there's a decision that's been made to either stick with your attitude or not stick with your attitude and do the thing. There's. There's other stuff that we can't see inside of our minds. And so to purely look at the human experience as data and believe that that data can be fixed, that the entropy associated with our bodies can simply be fixed by usually inserting more data, well, I think that that that sort of falls short of the human experience.
- [17:33]
Carl Miller
And perhaps there is no single individual, certainly that I can think of that better represents the idea of quantifying yourself than Brian Johnson.
- [17:45]
Alex Krotosky
Brian, tell us a bit about Brian Johnson.
- [17:48]
Carl Miller
Up to now, we've been talking in this kind of fairly abstract way about all these ideas, and I think it's important that we put some flesh on the boat bones and kind of try and describe people like, what the radical longevity movement actually really looks like when it takes human form.
- [18:01]
Alex Krotosky
Yeah, good old Brian. Everybody. Everybody's fascinated by Brian Johnson. I would say that it's. I don't think I have had a conversation about this book in development or the podcast in development without somebody talking about Brian Johnson. Brian is a very, very interesting person, very nice guy. I know a bunch of people like Brian. They're not nearly as successful, Brian, in terms of financially successful, but I know a bunch of people like Brian. Super geeks, right? Had a bit of a breakdown and decided that they were going to change their lives and. And leaned into what it was that they knew, right? And frankly, that he accepts that that is what happened. So Brian Johnson grew up in a Mormon household, a very sort of dogmatic Mormon household, with a dad who. All of this. All of this. He's very open about both of them, including the. Including his dad, very open about. He grew up in a household where his struggled with addiction and was absent. When his father became absent and left the Mormon Church. Brian told me that his father became like the devil himself. He became other. And he had to entirely reject his dad in order to preserve his belief in his Mormon religion, the dogma associated with the Mormon religion. But as he grew older and he tried to reach out to his dad and all kinds of things happened over the years and he got married within the faith. He had these wonderful experiences of, you know, going off on his mission and sort of discovering how people live and what makes people happy and unhappy and healthy and unhealthy. He came back, he had three young boys and his partner. He was trying to be an entrepreneur. He had loads and loads of startups and he finally lands on one which suddenly is, you know, it's really, really hard to do. A startup starts to make him cash. He sells it to. I'm sorry, he buys Venmo, right? Because he's got that much wonga, he's got that much cash from this company that he's. That he's built, and then he sells onto PayPal. At that point, the world is open to him. The three young boys, which, you know, they're exhausting him, his partner, unfortunately, that relationship falls apart and he finds himself in the same situation as his d. The addiction. He leaves the church. And so he's freaking out because, oh, my goodness, you know, history is repeating itself. It's like he might lose his children because they see him as the devil. And he's, he's just had this divorce which is, you know, challenging. Any kind of breakup is challenging. And he's just sold his company. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars. Anybody's going to have a rethink, shall we say, about their lives. And what his rethink ended up being was, I am going to become the healthiest person on the planet. I am going to be the person that is going to prove a theory true. And that theory, I need to explain it. The theory is something called longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is the idea that you can outrun death. And the way you can outrun death is a bit like how a rocket needs to have a particular amount of velocity to escape the gravitational pull of Earth. Right. You need to have more, let's just say fuel in order to escape the gravitational pull or the chronological pull of aging. And so he tried to put this into practice. The idea is that you don't die tomorrow, right? You don't. The idea is that if you continued along the same chronological path with the same chronological inertia as most of us, I would say all of us do, then we will die of a thing that has not yet been cured. Right? Right. Okay. That's a kind of basic. But his argument is that if he can somehow escape the chronological pull of age, then he will live longer, healthier, because by the time his body gets to the place where it gets to the thing, the disease, the, you know, the, the syndrome, whatever that would have killed him, they've already figured out how to fix that. And so he's not going to die from the common cold, or he's not going to die from the flu, or he's not going to die from diabetes or heart disease or any of the other things that are going to end up taking all of us eventually. So he's trying to outrun death by either keeping his age the same or preferably reversing it. There's a lot of assumptions in here, right, aren't there? There's a huge number of assumptions. And I'm sure you have questions about like this. But the way that he's done it is he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into devising an algorithm, a recipe making machine that spits out not just recipes, but also Recipes for life, the different types of supplements he should take, the different types of treatments he should do, the different types of exercises he should do, when he should sleep, when he should have sex. All of these things are measured and calculated. And so he is no longer a human being with free will when it comes to effectively anything that could affect his life. He now defers to his algorithm because he sees himself as measurable, entirely and completely measurable. And his baseline is something that's called biological age. It is a contested measure. There are lots and lots of measurements for it out there. There's none that have been, you know, sort of fully scientifically evidenced, but there's a lot of them out there. You probably will have heard of them. And so he measures his biological age at one year, and then he measures it again after he goes through this protocol. And when I had interviewed him, he was just sort of basically starting on this path. And he, he claims that his biological age is actually in. Is going in reverse now that he actually has achieved longevity, escape velocity. I don't think it's a particularly joyful life. I would not do it because I don't have the willpower, nor do I have the kind of the motivation to do such a thing. But for him, it seems to be working. Seems to be working.
- [24:50]
Carl Miller
I mean, like, is it actually work? I mean, do you. Is it credible? Could we currently, Alex, be sharing the earth with a man who has effectively stopped aging?
- [25:04]
Alex Krotosky
I think no. Short answer. No longer answer. I have a real fundamental issue with
- [25:15]
Carl Miller
tracking so obsessively all the biomarkers that he looks at daily, almost real time,
- [25:24]
Alex Krotosky
because I fundamentally believe that physiologically, and this goes for, you know, all of, like the, the mega biohackers who live to. For their numbers, who, you know, use their stacks and they do protocol blah. I fundamentally believe that their numbers will eventually go down, right? They're living, they're living according to this sort of biohacker philosophy. Number goes up, right? It's also a cryptocurrency philosophy. So, you know, you can see, you can see where the tech comes in there. But number goes up, number always goes up. Number goes up equals good. Number goes up does not take into consideration context, right? It doesn't take into consideration stressors in life. It doesn't take into consideration illness. It doesn't take. Well, obviously it doesn't take into consideration illness in this particular case, but come on, people get ill. It doesn't take into consideration something as fundamental as pregnancy, right? I got pregnant and my numbers went down. And wow, did that affect me. Whoa, that freaked me out because suddenly I was not getting fitter. I was growing eyeballs, right. Like, I think props to what it was that my body was doing at that point. But if you're in this number goes up sort of frame of mind, any deviation is going to really mess you up psychologically if you're completely devoted and believe in it. Furthermore, we're surrounded by a society the sort of the, the wellness cults or you know, just the wellness phenomenon tells us that we always have to be. Well, that we always have to whatever well is. That's very subjective. We always, always, always have to. And we're always striving for it, but we're never actually able to achieve it to our sort of most fundamental. So I, I actually think that it is, it is more problematic to talk about the idea that, that this one person who's doing a very, very specific protocol for his body, right, is indeed going to live forever because his numbers will eventually go down. How he's going to deal with that, I don't know, because it's so much part of his identity. Same for all the other biohackers that concerns me because if, you know, we live in a world in which there is not a lot of sympathy, that could come back to haunt him. And I, and I really hope it doesn't. And I just think that there's something fundamentally separate from the feeling, the experience of wellness and the experience of reading those numbers. So to answer your question, in a long way, no, I don't think that he's going to live forever or even live to 120 or maybe 150. I don't think so because I think that ultimately, you know, things are going to interrupt. Life happens and you can't always be in control and in charge of absolutely everything. So there's that. How is this sustainable? How is this manageable, you know, in, in those off weeks or those off months or when life just simply, you take a hit? And then secondly, I also think that it's. It's not helpful to have this kind of disordered approach to the human body and sort of publicize it because all it's doing is it's feeding a kind of disorderedness associated with how we feel about our bodies and how we know if we're well or not. Not to mention the fact that it's usually ageist, massively ableist. Like there's, there's also all of these, like, sort of societal implications for this. But yes, that's I think that's my long answer to your to your question.
- [29:28]
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- [29:59]
Alex Krotosky
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- [30:22]
Mia Sorrenti
Namaste.
- [30:23]
Alex Krotosky
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- [30:28]
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- [30:57]
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- [31:22]
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- [31:57]
Carl Miller
You mentioned kind of, you know, you mentioned cults and I want to talk about that in a second. Because this isn't just about individuals, is it?
- [32:03]
Alex Krotosky
This is.
- [32:04]
Carl Miller
These are whole movements that kind of equate wellness with virtue, that worry about the singularity, that have developed an eschatology that, you know, I mean, there is a absolutely fascinating intersection here between rationality and religion, which I would love to unpack. But before we do, I just. I imagine there's quite a lot of people that are listening right now, Alex, that are thinking, what are they actually talking about when they are talking about these various interventions these people are doing? You know, what do you actually practically do to yourself if you're trying to live forever?
- [32:41]
Alex Krotosky
It really depends on how much money you have.
- [32:44]
Carl Miller
Yeah, right. But also kind of which tribe you're in. Right. So it seems that, like, there really isn't a single answer. There's a whole myriad landscape of different kind of options for you. And it quickly descends into very polysyllabic words. Plasmapheresis and melformin and lots of hormones and lots of supplements. Give us just a sense of what the major kind of choices are like. Like. What are the kind of, like, general kind of, like, approaches that one would take if one begins to walk down the kind of radical longevity road?
- [33:20]
Alex Krotosky
Really great question. So I'll start with the two that you mentioned. The first is something called plasmapheresis, and this is based upon some research that was done in the early 2000s, published in the early 2000s by a couple from. In Berkeley at University of Berkeley. University, California at Berkeley. Mike in Arena Convoy, or shall I say Irina and Mike Convoy? Because Mike is like, Irina is the one who's leading. I'm just. I'm the support team. At the time, they were postdocs, and they were working in a lab, and they were. They were gerontologists. So they were. They were aging researchers, both literally and figuratively and descriptively, they were researching aging, but then they themselves were also aging. And at the time, aging research was very much in, like, the.
- [34:17]
Mack Weldon Announcer
The.
- [34:17]
Alex Krotosky
The kind of like, nobody wanted to do it because it was all about decline. All you were doing was you were documenting decline. This goes down and this goes down and this goes down. And a. As the sort of. The genetics boom exploded with new technologies around the time of the Human Genome Project, there were some discoveries that suggested that aging, in fact, was not a whole bunch of different things that happened, but perhaps there was an underlying biological mechanism for aging. Right. Just why did everything suddenly start to switch? And these two researchers, Mike and Irina, had come up with a research design that they thought Would be quite useful to test this theory. Why is it, as Mike said to me, that all the things go to heck in a hand basket with age? He actually said heck in a hand basket. It was so. It was so great. It was. And the fact that I'm talking to them and their dog is like chewing its leg next to me and they're both in matching tie dye T shirts. I was so charmed by these, by these researchers. Why does everything go to heck in a handbasket with age? So they thought to themselves, okay, so the. It could be the skeletal system, right, that touches all your muscles or and your brain, hopefully not too much. Maybe it's the, your hormonal system, your endocrine system, or maybe it's your vascular system, all the blood that goes through your body. And they realize that they couldn't actually, they couldn't really kind of mess around with or control either the endocrine, the hormonal or the skeletal system. But maybe they could mess around with blood. And they did a very, very seminal bit of research in which they performed parabiosis. Heterochronic parabiosis. Oh, I love that word. I want to name a band. Heterochronic parabiosis. What that meant was take two mice, one's old, one's young, right? Create a little tiny slit in the back, the hind leg, and then suture the. In both back legs, suture the wounds together so that rather than healing next to one another, the vascular systems, the scar tissue, the two mice kind of become conjoined.
- [36:39]
Carl Miller
You wrote about that so clinically. And then I was like, what? I know you're creating a single mouse out of two mice.
- [36:47]
Alex Krotosky
A single mouse out of two mice, right? One old, one young. Parabiosis, right? Absolutely. Super fun, crazy Frankenstein. This is actually the thing that got me interested in this whole thing way back. Yeah, it was their research, but it was also how Silicon Valley was effectively trying to monetize it and popularize it at the time. And this is in 2017, 2018, 2019. But what they found and the reason why Silicon Valley went, oh, yeah, let's find out more about this and start to, you know, really research it or just sell it for a vast amount of money was what they found is that the liver tissues and the kidney and even the cognitive functions of the older mouse appeared to get younger. It appeared to rejuvenate those muscles and also those kind of brain, as in
- [37:40]
Carl Miller
the young blood flushed through old organs made those organs retard in age.
- [37:47]
Alex Krotosky
Exactly. They're not really sure why this works, but fun fact, which didn't make it into the book. It's a little bit. What's the book with the. It's an Oscar Wilde book and it's about a portrait of Dorian Gray. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a bit Dorian Gray because the young mouse got old. Oh. So it seemed to them to. There's something in the blood. We don't know what it is. Still to this day, we do not know what it is. Right. But there is something. Either it's an absence of something or it's a. Or it's an increase of something. We're not sure what it is in young blood. Well, Silicon Valley finds out about this, they go, woohoo. And they start to pay $8,000 a liter for young blood to be pumped into their veins. It was even in an episode of the HBO series Silicon Valley, if you ever saw that. It's very, very funny. Epis. Um, that seems to be maybe, maybe something. And you're seeing people like Brian Johnson and other Silicon Valley billionaires having what. What they describe as their longevity oil change on a regular basis. Seems to be actually something specifically in plasma. Right. They've narrowed it down from taking out the red blood cells, so now it's just the white blood cells. It's just the plasma. We're not sure why. You can just simply get rid of the old stuff and stick the new stuff in. And your biomarkers, those little indicators of how well you're doing in life, they. They kind of reduce. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna massively throw out a public health safety.
- [39:30]
Carl Miller
Do not start injecting yourself with younger person's blood at home, folks.
- [39:34]
Alex Krotosky
Right, exactly. My daughter, who's 11, laughs. She's like, so I'm your young. You know, I'm your young blood vessel.
- [39:42]
Carl Miller
Oh, I see. I see you've already raised it then.
- [39:44]
Alex Krotosky
Oh, God, no, totally. Like, we actually wanted her to read the audiobook like, we thought it would be brilliant. She even, like, she even read through my chapters and was like, okay, so, you know, this is what it is on Youngblood. And she knows Brian Johnson's voice intimately because he did this. Right? He did this with his son. It was a great stunt and got him all over the newspapers. Terribly, terribly exciting. He did. He also did it with his dad. He put his own blood plasma into his father. I mean, just peel back the layers and it's bonker balls. So plasmapheresis is the practice of flushing out, as you say, the old Plasma from your body and putting, putting fresh plasma in it's super vampire. So that's something. The other thing that you mentioned is metformin. And metformin is interesting because metformin forms a bit of a core of another aspect of the book, which is that experimentation is actually really important when it comes to science. And this is definitely what drives our sort of technologists is they're all about experimentation and we should be able to experiment on ourselves and we should be able to have safe places that are unregulated where we can do experiments, because we're going to do them on ourselves, not on anybody else. Metformin is a kind of like, is a good example of this that happens to be within the regulated system. Metformin is a diabetes drug. It is a generic diabetes drug and it's probably the most prescribed diabetes drug in the west, certainly in the US And I also believe in the uk but in the west it's, I mean, it's so well prescribed that as I say, it's generic. So what happened though was that patients started to come to their doctors and say, you know, I appear to be feeling better, right? Something, something extraordinary is happening inside my body. Doctors started to take note. There was some research that's been done on it that suggests that it lowers the rate of, lowers the rate of diabetes, it reduces the, the, the of developing dementia. Like there's all kinds of things that metformin appears to do as like individual studies have, have sought to identify it and that has made it a very popular off label. So, you know, not taken for diabetes drug. For longevity enthusiasts. You will absolutely find it in all longevity enthusiasts supplement cupboards. Not because it actually does or has been found to reduce aging per se, but because there are all of these associations with a variety of different studies that have suggested that metformin may actually reduce the incidence of these sort of the cluster of aging diseases. So that's cardiovascular, cardiovascular, heart attacks, et cetera, diabetes, cancer and dementia. And so metformin is another thing that people are taking. People are also taking a drug that's called rapamycin and that, that actually was derived from the, the, the skin of wine grapes, which is great. You know, that's why you often hear like wine's good for you, it's not good for you. Wine grapes, blueberries, that type of thing. And that's another drug that, that is taken off label, right? It's not prescribed for the thing that it's supposed to be prescribed for. But regardless, it's taken off label because that's the type of thing that seems to kind of extend someone's healthy life. And that's actually a very, very important point, is that here we're not just talking about longevity, we're talking about extending healthy life. Everybody now has shifted their attention from I want to be 5,000 years old, though there. Those people do exist, but they want to live 5,000 years healthily. They do not want to be in severe decline. And so health span has become the term of art. And these sort of treatments, as it were, all off label, none of which have been approved by any regulator anywhere in the world for these particular uses. Are those that many longevity enthusiasts?
- [44:16]
Carl Miller
Well, I certainly don't want to live with a thousand years of Brian Johnson's diet, I can tell you, because there didn't seem anything worse. I mean, everyone, he basically eats some kind of like Nut Putty most of the time. It seems like torturous. But, Alex, we've probably got time for one final theme. And I was thinking we probably have to end with like, well, in a sense, the end, the singularity. Because that's a really important part of the puzzle, isn't it? The way you write about it is, is almost like these creeds or sort of religion, culty religions are in a sense kind of forming. I don't know how you best see them. But you've got, you've got different ideological responses to the Singularity, don't you? You've got the kind of transhumanists and long termists and singularitarians and effective altruists and accelerationists, a whole new kind of landscape of ideology which is quite exciting and I imagine will probably sound quite foreign or unfamiliar to most people listening to this. How do they feature, though, in this race for longevity and how does the singularity feature?
- [45:23]
Alex Krotosky
So ultimately, you know, what we've been talking about is very much the kind of, the examples of and how do you do it? But behind the scenes, behind all of this is basically, this is a book about belief, right? It's a book about what do I believe in? What do I believe the human body is, what do I believe death is, what do I believe meaning is? And for technologists, there has emerged a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very fundamentalist belief in technology as the sa. I remember hearing about this, and this is where I am. I am eating my humble pie. I remember hearing about this in the early 2000s as I was covering, as I was writing for the Guardian, and I remember hearing about these wacky people in Silicon Valley. Who had this crazy idea called the singularity. And the Singularity is this idea that at some point, because we have a kind of, we have technology and science that produces and provides accelerating returns, right? Accelerating returns in our investment. Every time we build something, we are able to then build on top of that, and our ability to then get things that are faster and more powerful, et cetera, become shorter. Because these new technologies, these new discoveries are actually, they make it easier for us to create things that are then even faster and even. It's the shoulders of giants vibe, but with a kind of like a notion of how quickly new knowledge, new information comes along. Because of the law of accelerating returns. We will, within 15 years. It's always 15 years. It doesn't matter what year. I'm telling you this, right? It's always 50. If 15 years ago I heard it was 15 years, but whatever, within 15 years we will have a technology that is so powerful that we will be able to integrate with it. And at that point we will become a single consciousness. Usually artificial intelligence is involved. Today artificial intelligence is involved. It used to be that nanotechnology was more prominent in this story, but nanotechnology is now just part of the story. We put lots and lots of little robots into our bodies. They continually fix us based upon upgrades from a server which is effectively implanted on the neocortex of our brains. If you've heard anything about Neuralink, which is Elon Musk's brain company, this is, this is what he's doing. Create this kind of digital layer of the neocortex which will then upgrade our bodies, et cetera, et cetera. And then we'll be able to merge with artificial intelligence and we shall have the other side, whatever the other side looks like. Like bliss and delight is the positive. Like lots of people are looking forward to bliss and delight. I'm not kidding. This is, I am not, I am genuinely not crazy when I see that. I saw this in 2002, 2003. I thought it was wacko and I'm hearing it today. I, I, I thought to myself, this is too crazy. These technologists are too wild. There's no way this is going to peter out. It's just going to go away. And it hasn't. And I wasn't looking at it. And like Qanon or any of the other conspiracy theories that have happened over the last 20 odd years, right, it's still bubbling and there's a really strong community. And this idea of the singularity has taken over so much that we now have entire institutes that are based around it. We have learned institutions that are absolutely focused on this happening and how best to ensure that we as humanity can survive in tandem with technology. I find it improbable. Also, the science fiction geek in me finds it very, very exciting. So, yes, there are factions that are looking at the singularity, the inevitability of the singularity, that do fall along different ideological lines. We have our transhumanists who believe that we have the fundamental right and obligation to put technologies to augment ourselves with technologies. These are the folks who are really looking forward to the time when we can upgrade our consciousness to server farms that will occupy Jupiter. This is part of the plan, right? This is not a small group of people, right? This is the transhumanists. And they're looking towards a singularity as a moment, almost like a messianic experience. Right? The, the apocalypse will come. Everything that we know from the past will be gone, and only the future of Bliss, Delight and, you know, incredible power and wonderfulness will exist. We just happen to be consciousnesses on server farms in Jupiter if we wish. The second group is, you mentioned the effect of altruistic. And they're sort of buddies in arms of the long termists. These, these folks are actually a little bit more concerned about what happens after. They're not like, hooray, that's it. Bliss and delight. They're like, oh my God, what happens when. How do we ensure that we can operate to the best of our ability? Effective altruists are looking at that in the relatively short term, trying to figure out what are the, what are the most important things that can be funded, what are the most effective ways that you can distribute your altruism, Whether that's time or money, preferably. And they decide what that is on the basis of hyper rationality. Right. This is the rationalism aspect. They, they use unbelievably complex algorithms effectively or equations. It's so thrilling to be lost in the debates around this because you just get like philosophically massaged. The whole thing is really exciting. It is way out of reality though, right? It's really. It only looks at, it doesn't look closely, it doesn't look locally. It doesn't look, it looks at like, you know, very, very important issues like malaria. So they're looking at mosquito nets in parts of West Africa. Absolutely. Put your money into that. But they're not supporting, you know, the local food bank. Right. They're not thinking locally. They're also creating quite considerably problematic decisions when it Comes to, as one of my contributors said, sort of ableism. They're not looking at different religions. It's much coming from a white Western savior point of view. Add to this, this notion of long termism. So here you have your kind of like, what is the most effective use of your, of your finances or your altruism right now? There's also a group that are adamant that we shouldn't just look within our lifetimes, but we should look billions of years hence. Sorry, not sorry. We should look generations hence for the billions of lives that have not yet been born. Because, you know, when it comes to straight utilitarian philosophy, every life is flattened out as a unit of value. And are those not as valuable as the ones today? And so they're making extraordinary decisions that are, in one case, Sam Bankman Fried, who was a cryptocurrency king, has caused people to make decisions that effectively make them fraudsters, put them in jail and steal millions of millions of dollars for this particular cause. So we're starting to see like these ideologies really, really, truly bubbling up. So you, the, the, the issue that I see with the technologists of Silicon Valley is that their sort of midlife crises, as it were, because they have the power, because they have the ear and influence of powerful people, because they have the finances to do it themselves, and because they have these fundamental beliefs that are unshakable and because they have a particular view of humanity as data objects and solvable, this is where the problem lies. And this actually is the crux of what we really need to look at if we, the plebs, the rest of us, are to go along with whatever else that they decide that they're going to put out there for us, as we have done so far with all of the problems that we've experienced with digital technology. So that's the, that's how belief and the kind of the cultish behavior arrives around this singular point of the singularity.
- [54:47]
Carl Miller
Well, Alex, it is on that singular point in the singularity. And it's glaring juxtaposition of Silicon Valley billionaire midlife crisis versus techno rapture that will have to, alas, bring things to an end. But that was Alex Kotosky everyone, author of course, of the Immortalist, which is available now online and in stores. It's a brilliant book. I heartily recommend that everyone goes out and reads it. I will end on a quote, actually, the one that, that chimed most with me in the book Death Comes to Us All. Alex writes, the only thing we can control is how we face it. So I've been Carl Miller, you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much as ever for joining us.
- [55:31]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events just head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [56:05]
Alex Krotosky
Foreign.
- [56:12]
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