Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - How Technology Will Make Death Optional Within Decades | Zoltan Istvan - Futurist & Presidential Candidate

Transcript

Lessons - How Technology Will Make Death Optional Within Decades | Zoltan Istvan - Futurist & Presidential Candidate · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, discover the bold world of transhumanism and the quest to radically
• 0:04
  extend human life through science and technology. Learn how synthetic organs, gene editing,
• 0:09
  and mind uploading challenge the limits of mortality, explore why religious and societal beliefs
• 0:14
  spark controversy around life extension and understand how redefining aging as a disease could
• 0:18
  unlock major government investment in longevity research.
• 0:21
  For people that have never heard of transhumanism ever, what does that actually mean? Is it disease
• 0:33
  prevention? Is it like neural ink? What is it? Sure, well transhumanism is just a social movement
• 0:40
  and it has a fun it's a funny name. It's just an umbrella term for a lot of different things like
• 0:45
  cryonics, immortality, life extension, singularity thinking. Whatever it is, it's just a term that
• 0:51
  covers a huge movement of scientists and normal people that are pushing to use science and technology
• 0:58
  to radically extend the human being's life. Now how would we do that? Well most people die
• 1:03
  from organ failure. So for example, one of the transhuman's greatest cause is working on synthetic
• 1:09
  organs and 3D bio printing them and there have been huge movements and it's not just you know synthetic
• 1:14
  organs could be pigs organs, you know which the big giant company in Florida is dealing with that.
• 1:19
  There's so many different ways of extending life but the point is transhumanists want to stop death
• 1:26
  through science. Now the other methods are you know genetic editing for example trying to
• 1:31
  adjust yourself so they don't age. There's a little thing called the telmerase at the very end
• 1:34
  of the you know DNA and if you could eliminate that like the jellyfish you could live perhaps hundreds
• 1:39
  of years longer. So there are transhumanists working on that and then it gets a little bit more
• 1:43
  science fictiony where it's kind of like some people are working on uploading your mind and
• 1:48
  I just heard Peter Diamandus yesterday a big you know the ex-price founder. He said within five
• 1:53
  years we're going to be uploading our minds. Okay five years this is crazy uploading my so this
• 1:58
  is another form of not dying. So it's across the board we don't know which one's going to work
• 2:03
  but what we do know is that there's now hundreds of billions of dollars especially in Silicon Valley
• 2:09
  where I live that are pushing towards overcoming biological death and when you have that much
• 2:14
  money involved in something I think there's going to be success. I was listening to a couple
• 2:17
  podcasts and one of the hosts mentioned your views were controversial. I don't understand how
• 2:23
  now that I understand what transhumanism is how living longer and extending life span and keeping
• 2:28
  people healthier what's controversial about that? Sure well you know you would think upfront
• 2:35
  nothing is controversial about it but what really is is we live in a very religious dominated
• 2:41
  country about 80% of the United States believes in an afterlife and believes in some type of God and
• 2:48
  around the world it's even higher around 85% so the point is that if you believe in those things
• 2:54
  then you have to wonder why should humans take the power of immortality or indefinite life spans
• 2:59
  I'm not sure immortality. No you know most transhumanists don't say we're going to live forever we
• 3:03
  just like to think we're going to live 100 200 years 300 years we might be able to control
• 3:07
  when we die and if we die that's really the goal of it and I think that is controversial to
• 3:14
  the natural state of things so if you are a religious person and you hear somebody saying oh we're
• 3:19
  going to overcome death and you think well wait a sec the whole dichotomy of a religion is that
• 3:25
  you live you live a good life and therefore you go to heaven and you're judged by God and it's
• 3:29
  everything's okay but if you eliminate that need of the judgment and of God then where does
• 3:36
  I even leave religion and that's where the controversy in my opinion arises from some other
• 3:42
  people just to be fair other people say well death is needed in human evolution in order that new
• 3:48
  things will spawn and that's actually a good point it's very hard to argue against that the
• 3:53
  problem though is that even if death is needed to spawn new ideas I still don't want to die and
• 3:58
  I'm not sure that I need to die in order for others to feel like there's some kind of new spring
• 4:04
  always happening I certainly don't want my kids to die just because I'm supposed to make way for
• 4:09
  other people I think you know humans can maybe find other ways to be creative and spawn new beginnings
• 4:15
  I agree with that I love your opinion on is the government doing any sort of job in terms of
• 4:23
  longevity or quality of life I feel not to the degree they should I feel like we have a sick
• 4:29
  care system not a health care system and maybe that's why you ran for president but just talk to
• 4:35
  me about sort of the current state of what the U.S. government doesn't matter which party
• 4:41
  Democrat Republican what do they feel about longevity sure well let me just say you know when I ran
• 4:46
  for office and still the number one goal I would say of most transhumanists and longevity
• 4:51
  activists is to characterize aging as a disease for the government the United States government
• 4:58
  governments around the world to say that aging is a disease because if all the Sun we say that
• 5:03
  aging is a disease it will be treated like cancer like Alzheimer's like diabetes and also
• 5:08
  huge amounts of NIH and other types of funding will go into it but right now no one wants to say
• 5:14
  for those religious reasons we talked about before that aging is the disease and I couldn't
• 5:19
  agree with you more you know what is the point of living to 100 years if the last 15 years
• 5:23
  your life is really in pain and most 85 year old and plus people it really is dramatically hard
• 5:29
  so we do need to invest so I think you know the government has not invested enough and I come from
• 5:34
  a little bit of a libertarian bias with my like to like let you know that the people do what they
• 5:40
  want to do and hands off from the government type of thing it's not a party or a political
• 5:44
  affiliation anything like that it's just more you know I think I believe in people and entrepreneurs
• 5:49
  doing thing and not the government the government holding them back or putting on regulations
• 5:54
  but at the same time I think since the government has such deep pockets it would be very useful if
• 5:59
  they would stimulate entrepreneurship and people around the world trying to start businesses that
• 6:05
  would defeat aging but in order to do so you're going to have to characterize that and designate that
• 6:10
  as a disease specifically like you would cancer treat aging like cancer if we do that the game
• 6:16
  will change right now the amount of money flowing into aging related you know anti aging stuff
• 6:22
  is very minimal in the millions but if all the sudden we treated it like cancer we would be putting
• 6:27
  billions into it and immediately probably within five to seven years you would see a big impact
• 6:32
  in the everyday Americans life I think it's so important what the concept of of a more
• 6:39
  biological freedom what is that concept and why is it so important sure morphological freedom is
• 6:45
  this idea that you should be able to do with your body whatever you want to do no one should be
• 6:51
  able to stand in the way of that and of course if you're doing some of your body that is interfering
• 6:55
  with someone else's body that's a whole different thing but morphological freedom says as long as
• 6:59
  you're not interfering something else or anyone else you should be able to do with your body what
• 7:04
  you want so for example I have a chip implant in my hand but in various states across the United
• 7:09
  States even this chip implant which is just kind of an elective party trick I can go to I can trade
• 7:14
  Bitcoin with it or something I can I hold my information it has a credit card and you know
• 7:18
  things like that you can sometimes scan it send text messages with it but in certain states it's
• 7:24
  illegal you would think it's illegal yes yes it's illegal and and so I wrote a piece for the
• 7:30
  New York Times on this because all the states are saying well should we allow people to recreationally
• 7:35
  put in chips inside their body even if it's just for fun and party tricks and the answer was yes
• 7:41
  we shouldn't allow people to do that because we don't let them have freedom with their bodies
• 7:44
  so this is something that goes against the morphological freedom concept and you know generally
• 7:49
  speaking transhumanists are a little bit on the edge they're like biohackers you know they're
• 7:54
  fringe they're putting stuff in their body they're trying out new things we're trying to see what
• 7:59
  works and we don't want to be stopped by the government saying no you can't do that you know if
• 8:04
  we're not hurting somebody else we would like to write the experiment with our bodies that's
• 8:09
  interesting what do you I mean so you're an entrepreneur you've built some businesses but also
• 8:15
  are these businesses sort of focused on transhumanism on optimizing the human body I heard that you
• 8:21
  had a winery but there's like a a new tropic component to this this wine as well so so when you
• 8:27
  think about how you live your life talking about the businesses you build but also talking about
• 8:31
  personally like how do you live your life as a transhumanist sure well you know the the ironic
• 8:37
  thing is that I have built a lot of businesses but they have not really had much to do with transhumanism
• 8:43
  so far transhumanism has been this thing because I wrote my novel the transhumanist wager about 10
• 8:48
  years ago it became a bestseller and then through that I formed the the transhumanist party and ran
• 8:54
  for office for the you know for the US presidency and that you know just got lucky the media took off
• 8:59
  with it said oh we have a science candidate running for president all of a sudden I sort of
• 9:02
  became semi-famous because of that but my businesses were kind of boring you know I was working for
• 9:08
  national geographic I was getting maybe you know six seven thousand dollars for every three four
• 9:14
  five weeks I was away but it was coming all in cash and I didn't really know what to do with it
• 9:20
  and at the time my father was sick I was you know helping to pay some of the bills for him in Oregon
• 9:24
  and so I said well maybe I'll start investing some in real estate up there since real estate was
• 9:28
  quite a bit cheaper than it was in California where I live now and I started buying fixed
• 9:33
  ruppers and then on the office days when I didn't have a sign mincer you know I'd be home for
• 9:37
  two months at a time I'd fix those houses up I'd always had a good knack of tools because of my
• 9:42
  sales trip and then I flipped them and very quickly I am asked to almost 20 properties and you know
• 9:49
  before the the crash in 2008 I sold the majority of it because I realized things were kind of
• 9:53
  out of hand too good to be true and I you didn't you you you timed it right I timed it very
• 10:00
  right and I got very lucky and and and then I joined a band with a friend which is one of the reasons
• 10:06
  I sold the ironic part the band didn't succeed I played guitar the band didn't succeed but I had
• 10:10
  quite a bit of money in here I was sitting in my young in my early thirties as you know as I
• 10:15
  a multi-millionaire and and what should I do with my life now and this is when I I wrote this book
• 10:21
  the transumist wager and and that sort of launched my career as a public persona I guess going
• 10:28
  around speaking talking about transhumanism now though I have started to invest in vineyards
• 10:34
  through a company called Zoltanish fund vineyards and wineries so we have a vineyard in
• 10:38
  Appavali as well as a winery we have a vineyard in Mendoza Argentina the first one I bought and
• 10:44
  then we all have one in Bordeaux France a nice big giant one in a winery there a little chateau
• 10:50
  and you know it's all combined under one company and while we're we're our goal with that is to
• 10:56
  actually put transhumanist drugs called neutropics these are brain drugs that supposedly make you smarter
• 11:01
  some of my Berkeley PhD people friends have helped me out with it I get to be honest I'm not sure
• 11:08
  drinking wine even with this makes you smarter but we're working on it's wishful thinking it's wishful
• 11:14
  we're trying to get there so no off you know yeah so there's no question here your cognitive
• 11:18
  abilities are a little bit better I think but we haven't we haven't actually come to this solution
• 11:22
  yet where you drink wine it becomes super smart though we're working on it but this is the new
• 11:26
  company that I've been working on and we won some awards last year with our Malbec and Cabernet
• 11:31
  Savion and so it's my newest company and we'll see where it goes I'll send you a bottle one of
• 11:37
  these days when we have something that works thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't
• 11:41
  forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper
• 11:46
  into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you
• 11:50
  in the next one