Pod Insights All In The Mind Our millennia-long obsession with immortality About this episode Would you want to live forever? The rich and powerful certainly do.
There are numerous examples throughout history of people going to extreme lengths in search of immortality. These days, it's Silicon Valley tech bros, testing out everything from blood transfusions to merging our brains with the cloud.
Why are they/we so obsessed with dodging death? What is it about extreme wealth that makes people dream of defying biology?
Today, tech journalist and social psychologist Aleks Krotoski takes us into the world of the ‘immortalists’: what they think the future of humanity might look like, and whether the rest of us want to come along for the ride.
Guest:
Aleks KrotoskiInvestigative journalistSocial psychologistAuthor, The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/465089/the-immortalists-by-krotoski-aleks/9781847928504
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarProducer: Rose KerrSenior Producer: James BullenSound engineer: Tegan Nicholls
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0:38 Speaker 03 Okay, so I wanted to start by listing some phrases from the book that are just so bizarre. They jumped out at me and made me wince and I couldn't help but write them down. And how exactly these phrases relate to immortality might not be totally clear as I list them out of context. But anyways, here they are. Yogurt enemas. Biohackers post about their nightly erections. Juice extracted from a testicle of a dog or a guinea pig. Transplanted sex glands from the young onto the old. I could go on, but I will stop there. I could really go on. What do these lines tell us about the pursuit of immortality?
1:19 Speaker 04 They tell us that we will try anything and we will, we will do anything, that we're pretty gullible.
1:26 Speaker 04 I think all of those things are interesting because they have a whiff, just a gentle whiff of science associated with them. And, you know, the, the aspects of grafting monkey parts onto a human's testicle had apparently some, some good, robust science behind it at the time. Bearing in mind that the time that we're talking about was the very, very early 1900s. But all of those things are things that people do and have done in the past to extend their lives.
1:57 Speaker 03 Alex Kratoski is a social psychologist, a tech and society reporter, and the author of The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life. And these days, the pursuit of a longer life has less to do with animal testicles and more to do with data tracking, biohacking, AI, and a quasi-religious movement that's convinced will one day live on computer servers on Jupiter, with our brains having been uploaded to a cloud. Okay, so things in the longevity slash immortality space remain bizarre. And today's pursuit of longevity is driven almost entirely by Silicon Valley.
2:35 Speaker 05 That's tech millionaire Brian Johnson on a one-man mission to reverse the age of his body. You may have heard of him as the person who has done things like eject himself with his son's plasma.
2:43 Speaker 03 And the question I have is, what is it about extreme wealth that makes people think they can defy biology and figure out a way to live forever? And why would anyone want to?
2:56 Speaker 04 This is very much a Judeo-Christian phenomenon.
3:00 Speaker 03 You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, our millennia-long effort to dodge death, what it says about us, and how it can also take a sinister turn.
3:14 Speaker 04 There are so many people who identify as transhumanists and who identify as singulatarians within Silicon Valley that I realized that actually what I really needed to do was I needed to understand exactly what is it that they imagine for the future so that we can say no.
3:36 Speaker 03 This is so fascinating. I want to start by drawing a brief history of the human pursuit of immortality through time. So maybe we can go from ancient China to the Dark Ages to the wild stuff that was happening in the 1900s, and then we'll get to present day.
3:52 Speaker 04 You know, I think when writing this book, I found a lot of comfort in the fact that what feels really weird and wacky today actually has quite an extensive history. So the very first story, or one of the very first stories that was ever written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is actually a story of... The Sumerian king, fabled king, who basically, he tried to pursue immortality. He tried to become immortal. So that's like the very first story that human beings wrote down in language. So this has been going on for some time.
4:29 Speaker 03 Right.
4:30 Speaker 04 But if we start with ancient China, we have the predecessors of modern chemistry, the alchemists. And they were trying anything and everything. They were mixing these things and they were serving them up to emperors and to one another to see if they drank these elixirs, if they would give them longer lives. So far, none of them have. Then we fast forward to the Middle Ages and we have popes, we have kings. We have, again, people who are in great power, commissioning investigations and research into things like the philosopher's stone.
5:07 Speaker 03 And then, if you fast forward to the 1900s, you get those experiments with animal testicles as well as experiments with animal semen. Enter a doctor named Charles Edward Brown Sicard. He was a legitimate doctor and he had a storied career, but at a certain point...
5:24 Speaker 04 He in particular made the decision to shift gears when he was in his 70s and beginning to feel that he himself was not as vigorous as he described it. And so what he did was he decided, through investigating whatever research was available at that time, that if you extracted semen from the testicle of a younger entity, and that, in his case, it was a weird mix of dog and guinea pig. And I think monkey was probably in there as well.
5:59 Speaker 03 This is...
6:00 Speaker 04 And you injected it into yourself.
6:01 Speaker 03 This sounds like a terrible idea, but okay.
6:02 Speaker 04 It sounds like a terrible idea, but the guy was convinced that it actually, you know, it was effective. And he said that his previous vigor returned within a week. And he was, you know, he was sort of gobsmacked by this. And this became known as the Brown-Sicard procedure. After he announced this to a room full of learned scientists, and all of whom were absolutely floored, also a little bit skeptical, they did investigate this. They started to do what we would today describe as loose clinical trials and found that it was all placebo effect. But by the time that that finding emerged out of the research, the Brown-Sicard procedure had been performed not just on Brown-Sicard himself,
6:46 Speaker 04 but on hundreds of men around Europe.
6:49 Speaker 03 Oh, my god.
6:51 Speaker 04 Just it, the stories of people's desires, the stories of people's belief are really humbling, you know, because all of these things, people get carried away. They think that they know what they're doing. But ultimately, the story comes back to this really elemental human experience of running away from the beyond. And to do that, they'll just put any old thing in their bodies.
7:19 Speaker 03 Okay, let's come to present day. And the kind of current day poster boy of immortality as, you know, pursued by Silicon Valley types is Brian Johnson.
7:31 Speaker 06 I'm like an Olympian, but for longevity.
7:33 Speaker 07 He spends a staggering $2 million a year in an attempt to reverse his biological age.
7:39 Speaker 03 You actually spoke to him for the book. Can you describe who he is and how he came to be so obsessed with the pursuit of immortality or, you know, anti-aging and dodging death for as long as possible?
7:52 Speaker 04 So Brian is a really interesting character in this story because Brian sees himself as a guinea pig. What he's doing is, he claims to, with a group of medical experts, is they claim to go through all of the research literature about anti-aging, rejuvenation, longevity. And systematically, They have created a kind of a baseline of health for Brian so that they know if they input any new intervention, they can see the effect of that intervention. And some of those interventions include, you know, shocking your penis. I still have absolutely no idea why that would be a thing, but apparently shocking your penis is a thing that will give you longevity.
8:37 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
8:38 Speaker 04 Injecting and transfusing the the blood plasma of his younger son. So he describes his his son Talmage as his blood boy.
8:47 Speaker 03 Oh, my God. Okay.
8:49 Speaker 04 Eating an extraordinary number of supplements every day, you know, doing a huge amount of intermittent fasting. Now, Brian is part of the Silicon Valley set and he actually came out of a he invented an app that allowed businesses to exchange finance, right? It's sort of business to business payment platform. It became hugely popular and was so popular that he was then able with Braintree, this company, to buy Venmo, which was then subsequently bought by PayPal. And that was where he really coined it. You know, he has a lot of money and he's decided that what he wants to do is he wants
9:29 Speaker 04 to give over his life and his money to the pursuit of this so that we can all learn from his experience, which is bad science.
9:39 Speaker 03 Right. Yeah, yeah. N equals one.
9:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
9:43 Speaker 03 I have two questions on the psychology of all of this. Like, one is just broadly, why are people throughout time, why have people been so obsessed with immortality and living forever? You mentioned the fear of death, but, you know, the idea of living forever to me sounds just awful, actually. Why you would want to stay alive past, you know, everyone you ever loved being alive? I don't understand. But so why would we want this? In general, and then what is it about extreme wealth in particular that starts to make people obsess about wanting to live forever? Because, you know, the Emperor of China and all these people you've talked about through history, this starts as a real wealthy person's obsession.
10:26 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Sana, these are such great questions. So I'm going to tackle the first one, the first one second and the second one first.
10:32 Speaker 03 Okay.
10:32 Speaker 04 I think the reason why, why wealth attracts this type of thing is because frankly, they've got time.
10:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:38 Speaker 04 And they've got money and life is good.
10:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:42 Speaker 04 You don't see somebody who is trapped in slavery who's like, oh, I really want to live forever. And this is the life that I want to have. No, you see somebody who is very comfortable, predominantly white, often male, usually Western. When I've given talks about this book, I've had people from different religions. I've had people from, you know, different contexts and cultures come up to me and say, this is not part of my life. This is very much a Judeo-Christian like phenomenon, right? People in the Hindu religion, for example, I get a lot of people commenting about the fact that they're like, this doesn't work for us, that, you know, we want to, you know, we want to advance and we want to reincarnate.
11:20 Speaker 03 Right.
11:21 Speaker 04 So, you know, that requires that we die.
11:23 Speaker 03 Yep.
11:23 Speaker 04 And, you know, and I have, I have all of the respect in the world for that. And I think that that was something that came out of this is that for this cluster of very wealthy Judeo-Christian, white folks who predominantly live in the beautiful, you know, Silicon Valley or thereabouts, they're perfectly happy. And wouldn't it be nice if they did live forever? And some of the researchers that I spoke with actually said that for them, it's also the kind of the next problem to solve. Given that they are so solution oriented, the objective is not necessarily to imagine what happens next. It's purely to solve the problem. And what they've done already is they've solved problems of politics.
12:07 Speaker 04 They've solved problems of economics. They've solved problems of psychology. All of the human sciences, whether those solutions are good for us or not, is up to, I think, where you are on the, the money earning side of that.
12:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:21 Speaker 04 But they see this as the next big problem to solve. They're like, well, we did it all and we're in space. So what next?
12:28 Speaker 03 Right.
12:28 Speaker 04 I know biology. And given that they have over the last, I would say, Well, 20 years, become essentially brokers of data. And our bodies have become much more interpreted through data. They are thrilled and excited by the reduction of the human experience into ones and zeros through smartwatches, apps, trackers, whatever. Then they're like, great, all we need to do is reverse engineer the human and we've got this. So for them, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, well, we already know how to do this. So let's just throw extra data at it and crunch some extra numbers, not to mention AI, which will come up with the solution as well.
13:10 Speaker 04 But with regards to the first question, why is it that people throughout history have sought to avoid the end is because they cannot imagine what it's like. This, this conversation comes out of philosophy ultimately. And my deep dive into that was through a really fantastic book that was called Immortality by a philosopher named Stephen Cave. And Cave's argument is that the experience of mortality is something that we can understand conceptually, but we cannot understand it truly. Even if you close your eyes and you imagine yourself not being right now, you're still
13:51 Speaker 04 at the center of that, that comprehension, still kind of cosplaying not being. And so this is what he describes as the mortality paradox. And he says that the mortality paradox, the, the idea that at some point we simply will not be, and we know it will happen, despite the fact that we live every day pretending that it will not happen. He says, this is the thing that's driven civilization. And it's a really, really compelling argument. I recommend reading that book.
14:25 Speaker 03 You are listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, the extreme lengths people will go to in the pursuit of immortality. And so far, the angles we've covered have been bizarre, but more or less straightforward enough to grasp. But things get a bit more theoretical from here on out because it turns out what it means to be immortal or how to extend human life, that is up for interpretation.
14:56 Speaker 03 So there's different camps with this whole business, isn't there? Because when Brian Johnson talks about wanting to live forever, is he actually talking about his body being around for a long time? Or are we talking about, you know, his brain eventually being uploaded to the cloud kind of thing? Tell me about the different camps in the immortality space.
15:14 Speaker 04 I, it's at this point that I, I truly feel like I need to like put my aluminium hat on. And the freaky thing is, is that as like, the, the more I talk about this and the more I see stuff coming in from newspaper articles about this whole space in general, I'm like, no, I'm actually not a crazy conspiracy theorist. This actually, these people actually do exist and this really is quite a dominant sense in, in not just Silicon Valley, but it's kind of spreading out a little bit further. So Brian, I, I describe as an example of a biohacker, somebody who lives by the data, right? And Brian's intention is not to necessarily live forever as a de facto, not to become
15:58 Speaker 04 immortal, but simply not to die today. The way that I'm going to do this is I'm going to hyper-optimize my body and I'm going to do everything with numbers, which means that I can then devote all of the health stuff to an algorithm so that it can keep him the same age, biological age, for as long as possible.
16:17 Speaker 03 But his mantra and his like movement is called "don't die."
16:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know.
16:22 Speaker 03 So is his ultimate goal to stay the same age forever or just, yeah, I suppose as long as possible?
16:27 Speaker 04 He's, he's really good at branding. I think, you know, his religion, as he describes it, "don't die," I think is part of the "I will not die today." And the reason why that exists is because by staying the same biological age today, not chronological, then he won't theoretically get those diseases of aging. And so his idea is to simply...
16:54 Speaker 04 Live at the same age as long as possible. So all of the things that would have killed him in the future will be solved by the time he gets there. And this is everything from cancer, diabetes, you know, heart conditions, all of that, all the way down to the common cold, right? Pneumonia will be sorted out.
17:11 Speaker 03 Right.
17:12 Speaker 04 Sepsis, all of these things that kill people will be sorted.
17:15 Speaker 03 This concept of keeping a biological age down for as long as possible in order to reap the benefits of these potential advances is called the longevity escape velocity.
17:26 Speaker 04 So if you imagine that escape velocity of a rocket is the rocket needs to have enough velocity, enough speed to escape the Earth's gravitational pull in order to go into space. Well, here you need longevity escape velocity. You need to maintain your age for as long as possible so you can escape the pull of time. And that's his approach to immortality. And that puts a lot of faith in technology.
17:59 Speaker 03 OK, so there's the biohacker types like Brian Johnson, trying to preserve their minds and bodies for as long as possible.
18:06 Speaker 04 Then you have the technologists.
18:09 Speaker 03 They also have a lot of faith in technology, faith being the operative word. You'll understand why as we keep talking.
18:17 Speaker 04 Then you have the technologists like Ray Kurzweil, who is the AI visionary at Google. He believes that we will experience something known as the singularity. And the singularity is the moment at which the technology becomes so advanced that we merge with it. At some point in the future, and it's always 10 years in the future. It doesn't matter if he said this 15 years ago. It was supposed to be five years ago. He said it last year. It's going to be in another 10 years, right? But in those years, that's when it's going to happen, when we will merge with technology. And at that point, we will experience singularity. Everything will come into focus.
19:02 Speaker 04 And life afterwards will be mediated and moderated by technology, nanobots, digital DNA, servers that live inside of our brains. Elon Musk's Neuralink is one of the interfaces that they're hoping is going to be this server that's going to essentially fix anything that goes wrong inside of us. And that is how we are going to live forever. Because immortality, that's what's going to happen. We will naturally become post-human. And that's the second form of immortality. A related third form is the sort of the political angle of this, which is rather than just saying, yay, that's going to happen in the future.
19:44 Speaker 04 The transhumanist movement say that not only will this happen, but we have a fundamental right and a responsibility to hack our bodies today. So that in the future, we will achieve the singularity. So it must happen and it politically must happen. And this is where a lot of the sort of biohacking and a lot of the really extreme stuff that we talked about before, when it comes to things like yogurt enemas and injecting, you know, sort of gene sequences and it comes to, you know, putting sensors underneath your skin, all of that. It is a fundamental responsibility of humanity
20:27 Speaker 04 to adapt ourselves so that we can achieve the singularity more quickly.
20:33 Speaker 03 And why is that a fundamental must and responsibility? Why?
20:37 Speaker 04 Because, because once we do that, right? All of this is so mad. Because once we do that, we can choose to be immortal. The transhumanist sort of mantra is three things. It's superintelligence, super longevity and super happiness. So superintelligence is the thing that is going to get us to this singularity, this sort of post-human thing. Superhappiness is what's going to happen after we achieve that. And super longevity, we will be able to decide at what point we want to kick the bucket because we will have choices at that point. So the responsibility is that it needs to happen and it needs to happen for all of us. So there isn't a class system.
21:22 Speaker 03 Right.
21:22 Speaker 04 Mad as fish.
21:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, like so much of this feels like a colossal exercise in missing the point. But also the transhumanist angle to this, is that like a fringe thing? Or is that what Silicon Valley is predominantly like thinking? Explain how dominant these ideas are.
21:39 Speaker 04 So when I was covering tech for the Guardian newspaper in 2003, I remember coming across transhumanism and I remember hearing a lot about the singularity because it was around that time that Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel and Peter Diamandis, who is another big investor in Silicon Valley, they were putting a lot of money into this thing called the Singularity University. That is a business venture that is, how can we prepare for a super longevity future type of experience? And I remember hearing all this stuff and I was like, y'all are crazy. Oh my God, you guys have drunk the Kool-Aid. This is not for me.
22:24 Speaker 04 And I entirely dismissed it as a fringe thing. And I thought, oh my God, well, they're just giddy with the possibilities of the internet, right? We all were at that point. 2003, everything was going to change. And I was like, y'all have done too many psychedelics. You read too much science fiction and you've just bought into it. And so I looked away and I looked away for almost two decades. And when I came back and was like, okay, I'm going to pursue this story of immortality, thinking that it was going to be about designer drugs and thinking it was going to be about different protocols that you're supposed to use, et cetera.
23:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:04 Speaker 04 Wow. Everybody came out and was like, transhumanism. And I was like, no, what? Singularity? Wait, hold on a minute. You got what? And to be fair, there is a scientific arm of the pursuit of longevity on one side who seek to differentiate themselves from the transhumanists. But up until, I would say, maybe a decade ago, everybody was all swimming in the same pool. They were all transhumanists and longevity researchers. So That movement within the bubble that is Silicon Valley grew and grew and grew.
23:45 Speaker 04 And now I would say that there is a huge proportion of the people who are operating in Silicon Valley as employees, all the way up to the CEO office, who would describe themselves as transhumanists, who see the singularity as something that we're seeking to pursue, that superintelligence is in fact, as Elon Musk described it, very close to his philosophy of life. And I realize that actually, there are so many people who identify as transhumanists and who identify as singulatarians, that I realize that actually what I really needed to do is I needed to understand exactly what is it that they imagine for the future,
24:29 Speaker 04 so that we can say no.
24:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, because I can't help but think like, surely they don't mean this for everybody, because if everyone lives forever, whether that's uploaded to the cloud or just more decades than we do now, can the planet sustain food systems to feed everyone? Can it provide the energy needed to sustain all of this? There's just so much actually that goes into this. Climate change is also happening, guys. The world's a dumpster fire. What are they actually envisioning the world is going to look like when we have the singularity?
25:06 Speaker 04 Well, the good news is that we will have all uploaded ourselves to the cloud and we're all going to be on server farms on Jupiter.
25:13 Speaker 03 So we don't need food.
25:14 Speaker 04 So we won't need food. We're going to be living in bliss and delight on server farms and our value is going to be pure happiness.
25:21 Speaker 03 Okay, but that's also like, what? No one's purely happy ever. Why is existing on a computer going to make us purely happy forever? Like, what? I'm so confused.
25:31 Speaker 04 It is a particular worldview. It's a very utilitarian worldview. And for the people who decide not to upload themselves to the cloud, for the people who decide not to stick a Neuralink interface, digital interface on their cortex in order to better communicate with the artificial intelligences, for all of those people, they're going to be fine and they're going to live forever. But for the rest of us, we're just going to not be part of the party. We're just going to... Fade away.
26:04 Speaker 03 Right.
26:05 Speaker 04 And we don't have any say and it's not our, it's, it's not our jam anymore because they have, they have taken us to the next step of humanity.
26:15 Speaker 03 Do you know what? I'm fine with that. It's not my jam. I'll opt out of this party. But the other question I have is when people talk about the singularity and this transhumanism movement, I'm like, what humans need to thrive and be happy is meaning, purpose, social connection? Like this accounts for none of that. And I suppose that's where it goes to like, this is an evolutionary thing. This is the next phase of hu- human life is what they say, right?
26:41 Speaker 04 Exactly. So I guess we won't need those things, but we will still get them. They will still be, if they're needed, somebody will design some kind of system that will do that for us in the cloud, I guess.
26:53 Speaker 03 It is a lot of faith. It's faith.
26:56 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, it's absolutely faith. It is 100% religion. And I, I mean, I, I sort of laugh at myself for not realizing that when I came into this. And then it suddenly became blindingly clear when I was watching this guy walking around on stage at a longevity conference and people were, it was, it was like I was at a revival. That's a thing that happens in the States amongst evangelical Christians. It's like I was watching a preacher riling up the crowd, talking about, and I can give you eternal life. And I was like, I grew up Catholic. I've seen this before, right?
27:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:35 Speaker 04 You were just wearing different clothing. And it was that, that moment that I, I kind of went, wow, actually, no, it is charismatic. It is giving people what so many religions, not all religions, what so many religions provide is this idea of you can have some kind of glory if, if, you know, if you do this thing and I, I can give it to you. Fascinating.
28:03 Speaker 03 The thing we haven't really accounted for yet is the biases inherent in a lot of these beliefs. If they're coming from a predominantly white, male Anglo-Saxon culture, a Silicon Valley culture, that's going to omit a few things, a few people.
28:20 Speaker 04 What actually became very clear as I was writing the book is that there is inherently an ageism associated with this entire movement. And the ageism is not just of the people, not just from the people who want to live forever, but it's also the system in general. It sets death up as failure. It sets aging up as failure. And that has a huge psychological impact on people who are going through decline. And also, you're funneling away way too much money from stuff that needs to be there to help the people who, between today and whenever you get your silver bullet, philosopher's
29:02 Speaker 04 stone made out of ones and zeros, these people need support now.
29:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a really good point because it did occur to me, my god, the amount of money being funneled in this direction when there is like really real problems in the world right now is shocking. But then there is also this like overlay of ableism that runs through a lot of this thinking.
29:23 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And some of my contributors really were like very, in fact, one of the people who did the fact checking on this was just like screaming at some of these, some of the people who were, who were talking about. You know, one of the, one of my contributors was basically saying, what about all of these other people in the world? There is nobody else who's being consulted on this except for this cohort. And, you know, there's no comments about gender, there's no comments about sexuality, there's no conversations about disability, there's no conversations about culture. All these different appropriatenesses are just coming to the fore. And yeah, it's a great fantasy, it's a great fairy tale until the day it actually happens.
30:08 Speaker 04 And then who's going to pick up the pieces? Well, Not them.
30:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:13 Speaker 04 Because I asked all of them, so what happens next? And not a single person had an answer for me.
30:18 Speaker 03 Wow.
30:19 Speaker 04 And that was also quite disturbing because that's exactly why we are in the position today that we are in. Now, we can excuse that from, you know, from the past. We can say, well, we didn't realise that technology was going to become such a big part of our lives and that, you know, the fallout would be decline of democracies, increase in populism. We didn't realise these things would happen. Now we do. Now we recognise that there is a cause and there is an effect. Right? So why not think about what's going to happen once you throw these technologies at your problem? Like, why not take some responsibility ahead of time and imagine some unintended consequences
31:01 Speaker 04 and figure out if you can build your solutions in a way that solves for those in the future so that we don't end up in the same situation that we're in today?
31:18 Speaker 03 That is Alex Kratoski, social psychologist, Techin Society reporter and author of The Immortalist: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen. Our sound engineer this week is Tegan Nicholls. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next week.
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