Living Forever? The Science and Ethics of Longevity

welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet finance and today on this episode of our zuzalu series we are exploring some New Frontiers New Frontiers and new technologies all of which are poised to completely revolutionize the world and change everything by the operating system that Society is currently running today we are exploring the frontier of life does it have to end is there a technical reason as to why we can't live forever and if we do figure out how to live forever should we what does living forever even mean how

does that look what kind of ethical considerations are there the longevity discussion was front and center at zuzalu there's a Dao called Vida Dao which is a community-owned collective dedicated to funding and and advancing longevity science that organize in an entire weeks-long worth of talks and panels and workshops which included speakers like Aubrey DeGray who's like the vitalik of longevity research the conversation of longevity definitely evokes some natural reflexes in people but in different directions

some people get triggered by the thought of the pursuit of longevity where the idea of living forever just seems unnatural and offensive to some and they immediately reject the idea outright some argue that it's immoral others argue that it's impossible everyone seems to have an opinion on longevity like immediately one thing I noticed at zoosalu is that there are different tribes that emerge out of the Health and Longevity space there is the Health and Wellness Group which would be characterized as the morning exercisers the cold plungers

those who refrain from drugs or alcohol who did the occasional fast and overall attempted to live as healthy of a life as possible in the two months that we had at zalu and then there's the longevity tribe who are closer closer to like crypto nerds who really like geek out on research and Science and they're all in the pursuit of the longevity pill the Silver Bullet intervention that humans need so that we can live forever the sciency research Innovation side of things and interestingly these two

groups were like really far apart the overlap between the Health and Wellness Group and the longevity group was not that great and as a member of the health and wellness tribe we often joked that the longevity tribe are just taking the Gambit of ignoring Health and Wellness in the pursuit of trying to find the silver bullet while living a fun and more unrestricted Life along the way anyways one important note about the pursuit of longevity is that there are two conversations here one is slowing down aging and the second is accelerating

Rejuvenation the deceleration of Aging can bias time and there's a lot of effort and research going into this and it's pretty simple exercise good food sunlight friends and family not looking at screens Etc but the magic really happens with the acceleration of Rejuvenation this is longevity this is the secret sauce that's going to get us from living to 150 years to 1 500 years or longer and if the idea of living beyond 200 years just makes you feel

icky I get it it's a weird thing to wrap your head around the first interview in this episode in this longevity series is with Patrick Linden who wrote a book called the case against death which flippantly describes why death is bad and life is good he addresses some of these socio-cultural reactions to the pursuit of longevity and I think it's just an appropriate place to start for people who are not yet bought into the idea that longevity is inherently a noble Pursuit after our interview with Patrick we'll talk with Sergio Ruiz who is working in the field of epigenetic reprogramming

AKA reprogramming the way our DNA is expressed and specifically reprogramming it to go backwards to a more youthful state which is apparently a thing you can do over and over and over again and is currently the most promising area of research in the whole pursuit of longevity thing and then lastly we'll follow up with Michael Greer who is the founder of an app called Humanity which uses a combination of big data and AI models to produce a longevity score and it's an app that I was using throughout my time at zuzalu in order to expand extend my house ban as long as possible

a goal that I've always been trying to pursue but sometimes crypto gets in the way like I said in the intro longevity had a front and center focus at zuzalu although not everyone was bought into it the growth of the longevity industry is constrained by Nathan nation state regulations it's hard to do research when things like the FTA just get in the way of all viable experiments which is why they longevity people and the networks date people mingled so well together the Network State people want to provide the longevity people a place to do legal longevity research I

understand that the idea of human experiments in the pursuit of living forever is kind of a bad look but first it's not as bad as it sounds it's not this like weird mad scientist experiments playing around with human DNA it's just that the FDA has such an immensely High bar that most human studies just can't get over it Additionally the downstream effects of discovering new treatments and interventions are immense part of the pursuit of longevity naturally comes with the elimination of many many diseases that both kill millions and cost trillions

the successful pursuit of longevity can free up an entire healthcare industry of ineffective practices and expensive interventions and unlock trillions upon trillions of yearly GDP all while massively reducing suffering along the way so even if the thought of living forever does make you feel icky the second order effects of finding ways to be healthier for on for longer will unlock so many new doors for so many new humans so that is my Preamble for this longevity conversation I think y'all are going to learn quite a lot so let's go ahead and

get into our first conversation with Patrick Linden and the case against death but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade on Kraken Pro you'll have access to Advanced charting tools real-time Market data and lightning fast trade execution all inside their spiffy new modular interface kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want

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started working with the first dowled layer 2 ecosystem check out mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at Xerox mantle banquest Nation May we are once again at zuzalu and I'm here with Patrick Linden and Patrick Linden has a hot take for the world Patrick what's your hot take it's very simple that life is good and death is bad how dare you well we should do all we can to avoid deaths basically it's my idea why have you gotten and the the story here is that uh explaining this that that death is bad there's well there's more to this

story but yeah Society uh pushes back on this frequently so maybe we can unpack this a little bit more like why is this a hot take and why do you get resistance for this well though two groups of people so so so one group will say what's your next book called kitten so cute Pizza is delicious that is they take it as an obvious fact that that uh death is bad but not only death but also the slow death aging of course uh is bad right and then there's the other group of people who say

you can't think like that death and aging is part of what it means to be human and it's not something we should resist per se as at least not do well we can but rather learn to accept in a kind of gracious way and you know they have various ways of saying that they say that you shouldn't try to add years to your life but you should try to add life to your years and so on so they will say sure it's okay to be interested in in

the quality of life that we have but to extend it it's not something we should be doing and that's it seems like it's a majority view in fact I don't know have you talked to people about this yourself and what what attitudes do you get yeah I think just a lot of people aren't ready to put themselves into the mindset that um that human the human project is one of seeking life and that's a novel like

area for people to consider and so when we say like life is good like you said like many people are like yeah but then when we start unpacking what that means like oh no life always life forever so when you say like life is good death is bad is this synonymous with the pursuit of immortality is is this kind of the on the same track here absolutely absolutely so I don't personally think immortality is the right word because immortality logically means that you're

unable to die and that would be very dangerous proposition because what could happen if you actually couldn't die you could have an accident and be buried in in a house and then millions of years later you find yourself buried hundreds of feet down in the soil right it's unable to unable to move right perhaps in pain but also unable to die so we're not talking about like Supernatural Powers we're not talking about super men we're talking

about simply the lack of aging and the lack of uh biological processes that cause us to die well so what I object to then is the fact that we are forced to die before we want to die so it's a little bit about essentially about expanding human Freedom as I see it so I find it a prison really for us that we have this set limit that we we just can't break break through so far right we're trying to

um and so what I want is indefinite life extension so there's no definite time that nature ordains you now you die but if you run out of interest in life uh or Prospect in life Etc and you think oh for some some reason you're very unfortunate circumstances and so on life can be an exit right but of course I also hope that I will never be in such circumstances so in effect I want this indefinite completely open road I want

an and every good person I want to have this possibility of a completely open road you have no idea when it's going to end but it's going to keep going as long as you want with some luck I mean there are accidents out there Etc right I think I think it's very good when you talk about supernatural because I think immortality in some sense belongs to the Supernatural and not the natural world I mean even when we talk about immortal

jellyfish for example or uh other Immortal creatures uh so-called Immortal creatures they're not Immortal at all right they just you can say they're contingently Immortal that is their Immortal as long as nobody steps on them right well you know a moto boat go drive through it or something like that it will keep going because aging is not going to kill it right but of course this issue is is so tied up with aging because aging is that which kills the most people and and is that which means

that no matter what you do and how lucky you are the Grim Reaper is going to get you right yeah so I think there's two boundaries on this argument that um living forever is good that that life is good one boundary is like we said like well we always want the option to be able to die that is an option that we would like to retain and so we don't want the curse of watching the machinations of the universe pass by as for thousands and thousands of years while we watch our families and loved

ones come and go and we are just this being that exists in this space-time Continuum at some unknown where time just becomes weird like we don't want that that's not what we want similarly um and with the one that we haven't talked about yet um and I can't remember the name of this like I think Greek Fable or something uh but this one man goes up to a God and and asks for uh the ability to live forever and he's granted that wish yeah but what he forgets to ask for as well is for health and so he

does live forever but he slowly he continues to age and he slowly gets more feeble and like just I don't know the full story but turns to dust so like there's two guard rails that we want to split between uh and that when we say life is good we mean to stick between these two things we want to be able to live forever while having the op while like being hit by a car will still kill you but also we don't want to be decrepit forever we want uh we want our health and our our Rejuvenation to be

very very strong and this is like the needle that we want to thread as a species correct yeah exactly so in reality uh the longevity will come as an effect of the health and everyone who works in this area see Health as being the means to longevity it's It's Not Mere survival that anyone is interested in uh well I am interested

in mere survival survival but having a uh the the the quality of your life being what also causes the quantity is is the ideal we're looking for here absolutely and that's something that when you argue these ideas and when you look at surveys that has been done uh people in general become more sympathetic to this longevity project once uh it's explained to them that they

will have a good health with it right then then the interest shoots up but it's it's people have a very more time wrapping their mind around it it's as if they they had a vision of what it is like to be 80 or 90. and especially when they're young and far away from it that is incredibly pessimistic right so uh when you ask just the ordinary general public uh or if I did this in my class so I taught a class at NYU for many

years Called Death longevity in values and each a semester I started with a survey of people's or the the the the students attitudes to death and Longevity and I asked a question that was it was clearly clearly specified that they would be in good health I asked the question how long they wanted to ideally live and I got an average of 90. and this is even when I explained to

them you're gonna be in in decent health and so on and still you got like a spectrum between you know 70 and and the 100. after 100 it's as if they could not fathom the idea that you could be 100 plus and still in good health right of course now we see it's one of the the biggest growing demographics in this world the fastest growing demographic it's a tiny demographic but it's fast it's growing very rapidly now the 100

plus right and the 90 Plus and 80 plus right what would your answer be well my answer is I can't give a number it would be ridiculous to give a number I don't know what my life is going to be when I'm 200. or 1000 right or 5 000. if I say 200 would be enough what happens on my 200th uh birthday I'm sure I I have tennis schedule for

next week I'm project I haven't done you know and and or I might just want to say well it would be terrible for me not to be able to just watch the sky I think people are um I think the mindset that we would have would obviously adapt itself and I'm talking here about

longevity through science through Health right which means that it's not something where you would be the only one in the situation but you would have many people choosing to live 200 or a thousand or five thousand years right uh and none of them I think have a good reason to say I mean we're completely arbitrary to sit and guess and in 2020 23 to Guess that I'd rather be dead uh the day after my my 200th birthday right I mean it's ridiculous right so so

it just show you the immaturity of this subject matter in the public discussion that even the most a basic fallacies when it comes to thinking of that or underexplored and so that's why I wrote my book and my book the case against this in order to expose all the fallacious reasoning around this topic that is just uh uh so underdeveloped right yeah so I think

people when they wake up every single morning they don't really ask themselves this but like if for the thought experiment you can wake up in the morning be like do you want to die today and the answer is probably going to be no and then you can ask yourself again that same question the next day and the answer is going to be no and what you're saying is like well you can repeat that process up until you're 90. and then you're going to wake up at 90 with this um all this health span technology and all of this longevity technology and all this improved Health uh uh environment that

we can create from ourselves that technology is going to create for ourselves and at 90 you're going to wake up and be like no I'm I'm ready to go to 91 plus one day and that's and so it's not really about I think when you ask the the question I was like uh to what age uh do you want to live to people are assuming this like Decay function in their life that is a fallacy that you're saying like don't assume the Decay function we're trying to eliminate the Decay function and so estimate your lifespan once we eliminate this Decay

function exactly but even when you explicitly postulate that we're not going to have as you put it the Decay function people still say 90 90 right yeah well because they're stuck in that mindset right it's like Stockholm syndrome and they're like stuck in this world where like yeah we we live to 100 and then it's a yeah it's interesting when you say stockhol arm syndrome so if if not all listeners aware what that is it's basically what it comes from a kidnapping case in Stockholm in Sweden

actually and uh it was um the kidnap victim started identifying with her uh captors right and so the idea here is that we are captive to aging and death so since we can't do we can't escape it looks like uh we might as well identify with the captors and say okay it's good exactly you know we'll actually want this I want to fall apart I want to see my parents fall apart I want to lose my grandparents I will go gracefully into that good night oh yeah it's gonna you know this is just how notice this is what I want I wouldn't want the opposite

you know and then people start intellectualizing it so what can I say on behalf of my my captors staging in death uh how can I paint them in a positive light okay I can't escape but I can kind of identify and glorify and make the captives will my will and thereby kind of overcome them this is like bargaining right we're bargaining for death yeah yeah so so so philosophy in monten's world where the the French philosopher Montana is he

says oh all geared in all history geared towards having us accept death right and he himself tried to I mean he was himself in that school of thought that this is something we shouldn't be afraid of but we shouldn't resist Etc which is very understandable of course when you live in a pre-scientific era where a very early scientific era right but now such Pacific is itself a problem and and dangerous because if people understood very simple truth that it's better to be

youthful and Alive than to be old or dead um we would see investment that well maybe we could have been 20 years ahead today from where we are now but there's a I mean it's a scandal when you when you think about the things we can afford in this world and that we cannot afford apparently or there's no interest in stopping aging which is hurting everyone around us is an absolute outrage and we

we should be outraged but you know the most important thing is to to wake up now and try to undo the incredible harm of inaction right a non-committal that is being sustained by a refusal to think about death in a kind of straightforward way where we say okay enough with the nonsense there isn't much good about aging and dying if it's the end it's a

personal catastrophe for every everyone everyone basically everyone yeah I think what you're saying is like it's just this like blind spot that we've accepted yeah that uh maybe like the medical field the medical uh areas of academic study and and actual practitioners just like just don't look there because no nowhere in humanity have we had the tools or the conversations to actually Point our attention to aging so Patrick why now why is now the time to try and

and uh illuminate this this blind spot that humans have well so now is well the thing is yes it is now because now is what we have but it could have been uh it could have been uh something we've done or you know the whole last century it could have been the focus and of course there were people who thought it should be the focus of science very early like Francis Bacon right Roger Bacon and uh Descartes and

uh Bentham and uh another philosophers who who thought that science should be concerned with this so well it's not today I mean it is we should have been doing this for for a long long long time but all we have now is the now and now now is high time to start of course right there is more promise now that this ambition is not just the pipe dream but uh we hear uh of course weekly about small small

promising possible breakthrough we're still waiting for the the the kind of cure that that passes the gold standard and where we have good uh longitudinal and clinical studies and so on but there are many uh people not enough people at all I mean some estimates say they're only 5 000 or so working on uh fundamental aging and so on so so much much too few smart people are working on

it but there are a lot of different paradigms that are being pursued and that itself is very promising that there isn't just one approach but there there's a plurality there is approaches and interventions from the the kind of everyday simple interventions they were getting better and better and better at I don't know if you follow the the debate about what we should and shouldn't eat you know it's it's it's still a terribly messy situation only meat no meat only

vegetables no not or the that but I mean of course uh sometimes that overshadows there's a lot of consensus as well uh that you you should avoid eating too much sugar you should get your exercise you shouldn't smoke you shouldn't drink maybe not at all or a little bit you can drink right and um and and you shouldn't engage in meaningful projects

um and so on right you should call your mom things like things like that those things are all positive when it comes to longevity and these are things that you can do today and in fact when you think about it and you when you think about what value and Beauty it is in just existing even if you have problem even if you have bad days um it might make you want to think well uh let me be serious about my health and let's do this while we're waiting for

the miracle drugs so in some sense um we can take action today because the longer we can keep us with this kind of low Tech interventions we can Keep Us Alive till the big breakthroughs will come right I I think it is worth noting that um a lot of the world of uh the health industry the the health Academia health research Health practitioners the hospital system like if you ask a cancer researcher what

they're doing they're saying oh I'm trying to I'm trying to cure cancer if you ask um some like infectious disease researcher they say oh I'm trying to cure infectious disease some metabolic disease practitioner what are they doing they're trying to cure metabolic disease and so as a whole we're all approaching these more surgical parts of uh Health interventions but if you really zoom out and look at the health care system as a whole each one of those systems is trying to create

health and prevent death and so this the idea of the health industry is a longevity industry it is a longevity Pursuit it's just people inside of this system are it's like the the elephant the people feeling the elephant metaphors like the the the cancer people are just feeling one leg and they say oh like how do I how do I help health I prevent cancer but if you look at the elephant as a whole what health and the medical industry is trying to do is preventing death but no

one really seems to be able to zoom out and understand like what this thing is from the big picture but that makes me hopeful that Society is on a cusp of like a phase change where once this narrative once this story breaks out and once people realize it and once this gets spread through the the culture through the internet through memes through propagation through podcasts like this I'm actually hopeful that there can be a pretty rapid phase change of people understanding like oh pursuit of health is pursuit of contingent more immortality do you see are you are you

that helpful as well because I am that hopeful are you hopeful yeah I'm very hopeful and I think that the practice the the science the Advent of medicine that actually works on aging and intervention that works on Aging together with the ideological change they will feed each other so the more hope that's rationally based that people can

prolong their youth the more positive they're going to be right and this this is what surveys show as well in fact just knowing about the various projects of extending life makes people more positive to it right simple simple exposure to it um and the way you describe the healthcare system too much of it is is sick care really too much of it is is not preventative medicine and that's an incredibly waste of money so of course because you're extending the worst parts

of your life yeah exactly it's it's a terrible waste of money and it's it's a it's a terrible wasted opportunity to relieve suffering so there needs to be a kind of mindset change here and the in terms of dollars spent versus suffering reduced is the worst like allocation of resources that we have because it actually it actually probably net increases human suffering yeah it's it's it's it's terrible I mean of course it it's it's great when you

have a something that that can manage a disease or patch it up or even cure it it's fantastic but it's much much better to have us not get sick in the first place and it should be obvious and in fact I like what you said before when you describe this kind of old mindset that in fact they see a contradiction where there is no contradiction if you if you if you talk to people about this even in the

health profession or even in the science many will have a kind of reaction when you put it in terms of longevity when in fact if they succeed it's exactly longevity right I mean they're going to get that as a side effect and we want to get it as a side effect from addressing the root causes of Aging of course when it when we look at potential upsides of a potential breakthroughs they must come from addressing