Elon Said Death is Solvable

0:00 Do you know who Ted Williams is?

0:01 The famous baseball player?

0:02 Williams was one of the first people to do this.

0:04 He's frozen right now.

0:05 Did you know that this is actually a thing that happens and how this all works?

0:10 So, we talked about this company Alcor.

0:12 And so, I was like, Alcor.

0:13 Now, I was really ready for this to be like super evil megacorp, right?

0:16 Like the free You pay them tons of money

0:18 and they freeze your body and they're like whatever.

0:20 It's But it turns out, I think it's a little more innocent than that.

0:23 It's a It's a nonprofit that was started

0:25 by this this husband and wife couple who they read this book.

0:28 There was a book that was published that was very influential in the space.

0:31 And it was basically a book that argued that today you could do this thing,

0:34 which is right when you die, if you're very fast-acting,

0:37 you can essentially do put like antifreeze on your body.

0:41 So, you can freeze your body as is

0:43 it's liquid nitrogen, not It's liquid nitrogen, right?

0:47 Yeah, but it it functions almost like it

0:48 They They basically inject something in your veins

0:51 also cuz they need your cells to not

0:53 like or like your veins not collapse or something.

0:56 So, they do So, they put something in your vein

0:57 and then they use liquid nitrogen to cool you down.

1:00 And then you are cryogenically frozen for indefinitely.

1:03 And I've always thought I I had heard of the concept.

1:06 I didn't actually fully realize that there's a business behind this.

1:08 You pay $200,000 and you're frozen and that, you know,

1:12 they've frozen I think 200 people have done it.

1:14 200 something people have done it.

1:15 1,500 people have are working with Alcor saying freeze me when I die.

1:19 They just haven't died yet.

1:20 So, I didn't realize like it's a thing.

1:22 It's like a a business that exists that people pay for and, you know,

1:26 it's it's $80,000 just to freeze the head and it's

1:28 200 grand to freeze the whole body and then you, you know, before you die,

1:31 you pay a couple hundred bucks a year to save

1:33 your spot and there's like this whole operation behind it.

1:36 So, that was like already fascinating thing number one.

1:38 Okay.

1:39 So, this kind of led me down a little bit

1:40 of a rabbit hole of like I'm like a hyper normal guy.

1:44 Like I don't really do that much fringe stuff.

1:47 And I would have never considered doing this.

1:49 But I've been reading a lot of these stories with AI.

1:51 We talked about some of them on this podcast

1:53 about like the guy who cured his dog's cancer.

1:55 And then you brought up the founder of GitLab who

1:56 cured his own cancer using AI and like hyper-personalized targeted medicine.

2:02 He's trying to.

2:03 He's trying to.

2:04 No, he did.

2:05 It's in remission.

2:06 Oh, he did?

2:06 Yeah, he did it.

2:07 And by the way, I have like a whole whole update on this crazy.

2:09 I really want to have him on.

2:10 It's a It's a Let's go to that in a second.

2:12 This is It's wild.

2:13 I just like went down the rabbit hole.

2:15 So, I've been seeing this and it's like, okay,

2:17 like it's not crazy that in the next 30 years that AI

2:22 is going to figure out how to like cure a lot of disease,

2:27 death, to be able to bring back cryogenically frozen

2:29 people to be alive or to like upload their consciousness,

2:33 upload their brain into some sort of like LLM.

2:35 Like that's not like crazy to me now.

2:38 Yeah, I don't Well, so, the I like Like I always get these videos.

2:41 I get like emotional videos on Instagram all

2:43 the time and like one of my favorite

2:45 videos is when a family meets the recipient of the heart of like, for example,

2:51 if my like kid or husband or wife died and I get to and I

2:56 get to put my ear on the heart and hear It always makes me emotional.

3:01 And so, I'm like, "Oh, man,

3:01 that's like the greatest gift in a bad situation." So, I do love that.

3:05 But I'd much rather be alive [laughter] than that situation.

3:09 This led me down a little bit of a rabbit hole.

3:11 Then I saw this Elon clip.

3:13 I I do think it is a very solvable problem.

3:16 When we find figure out what causes aging,

3:18 I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious.

3:20 It's not a subtle thing.

3:22 The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all

3:24 the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate.

3:27 Um so, why is that?

3:28 It It That That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock Right.

3:32 that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body.

3:36 So, have you ever seen this clip before?

3:39 No.

3:40 I didn't know that he cared about that.

3:41 The guy just asked him a question.

3:43 He's like, "Well, I've never I haven't spent time like looking into it.

3:46 It's not like it's not one of my missions

3:48 I'm on right now." But then he said this thing,

3:50 which is like you know, if Elon says something,

3:52 you sort of pay a little bit of attention.

3:54 So, he's saying, "No, I suspect it's solvable that the solu- that, you know,

3:59 the problem is obvious and the reason why That was

4:01 like a pretty first principle way of thinking about it,

4:03 which is like there's got to be a clock

4:06 because your entire body is aging at the, you know, roughly the same rate.

4:10 And if your body's synchronized, that means if there's a clock,

4:13 maybe the clock can be changed.

4:14 Maybe you could turn turn the the hands of the clock and slow

4:18 down the aging or reverse the aging or set it to a different time.

4:21 And you know, we've seen this with like stem

4:23 cell treatment and peptide There's all this stuff going on.

4:25 And so, you're like, "Hmm, that's interesting.

4:27 Maybe there's something there." And so, by the way,

4:29 the reason he does say why he hasn't spent much time on this and it's

4:33 pretty He's He's basically like aging {slash}

4:36 death is like a feature, not a bug.

4:38 So, he's like if people live forever,

4:42 society will like ossify because like the people in charge will

4:46 be the oldest people and the oldest people want the least change.

4:49 And like progress and change comes from some like

4:53 an out with the old in with the new mentality,

4:56 which comes like with a with a physicality of out with the old in with the new.

5:01 So, I I You make fun of me a little bit and it's deserving

5:04 I cuz I brag about how I think that we Well, Brian he told me,

5:09 "We were the first media appearance Brian Johnson has ever done."

5:13 And I take a lot of pride in that because if you

5:16 go and get past like the silliness of the whole thing

5:19 and how easy it is to like tease him for what he's doing,

5:22 if [snorts] you actually go and read his blog,

5:24 it is like pretty miraculous some of the stuff that he's doing.

5:28 Uh and the way that he looks the fun to I mean, it's easy to make fun of him.

5:32 Like it it seems quite amazing that if you

5:35 just take a little bit of what he's doing, there could be benefits.

5:38 I just signed up for a fancy doctor and I went and this was

5:41 the first time that I've met a doctor where they didn't not laugh at him.

5:45 Every doctor that I've ever talked to, they'll been like, "Oh, that guy's crazy.

5:49 Like, you know, what That's just stupid." Same with like

5:52 the the things that you and I did where you the preventative MRIs.

5:57 Pre-nup, yeah.

5:58 Yeah, they like laugh at him.

5:59 They're like, "Well,

6:00 it just sets off so many potentially false alarms." I'm like,

6:03 "That's the downside and that's why you don't want to do it?

6:05 That's incredible.

6:06 That's kind of silly." So, I I But my point being is I do think that a lot

6:10 of people are coming around to this and it is quite interesting.

6:12 It's way out of my IQ level.

6:13 To When people say disease and aging is solvable,

6:17 I think that's like a platitude that sounds cool,

6:19 but it's it's too hard for me to understand

6:22 cuz I just don't know anything about it.

6:24 But it is like interesting.

6:25 I wonder if in the history of the world has the richest people on Earth,

6:30 which now they are richer than potentially ever before,

6:32 that many of them have made this their cause.

6:36 Hmm.

6:37 Have you ever heard of this guy Aubrey de Grey?

6:39 Yeah, he's um like the researcher who does this.

6:43 He's like an academic, right?

6:45 So, he's been doing this for like decades and he kind of got canceled, I think,

6:48 cuz he was like hitting on his like lab

6:50 assistants or I don't know what was going on.

6:52 So, I'm not saying this guy's a great guy or whatever,

6:54 but he's just very fascinating guy.

6:56 He looks like Dumbledore.

6:58 He's got a huge gray beard like you know, down to his belly button.

7:02 He's like a longevity researcher who looks ancient, essentially.

7:05 And he's got this theory, which is like his theory,

7:07 if you've ever gone down the rabbit hole,

7:09 which I did one night like, I don't know, 5 years ago.

7:12 What he said is basically that death is not a mystery,

7:16 that there's these like 12 things that basically cause cell damage.

7:20 It's just wear and tear.

7:21 Like your cells in your body are like a car and the more you use them,

7:25 the more they accumulate damage and eventually enough damage, they they die.

7:28 Okay?

7:29 It's not like some mandate from God.

7:30 It's not like, you know, something that we don't understand at all.

7:33 His belief is like, "Actually, we can see the factors that relate to it

7:36 and if we can just reverse those factors,

7:37 then we you wouldn't die." The second thing he talks about

7:40 is like this idea of like longevity longevity escape velocity, LEV.

7:44 Ever heard of this?

7:46 I I've never heard of that, but is that as simple

7:47 as basically your biological age grows slower than your or sorry,

7:52 your chronological age grows slower than your biological age?

7:57 Am I explaining that correctly?

7:58 you had it right the first time, but no no, this is a different concept.

8:00 But what he says it's sort of like

8:02 the uh that guy Ray Kurzweil who talked about AI.

8:05 He talked about the singularity.

8:06 What he meant by that was like at some

8:08 point it won't be the humans that are programming AI,

8:11 but the AI will program the next AI to be better.

8:15 And then that smart AI will program the next AI to be better.

8:17 And it'll just keep And then that's when you get this explosion of intelligence.

8:21 And he's like, "No, you can't see beyond the singularity cuz once that happens,

8:25 all bets are off." Which is like kind of what

8:27 we're getting close to doing inside these research labs.

8:29 It's not just the the highly paid people at Open

8:32 AI or Claude or whatever Anthropic who are coding the models.

8:37 The models are coming up with ideas

8:39 and running experiments and coding the next models soon.

8:42 And that's like partially happening.

8:43 But once that fully happens,

8:44 the progress the rate of progress will like go exponential.

8:47 It'll hockey stick in a crazy way.

8:49 Claude did the greatest PR release ever or PR

8:52 thing where they said this model is so powerful, we we can't release it.

8:56 Too dangerous.

8:56 I'm like, "Okay, I want it." Yeah, like sign me up.

8:58 It's like the Four Lokos of of AI.

9:03 [laughter] Sorry.

9:04 Anyways, the idea being There's this There's a going

9:06 to be a point where medical research on longevity is adding

9:10 years to your life fast like adding more than one

9:13 year of your to your life lifespan than one year.

9:16 So, like the the research and the interventions

9:19 and the protocols and the the knowledge around extending extending your life is

9:23 going faster than your actual chronological age.

9:26 And when that happens,

9:27 then you sort of get at least like multi-100 year lives if not like,

9:31 you know, indefinite life.

9:33 Which is like a pretty crazy idea.

9:35 But when I read about this longevity stuff,

9:37 it reminds me of basically what's been going on with AI.

9:41 Like AI was something that's been talked about for 50 plus years.

9:44 Theorized, talked about, worked on, always seemed niche,

9:47 never seemed like a breakthrough, always seemed like a boy who cried wolf

9:50 type of industry where never really made enough progress.

9:53 And then suddenly you get, you know,

9:55 AlexNet and then then get ChatGPT and you get

9:57 these like breakthroughs and then the world's never the same again

10:01 and I kind of my prediction is that in the next

10:04 I don't know 15 years we're going to have a chat

10:07 GPT moment for life extension and that you're going to get

10:10 some breakthrough in this longevity and life extension that's going

10:16 to make it where it went from this like fringe kind

10:19 of like oh academic topic to just something that everybody does.