Chip Walter and guests dissect the race toward human immortality, featuring Calico's Art Levinson and CRISPR experiments in China that edit twins for HIV resistance. They examine bowhead whales' 225-year lifespans versus AI risks like the SF Police's blocked "killer robot" proposal and controversial brain memory implants. While discussing Blue Zones longevity and cryonics, they argue that despite existential threats from asteroids or pandemics, human cultural accumulation drives progress, yet we face a future where genetic switches might reverse aging or consciousness uploads could redefine our existence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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From Disposable News to Science00:04:46
I just always wanted to write, and I couldn't find anyone that would pay me to write when I got out of college.
So I got into newspapers, then I got into magazines, then I found my way to television, and then I was hired by Cable News Network when it started and became a bureau chief there.
And then I wanted to, I was just tired of.
Disposable news.
So I wanted to get into something a little deeper, a little meatier, and I got into documentaries, PBS documentaries.
And that led to the first book that I wrote because it was, I developed it for PBS called Space Age.
So I wrote that for Random House, did a couple of other things, and then fell into working with William Shatner, who wanted to do a book about Star Trek.
And so he and I got together and we wrote that book, and that was a blast.
And And then I finally was in a situation where I could write my own books, the kind of books I wanted to write.
I was fascinated with high technology, but I realized that we were never really going to figure out how to solve technological problems until we understood what made us tick.
So I thought, well, you've got to go back to the beginning and you have to talk about or understand evolution, human evolution, and what makes us the way we are.
Very strange creature when you think about it.
So different from anything else on the planet.
And so I just went back and I wrote two books about that, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears, and another one called Last Ape Standing.
And they really kind of try, it's my way of trying to understand why do we behave the way we do?
Why do we do the horrible things we do and also the remarkable things we do?
Think about it.
I mean, we're leaving other planets.
You know, what kind of creature does that?
Nothing like this.
Look at the cities we build.
Look at.
Look at the technologies we've built, both destructive ones and remarkably beautiful ones.
So those two were my effort.
And then it's almost with Immortality Inc., obviously I was writing a lot of science.
And I just was looking around and I was saying, could we be at a time in human history when our technology is so good?
That we could actually solve aging and we could eliminate death.
So I started looking around to see if that was the truth.
And I found that's when Calico was created by Google.
I found out Art Levinson, who had been at Genentech, he was the CEO of Genentech, which was the first biotechnology company.
He was asked to become the chairman of that.
And then I came across Craig Venter, and everybody knew Ray Kurzweil, who's a big-time futurist and inventor.
And I just thought, well, these guys are the real deal.
They're not snake oil salesmen.
They're serious scientists.
So I took a while to track them down, but I finally got to them and Aubrey de Grey and Robert Hariri, or kind of stumbled across Robert Hariri's work in stem cells.
And then I wrote the book.
I just tried to, first of all, figure out why did they even care?
To do this, and why did they put all the expertise that they had to solving death?
And then I thought, doesn't everyone want to know this?
So I kind of told their stories and told the story of the science behind that.
And then my most recent book is this novel that I have written called Doppelganger, which is really a kind of a dramatic way to look at the whole question of artificial intelligence and the singularity and all the questions we're now grappling with where we have these powerful technologies and we have to figure out, you know, what are we going to do with them and how are they going to shift?
Everything and I don't have the answers, but I thought it's a hell of a story, and so I wanted to get that done.
I just have a series of probably 10 books I want to write.
When did you release the immortality book?
What year?
That was 2020.
2020, yeah, the very beginning, it was right when COVID hit.
How long did that take you to put together, and including all your research and interviews and stuff?
The Promise of Living Forever00:08:07
Almost four years.
Four years.
I spent almost all of 2016 traveling.
Wow.
And spending hours and hours and hours with these guys and getting into their labs and learning the story of what was going on.
At one point, because I had heard that bowhead whales don't age.
Really?
Yeah, they found one.
Bowhead whales?
Yeah, they're the second largest whales in the world.
I don't think I've ever seen one of these.
It's fascinating because they don't seem to get cancer, they don't seem to have dementia, they don't age.
And they thought they lived to be like 70 years old or so, just like most whales.
But, and I met the guy that was there when this happened.
They had a dead whale that they had brought in because they're allowed to be harvested two times a year by the Inupiat people.
And this guy reaches and he sees a kind of crease in this dead whale.
And he reaches in and they slide it or cut it.
And he reaches in and he pulls his hand out.
And it had a harpoon from 110.
25 years earlier.
Wow.
And they went, holy mackerel, this animal is way older than we thought.
And then they started doing genetic research and found that they routinely live to be 225 years old.
Isn't there a shark that can live like almost a thousand years?
I saw a recent thing where there's sharks that are older than like some trees.
Yeah, Greenland sharks.
Greenland sharks, yes, that's what it is.
Yeah, they can live to be 500 years old.
And the theory on all this is that something kills them eventually.
I mean, something's going to get you eventually.
I mean, if, you know, but what doesn't kill you is aging, you know, and therefore, and aging is the main reason cancer kicks in, dementia kicks in, heart problems.
Almost every problem anybody has happens as people age or unless you're hit by a car.
Right.
You know, so even if you live a thousand years, you're going to get hit by lightning or something.
And that's what apparently happens to these animals eventually.
From what I understand, the human body hasn't become more resilient over time.
Like, if you take a human being from the fifth century AD and you looked at us now, like, we would essentially have the same lifespan.
The difference is medicine is not as good.
There were more people dying from famine, hand to hand combat was more prevalent.
But essentially, if you could put those two people in a vacuum in different time frames, we'd live about the same time.
Yeah, yeah.
It's mainly, I mean, the big advance around 100 years ago was sanitation.
I mean, most people just got a lot of bugs in their system and eventually it killed them.
And that was 100, I think in the 1890s, stomach problems, which was just a generic term, was the main reason people died.
Nobody died of cancer.
I mean, almost nobody died of cancer because they were dead already, you know, before they got it.
People didn't die of heart attacks until the 50s and 60s, you know, because they were already dying before that.
And a lot of times it was just sanitation or a lot of times it was childbirth.
One out of five children died in childbirth in 1900.
So once we started getting just good sanitation, more people lived longer.
And then sulfa drugs and penicillin and those sorts of things.
I mean, people would routinely die from typhus or scarlet fever or, you know, even, I don't know, just a sore throat.
Yeah, a bad cough.
Yeah, and we'd just get out of hand, you know, and now, you know, all those drugs keep people alive now.
And then statins came along and, you know, all sorts of other drugs that are extending life.
But one of the things I discovered with Immortality Inc. was people were living longer, but not necessarily better.
You know, I mean, you see a lot of people in their 80s and they're just. struggling, you know, or even in their 90s.
But no one's living a great life up to 100, you know, and dementia starts to kick in almost universally by 90, you know, so it's just, I mean, you always find good stories of people that, you know, 100 years old and smoking cigarettes and drinking and they're just fine.
But one of the things we discovered in the course of the book was those are people that mainly don't have very many bad genes.
That's ultimately what gets you.
Bad genes.
Bad genes.
Yeah, like if you have a heart issue, your vascular system is going to break down at some point.
Everybody has, nobody has perfect genes, you know, but those people that have something closer to perfect genes are the ones that live the longest.
Interesting.
So at some point, no matter how much you work out, no matter how great, you know, your diet, eventually your genes are going to get you.
So that's where the work that.
Art Levinson at Calico is doing, you know, where he's basically trying to figure out what are the switches that get flipped in, you know, in our DNA that make us actually age.
You know, there's something going on that says it's time to age.
It's time to start breaking down.
Otherwise, we just rebuild our bodies.
We're perfectly capable of it.
Right.
So that's where stem cell therapy and that sort of thing can help extend life.
What do people like Art Levinson or Ray Kurzweil say as far as a timeline to when we're going to be able to extend our lives significantly?
And not only when in the future do they think that will happen, but how much longer do they think they're going to be able to make humans live?
Okay, great questions.
Well, Kurzweil always has very specific numbers for everything that he's predicted, and often he's quite.
Right or very close.
He pretty much believes that by the late 2020s, we will have created enough advances in, and he predicted this in 2000, enough advances biologically that we can begin to extend life longer.
Basically, extend life for every year you're alive, you would be able to extend life another year.
So, okay, so you could be able to stay stagnant.
Yeah, yeah, you can keep yourself going and keep yourself going kind of at that level of health.
And we'll get there in the late 2020s, he thinks?
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that sounds pretty accurate.
And then he believes that in the early 2030s, what will kick in is nanotechnology.
nanotechnology.
So basically you can have molecular sized machines that are obviously invisible and they're just mechanical versions of biology.
So they go in and clean out your heart, you know, or go in and augment your brain.
You know, suddenly you just, you know, with the flick of a switch, you're in another world because you have nanotechnology in your brain that's just creating that world.
So they're artificial neurons, artificial cells, you know, that can do anything your body can do except better.
And then that really begins to reverse aging, you know, so that you can actually get younger, not simply continue to stay alive.
And then once that happens, you know, you could basically live forever.
And I think Aubrey de Grey calculated at one point you would probably live a thousand years and then something would get you.
You'd get hit by lightning or by a bus or something that it's just so kind of like you can't come back from it.
Merging Humans with Machines00:03:09
Yeah, some random event.
Eaten by a shark.
Yeah, right, right.
Some random event is going to happen.
Yeah, but won't those people be able to at some point upload their brain to a chip or to a flash drive?
And if their body gets eaten by a shark, they'll just have a backup.
They'll be able to just plug it into a cyborg or something.
Yeah, well, and that's exactly the premise of Doppelganger.
Okay.
That is precisely that.
And that, the concept or the kernel of that.
Story goes way back to a meeting that I had with a guy named Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon.
And he was the head of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.
And he wrote a couple of really interesting books.
One of them was called Mind Children.
And he was the first scientist to say we could download a human brain into a machine, a robot, because he was a roboticist.
And I remember when I read that, I went, Whoa, you know, well, and then I thought, well, what if this guy, you know, uploads or downloads his brain on Friday and he's murdered on Sunday?
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Now back to the show.
And then you create, you give him his backup, and his backup.
Is from Friday.
So when he wakes up on Tuesday, he thinks it's Friday and he doesn't know that he was murdered.
Right.
And then, but he would want to know once he finds out who killed him.
And that's the underlying premise of Doppelganger.
And it basically buys into the concept that someday we will be able to completely download a copy of yourself.
Yeah, whoa.
And that, of course, creates all sorts of other possibilities because then you can make doubles of yourself.
Right.
Westworld and Dangerous Futures00:05:00
And then versions of yourself could go off and do things and then come back and put it all together in one brain.
I mean, there's all sorts of.
You know, ways that it could go.
Oh, yeah, that gets scary.
That gets scary quick.
It was to stop tyrannical dictators from just duplicating themselves a thousand times and spreading themselves all over the world.
Right, right.
Yeah.
There are certain people I think we can all agree we don't want to have one of them.
Right, right, right.
So, I mean, the reason, one of the reasons that I was fascinated by this, and there's really documentaries that got me into science.
I was an English major, you know.
So, one of the things that got me into it was, There's philosophy and there's history and everybody has an opinion basically when it comes to those kinds of things, when it comes to the human behavior and human culture.
But science at least has a shot at truly understanding how things work.
And if we can get a handle on it, then so we're creating these powerful AIs.
They could help us solve those problems.
There are some wonderful things that artificial intelligence can do.
And there are incredible technologies we've created that can solve a lot of problems.
But we have to be very careful because, I mean, just take nuclear power.
Everything's a double edged sword.
Every technology going back to the first knife is literally a double edged sword.
So, do you want to kill someone with that knife or do you want to use it to have some meat so that you can survive?
So, I just think it's.
All fascinating and we really are coming to a time in in human culture where a lot of these problems, big problems, can be solved, but they can also be incredibly dangerous.
So what are we going to do?
Have these scientists that are on the cutting the leading edge of this life extension research, have they talked to philosophers about this, about this conundrum or like, like how this affects like, the meaning of life?
Or, I don't know if you've ever heard of Sheldon Solomon.
He came on this podcast a few months ago and he wrote a fascinating book.
He's a psychologist.
He wrote a book called The Worm at the Core.
And basically, the premise of it is that fear of death is the worm at the core of human consciousness.
And it's the fundamental driver of human beings and our behaviors.
I'll have to read that because I agree with that.
Well, before he came in, I thought sex was the fundamental driver.
But, you know, it doesn't have to be black and white.
There's multiple things, but he makes a really great case for fear of death being the fundamental driver of human behavior and basically dictates what we do and why we do it.
Well, I think that fear is the most powerful emotion, you know, so it drives an enormous amount of behavior.
I do think that from an evolutionary standpoint, sex, living long enough to essentially get laid.
Is what it's all about.
I mean, we're just trying to reproduce.
DNA is using us to reproduce itself.
It's like the egg is really making the chicken as opposed to the other way around.
Have you seen, I'm sure you have, Westworld?
Yes.
Westworld.
Yes.
Yeah.
I love the scene where Anthony Hopkins is talking to that lady robot in his underground lair and he was explaining like the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, all these great, you know, wonderful pieces of architecture and fine art throughout history, all is nothing but an elaborate mating call.
It's peacock feathers.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
There's actually, there was a, I can't remember the, I think it's called the mating syndrome or something like that.
But that was one of the ideas that just like a peacock, You know, that shows its feathers and says, Look how beautiful I am, how powerful I am.
I have great genes.
So, you want to mate with me?
You know, that being an incredible artist, you know, or being incredibly charming, you know, that people find all sorts of ways to attract other people, you know, and it's so important to us to be attracted to other people.
We have to matter, you know, and I think that maybe that, you know, that might play into the idea of fear because we do many things out of fear.
Because we want to matter.
That might not be the best reason to want to matter.
I mean, hopefully, you want to matter because you want to connect with other people, you want to fall in love, you want to love other people, take care of other people.
But fear certainly drives a lot of behavior.
Solving the Aging Problem00:15:50
Like, am I going to have enough money?
Am I going to find someone that loves me?
Whatever that is.
Am I going to be able to get whatever it is you want?
Fear is a big.
You know, absolutely is driving a lot of that.
Yeah.
And also, it would have to, if we knew, if human beings knew that we could live 400,000, 500,000, a million years, it would literally redefine the meaning of what it is to be a hero or a coward.
Yeah.
When you would have, yeah, those are really interesting questions because if you basically didn't have to worry about dying and you were going to be healthy the whole time, your whole, Attitude toward life would completely change.
The political system would change.
Oh, everything changes.
Economics change.
I mean, imagine the economics when you have someone that.
Right.
I mean, that's one of the questions people would ask me.
They said, well, could you get Social Security for, you know, a thousand years?
Are we going to be able to pay for that?
Well, my guess is that if you have a thousand years to live, you're going to have the time to figure out what it is you really want to do and how you're going to get there to do it.
And then you're going to, you know, hopefully have a good life.
But, you know, there are always going to be.
Bad apples.
So you have to factor that question in.
Another thing that I was discussing with Art Levinson whenever we were meeting was how rapidly time begins to accelerate as people get older.
As people get older, like when you're four years old, one year is one quarter of your life.
So one year is a huge amount of time.
When you're 80, it's 180th of your life.
So they're just going by like that.
Time flies.
Well, what if you're 500?
I mean, what's your day like?
You know, it just must go by like a nanosecond, you know, and how does that affect the way you see life on a day to day basis?
And, you know, and then again, you know, you could say, well, I'm going to learn how to, you know, play the piano.
I'm going to learn German.
I'm going to travel everywhere in the world because I don't have to worry.
I'll get to it, you know, and you'll actually have the time to do those things, assuming you can make a living at it, you know.
But one of the things that Hans Moravec said was, Robots and artificial intelligence will eventually take care of everything.
And the day you're born, you'll just start getting checks.
It'll be like social security checks because the economy will be run by machines and it'll make, it'll generate tons of money and the rest of us will just get it.
Of course, that raises all sorts of other questions.
Is that really what makes us tick?
You know, I mean, do we want to just sit there and have anything we want?
I don't think we're built that way.
You know, one of the fundamental drivers, like going back to things like the fear of death or reproduction, it's also one of the main.
Drives for people to innovate and create new technology.
And if machines take over everything and we suddenly don't have, they're doing this stuff for us, what does that mean for us?
And what does that mean for innovation if we're no longer responsible for innovation?
Right, right.
And this all plays into that question of becoming the Neanderthals.
You know, I mean, if machines take over everything and, you know, It sounds like science fiction, but it's happening.
Anybody that's looking at ChatGPT can see it's happening.
It's not crazy to be thinking about these things right now.
That goes back to what I was saying before, that we have to find a way to put a governor on this.
We're going to have to, whether we like it or not, somehow augment ourselves in the way that Ray Kurzweil talks about using nanotechnology to augment the brain and the body.
If we don't, we're not going to be able to keep up.
And there'll just be, now again, the machines might be, Hans Morvec would say, well, they might just create a nice, verdant zoo for us on Earth.
Maybe they already have.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Maybe these UFOs are just future humans or AIs that are flying around just doing their thing and they got us in our own little boxes.
Yeah.
Who knows?
I mean, you really don't know for sure.
But if we just kind of go by the idea that these machines, Could become incredibly powerful, and they say, Okay, we'll just take care of you, we'll be very nice, and we'll go off and run the universe.
Uh, and but we'll still be the new Neanderthals.
I mean, you know, we'll, I mean, it'll be nice, you know, but it'll be like a nice zoo.
We can be just like the uh silverbacks up in Rwanda, right?
Uh, so I don't think that's what we want, and that's kind of the premise and uh, of doppelganger, you know, uh, that that we we still want our liberty, we still want to matter.
We still want to, I mean, I guess in a way, want to be the top of the food chain.
So the question is can we continue, can we use this technology to augment us and become partners with us, you know, to make a better world, a better, whatever it is we end up creating?
Or are we going to allow ourselves to be the bug on the windshield?
Right.
And also, if we're allowed to, if we're suddenly able to live for thousands of years, How does that affect the population of the planet?
And can the planet sustain a trillion people, trillions of people?
Yeah.
You know, if you think of humanity as like a virus on a living being, and suddenly this virus turns itself into a super virus that can outlive, that can live forever, how does that affect the planet?
Because, you know, we're not necessarily good for the planet.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's the first question anyone would ask me when they were reading the book or, or, you know, would find out what the premise of the book was.
Yeah.
You know, and by the way, the book doesn't say, Hey, I believe that this is what we should have happen.
Although I do believe that if there was suddenly a pill that was provided one day, which one of us would say, nah, I don't really want that pill.
I don't want to live forever.
I think these guys have thought about that, though.
Yeah, in some ways they have, in some ways they haven't.
Because Ray Kurzweil, I really think a lot of his work, but he's an optimist.
He just says technology will solve all of it.
I don't think politics don't help the situation.
If everyone was in agreement, maybe we would.
Politically, if something like this starts to happen, it's going to be crazy.
We're trying to go back to your original question.
Overpopulation.
Yeah, the question of overpopulation, I do think that So, look, it's going to happen.
Here's my opinion.
It's going to happen.
People are going to start living longer and they're going to start living better.
So, we better start figuring out how to solve that problem.
Clearly, you can't put trillions of people on the planet.
I think once in one of the meetings I was at, you know, for one of the documentaries I was working on, a scientist said 11 billion people is about what we can sustain.
And we're getting there.
So, yeah, we're close, right?
How many people are on the planet right now?
Eight billion?
Eight billion, yeah.
So, And it's happening fast.
I mean, I think whenever I was writing Last Ape Standing, it was six and a half billion, you know, so it wasn't that long ago.
So it's moving fast.
So we have to solve this problem somehow or another.
And clearly, you have to go off planet.
And so you have to solve the problem.
I wish I had a simple solution to it.
But, you know, whenever people would talk to me about this, I would go, yeah, how are we going to solve that problem?
And then I went, oh, wait, we've got a bigger problem.
It's not.
It's going to happen and people aren't going to say no to it, so we better dig in.
Or maybe maybe this is only available to like the super rich, billionaires or the people that run the world.
Maybe only they get it and they keep it.
That's I mean.
That's, if you want to get dark, maybe they keep it secret.
It could, I mean certainly, right now, people that it's people are very wealthy who have access to, you know the, the best technology that's keeping them healthier longer yeah, and and better.
And that is true now Zuckerberg, with all of his doomsday bunkers.
Right, right, right.
And they, you know, it could go that way.
I mean, that's about the politics.
It could get dark.
I hope it doesn't, because generally what you see is that over across human history as technologies that used to be exotic become more mainstream, you know, nobody used to have, you know, running water or toilets, you know.
Now everybody has them.
Well, almost everybody.
You know, nobody had access to sulfa drugs or, you know, those kinds of things.
And now they're almost free.
So same thing with cell phones.
You know, I mean, they're ubiquitous now.
It used to be only a couple of people had them.
So the hope is that new technologies will get cheaper and then become more available.
But it does.
We do have this problem where there's a zero-sum issue.
And they had to have.
I mean, these guys have to have thought about that, right?
If they think that 11 billion is the cap for the population, like, what is their plan?
Because we're getting there quick.
Yeah.
And we haven't, we're not even close to getting human beings off this planet.
We haven't put somebody on the moon in what, since what?
Yeah.
70s?
Yeah.
Right.
70s.
70s.
I think that was the last one.
Those people haven't thought about it, to be honest.
I mean, like I said, Rick Kurzweil basically say, you know, we'll solve it.
Science will solve it somehow.
Someone like R. Levinson basically says, I don't expect to survive this.
He goes, I'll probably pass away, but I'm hoping that I'll pass it along, you know, to the next generation and we'll solve the problem.
How old is he?
He's 74.
So, I mean, he's in great shape and sharp as can be.
But, you know, Craig Bencher, the same thing.
You know, I think biology is incredibly complex.
So we'll see, you know, how well we really solve this problem and how quickly we solve it.
Just because Ray Kurzweil says we'll solve it, you know, by the 2030s doesn't mean we will.
Biology, he's an engineer, he's not a biologist.
When you talk with someone like Art Levinson, he goes, it's super, super complex.
But one thing he did say, the first time I met him, he said, I don't know that we can solve this problem at all.
He said, I don't even know if it's solvable.
He said, but we're going to give it a shot.
And then halfway through, while I was continuing to interview him and do research, he said, Yes, we can solve it.
And it was because they had found evidence that there were mammals that seemingly live, they don't die from aging.
So he said, There are switches in mammals like us that can be flipped.
And so we can solve the problem, he goes.
But it might take 20 years, might take 30 years, might take 50 years.
But he did tell me the last time I talked to him, he said, It's that whale you saw, the bowhead whale, and what else?
The bowhead whale and the naked mole rat.
Naked mole rat?
Yeah, interesting.
I had those in my backyard.
Well, the naked mole rat is one of the ugliest animals you've ever seen.
But they live, most rats live three, four years.
These live 34 years.
And then they.
How do they die?
Well, they die from like if they had an aneurysm or another rat killed it, but they don't die from aging.
They're still having sex right up to the day they drop.
Wow.
No problem.
I mean, just not aging.
So when he saw that, he went, okay, we can figure it out, but I don't know how long it's going to take to figure it out.
He said, but there's something in the genome that's flipping those switches, and it's just a matter of time before we find it.
What kind of technology do you think we would use?
to fuck with the genome or to get in there and tweak the DNA and try to flip those switches.
Are there any technologies that are already being used that could be improved or does it have to be like a completely innovative new thing?
Well, CRISPR can do it.
CRISPR can do it.
CRISPR can go in and flip.
It can edit genes.
Right.
So you just have to get better and better at it.
And right now we're using biology to do it.
if you get to the point where you have nanomachines that could go in and just say, okay, there's the gene.
First of all, you have to find the genes.
You know, there might be multiple genes.
And then you have to find out how are they expressing themselves and when do they express themselves.
And then you've got to go in and have a machine or, you know, some kind of biology that's going to go in and find it and fix it, change it.
You know, I mean, they've already come up with a drug that fixes sickle cell anemia, you know.
Really?
That's a genetic problem.
How long ago did they find that?
Well, I shouldn't say that they've solved it.
I think they're in the process of thinking that they've solved it.
You know, they're doing testing.
And that's a genetic disease.
And if you can go in.
And there was a guy that a couple of years ago who changed the genes of two children that had genes for HIV.
Really?
And the bad thing he did was he did it without telling the parents that he did it.
Damn.
Can you find this online?
Yeah, yeah.
I wish I had a name for it, but I'll find it.
Changed, doctor changed the DNA of people with an HIV gene.
Two twins.
Two twin children.
And they had a legacy gene.
I think it was HIV.
They had a legacy gene, the result of HIV.
Is this it?
Yeah, it looks like he acted on his own.
All right, cool.
Let's see what we got.
China says a doctor who claimed using CRISPR to make gene edited babies acted on his own.
All right.
Oh, yeah, this is it.
Can you punch in a little bit?
Chinese investigators determined that the doctor behind the report.
Reported births of two babies whose genes had been edited in hopes to making them resistant to AIDS virus, acted on his own and will be punished for any violations of the law.
State media reported on Monday.
Investigators in the southern province of Guangdong determined Dr. He, I'm not even going to try to say that, Jiang Q, organized and handled funding for the experiment without outside assistance in violation of national guidelines.
Wow.
But was it successful?
Well, he says it was.
Stem Cells and Genomic Fixes00:12:25
I mean, there's no I guess you can't prove it.
Yeah, you can't.
I mean, I guess you can do a genetic test and see if they have the gene.
Right.
You know, or if it's not, or I guess more accurately, don't have the gene.
But do you know what the laws are when it comes to CRISPR in the U.S. or in different countries?
Everything has to be done, you know, peer-reviewed.
It's got to be, you know, FDA, at least in the United States, you know, it has to be sanctioned by the FDA and you have to do testing and, you know, and they have very strict rules about how you have to do that stuff.
So, and then it has to all be peer reviewed and everything.
So, it sounds impossible.
I mean, it sounds like progress would be so, I wouldn't say impossible, but so sluggish for progress to happen.
Like, how do you know that you can remove these things from a human genome and remove cancer if you're not allowed to test it?
Well, you can test it, you just have to, you know, go through the FDA approval system.
And that's why there's a lot of people that are doing work in Costa Rica and Oh, really?
Yeah, Bangkok, Thailand, and Baja.
Yeah, you have to go down there just to get stem cell treatment.
Yeah, yeah, right, right.
Well, I think you can do it here, though.
It's way more expensive, maybe.
You can, but it has to be prescribed.
You can get your shoulder injected.
As long as what you're doing is you're basically taking fat cells from your own body and then spinning those out as stem cells and then re-injecting those into your own body.
There are people that are also using stem cells from other stem cell lines that aren't yours and using those to boost people.
Sort of in the way that they use, I think it's called PRP, you know, with baseball players and that sort of thing where you're using, you know, plasma, you know, injections to, you know, to kind of boost your system.
From other people?
No, from themselves.
Oh, okay.
In that case.
But yeah, there are definitely people.
In fact, Robert Hariri already you know, says take your own stem cells and put them in a refrigerator.
Really?
Yeah, and save them.
Don't people save like the umbilical cords of their babies?
Yeah, yeah.
I highly recommend it.
Really?
Yeah, because.
Did you do it?
Did I do it?
Yeah.
Do you save the umbilical cords of your children or do you have kids?
I don't know if you have kids or not.
I have kids, but they were two.
That was before that.
Yeah, it was before they could do that.
I would have absolutely.
Right.
Because basically.
Because they make it super expensive, too.
Well, it's more expensive than you want.
Yeah.
And again, it would be nice if this sort of thing would go mainstream.
Yeah.
You know, but the FDA is kind of watches that, too.
But Bob Hariri is the guy.
He's in the book.
He's the guy, the first guy to figure that out.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
He was a guy that, I mean, he was a trauma surgeon.
And so he was actually dealing one day with a woman whose husband had been massively damaged, you know, brain damage in a car accident.
And he was trying to console her and trying to figure out how could I help this guy.
And he went down and his own child before she was born was, his wife was getting a sonogram.
And he's looking at the sonogram and he goes, Wow.
He goes, there's the embryo.
And then there's this big mass there.
And he realized it was the placenta.
And he goes, wow.
He goes, that's big.
What's it doing?
And what it's doing is it's pumping tons of stem cells into the baby.
And so he said, we just tossed this stuff in the garbage, literally.
It's called the afterbirth.
And he said, I realized that what it is is a stem cell factory.
And he said, so that's what he's been working on for 25 years.
And he's making real progress now.
in trying to create medicine where you can use the stem cells, your own stem cells or your children's stem cells, and create a medicine so that you can either inject or take a pill that would solve problems.
An example would be sarcopenia, which is muscle wasting.
Now, everybody gets muscle wasting disease as they age.
It's just part of what aging is.
Sarcopenia is something that you get when you're younger, solve that problem and it's very difficult to solve.
It's genetic.
So what he's, what he, that's one of the first things he wants to do is to be able to solve that for aging because as he pointed out, he said, when a 30-year-old man has turned 60, he's lost 60, and he's just using men as an example, he's lost 60% of his muscle mass.
And he said, when you lose 60% of your muscle mass, you're not just losing muscle, you're losing almost 100%.
Bone mass too?
You're losing vascular.
Capability.
That's most of your vascular system is in your muscle, and that's what's delivering your immune system.
That's what's delivering all the nutrients to your body.
And so you're just going downhill.
And so he figures if he can come up with a way to reboost muscle mass, then you're boosting the whole system.
Interesting.
So that's where I think the first breakthroughs.
I wrote this when the book came out.
I wrote an article in The Hill.
And And I basically said, I think there are four things that are going to happen, you know, within the next, at that time, five to ten years.
So now we're four years in.
You know, first, stem cells, which will boost and lengthen healthy life.
And the second thing is genomics.
I mean, we're rapidly, and AI is helping this, you know, we're rapidly figuring out what's going on with the human genome, you know, which, What the hell?
I mean, it's so complicated.
And the third thing is really under, you know, what Calico is working on, really trying to understand what are those switches.
Once you understand the genomics well enough, then what are the systems in the body that are causing aging and then turn them off?
And then AI is absolutely necessary to figuring that out because you're not going to get a bench scientist that can get down there and look at cells and figure it out.
It's all happening way too fast.
So, the guy who was in the violent car accident, was he able to help him at all with stem cells?
No, because, well, first of all, it was just a concept that it was like, The light bulb went off, but then he had to figure out, well, what's the placenta?
And he had to do all sorts of research and everything.
He has more degrees than.
And is there a difference between using the placenta and the umbilical cord?
Yeah, yeah.
The placenta, well, the umbilical cord is what is the connection between the placenta and the baby and the mother.
Okay.
So they're, you know, but it's this little engine that's just what makes stem cells.
So you want to save the placenta, not the umbilical cord.
Right, right.
But people do also, there's a lot in the cord blood.
Cored blood.
A lot of people do that.
But if I were giving advice to anybody, and I'm not a doctor, but I would say look into if you're having a child, saving the placenta.
Don't throw away the afterbirth.
And what is the benefit of having the placenta of your own child versus people who just get stem cells from?
How does it work otherwise?
Does it people just get random stem cells?
That's a really great question.
It's a really important one, too.
If you are using your own stem cells, Then they recognize themselves.
And so they will literally go in and boost you.
Okay.
You know, if it's somebody else's cells, then what happens is they'll go in and your body goes, okay, this is boosting.
And there are these communicators called exosomes that every cell has.
And they create the communication between different cells.
And there are billions and billions of them in every cell.
And so what happens is when.
Somebody else's stem cells are injected, they're released and they seem to boost your own cells, but the stem cells themselves, you know, within a week are just, you know, go out of your system.
But if they're your own stem cells, then let's say, I don't know, let's say you have a heart problem, you know, and you get your body injected with your own stem cells into your own body, your body's going to start.
You know, looking around for trouble because that's what it does.
That's what stem cells do.
They're replenishing your body all the time and it's going to find trouble and it's going to fix it.
But even like a jammed artery can do that?
Well, it'll make it younger.
You know, it'll make it more pliable.
Right.
Okay.
You know, it may not get rid of the plaque, you know, but it'll make it, you know, be able to handle it better.
Son of a bitch, Steve.
I have to have another kid now.
I thought I was done.
That's wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Even it's still not too late.
I mean, no matter how old any of us is, andor how old your children are, it's relatively simple to save your own stem cells.
So, if you have young children, you can still save their.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you can have the fat, you know, have some fat pulled out.
And once you have the stem cell, then you can create lines of stem cells, you know, so you can create millions and millions of stem cells that are all identical copies.
Okay.
And so, it's not like you need to constantly reinject.
So, where do I take my baby?
I got a one year old.
Oh, wow.
Congratulations.
I just go to CVS and take the stem cells.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Let's get to that soon.
Is there a drive through?
Yeah.
No, I mean, I'll put you in touch.
Bob Hariri.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
He created the first company to save placental stem cells.
Oh, wow.
In fact, I think he did cord blood first.
So, what are some of these guys, some of these big shots that are working on this stuff, are they doing any kind of crazy protocols themselves to stay younger, to make themselves last to where?
I know, like, Ray Kurzweil talks about he takes a bunch of vitamins and stuff, but, like, are there any crazy things that they do to make themselves younger besides stem cells?
I honestly don't know because they haven't shared with me.
I'm pretty sure that, well, Peter Diamandis, who is one of the founders with Bob Hariri of Fountain Life, it's called, he's been pretty open about using stem cells in his own body.
Ray Kurzweil hasn't, but I'd be surprised if he hasn't because he's been talking about this stuff for a long time.
Right.
And he's close friends with Peter Diamandis.
They work together.
I don't think Art Levinson is doing anything.
But if he creates a drug that comes out of the work at Calico, I'm sure he would.
But his hope is that there'll be a drug.
Now, it could be outrageously expensive at first, but eventually, once the drug's created 15 years later, the patent expires and then it can be used by anybody.
It gets way cheaper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a scary thing, too.
Like when the pharmaceutical companies bid on these things and drive the prices up and, you know.
Yeah.
They spend, you know, they spend billions of dollars.
You know, I think it depends on the company.
Some of these companies, I think, are really well run and they're doing things the right way.
You know, they spend billions and billions of dollars.
So they've got to recoup those costs.
Otherwise, they'd go out of business.
But I think some of them are predatory and that's been proven, you know.
Sequencing Our Future Genomes00:03:58
So you just have to.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's look at the lawsuits.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
And so you just have to hope that the predators don't win on that count.
But again, it raises all these other issues that we've talked about.
Yeah.
I mean, there's this convergence.
What's, I think, interesting at this time of human history is that there's this convergence of incredibly powerful technologies.
It's not just one technology.
It's not like just nuclear power or rocket science or something like that or the internet.
It's artificial intelligence, which is rapidly moving forward, and it's You know, these drugs that are going to change the way people live.
The internet itself creates communication in ways that are both good and bad, that change politics.
Economics are changing rapidly.
And what, you know, people would say, you know, what's going to happen in the future?
And my answer is it's going to get more complicated.
It's just going to get more and more complex.
Now, is there going to be a way to.
Using some of these genome technologies to essentially like take a sample of your blood and do some sort of a minority report analysis of like everything that's going to happen to you in the future?
Yeah, yeah.
That's that I think is part of the genomics question, you know, the kind of phase two.
Because once you like, I've already had my genome sequenced, but it doesn't help me a whole lot.
How does that work, getting your genome sequenced?
Essentially, they take blood and then there are machines that will sequence, take a look at your genes because Craig Venter was one of the first people to sequence the first human genome.
So you know how to sequence the genome.
So you go, okay, this is what your genome says.
The problem is, it's like reading hieroglyphs that you don't know what it means.
A whole lot of information, and you go, yeah, what does that mean?
And so that's why one of the things that Venture was initially trying to do was get a million genomes in a database so that you can then, the more information you have, it's like the more you understand Japanese, you know, the better you speak the language.
So the more data you have of the human genome, then the more information you can put together and say, oh, okay, these do this, this does this, this does this, and this, you know, does this for you, you know?
So once we get to that point, then you would have.
The sort of situation where you say, okay, we're sequencing your genome, and now we know you're going to have atrial fibrillation, you know, probably around age 60, you know, or you're going to start to have vascular problems at such and such a time, or, you know, I mean, it won't simply know that your eyes are blue and, you know, what color your hair is, that kind of thing.
It's going to be much more, and that's when you can begin to tailor drugs.
I mean, one of the reasons when, every time you see those commercials that are on, you know, television that say, get this drug and, by the way this this, this and a long list of horrible things that can happen to you right yeah yeah, you know the reason why that is is because everyone's genome is different and for some people it works and for some people it's lethal, you know, I mean, that's why, you see, you know, concerns that people have about covet and uh, vaccination.
Some people the vaccinations are not good, but the vast majority they are, you know.
So uh, everyone's genome is different and the goal is that you get to the point where you can look at every you know your genome and everybody else's genome and go, we know exactly what kinds of problems they're going to have and Now we can build the drugs to address those problems, right?
Killer Robots in San Francisco00:03:58
but who knows maybe the nanotechnology already have kicked in so yeah, so many things working at once yeah Robotics that's another big issue rapidly moving forward Robotics robotics.
I mean got machines now that can you know play soccer can't knock them down yeah, you know, I mean they're They're amazing, you know, so what would they be doing yeah Then put them together with AI Yeah, there was a story a couple months ago.
I think I saw that there was some sort of killer robots that they were putting on the streets in San Francisco or something.
I think I saw something about that on the internet and I'm not sure it's real.
Yeah.
It looks, doesn't something about it?
I heard that it was like something that they had in the works or something like that.
And then it got so much push, like backlash and media attention when it came out.
They were like, okay, let's just shelve this.
When was this?
It was a headline somewhere.
It was like, law enforcement are using killer robots in somewhere in Northern California.
I want to say it was San Francisco for law enforcement.
Robots that had the autonomy to kill.
Yeah, to pick up an AR.
There it is.
San Francisco Police Department may resubmit proposal for killer robots after policy was blocked.
So it was a policy that was put forward.
Oh, wow.
Robots with the ability to use deadly force may be back on the agenda in San Fran.
Wow.
That was like a year ago.
That's kind of ironic.
Dude, San Francisco is insane.
Me and Steven were just there a couple of months ago, and it was like, you can't, people are allowed to break into cars.
Oh, yeah.
They're not penalized.
What?
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Like the guy we were going to visit there, he was like, don't leave anything valuable in your car, whether you lock it or not.
He's like, it's going to get broken into.
We were walking to lunch, and there was like at least two cars that we saw with purses laying next to them, nothing left, just like a couple of useless things scattered or Like throughout the road.
And he's like, Yeah, he's like, This is just normal.
Oh, that's.
They just loot cars and they don't get in trouble for it.
That sounds crazy.
Yeah, well, I used to be the bureau chief at CNN and it was very different then.
It was a great city.
Oh, in San Francisco?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, beautiful city.
What year?
I was in the 80s.
Oh, wow.
You know, it was a perfect city then.
It's a beautiful city.
I mean, the geography and the weather and just the landscape.
That's why everybody's in there.
The ocean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's unfortunate.
It's starting to feel like New York now.
And it wasn't like that when I used to.
When's the last time you were there?
Oh, I was there just a couple of years ago when I saw Kurzweil because he has offices there.
He actually has an apartment there.
So I was like, wow, it's gotten so big.
So much traffic and everything.
It's too bad.
Yeah.
So I guess this killer robot thing's on the shelf for now, but they're going to resubmit it.
We'll see what happens.
This is my favorite quote from the thing.
It's too soon.
It's triggering.
It's painful that when you're discussing ways to kill us, How maybe an officer could be protected by having a robot kill us instead of the officer.
Yeah, right.
Maybe it'll be better.
You know, maybe the robots will be able to make better decisions.
I think so.
Stephen, he really, really trusts the future of AI.
He trusts, you know, he can't wait until cars are able to pick us up and drive us to where we're going.
And no human, he wants robot police.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's getting very, very close.
I mean, they're making them in Pittsburgh.
I mean, that's where they.
They created the first self driving cars.
So, yeah, I'm for that.
I'm just scared about when it gets to like minority report level to where it's like, we know you're going to commit a crime in next week.
So, when you catch this Uber to the airport today, you're not going to be able to get out.
Implanting Artificial Memories00:03:18
You're going straight to prison.
And then, something yesterday I saw on Twitter, they're creating this new prison technology where if you go to prison, you'll have the option.
You can either go to jail for 10 years or you can.
Be downloaded into the you get put into this like matrix looking pod where they scramble your brain and wire you with new memories.
What this is real, I swear.
Yeah, you can find this easily if you just Google uh, um, prison new uh, memory implants for prisoners, you'll find it'll be the top thing.
That is right out of uh, where they basically rebuild your whole life and they uh, depending on how uh, violent your crime was, click on the link.
That is science fiction.
That is nuts.
It's wired.
Yeah, that's it.
This is it.
Prisons of the future.
Criminals could get false memory implants.
There's a really cool video if you can find it.
It's probably on this article if you scroll down.
Oh my God, why am I blanking out on the famous PJ?
Keep going.
Go back.
Click back.
And then prisoners.
Click that.
No, it's Facebook.
Don't click that.
Click on the YouTube one.
There you go.
There we go.
Okay.
Welcome to the Bollywood, a facility designed to treat criminals like patients.
Instead of spending years in an actual prison cell, prisoners could finish their sentence here in just a few minutes.
Cognify could someday create and implant artificial memories directly into the prisoner's brain.
These complex, vivid and lifelike memories are created in real time using AI-generated content.
Depending on the seriousness of the subject's crime and their sentence, the memories could be tailored to the rehabilitation needs of each subject.
The artificial memories implanted by Cognify would be seamlessly incorporated into the existing neural networks of the brain, preventing cognitive dissonance and ensuring the subject experiences the memories as if they were real.
The Cognify concept offers a new approach to criminal rehabilitation, transforming how society deals with offenders by focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
First, the prisoner is given a choice, either spending tens of years in a prison cell or seeking fast-track rehabilitation through artificial memory implantation.
If the prisoner chooses to undergo fast-track rehabilitation, the Cognify device is used.
Next, the prisoner undergoes high-resolution brain scanning to create a detailed map of their neural pathways.
This brain map helps guide the Cognify device to target specific brain regions responsible for memory, reasoning, and logical thinking, such as the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, parietal lobe, and anterior cingulate cortex.
Once the target brain regions are identified, Cognify is then placed around the head of the prisoner.
The intensity and the type of artificial memories is then adjusted, depending on the crime.
Inside the criminal's mind, time would pass differently, slower than in real life, making them experience years' worth of Of artificial memories in just a few minutes, yeah.
The Irony of Primal Drives00:07:41
This just came out like a couple days ago.
This is total recall, so yeah, total recall, yeah.
Um, and it's it could be just as scary and remorse.
So, I gotta figure this is so.
How would this work?
Would this cognify company have to pay these prisons or something?
Like, how do you incentivize this to the prisoner, the prisons to work with this company and do all this?
Like, who pays for all this?
Yeah, I well.
Yeah, investors I'm sure would ante up if they thought there was any chance that there was a true business here.
You would have to get, I mean, in the United States, there would be massive numbers of FDA approvals that would have to pass because if you scramble someone's brain the wrong way.
Right.
I don't even know that we understand memory.
So I don't know where you stick the chip even.
Right.
This is not a simple problem to solve.
It might be something that feels to me like it's.
Good marketing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is, it's a terrifying video.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, it's, that's exactly what it is total rebirth.
But what would you do though?
If you had 10 years in prison or to go for, give this a shot.
If it looked like it was going to work, I'd say, yeah.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I just say, I think most people might.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You save 10 years of your life, you know, plus theoretically, you're happier.
But what is, but are you basically a new person when you get out?
Like, yeah, right.
Is it like dying and being reborn?
Well, that's one of the questions you'd have to ask.
Would you recognize your wife?
Right, right.
Or your kids, if you had any.
That's wild.
It's so unknown.
The future is so unknown.
It's terrifying.
I mean, I believe that something like this is possible eventually, but I don't think we're very close to it yet.
Thankfully, we don't have to.
But it's actually a good indication of the many, many kinds of complex problems we'll have to solve.
And can we really solve them?
I mean, we don't move very fast doing this.
Technology is moving way faster than we're moving politically or legally.
Yes, it's definitely leaving us in the dust.
Yeah, and that's one of the ironies.
I mean, it's just advancing so rapidly and our old-fashioned wetware DNA just can't keep up.
Yeah, you really see that with social media and just with the way that media moves around so quickly.
And it's so much easier because there's such an overwhelming amount of information now.
Like, you know, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, it wasn't hard to go figure out, you know, Figure out what was going on in some other part of the world or what happened.
But now it's like there are so many different sources of the same story that are all so different and have different takes depending on political bias or what country it's coming from or what nation.
And it's just overwhelmingly difficult to figure out the truth about anything because you have to literally read 10 sources of one story to find out the truth.
Most people are just lazy.
They just want to read one and then they think they know it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's just got us.
In this weird, weird place.
So then you, you know, so now you say, well, I can't handle all of it.
So I'll have ChatGPT write me a summary.
Well, what's it summarizing?
Right.
Is it summarizing the truth?
Is it summarizing some version of the truth?
Is it summarizing, you know, how accurate is it?
You know, but if you believe it, I think one of the big ironies of all this is that the very thing that is kind of undoing us and creating.
This world that's so complex and so difficult for us to live in is the same thing that we love about it.
We love the internet, you know, we love stories, you know, we love drama.
And a lot of times we love things that aren't really very pretty as long as it's not us that's getting, you know, I mean, how many car accidents do you just drive by and not look at?
You know, I mean, we're immediately drawn to them, you know, and so that's what makes news, you know, and and So, these kind of primal drives that we have are getting us.
You know, we have these primal drives on the one hand.
This is what Last Ape Standing was all about.
And then we have these technologies that we're creating that are incredibly complex.
And it's, and we're putting ourselves in a really tough spot.
That's like a negative feedback loop almost.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, we, and that's why I, you know, my big thing right now is let's just think real hard about what we're doing and not just say, oh, wow, isn't this cool?
You know, Or even to be just saying, well, let's make sure that we don't have somebody's voice pretending they're somebody else, which you can do, or somebody's face looking like somebody else's.
Those are important things to keep an eye on.
But the bigger, bigger, much bigger question is this can replace us.
There's something called emergent behaviors, which have been around since John Stuart Mill wrote about them 150 years ago.
And it's like when the Big Bang took place, there was so much data created, then something totally new came about galaxies and stars.
The same thing happens when a beehive is created.
You get enough bees together, it creates a hive.
And the hive is very different than the bees.
It's an emergent trait.
So it's the same thing whenever we became conscious.
You simply had enough neurons, billions of neurons, that suddenly something went, oh.
I'm aware.
I'm self-aware.
And that's an emergent trait.
There's no reason why that can't help them with machines.
You get enough data, they'll just one day go, hmm, I'm me.
Right.
And you're different from me.
I have rights, I have feelings, I have thoughts.
So, you know, we don't want that to happen.
Yeah, we don't.
It's just, yeah, it seems like we are just going to have to bend the knee and to integrate somehow.
But yeah, I don't know what that looks like.
Well, it starts with conversations.
Yeah.
You know, like this.
Yeah, definitely.
Where you start to make people just think a little harder about what's really going on and try to, you know, step back from it and say, let's try to be smart about how we're doing this.
You know, there are downstream ramifications from every technology.
And, you know, most of the time we haven't known what they would be.
I mean, when, you know, Ford created the assembly line.
And suddenly everybody could have a car.
We didn't know that we were going to be.
You know, burning down the planet with carbon, you know too much carbon, uh.
So maybe we can learn from that, you know, and we can look at something like this and say okay, let's try to figure out.
We can even use Ai to help us figure out what could be the undoing of us in going.
Outpacing Human Evolution00:15:48
Also going back to um we were talking about earlier with the, the different kinds of mammals that uh, they don't age, and it seems, like um, I was thinking about this when I was reading your book, The Last Ape Standing, that there are, when it comes to different types of animal species, like specifically, whales or most animal species,
there's such a wide variety of them, right?
Like whales and dolphins and sharks and fish and everything else.
But when it comes to us, there's no variety.
There's basically one basic standard cutout of a human.
And there's no evolutionary drift much.
You know what I mean?
There's such a wide gap between us and the next primate.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that was pretty much what Last Ape Standing was about.
From the research that I did over the last 7 million years, when the first hominin kind of emerged, there have been, I think, now 29 hominin or human creatures.
that evolved.
At one point, at least five were living simultaneously throughout the planet.
Probably a lot more, we just don't know about them because you only find what you find.
Fossils are hard to find.
But there were Denisophans, there were Neanderthals, there were Homo sapiens, there were Homo erectus, and there were floriensis?
Yeah, the Floriensis.
Those are five that 75,000 years ago were, and we were actually barely surviving.
You know, there were only probably a couple of thousand of us because most of Africa had been, you know, decimated.
You know, we don't know if it was a huge volcanic eruption 70,000 years ago.
We have 70, 75,000 years.
Right.
You know, so, you know, the fact that, so there were lots of other, Creatures and they were highly intelligent, you know, very bright and doing just fine.
Find.
I mean, Neanderthals were around for, I don't know, almost 400,000 or 300,000 years, 400,000 years.
And they survived three ice ages up in Europe, whereas we were down in Africa.
It was much warmer.
So that was the essential question of last ape standing why are we the only one left?
And essentially, we seem to be slightly more flexible, we're more adaptable.
And the The thinking that I came away with in it was that we're born very young.
Yes.
You know, it's a trait called neoteny, which means a creature is born young.
It's kind of.
It takes us forever to be able to survive and take care of ourselves.
Right.
Most animals are born and they got a couple hours to figure it out.
Right.
Wildebeest hits the ground, comes out of the womb, and he's already up and running.
You know, a horse, same thing.
You know, and that was probably more true of some of these other species.
But because of the size of our heads, we couldn't have the baby, you couldn't keep the baby in the mother any longer than nine months.
You had to get her, get the baby out, and evolution taught us that nine months was it.
Now, when a human baby comes out in nine months, after nine months of gestation, they're helpless.
And for the next four years, their brain is growing in a Incredible clip.
So basically, a lot of what happens in the womb with other animals is happening outside the womb with us.
And what that means is your personal experience is being changed by the neurons that are rapidly developing in your brain.
So you're not being driven by your genetics, you're being driven by your genetics and your experience.
And so, you know, if you're hearing music, if you're, you know, being, you know, your parents are really tuned in, if depending on where you're living, a million different things that are going on in your brain whenever you're a year old.
And there is an enormous amount of brain cells that are being made at that age.
It's shaping literally you.
And that's why we're so unique.
Each of us is not so much like a horse, another horse.
Horses and dogs and everything are different, but they're not as different as we are.
And they're not as smart as we are.
And they're not as pliable and creative as we are.
And again, ironically, because of that, we were able to create these technologies and then build on them and learn from them, create language and create writing.
You know, all things that enable us to build on the past so that we get culturally more and more intelligent.
But why is there such a big gap between us and the next primate?
Like, why don't we see any sort of like middle ground?
And why don't we see apes evolving still?
Or do we?
They're evolving just slow.
And we're evolving slowly too, but our culture moves rapidly.
You know, I think the answer to that is for one reason or another, and there are probably multiple reasons.
all of those other highly intelligent creatures that were around when we were are gone.
They were way more intelligent than your average chimpanzee, you know, but they're gone.
Now we played a role probably with Denisovans and Neanderthals because we moved into territory where, first of all, they were struggling and maybe 100,000 Neanderthals spread from Britain to the Atlas Mountains.
You know, that's just not very many people over that broad a space.
And so they didn't build cultures as rapidly as we did.
We were just more successful at procreating.
And then we built tools that were probably a little better than their tools.
And so we just started taking over their territory.
And it may have been just simply that.
And we might have also just mated with them and kind of overrun them, you know, genetically.
Because you probably have Neanderthal genes in you.
I have 4%.
I think it's 8% of my genes are Neanderthal.
So, somebody was mating with somebody somewhere down the road there.
And so, you know, for one reason or another, they just got wiped out, you know, by 30,000 years ago.
And my guess is probably more like 20,000 years ago, the last of them departed.
And the same thing happened with the Nisovans, who moved more toward Asia.
And, you know, the other ones probably just couldn't survive, you know.
I mean, every species goes extinct.
99% of all species are extinct.
So eventually, everyone goes the way of the dinosaur.
Do you think the timeline for humans has been linear, like perfectly linear, like it's thought of conventionally?
Like we started out as apes and we just progressively got better and more technological, or do you think there was any sort of like recess?
Do you think it's possible that there was a more advanced version of us?
In the past.
In the past.
Well, the fossil evidence doesn't indicate that yet.
We haven't found any.
you know, fossils of more advanced creatures.
Although how we would know that is hard because all you've got left is bone and you only get so much DNA.
But from a scientific point of view, I mean, I think there are probably theories about that.
But from a scientific point of view, there hasn't been anything found that said, oh, here's a creature that's smarter than we were.
Neanderthals actually had a larger brain than we did and they may have even had more neurons than we did.
But how they were put together, nobody really knows.
They may not have had, they probably didn't have speech that was as complex as ours just because of the way their throats were.
But, and that just might have been a fluke.
You know, we might have just gotten lucky that we could make the sounds that we make and we were able to use them to communicate.
I mean, it's kind of odd when you think about it.
I'm sitting here, I'm making noises at you, and you're hearing these noises and somehow you know what they mean.
You know, and we just make these noises back and forth.
You know, when you go out to other countries and you hear somebody speaking a different language, it just sounds like gibberish, you know, but we're able to do it.
It's a really smart technology.
And I don't know if Neanderthals could do that.
And if they couldn't, it, you know, it meant that they couldn't communicate as effectively and therefore they couldn't build tools and culture as rapidly.
And so, you know, when they just couldn't survive it.
And there was also, you talk about the symbolic thinking.
that came about and like how we were able to communicate with symbols and how that expanded the brain somehow?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and so that's, I was lucky enough for National Geographic to, they asked me to try to track down the first artists, you know, which is basically the first symbols.
And so I spent a lot of time for that article doing that.
And maybe around 100,000 years ago, something happened where we were able to, Say, oh, this thing stands for an idea, you know, or this sound means a particular letter, you know.
But somehow we were able to symbolize an idea.
I mean, it sounds obvious, but think about it when you see, I don't know, a logo, and you go, oh, I know that means Nike.
Being able to do that is what makes language possible, art possible, words, the written word.
I mean, imagine you're there's probably so many things that were created and then lost because you had no way to save them, you know, except to talk.
You know, so when that person died, then their ideas went away.
You know, when you were able then to write, you know, hieroglyphs or whatever, and you could save ideas, then you could build on those ideas.
And then that's why we have this rapid advance that's taking place now because we have more and more information, more and more data, and we're building on that data and we're learning faster and faster.
And now we're kind of outpacing ourselves.
Putting ourselves in the crosshairs.
Yeah, I mean, but if an asteroid hit us right now, we'd lose all of that.
Yes.
Like literally, if we had a massive cosmic impact, we would have nothing left but like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, maybe not Stonehenge, but we'd have like the Hoover Dam.
Yeah.
Assuming it didn't get hit.
Right, right.
But like only the stonework would survive.
And I think I had someone on here once who said that it would take less than 250 years for.
All of New York City, all the buildings in New York City to be reduced to dust.
I believe that.
I believe that.
Probably some steel girders that are rusted, but even they would go after a while 250 years.
Kind of makes sense.
The only way would be to put a hard drive on the moon somehow.
Right.
Yeah.
You mean move all technology, all of our data, somehow back it up somewhere else.
Because there's been a violent history of catastrophic events that have wiped out.
Right.
Right.
Actually, that's a great idea.
You know, it's not an easy problem to solve because we have a lot of data and we're constantly creating more data.
You know, every day, I mean, every split second, we're, you know, probably increasing the amount of information that we used to have, I don't know, 500 years ago over a week.
You know, you might not even need to go to the moon.
You might be able just to keep it underwater because, you know, there's a lot of animals that survive to that stuff, like sharks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's where they have the best shot.
You know, because they actually can live there, you know, or put it deep in the, you know, deep in the planet.
But I kind of like your idea of putting it, you know, assuming the moon doesn't get hit too.
I don't think we're very far from people hanging around the moon.
I think, I think within 10 years, people will be taking nice little drives.
You think?
10 years.
Yeah.
Why don't you think we've done it since the 70s?
What do you, I mean, it seems like we're doing so much, we're innovating so much, we're creating all these new technologies, but like we haven't given a shit about the moon.
Was just the space race, was that the only thing that was just motivating us?
Now we don't care.
Yeah, we won.
We won.
We won.
And so then, I mean, within, I think, four or five more Apollo missions, it was over because there wasn't any, it was expensive as hell.
Yeah.
But I think that.
But now all the technology that we had to get to the moon basically would be we could fit that inside of an iPhone.
Yes.
Yes.
And yeah, it's kind of amazing.
I mean, truthfully, it probably has 10 or 100 times more power than we had in the moon, those moon shots.
Yeah.
So, I, yeah, just keeping a handle on the data that we have.
But obviously, there would be things that would be worth saving.
And there's really no way of knowing.
I mean, there are people that are working on that too, trying to figure out, well, is there something coming our way?
And if it's coming our way, well, I don't know how you get around it.
Luckily, there's fewer and fewer of them coming our way because four billion years ago, the planet aggregated, and that's when all the damage was being done.
And there's not as much stuff out there to hit us, but, you know, we could still get hit.
Yeah.
There's lots of ways we can go.
Epidemic.
You know, there's a great book that's called Earth Will Abide.
It was written in the 1940s.
What's it called?
Earth Will Abide.
Abide.
And it's a brilliant book.
And it's just basically a guy is out in the middle of nowhere, you know, working on something, and he comes down and.
To a small town, and there's nobody there.
And then he keeps getting to bigger and bigger cities.
There's nobody there.
Everyone's died.
And he finds a few people that live.
But it's essentially that story you're talking about.
You're just watching the planet disintegrate, the infrastructures.
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see who survives.
I think the people that would survive would be like the hunter gatherers that are still on Earth today.
People like the hunter gatherers in Tanzania or the Amazon rainforest or some of the uncontacted tribes on various islands around Asia.
Cryonics and Life Insurance00:06:45
As long as their environment doesn't change.
The people who depend on technology, I think, are the ones that would go the first.
Yeah, yeah.
If there's an epidemic.
An epidemic or even a cataclysm, right?
Like if the grid was to go down.
Oh, yeah.
Even though it went down.
If the grid went down, right?
Like if we lost that kind of stuff and we didn't, for some reason, we didn't have power or any way to sustain energy.
And I even think about, like you talked about, those transhumanists.
Yeah.
Those people who get their heads severed and put into these cryo chambers or whatever.
Yeah.
Like the people that own those.
Those cryogenics companies out in the desert in Arizona?
Like, do you think the first thing that they're going to be worried about is saving those heads when the grid goes down?
I don't think so.
Yeah, I don't think so.
And plus, they would, well, after a few weeks, they would start to warm up.
But yeah, I spent a whole lot of time down there.
I forgot, I almost forgot.
It's how I opened the book.
You know, I spent a whole lot of time down at Alcor and to see how that works and, you know, what the whole thinking is.
I had a guy in here once who, he had a dog tag around his neck he was wearing.
And I was like, what is that?
He's like, oh, this is.
We didn't even plan on talking about it, but he brought it.
He was like, Yeah, I paid an exorbitant amount of money to reserve a freezer for my brain after I die.
Yeah, and he's only doing the brain.
You pay more if you're doing your whole body.
Oh, people do their entire body.
Yeah, yeah.
And essentially, it's like plexiglass.
That's all that's left because they just slowly freeze you down and then take all the moisture out of your body.
And all of which will come back.
But the whole concept is that you won't come back until the technology exists to reanimate you.
But we don't have the technology to reanimate anybody yet.
No, no, no, we don't.
But as one scientist that's in the book, you know, put it to me, he said, look, you know, it's like an experiment.
He said, you know, you have the control and you have the experimental animal.
And he said, clearly, I'm the experiment because I've done this.
You know, he said, but I already know what happens to the controls.
They all die.
He said, so what's the downside?
Wow.
May as well give it a shot.
Yeah, it's a gamble.
If you got that kind of money to throw at something like that, I guess why not?
Well, they argue that you can get a life insurance policy and then turn the life insurance policy over to them so that when they die, they become the beneficiary.
Alcor becomes the beneficiary of the life insurance policy.
So you don't have to actually pay $250,000.
You just get a $250,000 life insurance policy.
And then you turn it over to Alcor.
So you're paying the premium.
But it's nothing like that amount of money.
Yeah.
I was always just so skeptical that that was just some big scam.
I know the guy that I spent a lot of time there, and I know the guy that runs it, Max.
I'm trying to remember his last name now.
But he's legit.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, they're not making tons of money from it or anything.
I mean, it's there.
I saw it.
I saw everything they do.
It's not something they're making up and just putting money in their pocket.
And they have a lot of rules and regulations and everything.
That money is set aside, and it's even set aside that when you wake up, you'll be able to get back on your feet financially and live a life.
Really?
Yeah.
Do they have a plan for what happens?
Because if you're dead, right?
Like legally, you're dead.
So they get the money from your life insurance policy, right?
Right.
Do they have a plan on what happens 400 years from now whenever that person comes back to life?
I'm not sure if they're buying into the idea that 400 years they won't have solved the problem.
I think.
That's the way they see it.
So it's a good question.
I don't think I asked that question because they clearly feel that they're going to solve the problem or that science will at some point solve the problem.
And so it's a foundation.
So the money goes into the foundation and then it's invested.
So somebody's going to have a boatload of money, that's for sure.
Right.
If they don't figure it out.
Wow.
And some of the people were, you know, they were frozen in the 70s and 80s.
I mean, there's no chance that they're ever coming back.
I mean, the technology just wasn't good enough to get them to a state.
I don't think.
I suppose it's possible that if you could, you know, some genetic technologies might 100 years from now be able to reinvade anybody.
Didn't Steve Jobs have that done?
No, he didn't have it.
No, there were discussions about it and there was discussion, you know, there's stories that Disney had it done and stuff like that.
Oh, really?
But he didn't.
He's really in, you know.
He's really in a cemetery right outside of Burbank.
But Ted Williams is there and his son is there.
Who's Ted Williams?
Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters ever.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
He's the last guy to hit over 400.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, yeah.
And his son, ironically, he got his son in or he got his dad in and then he died of cancer.
Oh.
So he's there too.
Wow.
I wonder if you come back to life, will the insurance company want their money back?
If they're still in business, if they still exist.
With interest.
Yeah, yeah, right.
And will they exist?
Because with all the, I mean, I was just talking to a friend of mine in the insurance business, and he said, we're just getting hammered because of global climate change.
He said, you know.
They're getting hammered because of global climate change.
Paying billions and billions of dollars.
He said, nationwide has not made, has lost $100 billion a year over the last three years because of hurricanes and flooding.
Or property insurance?
Yeah.
And they stopped writing new policies.
Wow.
I mean, you know, when insurance companies start freaking out, you know, you've got issues.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's not a good sign when insurance companies are freaking out.
No, no.
They rarely are short on cash.
So it's, again, you know, that's another big thing that's going on.
You know, it's another big force that's taking place that's converging, you know, in the 21st century.
Secrets of Blue Zones00:07:50
You got to really hold on to your diapies.
So.
What are you working on next?
What are your plans for your next projects?
Well, okay, so there's, aside from the 10 other novels that I want to write and a few nonfiction books, my wife and I, two and a half years ago, started traveling all seven continents.
We began this journey to travel all seven continents, but never by jet.
So it takes some time.
Now, we come back.
My wife, Cindy, said, I'll do this, even though I think you're crazy.
I'll do this as long as I can come back and visit my mother.
So what we do is we fly back, visit her mom, and then we fly back to wherever we were and pick up where we left off.
So the last place we were was Vienna.
We had gone from Newfoundland all the way down through the United States, across the United States, down to Baja, and then down through the Caribbean.
And into South America and through Peru and Chile and all the way to Antarctica.
Wow.
And we did all this, never traveling by anything except ship, car occasionally, trains, buses, you know, sometimes mules.
And we got to Morocco and then we took a, but before that or after that, we took a ship up to Europe.
And then we did Western Europe, and now we're coming back down, and now we'll be heading into the Mediterranean and Africa.
Wow.
And then we still have to go into Asia and Australia and Japan and all those places.
So we got probably another couple of years of travel.
And I'm writing about this.
It's called vagabondadventure.com.
And so you'll be able to see every place that we've been and tons of pictures, and it's been an incredible experience.
What's been your biggest takeaway from that?
People.
Huh.
People.
I mean, first of all, you meet extraordinary people, especially the kinds of people we've run across because when you travel that way, you're not traveling into a resort.
You're not just traveling for a week.
You're plodding across whole countries.
And so you've run into some other super serious travelers.
And you think you've, like I go, well, I've traveled.
Nah, I haven't traveled compared to some of these people.
And then the cultures, of course.
I mean, you're immersed in the culture of whatever country you're in and you're listening to the language and the music and you're learning the food.
And that's what we wanted to do.
That's why I said, let's do it this way, because we don't want to just fly in and fly out.
We want to really absorb what the world has to offer.
And then once you go, and the other thing that happens is as you're doing it, you begin to aggregate more and more of these experiences and you begin to compare and contrast.
The kinds of people you meet, the kinds of cultures that you come across, the kind of foods you eat, the weather.
You know, I mean, just going from, you know, the South Pole, Antarctica, to Svalbard, which is the northernmost human habitation in the world, you know, in between, you cross the equator, you know.
I mean, you're cold for a couple of weeks, and then it's just getting warmer and warmer and warmer.
The days are getting longer and longer and longer, and then you cross over, and then the days start getting cooler and cooler, and then they get short.
By the time we were in Svalbard, it was four hours of daylight.
So it's just that kind of that's the most recent piece right there when we were in Morocco.
Oh, wow.
And that's one of the drivers that we met.
Didn't you find that a bunch of places that you went to had the people there had longer lifespans?
Oh, yeah.
Well, whenever I was working on immortality, we went to one of the Blue Zones.
This guy named Dan Buettner, who wrote a book called The Blue Zones.
And so I wanted to at least visit one of the blue zones to see what was that all about and why were people living longer.
And we went to a place called Icaria, which is based on the old myth of Icarus, you know, who plummeted into the Aegean Sea whenever he flew too close to the sun.
And those people do live often routinely to 100 years, late 90s.
But when you go there, you kind of realize why.
First of all, everybody, there's not a flat place on this island.
It's one of the Greek islands.
It's fairly close to Icarus, I mean, to Turkey, actually.
But oh, wow, look at that.
Yeah, so that's the Agios Kyrikos.
That's where we came in.
And there it is.
It's a little tiny island.
And so there's not a flat area on it.
So people just walk and did, you know, walked everywhere.
And so they're in really good shape.
They're very social.
Everyone's super friendly and they get together every night.
There's not a lot of TV or anything like that.
Very simple, no stress, easy going lifestyle.
So living a stress free life.
All five of these blue zones are like that.
They're just stress free, good food.
All these people basically grow their own food.
Now it's changing.
There's more and more Vespas around and there's more and more roads and people are eating more and more.
Junk food and that sort of thing.
So, my guess is it'll start to change.
But it was still a really interesting place to go.
And we'll actually probably be going back there because we're getting close to Greece.
And so, I think we'll probably get there in October.
And then we'll head into the Nile.
The Nile.
Okay.
And go up the Nile.
I'm really looking forward to that.
Have you ever been to Egypt?
No.
It looks.
I mean, that's the mother load there of human culture.
Yeah.
I mean, where I was just in Costa Rica last week, and everybody there is just, everyone that I interacted with, it's just like their lives revolve around waking up early and riding their dirt bike to the beach to check the waves to go surf for the day.
Yeah.
And then they eat, they have amazing food there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually, one of the blue zones is in Costa Rica.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember.
I was in Nosara.
This is called Nicosia or something.
Oh, Nicoya.
Yeah, that's right where I was.
There you go.
Yeah.
So you can see why people were living a long time.
Yeah, that's wild.
Yeah, you should go there often.
Yeah.
It's hard with kids.
It's hard with toddlers.
Yeah, You couldn't be doing what we're doing with a toddler.
You know, it's hard enough whenever you're a grown-up, you know, and that it's hard whenever you're flying and stuff, too.
I've been there, so we had four kids.
But, you know, later they're going to love it.
You used to travel with your kids?
Travel Adventures with Kids00:02:28
Yeah.
I mean, they're easier to travel when they're really young.
You think it's easier.
Yeah.
It's easier because once they're mobile, look out, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, they're all over the place.
Right.
You know, and I've often watched little kids just take off, you know, when they're mobile, you know, when they learn to run and, you know, be in a train station or an airport or something like that.
And you're just like, they're having so much fun.
And we've forgotten, we don't remember.
That's a really important thing about those first four or five years.
We have no memory of them.
You know, so I'm sure if we could remember, we would go, Oh my God, I'm able to run.
I am so happy.
You know, it's just got to be one of the most liberating things in the world.
And so you just watch them take off, you know, and usually parents are like, Oh my God, you know, it's the most stressful thing ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're scared to death, but the kids just loving it.
Yeah.
You know, and I get it.
So that's, yeah, that's when it'll be a little harder.
Yeah.
Well, Chip, thank you so much for coming on here.
And talking with us today, I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
It's just fun to talk and conversation's good.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah, definitely is.
Tell people that are listening where they can find more of your work.
And I don't know if you have social media.
Follow you on social media.
Yeah, yeah.
You can follow me on social media at authorchipwalter and also vagabondadventure.
And then there are two websites one is vagabond adventure.com.
And that's all about our travel.
There it is.
And that kind of shows.
Gives you some idea of where we've been and what we've seen.
And then my website is chipwalter.com.
And that's where you find all the information you need about my books, including my most recent one, Doppelganger, which is a novel that's getting great reviews and people seem to love.
So I hope lots of people will read it.
Yeah, that's really cool, man.
I love the variety of books that you do with the science fiction and the documentary type stuff.
It's really cool that you're able to diversify that way.