Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation. Hello and welcome to this episode number 162 of the Free Cities
podcast brought to you by Veritas Villages. Veritas Villages are building off-grid freedom-oriented
communities in Latin America. And these are communities that will appeal to freedom lovers
who are looking to live amongst like-minded individuals in places like Nicaragua, Panama,
and a new one in Costa Rica. And if you're a Bitcoiner, well, you can buy your property with
Bitcoin and spend Bitcoin at any one of Veritas Village's communities. They can even help you mine
Bitcoin with the excess energy that your self-sufficient home will inevitably produce.
Right. You know where to go for more info.
www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities.
Please mention us if you decide to do business with them.
And I'm going to repeat just one more time something that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
There are two properties that have just come onto the market.
They're just finished in their Nicaragua Veritas village.
That's in Playa Pacifica.
And these are available for sale with preferred pricing.
That's 2025 pricing.
Construction and material reviews take place regularly on these builds.
And the price in 2026 will be very different.
so you've got up until the 31st of december to get your preferred pricing cost of these two
amazing beachfront residences and by the looks of it that means a saving of about 30 000 dollars if
you choose to go ahead click on the link send them a message tell them you're interested
and thank me later right today's show it's probably the last one of 2025 by the looks of it
so i thought maybe we should look into the future and dive into the world of longevity
vladimir leshko is a biomedical engineer and the coo of unlimited bio which is a gene therapy
company who've positioned themselves within prospera to work on longevity medicine
now gene therapy and longevity and the right to opt out of aging are no longer science fiction
and in fact they're colliding quite heavily with regulation philosophy and meaning right now that's
what my ai thought anyway what are the key takeaways from this conversation well why
prosper enables gene therapy trials that are impossible elsewhere how gene therapy differs
from editing dna and why most fears about those things are misplaced and what radical longevity
would mean for identity spirituality and human purpose now that was my favorite part of the
convo of course we go into near-death experiences spirituality psychedelics and the psychological
risks of confronting uncomfortable truths closing with a really interesting discussion about
you guessed it ai abundance meaning and whether choosing not to die could become a moral imperative
rather than a technological curiosity right not going to beat around the bush today too much
goes without saying that I wish you all a very very very Merry Christmas although I've learnt
from past experience not to go too heavy into the seasonal things in these intros
because according to my research at least quite a few of you will be listening to this in January
and beyond and in my experience there's nothing worse than hearing someone getting all Christmasy
about something when it's all over it's a terrible feeling that is right i'll stop
thank you of course to our excellent value for value subscribers and can i ask a favor
would anyone listen to this who hasn't already done so please drop us a quick review
in your podcasting app i know i should ask more often i'm told i mean you don't even need to write
anything just click on the stars to rate us however you think we perform and especially
if you're an apple podcasts user there's a strangely low number of reviews on there and i
don't know why but you could help by putting your review on there right remember guys and girls
if you're 54 years old or less that's my age by the way then according to this interview at least
you will be able to decide to live for as long as you like.
Think about that one.
That's definitely worth sitting back and relaxing for
as you enjoy my last 2025 conversation with Vladimir Leshko.
Good, Vladimir Leshko.
Yeah, that's correct.
Correct.
right i've got i've done look i've got very limited amount of information here i'm challenging
myself well at least you've got my name that's something yes i have well you know like we
because i've been we're on episode what 150 something and it's it's mainly free cities
content well i mean it's free cities freedom content so i've spoken about most things so i
can tug on most threads but i suppose in in honesty one of the one of the things i've spoken
the least about is probably longevity that kind of stuff well i had a guy called um
oh what was his name oh that's a bit embarrassing a medical doctor right no no no no no he was a guy
who was who was proposing a a sort of longevity city oh lawrence iron yeah lawrence i'm a good
friend oh you you know lawrence right okay lawrence was the only person i ended up really speaking to
about um but he's not uh he's not a scientist in any shape or form technically i am a scientist
i have a master's degree in biomedical engineering but well i i don't do a scientific job in the
company so i'm i think i'm not qualified enough to uh go deeply into the science but i have some
sort of a helicopter view. So, so what is the company? Unlimited Bio are we talking about?
Okay. Correct. Let's, let's talk. So here's, here's my, my observation of what's going on here.
You're a gene therapy company, potentially. Yes. Yeah. Unlimited Bio, Biohacking, that kind of
stuff. And you have basically positioned yourself in Prospera because of the regulatory environment.
Yeah, correct. Right. Perfect. Okay. Tell me a bit more about Unlimited Bio then.
Let's start there.
You know, our company started in 2024 when my co-founders, Ivan and Nena,
they were visiting an event called, I think, Vitalia or something in the city in Prospera.
Vitalia. Yeah, that's Nicholas's, right?
Yeah, right. Nicholas and I think Lawrence was also on the team back then.
So they were organizing it together.
And you know they learned about mini so when magic a gene therapy company working in prospera and doing therapy experiments there and you know that led
to a realization that actually in prospera you can do stuff important for
us as like longevity enthusiasts and people who think aging is like the
greatest villain of humankind that prosper gives us opportunities that no
other country does and it doesn't give us in a way that we can be open about
this we can do clinical trials and like officially register them for example on
healthy volunteers who it's just an example for example they want to or run
fast or they want to know think fast or whatever so and we can do a clinical
trial on a certain drug or combination of therapies that will aim that
enhancement of those individuals or that will be aimed at preventing certain
disease from occurring and for example we'll be collecting biomarkers that
correlate with this disease so registering such a trial outside of
prospera would be just impossible I mean I know how much time and effort you
would spend in trying to pass different IRBs ethical committees and so on and
yeah it prosperates basically takes around a month or so and also it depends
on the regulations you pick because prospera gives you three tracks there
so first of all you can when you act in health space you have to pick health as
a regulated space because you can hurt other people right so you can pick three
opportunities there first of all you can elect it's so-called optimal
regulation from one of the country and service called best practice
countries so it's like US European Union Japan and so on for example if you are
an entrepreneur from Japan you can just pick the same legal framework as in Japan
and then when you function there you will just have to constantly show that
you follow this framework to the regulator then the second option is
designing your own regulation and getting it approved through some sort of
like prosper board like government so to say then the other option is just
picking one of those already designed regulations. And in our case, that's what we did. We just picked
the regulation of our partner, GAM Clinic, that they already developed specifically to do trials
like gene therapies, stem cells, and so on. Is that a particular country's regulation,
or is that a prosperous thing? No, they took, I think, like FDA regulation and adapted it to be a
bit more flexible so they have an IRB so in order to register a clinical trial we have to pass an
like an independent committee of five people composed like according to the rules of how
IRBs should be composed so it should have one scientist one non-scientist one person like
from outside of the field and so on so yeah we have to get the they have to review the safety
data we present like what's the rationale behind all this so we kind of have some regulation on
top of us it's way less tricks than we would have in the us uh but still it doesn't allow us want to
do like basically anything that comes to our mind and the last option there is just um acting based
on common law and in this case you're subject to triple liability and you're also personally
liable for what you do and you also isn't there another layer on top of that which is you need to
be insured as well yeah so it doesn't matter whether you you could do all that correctly but
if no one's going to insure you you still can't go ahead so and then they do the insurance company
then basically does its own studies and background and stuff.
Yeah, correct.
Yeah, this is one of the things I think people don't understand about Prospera.
I think the meme is you can just go there and do whatever you want
because you can create your own regulations.
But they don't understand, not only is there an internal process,
but then even when you've got that through,
if you want to create your own regulation,
you've then got to find someone to insure you.
And they're going to go back and do that whole process again.
and there's more risk for them in a way than there is for you.
So, you know, it's a great system,
but it's just completely misunderstood by most people, I think, you know.
Absolutely, yeah.
I think people tend to simplify things.
So they just hear Honduras clinical trials
and then you just go to conclusions
without taking an effort to actually examine the documents, whatever.
Well, the other thing is, I think, gene therapy, oh God.
You know, even me, I'm very open-minded,
but that already conjures up pictures of Frankenstein people and grafting things onto, you know.
Almost certainly people will be biased against gene therapy.
I mean, gene therapy itself just sounds dangerous already.
Put my mind at rest. You're someone that's actually involved in it.
Why is gene therapy not as bad as I probably think it is?
Well, first of all, because it's a solution to, I know, hundreds of thousands of diseases
that we might inherit from our parents.
And to give you a very close example, for example, 11 years ago, almost 11 years ago,
I became a father, and my son was quite unexpectedly born completely deaf.
Oh, really? I'm sorry, is it?
Yeah, we realized that when he was four months old, commercial genetic tests like 23andMe
and so on, at that time we were living in Russia and they were not openly available.
They became available probably a few years later.
And when we did this test, like the cheapest test on the market more or less, both me and
wife and we had like the same uh you know red flag that's like keep in mind that you're a passive
carrier of this um genotype that if you make a child with another person with the same genotype
you have a 25 chance of having a deaf child really yeah because it's that easy to i mean it's that
specific you can that seems really specific that you can you can just look at your genotype
genome or whatever it's called and say right if you two mate there's a 25 chance yeah you can do
that wow it's that specific yeah uh yeah uh it's so the 25 chance that you get a child with like a
perfect so to say genotype uh who won't be even a carrier of that uh um gene then 50 percent of
children will have the same genotype as you do and 25% will be carriers of active carriers
of a disease.
Yeah, and it's like the simplest form of inheritance that you know, I think I started it in school
in like, mid school something biology.
Malphys.
And now then like 15 years later, so I am actually facing it directly this like form
of inheritance that we did you know simple problems on biology lessons and I realized yeah
that works and but it's not too bad because it was solved with cochlear implantation so he got
implants at age one on both years and now he like speaks perfectly so people cannot really understand
that he has problems hearing and he speaks three languages like English Dutch and we live in Netherlands and Russian So that just impressed me that how powerful technology can be
And in this case, implants that can literally transform the life of a human and like a human who just got his chance was born.
And, you know, it can also be solved with a gene therapy, of course.
Yeah, that's one approach.
It can also be solved with embryo editing.
It can be solved with embryo selections.
So right now you even have like a whole array of approaches of how to address a problem like that and thousands of similar problems.
I've just got a quick question before you go on.
You can't treat it retrospectively though.
When you say you could treat that with gene therapy, do you mean that you and your wife could have had gene therapy before you had a son?
or do you mean that the son can be cured with gene therapy?
Yeah, no, treating parents at current stage doesn't make any sense
because you have to modify the cells,
well, the sperm cells and the egg cells,
which will actually combine to form an embryo, right?
So unless you modify those cells, it won't affect the child.
Sorry about that again.
And so that would mean you have your genotype test,
you realize that you and your wife are high risk for a hearing-impaired child,
and then you do the gene therapy on the egg and sperm.
Is that right?
Well, it's never been done yet.
I think it was done once in China,
and then the guy got imprisoned when he added his embryos.
He got three years in Chinese prison
and became like a worldwide celebrity after that because you cannot do embryo editing like that
right now but yeah it's probably an option for the future but what like the most common use
of gene therapy for disease right now is that you get a child born with a certain genetic anomaly
and it means that a very important protein encoded by that specific gene it's malfunctional right
so what they do is they deliver a very high dose of virus and this virus
encapsulates DNA and this DNA gets injected by the virus inside like
billions or maybe even trillion or so cells in your body their cells get on
top of like malfunctional DNA a normal DNA like a correct DNA specifically for
that protein and that DNA gets used by by the body to buy your cells to build
your body and that's like the development of a child goes a bit more normally
than without that's corrected DNA present so the original DNA remains it
intact but it gets anyone on top and that's like the main principle of from
gene therapy used right now it's complementing your own DNA without any
sort of modification with additionally so can you do it a young age then is
that in the case of your son would you do it when they're small or does it yeah
if you take his gene specifically there is no gene therapy available yet to fix
problem yeah but if you would do that you would need to do that very early on
because when the body is already developed and in his case he didn't get
hair cells so cells responsible to for converting vibration into electrical
signal which travels through your nerve hearing into the brain so this cells
didn't develop and when they didn't develop like no matter how you complement
your DNA like the cells they don't grow constantly and this organs they don't
form constantly throughout your life so at a later age it would be a hundred
percent ineffective so in his case only implementation or maybe later on
something like injecting specifically the stem cells that would grow those
organs something like that so different approaches for different ages and of
course same with any disease the earlier you act the easier it is to fix so you
said you live in the Netherlands. I assumed you lived in Prospera. No, no, I just travel
there from time to time. So the, so unlimited by the company has employees in Prospera
or do you only go out there when you need to do actual therapies or are there therapies
happening all the time? How does it work? I, you know, I've got no, I've been to Prospera,
but the last time I went was like three years ago and I know a lot's changed since then.
So, yeah, we have a clinical partner there which works with the clients.
So it's a clinic, GARM clinic, which is open six days a week or so.
And they just accept the patients.
They review medical history.
They do blood tests and so on, all what's required to make it a safe and a comfortable process.
So we only need to deliver the therapy to them.
and that's all what's required.
And have you got like a kind of menu of therapies you can get?
I mean, how does it work?
Yeah, in GARM you have a menu,
so they do all sorts of regenerative treatments,
also stem cells and so on.
And we provide them with, for now it's a single therapy called VGF.
And soon we'll have a second one available called folistatin.
So it's a gene responsible for muscle growth.
I've heard that.
I think I heard about that on the Joe Rogan show, I think.
That was one of those things that people used to complain that they can't get hold of,
full of statins, because you're not allowed to get them in America or something.
Is that right?
Well, full of statin, yeah, it's a protein which makes your body weight.
it inhibits another protein called myostatin and myostatin inhibits muscle growth so there is like a
cascade of events there but if you increase the amount of folistatin protein present in your body
you'll basically get more muscle mass and the other one fjf vjf what's that do to you yeah
that protein is released to build new blood vessels and capillaries locally
so for example when you get injured the body needs to repair that injury and
this protein is secreted to like build basically roads to that place to repair
it to make it more efficient also as a response to exercise or I think also as a response to
low cone low content of oxygen or something like that so you get this new capillaries formed
for example with within your muscle to increase blood supply but the bad thing is that with age
this adaptive mechanism it becomes less effective so all people like no matter how they exercise it
it's harder for them to build new vessels and the blood supply drops to all organs like to your skin
to your hair to your brain to your muscle and so on so it's a very important process that declines
with age i can i can attest to that i think 54 i don't think as fast i definitely don't put on
muscle as quick as I could when I was a kid and I and I put on weight very easily. So like what's the connection between then this and
longevity because the longevity world is a is quite a thing now isn it and and i think the the heart is this idea right that um that age is possibly something that we shouldn necessarily
accept as as a as fact aging sorry is that are you are you of the same sort of like um belief
Yeah, indeed. So we think that people should have the capacity to meaningfully affect the
process of aging because like no matter how much you exercise, how well you eat, what
kind of drugs you take right now, you will still become old, eventually demented or incapable
to stand up from your bed or to go to shopping or to have your grandson pick up your grandson
or whatever you want to do at that age and no ski or walk around so you you'll become deprived of
all those capabilities and eventually you'll just die even though you might not manifest any kind of
diseases
like you might not die from cancer
but
and you might be like
doctors will say that you're
in good health right now like you're 80 years
old and they'll say like nothing we can do
you're good
but nobody would be surprised
if the next day something happens
I know like
one of the arteries
in your brain
are just bobs and that's it and am i am i right to assume that aging is an evolutionary adaptation
to keep genotypes transforming like is it presumably i'm i'm guessing that because it
makes sense because we're uh we're um um there's there's always a male and a female to create
something new then that's the mixing of genes and the more they mix the the better in a way because
then the selection is allowed to occur. So aging is an important, death especially, is an important
part of evolution in its natural state, not necessarily in a state where you have more
control over things. Like we're entering that age now, obviously, where evolution is too slow for
what the human mind wants, which is I think why everyone's so scared of it, because we all know
that human minds aren't exactly reliable thinking sometimes
and they come up with terrible ideas.
But do you think there's any...
So first of all, is that true?
Is death and aging an important part of life?
And if so, what effect will it have if we start aging further?
Yeah, so first of all, yeah, that's one of the theories
that aging is like an adaptive process developed during evolution but i think it's it's not the only
approach to that so it could be just you know a side effect that basically evolution didn't care
much about what happens after your reproductive age is over uh and for example if you take primates
they're like grandparents they play an important role in uh helping parents and that's what we also
experience as primates that is great to have grandparents around when you have
kids growing up right so like evolution didn't want to kill us too fast that's
for sure and another argument against that would be that there are species that
survived well to this day that don't experience aging as we do so such as
as snaked mole rats uh certain um types of um turtles that we cannot even tell like how old are
they and certain whales sharks trees hey do you include things like that also like i think um
a form of i think some some organisms like um not fungus what are they called they live underground
and they're a network of, you know, they live in association with trees.
They can live for tens of thousands of years, can't they?
Well, if you take trees, it's very easy to say how old the tree is.
Yes.
So you could say that the tree does age and then you get the super old trees
where, you know, the inside degrades and only the outside remains.
So I won't say that for trees, but, and also trees are, you know,
very distantly related to humans and to most of humans at least and if you take uh naked mole
rats so those are mammals so they're quite close to us did you say naked mole rats yeah yeah i know
i know that species yeah and what they don't tell me about that what how how old how old are they
live to then well i think they at least make it to their 20s or maybe even 30s but i don't think
it's established yet because to actually find this out you need to isolate them protect them
from all sorts of environmental damage from killing each other from predators and so on
and that's really hard complicated and expensive to make this experiment i think people are trying
that but i didn't yet see conclusion of how old they can actually get but is the theory that they
all die of um something like accidents uh trauma whatever they don't die of old is that right
naked mole rats don't die of old age that's bizarre yeah i think they have like extremely
efficient uh repair mechanisms for dna so uh they kind of are able to maintain themselves and
in good shape throughout the years and if you take like a two-year-old uh guy and then a 20-year-old
and it would be extremely hard to tell the difference.
And for mice, it would be evident.
And mice live just a few hours,
and they're very similar in how they even look like
in terms of DNA also.
But still, there are a few important distinctions
in naked mole rats that allow them to escape aging somehow.
And that's also an important line of research
to see what we can learn from them to translate that to humans.
What were the other ones you said that seem to defy aging?
Which other sort of organisms?
Well, I would say turtles because we know that they can live at least 150.
But, you know, they're reptiles, so they're quite different from us.
Also, some types of sharks, whales, then also tiny organisms,
like those amoebas, I think.
And, yeah, a few others.
So there is a list of organisms we should pay attention to and study what we can learn from them.
So, all right, then, if we start messing around with our average age, which, I mean, we've already messed around with it, really, because it used to be about 35, didn't it?
And then with the industrial age, didn't we put the average age of a human dying up to about 70, 80 now?
we're at 80 so even without adapting the human genome we're we're already by eating well by being
safer by not dying in childbirth all these things that are making our lives better so what's it
going to do if we like first of all what do you imagine in in recent the recent in the near future
Let's say in an interesting way, how could we expect to, how old could we expect to live
to in, you know, 40 or 50 years then, according to you, of what you know?
In 40 or 50 years?
Yeah.
Well, you know it.
I'm trying to think whether or not I've got enough time left to get on board so that I
can live a bit longer.
I'm 54.
So if I was going to live to 90, I got 36.
54, 60, 70, yeah, I've got 36 years.
I think you have pretty good chances of not dying at all
if you keep yourself in shape.
If that's what you could fancy, I mean.
Do I want to not die then?
Eventually it would be up to you, yeah.
Do I want to not die?
Yeah, you tell me.
I mean, what's the philosophical implications with that
are quite extreme.
I'm thinking, number one,
do I want to see my own children as 90-year-old people?
That would be bizarre in its own right.
Why?
Just because I've never imagined seeing them like that.
But, yeah, you're right.
I would probably get used to it.
But they will look like you look right now, right?
Because they will be functionally younger.
Oh, you don't age.
Oh, right.
So I won't start looking old.
Yeah, that's the point.
Will I get stuck like this,
or will I get better?
Well, eventually we hope that you might get better.
I mean, but it's of course harder to achieve.
So it's good for now to preserve yourself in good shape, you know.
So there might be an age I can aim for.
I mean, it'd be great to be...
Yeah, I enjoyed my 30s.
I was in my prime in my 30s.
Mentally, physically, everything, you know.
It'd be nice to go back to that and then just stop.
But then again, would it?
I don't know. I don't know whether my brain's designed to live for a very long time. I mean,
is it, I think you do hear many stories of people in their old age, especially 90 year old people
saying, you know, being satisfied that they've lived a long and good life. Right. Well, it's a
way to kind of calm yourself down. And, you know, when you're 90, like your body, it adapts all the
time. So kind of you get older and if you take yourself in the 30s and yourself in the 50s,
you can compare that you're not in the same shape, you got worse. But at the same time,
you don't feel terrible every day you get up like, oh, I'm 55, goddammit.
No, but I've got a bad back.
Yeah, stuff like that starts reminding you that you're actually old. But at the same time,
the brain adapts all those things and kind of accommodates the fact that we got older.
and you accept more and more and more of that,
more and more of that damage.
And eventually, you know, like all those things,
like pain in the back and all those limitations that you acquire,
I think you start getting a thought that, you know,
death at a certain point would be,
you would kind of not resist it that much
because if you, like, take a bird's eye view,
you're way worse now than you used to be before.
And I think that's what the people are afraid of,
of becoming old.
They see their parents debilitated,
demented and not being able to get out of bed
on a wheelchair and like spending half of their life
in a hospital and constant medical exams
or whatever in a constant death
that something else will just snap
or you will fall and won't be able to get up.
and that's what people are afraid of because as long as you're functioning okay like why die you
just continue living if you feel good in the present day like next day is going to be good as
well it is one of the cruelest in my opinion anyway one of the cruelest things about life
is old age because you got it coming and you can spend your life doing being incredible doing
inspirational things but in the end you're going to die either in pain or very helplessly and that
is cruel because you've gone through you've known like when you're first born sure you're helpless
but then you learn to to survive and then you thrive and then you go back to being helpless
again and that's that seems cruel that's a cruel ending yeah you should be able to go out with a
bang shouldn't you you should be able to go out with but do you think people will choose to die
then if if we can live if we can live forever are people going to choose to die i'm sure some people
will i mean there's a lot of ideology behind that a lot of culture so like for the past
5 000 years so we'll be we've been accumulating stories about death explaining death thinking
about immortality about what comes next making mummies making all sorts of stories burial
customs, flowers, coffins, gravestones.
We accumulated such a huge cultural layer around death.
It's immense.
Like all those movies where somebody sacrifices himself for the good,
when somebody has such a great life and then dies,
so relieved, surrounded by the loving people.
like all this we kind of try to you know people think about that all the time you cannot you cannot
exclude death and uh the the natural reaction is try to find something positive about thing as long
as there is nothing you can do and like for the past uh millennia there was literally nothing we
can do about this so that's why people were focusing on making mommy mummies and like focusing
on the stuff that's beyond where they can also like take a look and right now we see that we have
all those biotechnological means we kind of have a lot of pieces of that puzzle we don't have the
puzzle assembled yet and we need to do like probably tens of years more of research but we see uh that
we can get there that if we uh fix that process that process that process and maybe uh 50 more
processes then we might have a meaningful effect on aging and yeah you say that there is a lot of
like attention to that field right now but if you take funding and if you take especially research
in humans like it's almost nothing because uh you know 40 years ago people were telling like
this transhumanists and so on that all we're gonna live forever in 20 years and they're telling
the same thing right now we're gonna live forever in 20 years but uh i i don't see much change
you know in the next uh 20 years unless we find frameworks how to accelerate clinical trials in
humans not in mice not in worms or flies or whatever but in humans and i don't think there
There was such good hope for the future before Prospera appeared,
where we really see how those trials can be achieved more or less right now,
at least with what we have developed already.
It's amazing.
You're a biomedical engineer, and you reckon that in my lifetime,
I could live forever.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, yeah.
It's fair to say.
I think your life expectancy right now, even without any progress, is close to 100 years.
And that gives us time, a lot of time.
Jesus, I better get on it.
What's your spirituality, by the way?
Do you have a spirituality?
How does that fit into all this?
Do you have any beliefs about what would happen after death if you did die?
Well, I'm Christian. I was baptized. I didn't subscribe to that, but my parents did that to me. I don't mind.
I always thought that religion is kind of contrary to what we do So religious people they eventually all want to die and transition to the next world of like an eternal uh happiness white clothes and sunshine and whatever there is there
uh but um you know i think some um sort of interpretations of bible especially they can be
aligned with unlimited life extension on earth because uh like certain parts of the bible
a hint that maybe we should build like a garden of eden here on earth so like god punished us
with mortality um a long time ago right then we went all those you know technological progress
with god's help we researched like how he built this world how he you know uh all the dna all
the code he put into us all the like the evolution with we've gone through and now we've come to a
point where we can use all those tools that religious people would say he gave us to actually
affect this curse he bestowed on us and build an immortal society like a paradise on earth.
I think the Bible allows for those kind of interpretations. Not all religious teachings
do, so some are way more strict and don't allow that kind of freedom of thinking in terms of
the mortality i i want i'm what i wondered if you'd ever had a spiritual experience that made you
think or believe or sense that after death something important was happening so if you
extend your life you're basically you know you're you're stopping a natural process happening i've
recounted this story before on on this podcast but i had a death experience once and um not to put a
But long and short of it, it was, and you could, I won't, I'll be honest, looking back, I could say this was just a bunch of neurons firing in my head.
And it's all a lie.
But to me, it seems really real.
I was ill.
I wasn't that ill.
I was lying on a bed and the process of death started and I recognized it.
That's the only way I can describe it.
It was a familiar process.
It was like a moving towards something.
and I was lying on the bed and I thought, oh shit, I'm dying.
You know, I recognised this.
It wasn't scary, it wasn't anything, it was just very familiar.
And to cut a long story short, I didn't die
and it has a lot to do with me thinking how absurd what was happening was.
I kind of stopped it happening.
I wasn't dying because of something that was happening to my body,
although I was sick.
I wasn't sick enough to be dying.
but um but the the two takeaways that i had from this experience which at the time like i wasn't
thinking about this i just knew this is the dying process number one it was very familiar
you know i i recognized it immediately it wasn't scary it wasn't anything and number two is it was
a birth a death and a birth are the same thing so a death is a birth into something and a birth
is a birth out of something else, if you see what I mean.
They're the same process.
And like I say, I can't back this up with any scientific data or anything.
And it was a number of years ago now.
It was almost 20 years ago.
But because I spoke about it at the time and I recounted it in my memory,
it's become part of, you know, something.
I don't know what.
But I think partly, number one, I'm not really afraid of dying, that sense.
I'm afraid of the consequences of dying.
I don't want to leave my children for example
I also don't want to die in pain
but I know that's quite likely
unfortunately most people kind of
do die with some form of pain unless they
take you know
like painkillers but
I just wondered if you'd ever had an experience
which made you think
that prolonging
life
beyond a certain point might
be counterproductive because there's something
else if you see what I mean not that we're all
going to heaven because i quite like that idea that you've just posited that um because i think
there's truth in it that heaven is here you know like the idea of heaven for me if i think about it
in the religious sense is this is heaven like i'm super happy i love doing what i'm doing i enjoy
conversations i you know i wouldn't be what are we doing anywhere else if i went to heaven
it'd be the same as this you know so I'm already here it's for want of a better expression and also
the thing I've always thought about heaven is um it seems strange a strange concept because heaven's
like forever you know it's like and I quite like the ups and downs of life do you know what I mean
like I enjoy I know when you're when you're having strife and trouble and that it's not nice
it's great but when you are like this now i'm feeling great the only reason i know it is because
a few years ago i was having a terrible time and the thought of just being in heaven this place
where everything is beautiful it seems really boring in fact it seems like what forever just
like this you know so i'm i'm i'm with you on that that earlier one that heaven is already here
heaven is a is a manifestation of of whatever you want i don't think you need to wait for for to die
to get it you can get it here now if you really want but then maybe i'm underselling myself but
yeah back to the thing do you think that there could be a negative to prolonging your life too
long no let's leave it at that but so yeah a lot of points there so i think it can make up for like
three podcasts at least the first one was your near-death experience was it
somewhere near sleep time or it was no i was just very ill um it wasn't it wasn't something that was
life-threatening but i was lying on my bed at my my mother's house uh just lying there because you
know i was too weak to get up um the so and you know like i say i can't prove any of this all i
know is because I wasn't expecting anything to happen I was just lying on my bed because I was
weak the process started and as I did it was it's like I and I knew what it was I had I knew oh my
god you know it was very very familiar and it was the process of dying that's the only way I can
describe it it would be like when when a woman gives birth for the first time I mean I can't
you know you don't want giving birth feels like do you but when it happens it happens and you know
what's happening because it's happening but it's it's almost involuntary you know like or or or
love love you know the first time you when you've never if you think you've never fallen in love
with someone and then you do fall in love with someone or all the different facets of love
they're all quite familiar they you can you can label them as something without you know the
difference between anger and love for example without someone having to tell you what what
the difference is and in my case with the the the the process of dying was very familiar to me
and it was a it was also a birth the birth and death process are the same they're just a movement
between places if you see what i mean if it was the process of dying why didn't you die
do you want to hear the funny side that i i was lying i started dying and i started going with it
And then it occurred to me, my brain went, you can't die. Literally, your mother is downstairs cooking food. She's going to come up here. There's going to be a dead kid on the bed. This is the most absurd thing. And it brought me back to reality. That's the truth of it.
So I know it all sounds a little bit far-fetched, but I have no other way of explaining this.
It was real and I don even think about it much If it comes up in conversation I gladly talk about it But for a long time it had quite a profound effect on me because I stopped being scared of death
Not that I haven't really thought about it, but since I have, I'm not scared of dying.
However, since I have children, there's this new layer now because I would hate to leave them as children.
Maybe as adults, it would be easier, but as children.
So there's this, you know, I don't want to die now.
Not because I fear of dying, but I don't want to leave my children because they need me, you know.
But yeah, that's the absurd part is I, my brain literally pulled me back because it just seemed absurd.
Because when it started happening, I went, oh, I'm dying.
And then I went, you know, like a few seconds later, it was like, what the fuck are you doing?
Don't die. You're like 23.
your mum's downstairs you're this you're that you know and it it stopped it happening so i don't
know why what when i don't know why it happened but certainly i knew it was death that's all i can
say you know uh have you heard about this uh phenomena when uh you know you have um sort of
dreams but uh lucid dreams lucid dreaming yes have you explored that i've i have had plenty of lucid
dreams yeah I've had a lot of lucid dreams in fact I know that experience
very well but this wasn't this was different this was not that because for
me lucid dreams happen at the point of sleep and I was I wasn't I'm not
necessarily I mean there are people who well at least they claim that they do
some sort of training and you can put yourself into that kind of trance lucid
dreaming also while awake usually you have to lie down uh or something but do sort of manipulations
like meditations or whatever and uh get into that uh state so but let me explain it another way then
it could have been a lucid dream i have no way of knowing right the but the point is if i lucidly
dreamt about tasting a an apple right i'm still tasting an apple if you see what i mean what the
the overarching experience that i had was i am dying and there was no reason to think that there
was no i i the the only reason that i thought it was because i recognized it it regardless if it
was a lucid dream it could have been a lucid dream but i was still recognizing the experience
of dying if you see if you see what i mean like i would have done if i'd have ate an apple in a
lucid dream i would have gone oh that tastes like an apple because i know what an apple tastes like
well uh well imagine you see an apple and your brain is like oh an apple i'll go take a bite of
that apple then you bite it and you realize it's a fake apple made of wax and you're like damn yeah
so i mean your brain is really good at fooling yourself as well so it kind of just maps a certain
experience to something that you already experienced before because that's that's the
only way it can work right it cannot map it to something you never experienced because
you probably don't know how it feels like well that would assume then that i've experienced
dying before which i think that was my that was my understanding from it the only reason i
recognized it is because it was a familiar thing and and whatever i don't know what that means that
could that could mean a lot of things but it certainly meant that at least when i was born
i was dying from something if you see what i mean so to be born was a death from something to die
was a birth into something new that's that was that's my takeaway and like god knows what it
means i i don't know but um but i mean it's not even necessarily important here what what what is
important is whether or not um like whether or not we should stay forever if you see what i mean
like you know just getting back to a question about near-death experience i've had a similar
thing uh at the time that i you know tried to practice lucid dreaming a bit and got interested
in that phenomena and uh it was it happened well somewhere you know after waking up or before
falling to sleep when i also had a feeling of like being sucked in a black hole or something like that
and i became like insanely terrified and like i shook it shook it off and just to i know uh flew
out of bed or something so i was like a sense of terror was immense and like you're really falling
into a black hole and i didn't connect that to dying i connected that to some sort of weird lucid
dream experience but yeah it was terrifying i thought maybe i could have connected uh that to
diane if my you know at that time i was you know deeply into longevity or something like that maybe
maybe i would have made this connection what but what what did you decide like what did you decide
a lucid dream was after that experience well i thought it was like a sort of transition into a
lucid dream and maybe some sort of you know sleep paralysis also you know when you wake up and you
cannot move on top of that something like that so it didn't feel nice yeah i felt terrified and
i think kind of um very much lowered my enthusiasm towards lucid dreaming and uh that's like the only
conclusion i made after that but what do you think lucid dreaming is that's what i mean like what is
it? Well, it's a certain state of mind. I think that it is like a scientifically established
phenomenon because people did really, you know, track the eyeballs of participants who
experienced lucid dreaming. And they said they can't enter that state. So they answered and
they literally tracked their eyeballs. And they were supposed, I think, to do certain tasks while
in lucid dreams so do like specific movements to um convince the researchers that they are
controlling their eyeballs while they're in dream state and at the same time time you do an ecg of
brain waves and you really see that the person is in rapid eye movement so in dream phase of sleep
and so i think it's an established phenomenon i don't know if it's of any use uh i don't know
what it means uh why is it there like no idea uh but uh my my lucid dreaming experience is quite
bizarre and i haven't this i haven't done this for ages but i used to be able to see through my eyes
with my eyes shut in lucid dreams so when i entered a lucid dream state i could see around me
even though i was lying there with my eyes shut
yeah they should have put some some things on my brain to see what was going on because
once again could be all kinds of stuff could be my recollection of what i was seeing but
i'd had experiences where i saw things that were happening around me when my eyes were shut but
not like from some strange vantage point but literally through my eyes with my eyelids down
i know it's i've had a lot of weird experiences you know what i thought about lucid dreams is
that it might explain a lot of those prophets and the phenomena that occurred throughout the
world history when you just get you know one guy or girl like jean dark that has some sort of very
uh you know profound interaction with some spiritual entity and of course when you are
like a 12 or i don't know how old she was a 14 year old girl in uh medieval france like what else
could you map it to but uh interaction with god and like uh or some sort of uh connected uh spiritual
thing and this i think one of the mechanisms how we got all those you know prophets and enlightened
people It maybe not the only mechanism but it could be actually this lucid dreaming thing It might have played a way more important role in history of humanity than we think it did For sure
Hallustrogenic compounds, the same.
Absolutely, yeah.
Psychedelics, yeah.
But once again, what are they?
You know, I've had, actually, the episode which is online,
the latest episode of this podcast
was a three and a half hour conversation I had
with a Swedish doctor about the majority,
well, not the majority,
but probably half of it is about hallucinogens
and ayahuasca and all that kind of stuff.
DMT is particularly, you know what DMT is,
because that's a fascinating one.
If you're into the brain and DMT
and experiencing something else
other than the physical realm,
DMT is just mind-blowing
because it already exists in the body anyway.
It's just broken down a lot.
And, you know, I mean...
Did you try it to some?
No, I haven't.
That's the thing.
I missed that.
I did hallucinogens before I knew anything about things like that.
And as I got older, like, I'd love to do it now, I think.
But I'm apprehensive of it completely blowing my mind
when I live in a very simple environment with children and a family.
And, you know, when I was younger, I could trip and I could take mushrooms and do acid and all these things and just explore myself.
I suppose now I'm worried that I'll do that and decide to completely change my life, become a, I don't know, become a hermit.
And then what happens to my family?
there. It's not because you never know. I mean, they show you yourself those things. They show
you who you are. And if you realized you were living a lie or something, that would be terrible.
I wouldn't want to inflict that on my children. But there's always that risk. And also, I think
in my 30s, I had very good psychedelic experiences for a very long time. And then in my 30s,
I had one bad trip, which scared me.
I went to a place which I would call the pit of despair, of complete disconnection from life, the universe and everything, holding on by a minute thread.
And it was horrible.
It was absolutely the darkest night of the soul for me.
And I don't want to do that again.
I really don't.
And I know the possibility is always there now because I can sense it.
And you know what it's like?
Presumably you've done hallucinogens, have you?
Yeah, I've tried some.
Right, okay.
So you know that when you take them, it's like you're getting on a bus.
When the bus goes, you go with the bus.
There's no getting off.
And if that bus is going towards a cliff and the driver's intent on going there,
you go off the cliff.
and if you don't want to go off the cliff,
it makes it worse because if you resist it.
And I wouldn't necessarily say my psyche is strong enough
to embrace the darkest side of this stuff.
I don't even know whether it's going to be there or not.
I've got no idea.
But because I've experienced it,
I know the possibilities there
and I feel I have very important
and strong real life responsibilities
that I don't want to jeopardize, if you understand what I mean, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Well, looping into what you said before,
like how do you know that after death you want to end up in a pit of despair?
That would be fucked up, you know.
Exactly.
If you die, it like sucks.
It could be.
Why didn't I live forever?
I had the means.
Well, you're right there.
You're absolutely right.
But in my experience of the pit of despair, it changed.
It's just that when you're in the pit of despair, it feels like infinity.
But it changes.
And one of the lessons of life is everything changes.
That's for me as a 54-year-old bloke.
I teach this to my kids all the time when, you know, my daughter, my eldest the other day was deeply distraught because, you know, she was having a problem with her horse.
And it's horrible.
A girl and a horse.
She's only 13.
It's one of the strongest bonds, right?
and I find myself when I'm consoling her I'm saying look everything passes and remember this
because you know the way you feel now in two or three hours possibly you'll feel different
and I'm going to come to you and I'm going to say Alice do you remember do you remember what I said
right now you realize everything changes so that thing you're feeling now is not forever
and you know that because you get proven that over and over and over again it also happens for the
good times when you're feeling great it happens as well you take the rough with the smooth but
when you're feeling bad about something and when something's feeling tough you know
it changes and i think it becomes one of those rules of life everything changes
so and and i would probably that would be my mantra if i ever took hardcore psychedelics again
i think yeah but whether i don't know but one of the tips they actually officially give you know
to ground yourself that like everything passes and i think yeah you know there are all sorts of
manuals reading about this like how to do this responsibly and so on is that right i didn't know
yeah yeah there are like whole books reading about this by guys who did that especially in the u.s in
the 50s you know they had so much research going on about lsd there and so on before it was all
you know shut down yeah well i mean i would love to i mean like i say i and i feel like probably i
will again because i know how much stuff there is out there in that world that i that i want to
experience basically that's the perfect reason why you need to live forever so as long as you
actually wish to experience new stuff like be it's like traveling or exploring your mind
or exploring different human beings, planets, places,
new freedom cities being built,
witnessing new cities emerging where there was just desert and so on.
There's an infinite amount of possibilities,
like writing music, learning to play instruments,
whatever you fancy, doing sports, competing with people and so on.
that you know as long as you are interested in all those things and as long as they these things
they mean a lot to you why would you go and die instead like why go for that option and you have
no idea what what's beyond maybe there is something maybe there is not but as long as you're basically
enjoying yourself why why why do that i agree i do agree with you i just think that um people have
been dying for like thousands of years haven't they maybe i'll do um ayahuasca on my 200th birthday
then that'll be something to aim for but no i i can't i can't disagree with you i i think is
absolutely true and i think when you live in the moment age doesn't matter anyway like if you think
about age if you think about your past and your future then it matters but really right now you
and me talking doesn't it doesn't matter anything nothing matters it all that matters is what's
happening between you and me and I could be well I could be 30 right now in fact I don't feel that
different I don't actually feel much different I still identify with myself as the me of the past
I can't really remember being a child that that much but when up from you know being in my 20s
and 30s and 40s nothing's changed necessarily my ideas might have changed my ideology and I've
I learnt a few skills, you know, but other than that, it's me.
I don't feel like any different.
So that would presumably stay the same as well.
Yeah, you might never will because the change is so slow
that unless you experience severe breakdowns,
medical emergencies and so on, you might not realize that.
And I think that's how people actually approach their health.
They just keep on flowing and then something breaks
and they're like, oh, it just actually exists.
And then for some of them, it's like the tipping point when they start actually doing something about their health.
And sometimes this tipping point is actually the last thing they experience.
Because usually the most common symptom of a heart attack is death.
So usually just, yeah, it's too late.
So it's good to start early.
I suppose there's a part of me that doesn't mind the thought of dying.
I think because that's life.
You know what I mean?
It sounds a bit wishy-washy.
It's a bit wrong.
Well, it's just a bit wishy-washy.
It's like, you know, I feel like it's fair that you get a shot at life
and then you live your life and then you die.
I think that's fair.
Everyone's got it.
Everyone's doing it.
and people live great lives.
And I think we celebrate people that live good lives,
but then they die.
And then they're forgotten, actually.
And then they're forgotten very, very quickly,
even the most famous people.
It's a very few people that actually get remembered
for more than a generation.
So really, you know, a lot of what we do here,
it doesn't matter.
It doesn't really matter.
You know, it matters to us in the moment,
but in the grand scheme of things,
it doesn't really matter, you know.
um but but how that relates to longevity i'm not sure because i think probably if you asked anyone
do you want to die unless they were in extreme pain they'd probably say no
so you you you're you you definitely want to live forever yeah you know i don't like the word uh
fair because like is it fair that you're sitting here like a in a suit and there are people dying
from thirst or from hunger like the world is an extremely unfair place like and there are also
people who are like billionaires you know uh with huge swimming pools and like flying helicopters
and private jets and whatever so it's like extremely unfair but the fact that this happens
it doesn't imply that like death should be the great equalize like the fact that this billionaire
or dictator dies, it doesn't make your life better.
So I think it's a comforting thought sometimes
that you can live whatever life you want,
but we will still die.
But in fact, it shouldn't be
because if you spend your first 50 or 60 years
working your ass off and trying to get out of poverty
or escape from some sort of really dangerous place,
a war, some sort of humanitarian conflict, and then you end up, for example, in Europe
as a refugee, and you're already in your 60s, and your brain already is not good enough
to even learn the local language and start a new life.
So you're just basically preparing already to die.
You just do the things you can do, like watch TV or whatever, and then spend time with your
children, hopefully, and that's it.
But in case we are able to extend that sort of longevity, like everyone gets a shot to realize all those opportunities that they didn't have because they were initially deprived of this, you know, just because of how they were born.
So actually, in a certain world, I'm not saying that's where we are going.
Maybe it's going to go wrong, but immortality can be the great equalizer and not death.
It'd be interesting to thought experiment how this would relate on the timeline with artificial intelligence.
Because if you track that forward enough, many human qualities become completely redundant.
and which is fine but now they're redundant forever as opposed to now they're redundant
for 70 80 90 years and then you die now they're redundant forever and um i don't know what that
the implications of that are i i barely really got wrapped my head around the fact that
all human functions might actually become redundant anyway which which theoretically they will
in a professional sense yeah and in the sense that um an ai would be able to think better than
you and do better than you whatever that is yeah well you know there are factories that produce
uh you know um kitchen supplies uh better than you do but doesn't mean you still like and make
a spoon and sell it on the market and people will actually pay more for that spoon so uh you can
still do things that you like to do, like drive a car, even though AI is way better than you driving
a car, right? What I mean is then that there will be an infinite abundance of everything. So in a
way it will take the meaning out of many things. So take driving a car. Your dream might be to drive
a sports car. Well, in the distant future, you'll just be able to conjure up anything you want. So
will that devalue the experience of wanting to drive some unobtainable car or some very luxury
car i don't i don't necessarily know but but it could do well it could it's called i think there's
a term like hedonistic adaptation like the more access you have to all sorts of luxuries uh and
those luxuries start to mean less to you and they become like regular things to you yes not luxury
anymore oh yeah that definitely happens i mean that happens on a small scale with me like
with whatever but you know it's uh at the same time there is stuff which is not accessible for
to some people at all you know like health care or like quality food or you know like some very
basic things and if those things become accessible then it's a universal good because you know if you
see the correlation between income and happiness you can see that happiness grows until a certain income So if we have this universal income like established and it high enough then it could be like a very positive society but you know i not super
positive about ai to be honest so i i i don't know like my position on that because i'm also at the
same time uh concerned um sometimes i get some sort of you know ai depression for a few days
Because on one thing, it can make the world a better place
and it can help us with the research, what we do in terms of aging.
But at the same time, it can also, in certain scenarios,
wipe us out completely.
And you cannot exclude this possibility.
I think, for me, AI will be a forcing function
for us humans to take responsibility for ourselves for what we want to do because we will
we will have much more opportunity to decide what we want to do because many of the things that we're
currently forced to do in a way or at least coaxed into doing we won't need to do so we'll be left
with this opportunity. And I'm in two minds because I've, in various times in my life,
I've had masses of opportunities. And in those moments, I've found decision-making much harder
than when I've been forced into a situation where there aren't that many options.
so so with the ai future of abundance i think it might be quite debilitating for people
myself included what am i going to do because i really do have to and that as a result i really
do have to take full extreme responsibility for doing what i do because i'm almost certain i'll
limit myself in certain ways if everything is abundantly available and i for me that often
means that a lot of things are going to lose their meaning a bit. So I'm going to limit myself.
I'm going to make, I'm going to make things harder for myself. So I, you know, or I'm going to do
things which are pointless really in the eyes of an AI. This is a pointless because I, like you say,
I can do that better than you. The AI is like, you know, I could, you know, you could have a
Michelin starred chef robot cooking you food every single day. But what difference is that
after a hundred days to you eating rice and and something every day it's the same it's just a
different it's just a different level of existence you still get you'll still get accustomed to it
if you see what i mean i think we're already doing that so we're doing that right now like
imagine people uh a thousand years ago thinking like what if you would have water every day yes
what if you would have like you don't have to put up a fire to cook every day what if uh you could
have you know an ability to wash your clothes and not have to walk at three
kilometers to the river or something and we kind of already adapted to that and
and now we find pleasure in like taking a cold shower for example some people do
like me although we have hot water and we don't just you know sit in front of
the screen and just have a pipe with sugar or like our no whipped cream or
whatever into our mouth and like sucking on that although we have that capability right so we are
kind of already uh realizing that and we are implementing the source of like challenges uh
tiny challenges for ourselves to to keep to keep us going like we go hiking uh for no reason we
climb mountains or we cross the oceans on a sailing boat so we already do all those sorts
of challenges and i think maybe ai won't change that that much will hopefully still have the
capability to go hike and do this stuff which is i'm sure we will but but for me personally there's
a big difference between you know say climbing to the top of a very difficult mountain that's been
done by thousands of people or that's been done by no people or that or that i can't just sit on a
um a thing and it takes me up there you know like the because i've experienced this my life
i've traveled a lot over my life and i've traveled places which have changed drastically a good
example being yeah i made a film once in the himalayas about about um children who used to
go to school from a very high part of the of ladak in the himalayas they had to they had to walk for
five days down the frozen river to get to boarding school right and it was it's real hardship and took
five days sleeping in little caves and around fires every night and stuff it was very very cold
and very dangerous and now there's a road so since then a road has been built so so you can just drive
it in less than a day now i'm far less inclined to walk down the river now as a challenge to myself
because you see cars going by and stuff.
Whereas, you know, literally 25 years before that,
the only way down was to brave down walking across the chadar,
they call it, the ice.
And it was dangerous.
If you fell through, that was it, you were gone, you know.
So I can definitely think that it's going to be tougher
to find challenges that seem meaningful to me because, you know.
The real challenges.
Yeah, a proper challenge.
Well, like if you, you know, because I think a lot of our best challenges we're forced into, aren't we?
Like even now, like you and me, we've both got to earn a living, right?
If I was a multimillionaire, I probably, I actually would still, I would be doing this podcast, but it wouldn't be the same.
And I may not have ended up doing it to begin with, more to the point.
you know there is in in in in this hardship that gut life gives you there are some very important
drivers for us aren't there that's that's really what drives us some of the all the most the most
adaptive and the most innovative i've ever been is when i've been forced and not when i'm just
sitting pretty going oh well you know like things are chugging along nicely and stuff um what ai
what I might do is take away that forcing function
because there might always be the option to say,
oh, do you know what?
I could just get that to do it, all right?
My personal robot, which will be like a phone, is now.
There'll be a personal robot, won't there?
And it will be able to do all kinds of stuff for you And you know we might have personal transportation that can fly places or probably I don know but there be there be harder challenges
And do you know what I've often wondered is at that point, did the challenges become spiritual?
That's, that's why, you know, like, because that might be something that AI might
not be able to compete with us on because arguably we're alive and they're not
whatever that means aliveness you know like uh life life life is something that i think we all
acknowledge but but whether or not ai can ever have life i don't know some people say yes some
people say no so so there will be things they don't compete with us on and so there'll be the
places there'll be the frontier i i presume i don't i don't i really don't know i mean
i can't wait to find out in one sense but like you i do have my doom days where if you stay alive
you'll find out yes you're absolutely right actually bloody me you're right you always have
a way out so no reason to worry right now i mean yeah so all right we better wrap up soon because
my next person's coming in in 12 minutes um do you think that um we would we would choose to die
then do you think do you think choosing to die will become a cultural thing
it might uh very well become yeah a cultural thing i think some people you know we have a lot
of people who don't take vaccines right now and um yeah so um there will be people who reject any
kind of immortality rugs and maybe they just resort to to the life or to more like primitive
kind of lifestyle and deprive themselves of those technological advantages and decide they i actually
mean not people rejecting longevity i mean people having longevity and then deciding
philosophically, right, I should die.
Yeah, well, there always will be suicide.
I mean, you cannot get rid of that.
And that's what people do right now as well.
So they just decide either life is too bad
or they had enough
or they do some sort of risky stuff and they die.
So it's kind of like indirect suicide, so to say.
So yeah, I think that will still take place.
So there won't be like technical immortality.
I suppose what I mean is, even suicide seems like the wrong way to describe it.
I mean, the choice to die will be a natural and good one.
That's what I mean.
Like, so imagine you are a thousand years old.
I don't know.
There might be a realization that dying is important.
Not because you're depressed.
not because you're, you know, for a reason that seems that we don't really understand yet.
It could be.
Maybe even, you know, the governments will incentivize people to this kind of behavior.
They already do that in Canada, don't they?
No, they do that.
You know, anyway, that's a whole other thing.
But God, if the government's incentivizing it, I'll definitely stay alive.
If they want me to die, I'm staying alive.
But there is still war, so it's happening.
So yeah, it might very well be.
The more you live, the more opportunities open up and all kinds of those weird phenomena
might occur.
So yeah, we have to be ready to face them, we'll face them anyway.
So for now, it's a bit early to go in that direction.
But for now, we have zero things that slow down aging reliably, pruning humans.
So I think we should focus on that.
And then, yeah, we'll for sure face various societal transformations and maybe protests and maybe even some violence.
But it doesn't mean we don't need to go that way.
So we for sure need to think about those things in advantage.
but
I think it's still
a good thing that we will
it's like the best thing ever
that we will protect
people from the biggest killer
on the planet, we'll give the people
an option to opt
out of this misery
and death
Right, hallelujah to that
you're gonna
well I'm glad that you
think I'm gonna be able to live together
my kids are going to be so happy about that.
That's the first thing I'm going to tell them next time I speak to them.
Cause,
cause,
um,
that,
well,
I mean,
if I said,
look,
someone who knows about biohacking thinks that I will live forever if I choose to,
if someone had told me that when I was a kid,
that would have,
there would have been a little less trauma in my life.
Cause I did think about death when I was small and it's not a nice thought at all.
Is it when you're small?
I don't know whether you thought about it.
I remember when a bird flew into our kitchen window once and died and fell on the floor when I was very young and I saw it.
And we buried it in the back garden.
And I remember crying my eyes out for hours, sobbing.
And it was like, I think it was the first time I understood that death happened as a kid, you know.
But yeah, I mean, losing your loved ones, that fills me with dread sometimes.
um and yeah that's an important consideration because you know every death it's not just about
you but there's also people around you so if you you so to say lived a good life and you surrounded
yourself with people whom you love and who who love you then if you go away all those people
will be 100 guaranteed suffering and sometimes this suffering will be a very long time it could
be years it could be tens of years like they will feel that emptiness that when interacting with
objects or with the activities they will you will keep coming to mind and they will feel deprived
of like your attention your love and so on so uh yeah that's a huge loss it's like uh you know
empty hole uh that cannot be filled or it takes a lot of time to fill so um yeah i think like
it's it's terrible yeah what's going on right now and like this it's it's
happening two times a second almost in the world so like during our talk
thousands of people died and like probably tens of thousands are
suffering because of those thousands died so that a lot of sorrow all of the earlier you mentioned all the different ways we we honor death
funerals,
you know,
mummies,
all this kind of stuff.
I think that is what,
that is our,
that's the cultural mechanism for exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah.
And yeah,
maybe,
maybe you're right.
Maybe you in,
in growing old and in growing old or not in growing old,
But in staying alive within the power of your own self, you could choose, if you wanted to die, you could choose a point in which you would inflict the least pain, which will be possible.
Because I think in my case, it's, you know, like my children, leaving my children when they're young, as opposed to leaving them when they're sort of in their 40s would be a different thing.
Like I can imagine, unfortunately, both my parents are still alive.
But whenever I've done a thought experiment with them dying, I feel comforted by the fact that they lived a good life, both of them, very good lives.
But when you're a child, that's not true.
You don't understand that concept.
You just want your mum and dad.
You don't, you know.
But I think, yeah, I'm still obviously different to you.
I'm still in the idea of death is a natural part of life.
It is a natural part of life,
but a lot of stuff is a natural part of life,
and we try to get rid of that stuff.
So like cancer, it's a natural part of life,
but we're still trying to solve it,
and I think everybody considers it the best cause.
Viruses are a natural part of life.
And the fact that it's natural, I don't think it means anything.
I don't even know what's natural
like everything is natural
we are children of the universe
like everything is natural
but you know we are trying to
make our lives better
and not think what's natural
and what's not natural
no you're absolutely right
it's a stupid idea really
but it's because I haven't
it's because I don't live in the world you live in
I'm almost certain
because you work in that world
it's become part of your consciousness
that living forever is a solvable problem well it has become part of my consciousness before i
started working there it's what led me to working here really yeah you thought i decided to get
educated in biomedical engineering and so on that's interesting um what what problem without
we've got i've got i've got a knock on the head in in a couple of minutes but can you briefly say
why that do you know why that originally that thought originally came to your mind because
It's quite a radical thought, if you think about it, in the beginning, to decide that death is not necessary.
I think radical thoughts, when the kind of realization comes, they tend to stick because maybe you feel at a certain age that you're kind of revolutionary against what people think.
But this thought makes a lot of sense to you.
I think I first interacted with a scientist called Vladimir Skolachev.
He passed away since then, but he was a huge figure in biology in Russia.
He developed a type of antioxidant.
At that time, the oxidative theory of aging was super popular,
that reactive oxygen species kill you from the inside, from mitochondria.
So he found a way to tackle that.
Since then, this theory was completely busted and his antioxidant, I think, yet wasn't effective
in treating any kind of disease.
But his work led me to realize that aging is actually very complicated, but it's a biological
process that unwraps the body and we can approach it from different angles.
It has a lot of angles to it, a lot of components.
if we maybe simultaneously attack it from a different angle so we can do something about
that process so i think i was not really maybe that much inspired by defeating death because it's
so far-fetched but by the fact that we have like this very mysterious unknown process also like
embedded in our culture and we can kind of discover study it and find ways how to tackle
that. It's like a very mystical, scientific problem and people are almost not paying attention
to that. It's like ending up in a very curious place in a new country, but very unexplored.
You immediately feel the wish to share it to your friends or something like,
look I ended up in this place and it's like so amazing there's so much things to do here to see
and nobody talks about it or like you don't see a documentary in national geographic about that or
whatever and I think this kind of like new horizons is what inspired me and that's why I started you
know first focusing on you know biohacking and that kind of stuff supplements and all that and
And eventually had an education in that field.
Did a master's degree in biomedical engineering and later on joined Unlimited Bio.
Wow. Well, look, sorry to cut you off, but that's a time constraint.
Something we may not have in the future.
I could, yeah, we could talk for years.
But many thanks for sharing your story, Vladimir.
me all right it's um it's a it's a it's a i i always veer down the mind i always veer down the
sort of um thought experiment when we when people start talking about longevity because i just think
that there's going to be some existential questions that will need answering and um but i'm happy it's
happening and i'm i'm so happy that you think i might be able to choose because because i will
choose to live don't get me wrong there's 100 i'm not sure what will happen but i will choose to live
100 so thanks thanks for coming in and it's great talking to you and good luck with everything
amazing thank you timothy thank you so much for having me it was very insightful conversation i
enjoyed it so much so thank you
Thank you.