The Longevity Paradox

Michael Hebb: Welcome to what I’d like to call the Comic-Con of death.

We’ve been outsiders for so long. We literally don’t even know how to be among each other because no one creates places for us to come together like this. So welcome.

I don’t know if you’re going to make it out alive with the controversial ideas we were just talking about.

I’m going to flirt with Eric a little bit. We met...

Eric Weinstein: Are you going to flirt back? Was that a Me Too moment?

Michael: Oh, we’re really going to wrestle.

Eric and I met at a gathering in Utah. You might not know this about Eric, and I don’t think it was in the introduction, but in addition to being one of the most brilliant economists on our globe and what many consider the Einstein of our generation, working on cracking Einstein’s unified field theory, he is also now in Silicon Valley.

He was very much a Silicon Valley outsider until about four or five years ago. We met before he moved here.

We were at this gathering, and he leaned in and said, “I think that we should be good friends.”

I looked behind me because I figured he must be talking to somebody other than me. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to talk to this man about.”

It turned out he was talking to me. We’ve decided to understand each other over the last many years, and it has been one of the most meaningful friendships in my life.

Eric: Michael is one of a tiny number of people for whom my standing policy is, “Just say yes.”

You’ll end up in some crazy country or state, in a room you never expected, doing something amazing. It’s a great honor to be here. Thank you.

Michael: You came to Silicon Valley from academia, rather than from the startup or venture capital worlds. You were dropped into this wild land that is really like no other.

Clearly, this notion of extending life is core to it. We have this ramped-up idea that Silicon Valley billionaires and tech entrepreneurs have so much fear of death and so much ego that the work you’re doing, and “you” is the big you, all of your cronies, is about extending this precious ego for personal gain so you can buy more Bitcoin.

Eric: I’m waiting for the disagreement.

Michael: Right. Or start sovereign states that float in the ocean so you can do whatever you want.

I’ve found that portrayal to be patently untrue. I’m curious about how you feel about longevity, Silicon Valley and these delicate egos that want to be uploaded to the mainframe.

Eric: Talk about killing me softly.

I came here thinking that radical longevity was really stupid. I thought its supporters didn’t get it.

I think that’s largely because its misportrayal is so powerful. You have a bunch of children with billions of dollars to play with, and they dream about things that make no sense, like life going on forever.

I remember an old Twilight Zone episode where the curse was infinite life.

Gradually, I came to understand that it wasn’t really what the media portrayal suggested at all. I don’t think there is much contradiction between figuring out how to do the end of life well and trying to prolong life, when that is a meaningful thing to do. You can try to avoid going gentle into that good night for as long as you can.

I was at a place in my life where there wasn’t that much going on that I was dying to extend. I had a nice life, and I was happy to be here, but a lot of doors and avenues were blocked.

You find a lot of things late in life. Why didn’t I know that Indonesian was the language for me? It’s an amazing language, but all I knew about was French and Spanish in high school.

One of the things happening out here is that life is so exciting that, at a relatively advanced point, everything can suddenly feel new again. Every day that slips through your fingers makes you want more time to do more things.

Maybe you need to connect some aspect of economic theory, as in my work with my wife, with some aspect of physics and some harsh portion of evolutionary theory. It takes a lot of time to accumulate those things.

People with multiple wells of expertise often want more time to explore those connections and that creativity. It isn’t only a question of extending life or extending ego.

Our mutual friend Joon talks about the next frontier of radical longevity and radical fertility. Women may need options later in life to have children. Maybe what we’re talking about is enhanced creativity later in life.

There are all sorts of aspects to longevity.

I also think there’s no way out that I know of. I don’t think you can extend life indefinitely. There is always insult. You always have the opportunity to step off the curb while talking on your cell phone and walk into a bus.

Radical longevity doesn’t get you out of thinking about the good death. There are times when people have had enough and want to check out gracefully.

The problem is that the conversation has been misportrayed. The tabloid version of infinite life is pretty uninteresting. I would agree that we shouldn’t waste our money, energy and precious brains pursuing some kind of ego-gratification program for children with too much money and too little sense.

Michael: Not too long ago, I was in San Francisco as part of Reimagine End of Life. The founders of that conference are here, and it’s going to continue.

For that conference, I brought together Ira Byock, who is known as a deep humanist and a beloved palliative care doctor in this space, and Joon Yun, who is the founder of the Longevity Prize.

Ira was very excited. He had his knives sharpened to go after Joon’s vast, fragile ego with the humanist perspective that so many people in this room have worked to develop in themselves.

I got them into one of these seemingly divided conversations. But Ira didn’t know what motivated Joon.

Joon started talking about his motivation and said, “Let’s be very clear. The Longevity Prize is the largest prize in the longevity space.”

Joon is definitely one of the most dynamic characters and players in the longevity space and outside of it.

He said, “Everything I’m doing around extending life, this moonshot, this idea of curing aging, is going to have zero impact on my life. I understand that completely. I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it for my children and grandchildren.”

Ira was a little bit like, “Where do I go with that?”

Eric: He got all seventh-generation on him.

Michael: In a recent conversation, Joon also talked about what inspired the Longevity Prize. It was the loss of his stepfather, and it devastated him.

His hypothesis was that because we connect on so many other layers these days, because we watch one another’s videos and because of technology rather than in spite of it, we get deeper into one another’s lives faster.

I thought that was a revolutionary idea in and of itself.

Because we get closer to more people, and also more deeply connected with certain people, we’re not prepared from an evolutionary perspective for that level of loss.

Part of this longevity movement came from real loss and pain, which I thought was fascinating. But we can take this wherever you want in terms of evolutionary biology.

Eric: That’s great.

I remember when my son asked me for the definition of a paradox when he was about three years old.

I said, “It’s a question you can’t answer.”

He said, “Like what?”

I said, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

He said, “The egg.”

I said, “Okay, now I’ve got you. What laid the egg?”

He said, “Some bird that was one mutation away from being a chicken.”

Be careful whom you raise.

But that isn’t actually the chicken joke I need to tell. The chicken joke that is less funny but more important is that the evolutionary biologist’s definition of a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.

This is the theory of the disposable soma, that the only thing that really matters is what can be passed on. Usually, what you can pass on is genes.

Some other species have things like tool use that can be taught. There is some ability to pass meaning and memes, if you will, a primitive analogue of literature.

But the human animal, with the largest brain-to-body ratio in the animal kingdom, has a level of specificity of mind and depth of connection through language that is a complete and utter mismatch for the theory of disposable soma.

We are not simply a sperm and egg’s way of making another sperm and egg. There is no way to reconcile that with the legacy of literature, culture and meaning, or with what it takes to get past your youth and deepen your appreciation for the world.

Our poetry is our great tragedy, in some sense. We are here on a terrible frame for the beauty that an individual soul and life can contain.

Again, it isn’t every soul and life that needs to be preserved. But at our best, these relationships are devastating when you lose them.

In particular, I think about the loss of my grandfather. I continually talk to the dead, and it gets harder and harder to conjure him up. It isn’t because I’ve forgotten what he was like, but because the world keeps changing and moving, while he is frozen in time at 94 and a half.

When I seek his counsel, I’m really running him in emulation in my mind.

We have to reconcile the fact that the ability to pass language between us leads to a depth of connection that is unknown elsewhere in the animal kingdom. That’s what often makes death such a terrible tragedy. We are so much more than the evolutionary biology that brought us here.

Michael: You and Joon both occupy this vision that I think breaks down some of these barriers. It’s the notion of extending curiosity and compassion, rather than accumulation or propriety. It’s about extending innovation.

There are obviously examples within Silicon Valley that don’t fit that, but it at least gives those of you who want some space a little freedom.

When Shoshana and I first talked about bringing longevity into this, some of the wonderful folks within End Well were like, “Absolutely no. You’re at the gate.”

I knocked loudly on that door because I thought our shared curiosity about how we live and how we end can become so much greater without these factions.

You use this great word, agentic, meaning having agency. Let’s talk about continuing meaningful agency.

You also occupy a position in Silicon Valley that allows you to see every moonshot and every piece of leading-edge science. Some of it is completely whacked and isn’t going anywhere. Probably 90 percent of the stuff that comes across your desk.

Eric: It would be great if it were only 90 percent.

Michael: I want to know the most interesting points along the longevity spectrum so that we can go on that journey with you a little bit.

Eric: Here’s a project that I haven’t gotten anybody sufficiently interested in yet.

Look at all the edge cases where nature gets pretty close to something that looks like radical longevity.

For example, there is Syndrome X. There was this one unusual child who didn’t seem to mature developmentally, remained an infant and died at age 20 or 21. We have no idea what that was in terms of some kind of error, but it’s certainly very interesting.

Or take hydra. These tiny animals come in sexual and asexual varieties. The organisms that reproduce sexually seem to senesce, get old and die. Sometimes, the organisms that don’t reproduce sexually appear to have certain properties of immortality.

There is some relationship between sex and death that we don’t quite understand.

You can look at bristlecone pines. You can start aggregating all these things that senesce very, very slowly, or people who manage to have great productivity late in life.

There are unusual edge cases. I think Schrödinger didn’t really contribute to physics until his 40s and 50s, which was very late by the standards of the day.

Sometimes, at a personal level, you have to get lucky to understand what you’re supposed to be doing.

Out of curiosity, how many people in this room can raise their hand without embarrassment and say that you found the love of your life after age 40?

I bet some of you didn’t find the love of your life until after age 60.

When that happens, you want more time. Somebody else may not need more time, but maybe you only started living late. Maybe you worked through some stuff.

I have a relative who was one of Mengele’s twins, Eva Kor, who eventually forgave Dr. Mengele. That was controversial in the Jewish community, but the resentment, hatred and anger were deforming her.

What a courageous thing to do very late in life, to unburden yourself of that.

It’s important to think about both the scientific angles and the personal ones.

You can look at something like lobsters, which have this kind of obligate growth. They seem to senesce very little, but they keep getting larger. They eventually end up killing themselves because of the size they have to grow to.

We could aggregate all these unusual cases from the natural world and try to learn something about why nature can’t solve this problem.

It’s bound up in a theory called antagonistic pleiotropy, where there is a trade-off between length of life and vigor in youth.

Then you can look at the personal versions of this. Why is hip-hop culture so vital? Why do you have white suburban kids emulating the Black inner city?

It is partly because lifespans are very uncertain, so life is front-loaded and much more exciting, vital and creative. There are analogues at a cultural level and a biological level.

Consider the worm C. elegans, this primitive nematode. We have a complete cell-lineage diagram and an entire developmental map of this organism, as well as all 300 neurons in its brain and the connections between them.

It’s the only complicated animal for which we have a relatively complete map, and we still don’t understand how it works.

We are coming very close to learning why nature has never chosen to solve this problem. If you want evidence for why we should be thinking about how to die well, nature is certainly not indicating that there is any way of living forever.

Whether it’s histological entropy, tissues becoming confused or the difficulty of preserving state, there is good reason to think we’re up against a pretty hard problem.

I’m not particularly optimistic that a fast solution is coming.

But it’s worthwhile to think about both the science and the unusual analogues in culture and in our interpersonal relationships that make radical longevity and the ability to opt out gracefully, at a time and in a manner of your choosing, non-antagonistic objectives.

You can go back and forth between them.

There’s a beautiful story from India, where my wife is from. We went to visit a relative of hers who had gotten very sick.

She said, “It’s my time. You in the West don’t understand. We accept it. I’m going to be with God.”

Her sister said, “Yeah, I flew in from England and realized that was nuts. She just needed some blood plasma and fancy drugs from Switzerland.”

Sure enough, she got better.

There are ways to be graceful about it and also choose to fight when you have the opportunity. We need to stop thinking about these things as naturally antagonistic.

Michael: Both communities need to learn from each other.

One of the other things I’ve learned from you and Joon is that this moonshot mentality of “Let’s cure aging” or “Let’s solve death” is, at its core, marketing.

For the people getting riled up about the marketing around it, what it’s actually doing is creating great science.

The way Joon phrases it is, “What I’m interested in is increasing homeostatic capacity, extending the time before senescence so you can enjoy life better for longer. The way I achieve that is by telling people that we’re curing aging or solving death.”

It’s a brilliant marketing reveal.

Eric: Fundamentally, your body is the hospital you need most. It’s the most effective one.

During your youth, you can do all sorts of ridiculous things to your body, and it just comes back to this healthy state.

Then, as you accumulate more cell divisions and your tissues get a little confused, your extracellular complex can’t figure out where things are. It makes sense that your skin starts to sag, you begin to forget things and all these other things happen.

But these things could be mechanical problems.

Imagine we were a species where the longest anyone could live was 40, and somebody gave you our new limit, which is about 120 as the hard stop. One person went to 122.

Would that be horrible? Everybody would have been reconciled to 40, and suddenly we would be back to where we are now.

You have to ask the key question, not about us, but about the past.

Suppose you could give radical longevity to people in the past. Looking at all the craziness going on now, would you want to know how things worked out in the 1930s? Would you want to talk to people who had lived through World War I, the Civil War or the Age of Exploration?

Right now, I think we’re living through a weird, low-grade revolution of a type we haven’t seen before. Frankly, I wish there were more old people around whom I could talk to.

Most of what I’ve known throughout my entire adult life, at 52, is the stasis coming out of World War II. Having more elders would be a huge help.

Michael: The lack of elders.

We talk about this all the time. With Reimagine End of Life and End Well, transforming a very broken system is going to require a great deal of creativity, some playfulness and a lot of curiosity.

There are things that need to be revolutionized on the dying side and the deathcare side.

What I understand you and your cronies to be doing, in the best-case scenario, is exercising that kind of creativity and playfulness.

Eric: And curiosity.

One of the things we were just talking about was a news story that moved me and a lot of other people. It was about a father who knew he was dying and came up with five years’ worth of birthday cards and flowers to send to his daughter.

When she turned 21, she was sad that this was the last one she was going to receive.

I thought, “Why is this a news story? Why aren’t we all doing this? Why only five years?”

I read the story, and I still didn’t do anything about it.

In some sense, if you want to lead the way and talk about how we play with death rather than whistle past the graveyard, how we dance past it and develop a more mature relationship with it, how we get excited about planning our wake and thinking about the order of people we want to speak, or what we want to reveal years after we’re gone so we can continue having these conversations, that would be valuable.

Everybody thinks very much about themselves until they have children. Almost nobody believes, “I don’t care what happens to my kids after I’m gone.”

Try to think about the fact that death is simply part of a program that is already immortal, which is the theory of lineage.

Whether it’s the lineage of your ideas or the lineage of your genes, these things matter to all of us while we’re here.

One of the most exciting things is thinking about what will be remembered about me when I’m gone.

How do we put some fun into this crazy topic?

Michael: Hold your applause because I have one announcement that maybe you don’t need, but I do.

Because we’re at the Comic-Con of death, I’m going to do a couple of shameless self-promotions.

Death Over Dinner is a project I started. After four years, we’re launching version two of the project today, so I want you to check it out.

We’re also doing something around living wakes, inspired by conversations we’ve had.

But we’re out of time. They’re going to kick us off the stage.

Thank you for letting my friend join the death community.