 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Janati Stolyerov II. I am the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party as well as the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Today, I was hoping to have a discussion on effective strategies for advocating for life extension. In essence, the technological possibilities for dramatic life extension, potentially indefinite life extension, are on the horizon. And yet, only a small minority of the general public perceives these possibilities to be accessible within our proximate future. How do we change people's minds with regard to the feasibility and the desirability of achieving a dramatic life extension within our lifetimes? In order to promote this public acceptance, in 2013, I wrote and published a children's book called Death is Wrong. It was illustrated by my wife Wendy Stolyerov and it attempted to convey arguments regarding both the scientific feasibility and the philosophical desirability of indefinite life extension to an audience that doesn't typically get exposed to these arguments, namely children. And my aim in that endeavor was to break past the barriers that exist in the minds of a lot of adults who essentially have been met with a lot of excuses and rationalizations for why death is normal, why death is natural, why it is just the way of things and it is futile to fight against it. And because they're met with these rationalizations as children, they find it difficult to escape that kind of thinking even once they develop their critical and rational faculties. So that was one approach that I think encountered a moderate degree of success. However, we still have a long way to go. And today I was hoping to have Chris Montero of H Pluspedia and Transhumanist Party UK with me to discuss potential effective strategies for advocating for life extension, what works well, what might not work as well. He has not arrived at present. I'm still hopeful that he will join us in the course of this broadcast, which we have scheduled for about 90 minutes. Nonetheless, in the meantime, there are some audience questions and I will be happy to address them. Alcott Evans asks, how will the Transhumanist Party further their life extension agenda in a world that is still primarily religious? I think that is certainly an important subject to discuss. And one important matter to note is that not all religions and not all religious individuals have the same outlook toward life extension. I would characterize a lot of mainstream religions as being lagging indicators of societal attitudes. That is to say, religious belief systems don't so much shape worldviews as they respond to the phenomena of the external society. For instance, prior to the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the vast majority of Christians supported slavery and they would cite passages from the Bible to justify the enslavement of some human beings by others. And it was as a result of two phenomena, one the philosophical revolution during the 18th century Enlightenment, which was largely driven by secular oriented thinkers, and the industrial revolution, which rendered a lot of manual labor unnecessary. The people's attitudes began to change. And at first it was just a radical fringe of, for instance, Quakers, Shakers, other radical Protestant groups that were abolitionists. But gradually, the rejection of slavery by major religious denominations became mainstream and today virtually any Christian will tell you it is wrong for some human beings to enslave others. So we have seen this with other types of attitudes by religious people more recently, for instance, toward gay marriage. A lot more individuals calling themselves religious will accept same-sex partnerships as compared to even 20 or 30 years ago. So it is not so much that people are religious per se that is the issue. It is that religions today get used to justify the status quo, whatever it happens to be. So for instance, most religious people will accept open heart surgery today. Most religious people will accept train travel or automobile travel today, even though during the mid-19th century there was a lot of propaganda that essentially if you go faster than 40 kilometers per hour your body couldn't handle it and it's not the will of God, so people shouldn't build high-speed trains, for instance. And that clearly has gone away because people are familiar with that technology. They see it as safe. They see it as contributing to the quality of their lives and only some extremely, let's say, marginal religious sex. For instance, the Amish choose to reject that technology. So the question in my view is how do we get even people of strong religious convictions to realize that the technologies that would dramatically lengthen our life spans, by which I mean lengthen life spans past the age of 120, would be considered to be improvements to quality of life just like open heart surgery or cancer treatments are considered today. So that, I think, is a good bridge to considering how do religions evolve? What influences are there on religious people's thinking? I will say also I am not a religious individual myself. I am an atheist. I am encouraged, however, to see certain strains of religious denominations that are embracing transhumanism. In the United States there's a Christian transhumanist association, there's a Mormon transhumanist association, and to the extent that they advocate the same technological goals that we do, as well as certain more open cosmopolitan attitudes in terms of how we treat other people, they are allies. I would consider those individuals to be worthwhile individuals to engage in how we're going to push these technologies forward. So with regard to the next question, which was posed by David Wood, he asks, what do you believe is the main reason why people show little apparent desire for radical life extension? Is it due to their religion or to other moral based arguments or what? I also think that is a good question building off of what we just discussed. I think it's status quo bias. In essence for a lot of people, ideology of a particular brand, be it a religion or a secular philosophy, is more of an epiphenomenal justification for a more basic, let's say, emotional motivation or even personality driven motivation. And I would like to characterize it as hope versus fear. Or as Virginia Postrell put it in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, a dynamist attitude versus a stasis attitude. So a dynamist is somebody who embraces change and progress and sees, for instance, in evolving technologies and evolving societal institutions more promised than peril. And that doesn't mean being oblivious to the risks. That doesn't mean overlooking potential pitfalls. But it means fundamentally recognizing that the way things are is not the way they have always been and is not necessarily the way they should be. On the other hand, a stasis is someone who generally tends to think of the status quo, however suboptimal it may be as being the best of all possible worlds. And we have to accept it with all of the imperfections, perhaps even accept the imperfections and the great injustices as being contributors to some greater good ostensibly, be it the will of God or the cycle of life or the preservation of nature or what have you. So those two attitudes can have an ideological superstructure built on top of them, whether it be fundamentalist religions of certain brands, whether they be fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jewish or hardline Islamist or secular Luddite ideologies, like certain brands of regressive environmentalism, not the techno positive environmentalism, but the environmentalism that preaches renunciation of technology or arresting technological progress. Bill McKibbin is an exponent of that as well as Bill Joy who preached renunciation of emerging technologies and of the computer age in essence. So we can see people can brand themselves, any of a number of ideologies, but really what matters is the underlying outlook behind that. And it is a complex task indeed to figure out who stands on what side of that divide, whether that person will end up being an advocate of progress or an opponent of progress. And I think with life extension, we see that in particularly stark terms because of the ambitious nature of our goal. So we are seeking to overcome the most fundamental constraint of the human condition, our very mortality. And in some ways the goal is incremental. It's a continuation of what medicine and science have been doing the age of enlightenment. On the other hand, the end result of that will be a dramatically different approach to human life because right now so much of human decision-making is based on these very short-term considerations. The time span during which a person is youthful and energetic and is capable of accomplishing something is still relatively narrow, though it is quite a bit broader than it used to be, say, in the Middle Ages. So a lot of people live in this kind of frenzy where they essentially need to rush to make their mark upon the world while they still have the energy to do that. And oh, their biological capacities, for instance, for procreation are also confined to this same very narrow time window. And a lot of people still have this biological desire to procreate. So at the same time as they're trying to make their mark on the world, they also want to raise the next generation of humans. And they don't really have the time to, let's say, make fully well-considered, thoughtful decisions about every step that they're going to take. That leads to a lot of sub-optimality. It leads to a lot of frustration, stress, burnout for people who try to cram everything into this tiny sliver of life that they get. So what happens if that changes? What happens if people are biologically youthful for however long they want to be? And if they do want to reproduce, they have hundreds of years to do it. They have hundreds of years to attempt multiple careers to pursue, say, the creation of works of art or works of writing or works of new media that we don't yet even have an idea of what they're going to be. How will that change human lives and human incentives? A lot of people, I think, would be fearful and even contemplating those possibilities. For me, however, those possibilities are very intriguing. And I see opportunities. I certainly see a world that is preferable to the current one where we are fated to destruction. So then I see my answers have engaged a lot of individuals. Let us go on to the next question also by Mr. Evans. As technology and science become increasingly important in our daily lives, do you think that people will someday worse through peer pressure by their upgraded friends to augment themselves? That's also a great question. And we have seen to some extent in our technological society, if certain technologies become widespread, for instance, computers and the internet, there are certainly strong incentives to use them. If somebody decided to go completely off the grid, they could do that legally. Their right to do that would be respected. I think they would be missing out on a lot of potential social contacts. And they would certainly be missing out on a lot of economic opportunities given how much easier it is, for instance, to find a job today if you have internet access, how much easier it is even to find services that you want to use today. If you want to find a good restaurant or a way to navigate the public transportation system in a new city, you could just use paper-based information, look in newspapers, maybe go by word of mouth, but it would be more cumbersome. So there are incentives that channel people into using emerging technologies. Now, I think it's important in any future society to have a legal system that recognizes freedom of choice for any particular individual to accept or reject, especially something as intimate as an augmentation of one's own body. That is crucial. And it's also crucial to recognize that there will be a diversity of augmentations that are pursued. As technological capabilities expand, I don't believe there's going to be one hierarchy of augmentations, one set of ways in which people will seek to make themselves better, because different people will see different capacities as being important. Say, for instance, some people might want to develop the capacity to see ultraviolet or infrared light. Other people might want, say, echolocation capabilities. Other people might decide we're really fine with our range of vision, our auditory or olfactory range. We don't really care about that. We just want to live longer and be more durable. So there may be niches, subcultures that develop, and there might, as a result, be certain hyper-specialization emerging from that. If you can see ultraviolet or infrared radiation, you might have access to certain careers that others who don't choose these augmentations wouldn't have access to. But on the other hand, today, some people study nuclear physics, and other people don't. Some people study economics, or in my case, actuarial science, and other people don't. Some people become expert doctors. Some people are technophiles to a greater extent than others. So some people will purchase, for instance, the latest smartphones or MP3 players. Some people already have purchased virtual reality or augmented reality technologies, whereas other people haven't, and they may prefer to direct their time in other ways. So it's not necessarily the case that everybody will be pressured into doing the same things. Some people will find the social incentives to have certain augmentations to be compelling. But that doesn't mean that if you choose to be unaugmented or only augmented in certain ways, that you'll be left behind in some respects. Now, also, I think there will be factions of individuals who decide this isn't for us, and they may be future versions of the Amish today. They might decide, though, instead of staying at a largely 19th-century technological level, they might stay at a largely early 21st-century technological level and say, well, as long as we're comfortable and live into our 80s and have desktop PCs, we don't want anything else. And it would be interesting to see what proportion of the population decides that. Nonetheless, I would say respecting diversity, respecting individual choice, are important, both in the direction of acknowledging people's rights to have those augmentations and acknowledging the rights of people who may be cautious or reserved in certain respects, or may choose not to have them. Because if we respect their rights, that increases the probability that they will respect our rights in areas like the pursuit of a definite life extension. So then, we move on to our next question with regard to comments by Laura Indiana, who says, seems to me that if your life is very easy, you'd want to live forever. Well, if your life has been filled with challenges, you wouldn't. I'd say most people have challenged-filled lives, right? I would say today that's definitely true and that's true across the socioeconomic spectrum. Furthermore, she says, start aging and you don't want to live in the old body forever. Do you get a new body? I'm new to this stuff. The most compelling vision of indefinite life extension involves incremental repairs to damage done to the existing body. And, of course, if you were just to build a new copy of yourself from scratch, there are some serious philosophical concerns about whether that entity will even be you. It might look like you. It might have analogous physical structures to you, maybe in technologically advanced future far beyond our own. It might even be possible to exactly reconstruct the physical structure of a brain that gives rise to certain memories. So that person might think he or she has had your life experiences, but consider it this way. If all of a sudden, next to you, an exact copy of you were assembled atom by atom, but you were still there, and that person then went off and made decisions, perhaps informed by the same considerations that you would use when making your decisions, that person would not have your direct awareness of the world, what I would call, inus. That person would just go off and perhaps live an entirely different life that diverged from your own from that point forward. So then if you were destroyed, but that person continued to live, that would still not be you. So as a result, I don't see an alternative to using the body that we have and repairing the damage at a cellular level. Aubrey de Grey is a great resource for that. He is the bio gerontologist behind SENS, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Please visit SENS.org, that is the website for the SENS Research Foundation, where he outlines seven types of damage that occurs at the cellular level. And he notes the good news is all of these seven types have been known for at least 35 years, and the key isn't so much to understand the workings of the human metabolism that gives rise to that damage, but rather a much simpler engineering challenge, how to repair that damage as it arises, so as to periodically reset the body's aging clock, so that say every 10 years you go to a clinic, get a rejuvenation therapy, and then that gives you 10 more years of youthful life until you have to go repeat that procedure. And every time you go in for those treatments, technology will have advanced, so you get the benefit of more up-to-date treatments, just like say computer technology has advanced significantly over the past 10 years, and medicine as well has made significant strides over the past 10 years. So if you just stay alive long enough, you'll get to a point where your additional life expectancy will increase at a faster rate than the passage of time, and that is called longevity escape velocity. So moving on, David Woods says, good answer. I guess that people with a status quo bias are okay with the idea of relatively minor changes, but feel much less comfortable with larger changes, and I would agree with that observation. Status quo bias isn't necessarily insurmountable in the sense that somebody who has reluctance to embrace a technology that seems far off or futuristic might not have as much reluctance with embracing the next generation of smartphone, especially if all of their friends are doing it. So essentially, these people are not going to be thought leaders. They're not going to be radical innovators, but they might be persuaded to go along with the flow if the flow is one of technological progress. I would characterize perhaps 80% of the human population as being in that category. 10% would be truly innovative and open to radical changes, even if they occurred very quickly. Another 10% would be reactionaries, and they would want to resist that change, and this 80% demographic with the status quo bias will tend to go along with whatever forces dominate the society or culture. So whoever the thought leaders are, and in some areas those thought leaders are more progressive in terms of embracing positive change. In other areas, they're more reactionary in terms of trying to go back to an earlier time or freeze the status quo in place. And that's the big open question in my view. This is what the US transhumanist party is trying to influence, have a greater preponderance of technologically progressive attitudes in society as opposed to reactionary attitudes. Then David Wood continues in this area with regard to what can we do to help people break free from their status quo bias. And I think it has to involve a combination approach. One is a demonstration of incremental feasibility. An argument I've often made is once the first human being reaches the age of 130, people will start paying attention, most certainly, because right now there does seem to be a certain degree of hardness to the upper limit to human longevity. And average lifespans are increasing. Indeed, the number of super centenarians is increasing. However, most of them hit that wall around ages 115, 116. Only a few have overcome that with, of course, the most famous super centenarian being Jean Calment, who died at the age of 122 in 1997. And a lot of scientists hypothesize this is due to a condition called senile systemic amyloidosis, the buildup of amyloid plaques throughout the body similar to the amyloid plaques that developed in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. So if that particular condition can be overcome, if that barrier can be surmounted, then even people who ordinarily wouldn't pay attention would suddenly start to see glimmers of hope. And of course, other incremental successes would be important. And back in the early 2000s, I was a contributor to the Methuselah mouse prize, which aimed to reward scientists who could dramatically lengthen the lifespans of lab mice, say mice generally live from two to three years. If scientists are able to achieve five-year-old mice, essentially the equivalent of humans who live circa 160 to 170 years, that would also be a dramatic proof of concept, though perhaps not as dramatic as achieving a significant expansion of the maximum lifespan in humans. So there is this idea of proof of concept that a lot of people want to have before them so that they can be convinced it's not just wishful thinking, it's not just science fiction. Unfortunately, a lot of people are still of that mindset. With regard to going back to the comment about most people leading challenging lives, this is the kind of Gordian knot that we find ourselves in. Yes, most people live challenging lives in large part stemming from my observation that they have to cram so many things into such a short time frame. And a lot of them are also subject to great material constraints when they're doing that. What can lift those material constraints? It's technology. So any incremental progress of technology helps when Elon Musk develops safer cheaper electric cars with autonomous driving capability, that helps take some of the pressure, some of the challenge away from individual lives. The goal is to remove as much drudgery as possible, remove as much hardship as possible to give people time to think, to give people time to ask the more fundamental questions. And in my view, time is the most valuable commodity. Everything else, money, possessions, social standing can be acquired with time and with effort. But what leads most people to be frustrated, I think, is the perceived fleeting nature of life. And of course, the great challenge is they're frustrated because of, in my view, insufficient technological progress. And yet, very often that frustration leads them not to perceive the possibilities of technology for improving their lives. So it's similar to how, say, in a totalitarian society, if everybody is extremely poor and miserable and subjugated, that society is actually likely to remain totalitarian, whereas a society that has authoritarian features but a vibrant upper middle class of professionals and free thinkers is more likely to have a revolution. Indeed, historically, the countries where political revolutions of a more classically liberal character have occurred have been countries with a large prosperous upper middle class, and the revolutions were often driven by intellectuals within that upper middle class. So something interesting to think about, I would say that challenge is going to stay with us for decades. The way to resolve it is push technology forward on any fronts where that's feasible, and also push forward systems and approaches that can improve prosperity and take some of the extreme stresses away from people's lives. So then we move on to some further questions. User RedSBR asks, do you believe that life extension technologies will advance fast enough for people alive today to reach a state of indefinite life extension? How old is too old? Now, I'll qualify my answer by saying I'm not a biologist or a biogerontologist, so I have to defer to expert judgment on that question. Aubrey DeGray has stated for quite some time that there is about a 50-50 chance of longevity escape velocity being attained within the next 20 years or so, and five years ago he was saying there's about a 50-50 chance of it being obtained within the next 25 years or so with adequate funding. So of course, there's the qualifier, our research initiatives like SENZ going to get adequate funding in order to realize some of their more ambitious projects. Right now they get, in my understanding, about four million dollars per year, and occasionally they have some large donations from multi-millionaire philanthropists, much of the time though they actually utilize the donations of people of fairly ordinary means like myself and many other longevity enthusiasts. So I have noticed with regard to crowdfunding hubs like lifespan.io or longevity which are devoted to life extension oriented research projects in particular. Right now there are about a few hundred engaged individuals in that community who are willing to donate some significant funds, and for these kinds of research projects it seems to me the cap with regard to what they're able to get is around 60 to 70 thousand dollars if a project is well publicized, and that could be enough to support a scientist for a few months to support that scientist getting some lab equipment, performing tasks, publishing results. One important project that succeeded recently was the Mido SENZ research project that was crowdfunded by lifespan.io, and the results of that were published recently. So I would encourage you to do some further research of that. Essentially they were able to transfer to my understanding two genes from the mitochondrion to the nucleus of a cell, which is progress. But I think a lot more such projects need to occur, and the base of public support needs to be a lot broader. So the big challenge is how to go beyond the few hundred really committed enthusiastic longevity supporters to people who say would donate to a charity doing cancer research or doing heart disease research or ALS research. There was recently in 2014 the ALS ice bucket challenge in the United States, and it was kind of a gimmick where people would agree to have a bucket of ice water dumped on their heads if others would contribute enough money to the ALS association for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. And it worked as a fundraising campaign. I even donated, even though I did not agree to have an ice bucket dumped on my head. So there is some enthusiasm for doing research on diseases that are recognized as being debilitating and where a cure is in sight. I think the key conceptual revolution that needs to occur is in the view of aging as a disease, at least aging as the condition that so dramatically increases the probability of common diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease that without beating back that set of conditions the war on specific diseases is always going to be a losing war in the long term. So I would say a key message is you want to fight cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's disease and the diseases we know to be horrendous and devastating, fighting senescence needs to be a component of that agenda. So moving on, Alcott Evans states, it seems to me that the diversity of augmentations will cause humanity to undergo multiple paths of evolution. That's not necessarily a bad thing though and I agree. Essentially we're going to see a flowering of diversity unlike any that has occurred yet and of course in many respects human beings have already taken charge of their own evolution. We have transformed our habitats to something that wouldn't be possible through just unaided nature although I would say it is in our nature to innovate and use technology and improve conditions to suit ourselves and a lot of other species too have evolved or been selectively bred and increasingly will be genetically engineered to coexist with us in a symbiotic manner. So going forward the more technology advances particularly in areas like genetic engineering the more different traits humans are going to have and the more diversity of environments will emerge to accommodate different humans or other sentient beings with those traits. For instance the US transhumanist party recently hosted its online discussion panel on artificial intelligence and many of the experts who spoke in that panel actually found Ray Kurzweil's projection of an AI based singularity essentially a time at which an artificial general intelligence exceeds the intellectual capabilities of human beings as being quite accurate. So Ray Kurzweil predicts this AI based singularity to occur circa 2045 and if there are other sentient entities as well like AIs or uplifted animals which are also conceivable or if human beings come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life forms it will be important to have a societal recognition of diversity cosmopolitanism rights that pertain irrespective of a specific genetic composition. So if your DNA is augmented in a way that no quote natural born human would have or if you even have an entirely different makeup to your organism to your intelligence if you're not even say a carbon-based life form but you can reason you should have rights and you should be recognized as a sovereign being capable of making autonomous decisions. Now how far are we from that as a society today given that we have had a resurgence of nationalism and populism and xenophobia throughout the western world where even people based on their place of birth or superficial characteristics like skin color can still be discriminated against and excluded and treated in horrific ways. I think this kind of very tribal superficial differentiation among people into us versus them based on absolutely irrelevant characteristics like place of birth or skin color needs to be combated we need to ultimately recognize that principles values our capabilities as reasoning autonomous beings are what matter and what should unite us and that will enable us to accept that future diversity and again it'll be important for a lot of people to overcome their status quo bias during our lifetimes we've seen this happen with LGBT rights a lot of people had great concerns and reservations about for instance the legalization of gay marriage which only occurred throughout the western world during the last decade but say in the late 1990s if you surveyed most people myself included they would have been opposed to that concept I think what happened is a combination of greater exposure and a combination of activism so a lot of people found out that individuals who were close to them friends family members might have been gay or lesbian or transgender and that didn't really change who those people were it didn't really change their moral worth as human beings and it didn't change how respectively they behave in their interactions with others and that got a lot of people thinking it got a lot of people to recognize that perhaps the prejudice against LGBT individuals was not rational and should be overcome so even people with status quo bias by being gently introduced to others who have different ways of living who have made different choices but who are still good individuals and way of respect can change their views and the big challenge is how to do that with people who choose augmentations there have already been cases for instance of discrimination against cyborgs there's a famous individual who had essentially a bionic eye implanted and it had a recording device and there were certain instances where he had been harassed as a result of that so one of the positions that the transhumanist party will advocate is of course combating discrimination against people who choose to be augmented so moving on Alcott Evans says it would be funny if someone were to go for their first life extension treatment I presume and then accidentally slipped on a banana peel well I would say that does illustrate an important point biological life extension freedom from disease does not necessarily spare one from accidents as Aubrey de Grey says you could still get run over by a bus so it's not technically immortality it's not indestructibility I do think it will alter people's attitudes toward risk in other areas of life I wrote an article in 2013 called life extension and risk aversion so if you live dramatically longer then you have a lot more life to lose from an accident so I think people will become more careful in how they approach day to day life maybe they will drive more carefully or insist on autonomous vehicles being universally deployed now the time horizons will lengthen they will have more of an incentive for instance to prevent pollution or other long-term environmental damage since they will be around to see the adverse consequences of that or if their time horizons lengthen considerably they will have an incentive to prevent natural disasters that occur on very long time frames for instance earthquakes which could come about every few hundred years and while a few people are cognizant of that mostly seismologists and experts in public safety most individuals don't really plan for that and they for instance settle in areas and build industry in areas that are actually very seismically active for example the bay area in california which is the leading technology hub today and yet I wonder how extensive and unfortunate the destruction would be if another earthquake were to happen even of the magnitude say of the 1906 san francisco earthquake so individuals will have more of a personal incentive to get involved in preventing calamities like earthquakes super volcanoes asteroid impacts long-term climate change and man-made existential risks for instance the risk of nuclear war which unfortunately is still alarmingly high and if people have an indefinite amount of life to lose rather than just say 50 to 70 years of life to lose they will be incentivized to oppose this kind of reckless use of and even existence of weapons of mass destruction continuing on uh alcott evans says uh as someone who's made 90 of my money through stocks and other investments I see potential in the technological future what emerging fields do you think will be the best investments well this is certainly uh an important question in my view and I can by no means uh claim to be an investment expert given that it's not just the fundamentals of a particular industry or a particular field that lead to positive investment returns it's also in many respects macroeconomic dynamics that individuals cannot control and seem to be uh divorced from reason or from uh fundamental features of a particular industry the whole boom and bust cycle in an economy uh seems to be driven by forces that are independent of what a particular industry does a lot of economists for instance have pointed out it's due to government manipulation of the money supply or credit availability or interest rates and there's another school of thought uh the Keynesian school of thought that uh points out that there are certain animal spirits that operate uh essentially the bull representing this kind of irrational exuberance in uh allen greenspen's words or the bear representing irrational panic and excessive retrenchment after a stock market crash for instance and these kinds of forces especially over the time frame of a few years can negate even the most fundamentally sound and rational investment strategy with that being said i wish i had bought tesla stock circa 2007 because right now it would be uh at an immensely higher valuation per share than it was at that point in time nonetheless a lot of historically contingent events had to happen in order for that to be the case ilan musk almost lost all of his money and if it weren't for a last-minute deal in 2008 between nasa and space x going through uh essentially we wouldn't have space x or tesla today and i think that that also shows the importance not just of investing with the aim of profiting from a particular technology or a particular sector but also understanding particular businesses and how likely or unlikely those businesses are to succeed now in terms of future fields i think biotechnology uh is a tremendous growth field i think the blockchain offers tremendous opportunities for innovation not just with cryptocurrencies but with smart contracts that can execute themselves or even distributed autonomous organizations that won't need human beings to run them it may be more fundamentally honest or predictable or reliable so if i had a lot of money to spare if i had say ten thousand dollars that i could just afford to lose completely uh and it wouldn't affect my standard of living i would probably look at uh those kinds of emerging areas uh which are very young right now uh very high risk but potentially extremely high reward uh another area where i have some regrets is that i didn't mind bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 even though i was well aware of it i recalled the first pizza uh the first transaction with bitcoin in 2009 was a pizza that's sold for 10 000 bitcoins now imagine that the person who got that amount of bitcoins if he or she kept them would be a multimillionaire right now for selling a pizza and that that illustrates the potentially outsized returns of getting into a field very early when its prospects are still very uncertain but maybe one doesn't have to risk as much at that kind of early stage i did find out about bitcoin in the spring of 2011 uh back when it was selling for maybe one or two dollars uh per bitcoin and at the time i had computing capacity that i was using to run distributed computing projects mainly for protein folding but also for solving various complex mathematical problems and i was thinking of it in terms of well it's a nice idea this cryptocurrency idea but i don't know uh to what extent it will take hold and i realized the mathematical problems that uh were being solved in the course of bitcoin mining uh were just for the sake of essentially limiting the supply of bitcoin so that uh you wouldn't have dramatic bitcoin price inflation so i decided do i want to use my computing power to uh solve mathematical algorithms that don't have any broader public use or do i want to help solve actual scientific and mathematical problems and advance the progress of human knowledge and i decided on the latter perhaps i should have done more of the former because then i would have benefited from the uh astronomical rise in dollar prices of bitcoin since that time but that's hindsight and i would suggest a strategy where if you're risking something the potential rewards should be high but also you can afford to lose it all and not have it affect your basic standard of living so again if i had the money to execute that kind of investment strategy i would do nothing with 90 percent of my assets and i would place some fairly high risk but potentially high reward that's with 10 percent of my assets that i could live without now moving on uh user kivi i says if i gain success in my current business i intend to use the funds to start a business in blood transfusions my old my friend an old veteran who has passed on told me that every time he would go under the knife in his old age where he would receive a blood transfusion that he would feel remarkably different uh i think that's connected to the pair of biosis hypothesis where uh blood that is uh transferred for instance from younger mice into older mice actually uh leads those older mice to have a certain more youthful features to their organism more energy maybe even potentially longer life spans of course that's still very experimental and it's not clear to what extent that's going to work on human beings suffice it to say i think if there were a way to artificially manufacture a lot of blood that would mimic the characteristics of younger human blood for instance that would certainly be worthwhile to experiment with and see if it makes a difference uh but i would say that's still an emerging field nonetheless best of luck to kivi in setting up such a business let's see kivi also says well i've heard that something like Alzheimer's blood transfusions can reverse some of the effects and that relates to what was discussed previously he also has another question atlas shrug disparages the idea of government-funded science what are your feelings on this in particular if say a country shows to engage in a Manhattan project on life extension that is also quite a good question i had a video in 2008 urging life extension advocates not to accept government funding because of the potential strings attached to that as in politics uh being able to intervene and shape the course of life extension research the research or obstruct the course of life extension research if it becomes unpopular with certain constituencies now there's another argument that i expressed later in my video series called libertarian life extension reforms and that is a lot of government funding today is devoted toward explicitly destructive purposes say meaningless foreign wars uh that cost billions sometimes trillions of dollars destroy a lot of productive infrastructure destroy human beings set back the progress and certain parts of the world for decades if not centuries and compared to that scientific spending by the u.s government is minuscule so what would happen if for every increase in spending on life extension research or other scientific research or other technologies there would be an equivalent or greater reduction in military spending what would happen if the profile of government expenditures were transformed from one predominantly oriented toward destructive activities to one oriented toward constructive activities i think that would be a step forward and the reason for that is not withstanding the incentive problems the possible indirect drawbacks of government funded research i think it's an entirely different scale of problem to talk about indirect drawbacks versus what we have today which is direct destruction of many human beings by the current allocation of government expenditures so in an ideal world i would say there would be such radical abundance and such an abundance of private initiative and entrepreneurship that you wouldn't need government to do anything other than keep the peace in essence but that's not the world we live in right now and we are ultimately racing against the clock in terms of our own longevity so if there were a country that for instance undertook a Manhattan type project except not to develop nuclear weapons but to develop treatments and broadly distribute them throughout the population in order to achieve longevity escape velocity i would say the positive aspects of that program would outweigh the negative aspects especially if paired with reductions to military spending and particularly if paired with nuclear disarmament so let's undo the Manhattan project and replace it with a massive push toward life extension now continuing on laura indiana notes curtzweil is brilliant but he has some detractors and alcott evans states the last time i spoke to ray it seemed that he was ignoring the economic impact on science so i think with ray curtzweil's ideas which are quite insightful he seems to have a view that exponential technological progress is the predominant force and it overwhelms all other forces and he has presented historical evidence to that effect for instance computing power has improved in spite of two world wars a cold war various societal unrests during the 20th century and he seems to present that as evidence that social trends don't matter as much uh relative to the exponential advances of technology now to the extent that he provides historical evidence for this it's difficult to argue with his empirical conclusions nonetheless if you read uh not his 2005 book the singularity is near but his earlier book uh from circa 1999 the age of spiritual machines there are certain elements that he predicted that haven't arrived yet and it seems to me that the sociological dynamics that could warrant progress are perhaps more subtle than uh grand calamities like world wars uh there have been observations uh for instance by tyler cowan that at least in certain respects uh we have entered a so-called great stagnation where we have progress in certain fields we still have progress in computing and information technology we still have progress in medicine we have progress certainly in consumer facing applications but what about big infrastructure what about uh say space flight uh SpaceX is trying to make a significant difference in that area but in many respects we don't have say reusable vehicles uh even to enter into the earth's orbit and carry human beings there like the space shuttle was intended to do for 30 years from 1981 to 2011 we don't have supersonic passenger flights anymore along the lines of the concord which was retired in the early 2000s so there is this stagnation in certain very important aspects of our lives the large physical infrastructure and that is posing a barrier uh i think there is also another barrier that we have to be cognizant of and that is the barrier within our own minds we've been living through an era of information explosion and yet our ability to process that information given that most of us are biologically unaugmented is still about the same as it was a few decades ago uh so that's another barrier that uh suggests to me we're going to need to be creative if we want to continue pushing technology forward that exponential progress is not guaranteed we need to work for it uh in 2002 there was an interesting uh discussion between Ray Kurzweil and Max Moore uh another great transhumanist philosopher and while Ray Kurzweil took this position that the progress of technology is essentially inevitable and assured Max Moore emphasized to a much greater extent the cultural, political, sociological influences on progress and how you really do need to have public support and attitudes that are friendly toward positive change rather than reactionary now moving on Kvi says the issue and reason why nationalism is arising is the cultural void left by western style multiculturalist societies I think uh in to a great extent a lot of people misunderstand what multiculturalism is supposed to be uh I would say it is in its best form a kind of cosmopolitanism a cosmopolitan uh going back to the Greek roots as a citizen of the universe someone who identifies with universal principles and values to a much greater extent than with a particular set of people a particular tribe or the artifacts of that tribe and in terms of what a good multiculturalism would do it would emphasize the common values the common attributes that we all have and could potentially express so as to improve the human condition and the transhuman condition uh what I think is toxic is any form of tribalism any form of what might be called identity politics in the sense of saying what matters isn't what you value what you think what you do but some circumstantial attributes of birth it could be something superficial like skim color or hair color or it could be something more abstract like you were born in a particular place and you share these common cultural roots like a language or literature or art and I would say there are many cultural traditions that offer great value and we should be able to take from every society's history from every society's literature art science language philosophical tradition what we think is important and relevant and valuable to shaping our future this is where I would say perhaps the term multiculturalism may be misleading in the sense that to some people at least it might imply that everybody should stay within their own little fragmented tribes and what a cosmopolitan attitude would advocate is no everybody should try to find out as much as possible about everybody else and their world views and their histories and also try to create some sort of fusion that takes the best elements that everyone has to offer and that fusion I think needs to be grounded in the values and principles of the 18th century age of enlightenment the concept of reason the concept of universal rights for individuals who are capable of rational consciousness who are capable of autonomous decision-making who are capable of experiencing emotions at a certain degree of sophistication and that should be an ever-broadening circle of sympathy as Adam Smith described it in his theory of moral sentiments that should be interpreted in a way to encompass rather than to exclude so if there's ever any doubt if there's ever a borderline case it is best if we air to air on the side of inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness I think a lot of people think at least with regard to a particular stereotype of multiculturalism that it is in some sense devoid of value or purpose I believe that is also a misunderstanding the idea is to find universal principles that are actually stronger than the ideas that unite a particular tribe or a particular smaller group of people focus on values that would work for everyone and focus on goals that would be worthwhile no matter who you are where you were born what other circumstantial characteristics you might have values like technological progress prosperity liberty are ones we can potentially all agree on and life extension is among them I would say also it's important to consider philosophical paradigms and this is more of a sweeping characterization of entire eras of course for the vast majority of human history the predominant philosophical paradigm was one of pre-modernism essentially this more tribally rooted way of thinking where one's particular group be it an ethnic group a tribe a religion or loyalty to a particular leader or dynasty were considered paramount and that changed quite dramatically in the 17th and 18th centuries with the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment where the modern paradigm came to the forefront and the modern paradigm emphasized reason progress these kinds of universally applicable values unfortunately in a lot of the western world in the 20th century that was supplanted by the post-modern paradigm that essentially was characterized by a more divisive type of identity politics a rejection of universal truth this identification with more particular narratives and the idea that people could just construct their own narratives but they wouldn't be individual narratives they would be collective narratives and everybody was a slave to a collective narrative so what we need to do is call upon the best in the modern philosophical tradition and enter into a kind of trans modern or hyper modern paradigm as it has been characterized where the meaning and purpose can still be universal and broadly applicable and can encompass everyone and can overcome the old prejudices and these ideas of progress of individual improvement but also of the improvement of the human species can rise to the forefront the difference between modernism and trans modernism stems I think from the extent of our technological capabilities what we can do now is a lot more dramatic than what the 18th century philosophes of the Enlightenment were able to do they were mostly concerned with essentially thinking about the problems of the day instead of just blindly deferring to tradition and beginning to instead of just saying oh authority X wrote this in a book therefore it must be right considering how do we actually solve this problem if we want a good outcome and that simple change in attitude resulted in not just dramatic reforms to societies but an acceleration of technological progress the industrial revolution grew out of the Enlightenment and of course that vision can be replicated and it can be replicated to much greater effect given the technological starting point that we have now uh moving on Yucatidina Vladimirov writes what are your thoughts regarding the combination of bionic life extension with biological i.e. biological brain maintained with sense therapies coupled with a self-healed durable bionic body I think something like that is very likely to emerge in the future a lot of people already have a prosthetic one could even call them bionic parts some people have artificial hearts some people have artificial limbs today and I see no reason why in the future if a person wants to repair damage or achieve certain physical augmentations they would limit themselves either to a solely biological approach or to a solely bionic or artificial type of augmentation for lack of a better word so I would say yes it's quite feasible that you'll see a lot of people who are both cyborgs and genetically modified for instance let's see red sbr says that's very altruistic regarding bitcoin ha ha well uh in retrospect one can always say one could have allocated one's time a little bit differently uh with a somewhat different result uh again at the time it seemed more sensible to me now I do wish that while I would have continued to run the other distributed computing calculations I would have also mined some bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 uh let's see Wendy Stoleroff says there's no evidence that blood transfusions actually extend life unfortunately I would rather uh transhumanists weren't vampires in any case well uh I agree it should be uh research to a greater extent in mice it seems to have had some rejuvenating effects in humans we just don't know yet I think of course it needs to be done ethically so to do any sort of parabiosis experiments one would need to manufacture the equivalent of young human blood one shouldn't just use the blood of actual young human beings but uh I think that's pretty common sense uh going on did Chris cancel uh it seems uh Mr. Monteiro has not made an appearance yet so we will just continue with answering questions uh for the time being and maybe we will reschedule uh with him for a different time but I think this was useful in terms of engaging with fewer questions and certainly it has channeled the discussion towards some interesting paths uh let's see Laura Indiana asks how to weaken the military industrial complex well the transhumanist party as you know advocates replacing the military industrial complex with concerted research efforts to fight disease and push technology forward I think ultimately the military industrial complex derives a lot of its power from the prevalence of a fear-based attitude the idea that there are these threats everywhere be they threats from terrorists or threats from other countries regimes and we need to always maintain the strongest possible posture of deterrence lest we be overwhelmed and that too is at the very least an exaggerated threat perception to get people's fears aligned with the actual risks that face them I think is a major challenge of the kind of advocacy that we wish to pursue so for instance what are people most likely to die of in the western world they're most likely to die of heart disease cancer Alzheimer's disease with regard to deaths prior to senescence accidents automobile accidents in particular are a principal source of death and those risks dwarf the risk of a terror attack by orders of magnitude and it's important to recognize that because terror attacks are less likely to kill an individual than being struck by lightning or falling out of one's bed and yet most people because those other risks are mundane and somewhat ubiquitous either ignore them don't think much of them or accept them as just the dangers they have to face when living in today's society so how to get that attitude altered with respect to some very particular threats that are perhaps not as mundane and so they attract a lot of media attention and one reason why they attract a lot of media attention is precisely because they're so rare that you could write a story about one terror attack whereas if you wrote a story about one heart attack of somebody who is not a celebrity that would seem kind of odd John Smith of Chicago Illinois died yesterday at the age of 82 from a heart attack and he would have been one of several tens of thousands of people so it would be kind of strange if there were a news story just about John Smith other than in an obituary that attracted any significant attention and yet the aggregate death toll from heart attacks is colossal so how do we refocus people's awareness toward the things that are actually likely to kill them let's see continuing on again you continue if Lajinakava writes thoughts on Trump pick Tim O'Neill and roll back on regulations surrounding efficacy well let me just say I have been quite critical of the Trump administration more generally I do not know very much about Tim O'Neill's personal outlook Donald Trump has made some statements that in general I would agree with with regard to for instance allowing terminally ill patients the right to try experimental medicines I completely agree with that I completely agree generally that medicines that have passed FDA tests for safety even if they haven't passed tests for efficacy should at least be available for patients to choose from if they have done their own research and they are informed as to the fact that these treatments have not fully passed all of the FDA tests now what is O'Neill going to do more generally what is the Trump administration going to do more generally with regard to liberalizing these controls is still an open question and I am taking a bit of a wait and see attitude suffice it to say among my grievances with the Trump administration this is not anywhere near the top of the list but I would need to delve into it more systematically and see what O'Neill actually does before I pass judgment let's see moving on according this is again you continue Vladimiro Kovac according to Kevin he is actually a very good friend of mine and far from crazy he is a caring father and hardworking colleague who supports human rights and the reduction of global violence I am not certain to whom that refers whether that refers to Tim O'Neill or to somebody else but we can maybe clarify that later Wendy Stoleroff says I can't speak for Genotti but from what I can tell O'Neill would risk associating transhumanism with snake oil non-efficacious treatments I would say there's already to a large extent a history of snake oil being sold with the promise of life extension in fact that predated by many decades and even centuries serious scientific efforts at life extension it's one reason why there's been such a stigma around it and why for instance Aubrey de Grey has said if in the 1970s or 1980s a bio gerontologist were to say I'm interested in actually solving the problem of aging rather than simply studying how aging unfolds they would lose a lot of scientific credibility gradually that is changing and actually a lot of mainstream research is independently coming to some of the same potential strategies that Aubrey de Grey has articulated as part of the sentence program so I would say the challenge isn't one of how to prevent the public perception of longevity research from being considered as snake oil because that perception is already here the challenge is how to advance actually effective technologies and actually legitimate science to a sufficient extent that the perception of snake oil will gradually diminish and I don't know whether O'Neill will help with that or be detrimental to that I will have to examine what he actually does and what he stands for also keep in mind there are a lot of people who for instance take over the counter supplements today of dubious effectiveness there is even at the very least a strong dispute about whether taking multivitamins for a healthy individual actually does anything useful to lengthen life or prevent disease if you have a vitamin deficiency of a particular type then yes taking vitamins would help you overcome that deficiency but if you get all of the vitamins that are necessary for a healthy body to function in the course of your diet do you really need to be taking the multivitamin supplement there is a decades old industry that wants to convince you that you do need to take them but again scientific studies are also disputing that in some respect so it is always up to an individual to be skeptical to do their own research and to calculate risk versus reward to the extent that that's possible with the information available now continuing on Alcott Evans says I don't think weakening the military complex is a good idea most of our innovative breakthroughs the internet and sensory lights have come from military experiments and stealth methods to some extent that's true the internet itself was originally ARPANET that was intended as a communications system that would withstand even a nuclear war DARPA does a lot of experiments with robotics it has sponsored experiments with autonomous vehicles for instance and to the extent that military agencies have done that of course that has had good effects but that is such a tiny proportion of what the military budget is used for a lot more of the military budget I would say is wasteful spending say the infamous $700 toilet seats or fighter jet programs that somehow run into the many billions of dollars even though say building a commercial aircraft would cost a lot less and there's a lot of of course pork barrel spending a lot of spending that gets channeled to favorite contractors who want to keep certain programs alive not because they're useful for any sort of purposes of human well-being but because they are remunerative to those particular firms so this is where I think a more explicit focus on research into the areas that we would consider beneficial would be preferable so why not say spin-off DARPA as its own agency for advanced research projects and it wouldn't be necessarily primarily focused on military purposes if the military wants to use some of the byproducts of that that may be fine for instance helping soldiers recover from injuries or increasing their endurance or decreasing their exposure to combat situations through the more extensive use of technology I don't see anything wrong with that per se but I think the primary focus shouldn't be for military purposes with incidental civilian benefits that will be manifest a few decades later but rather the primary purpose should be of achieving civilian benefits and if the military also happens to benefit that's fine too so as an example the internet was developed at least in its early infrastructure in the 1960s and 1970s and yet the civilian benefits only really started to manifest themselves in the early 1990s so that's a generations gap between when those technologies became theoretically feasible and when they became available to the general public I would certainly hope that that gap between development and adoption be considerably decreased now continuing on Alcott Evans also says there's no way to cancel global conflicts especially with the rise of a lack of indifference so the idea I suppose that people care about the outcome of a particular geopolitical situation or a particular national rivalry he also says regardless of whether the conflict is economical or from a military purpose competitive play in itself will always survive so then the question is what is the damage that is possible through that uh competitive play I had a short story that I wrote circuit 2008 called the fate of war where the idea is in a future society where there are ample resources ample prosperity and material abundance people don't want to risk their lives anymore they have too much to lose so at first when fighting over resources when engaging in geopolitical contests they decided to set robots to fight other robots and resolve the contest that way so there would still be competition and then they realized it may not even be economical to have all of the destruction associated with robots damaging other robots because that's still quite a bit costly so why not just have virtual competitions and the outcomes of these virtual contests will decide essentially which nation gets to seize which piece of territory and of course in the future we might be a multi-planetary civilization so it might be contests over other worlds but why not do them in a way that inflicts minimal damage on actual sentient beings and on actual resources and instead just agree upon a set of rules and if you follow the rules and you win according to those rules then you might change the geopolitical situation I would say that's a lot more humane than what happens today now can we convince other people of this let's see Alcott Evans also uh notes that many people used the Venezuelan inflation crisis to invest in low wage jobs there instead of helping the economy I would say yes you you have people who attempt to profit from crisis in ways that are less than fully ethical on the other hand there was also a famous poem in the early 18th century by Bernard de Mandeville the fable of the bees which essentially talks about how sometimes private vices can lead to public virtues and his examples I would say are a bit more extreme than what I would agree with but there is also the idea from Adam Smith which was articulated in a more balanced manner that the pursuit of individual profit motives can often lead to more external benefit than even people acting with expressly benevolent intentions that I think requires the appropriate incentives as well so in a system where there's rule of law where property rights are respected where there's a strong deterrent against line cheating and stealing that could work on the other hand in a system where there's just pervasive chaos and there is no check for instance on fraud or on the use of force then some people will pursue their self-interest without any sort of moral restraints and that could lead to damage to others I will plan on concluding within a few minutes I note that key VI states you should do this more often highly enjoyable and I agree it was quite interesting for me to engage with the viewers here answer their questions on a wide range of topics and certainly I would hope to do that more often again we will also schedule another time with prismontero let's see steve key VI also says Stefan Malinou spoke recently on the success of the left and that their moral conviction is far greater to the point where they are willing to do anything to achieve their ends do you agree Wendy Stolier of replies Stefan Malinou has no intellectual credibility he runs a cult-like pyramid scheme he's a white supremacist and he's a misogynist and then there was a debate back and forth about the merits of Malinou I would say I I've listened to a lot of his videos and increasingly over time I have been disappointed with the extent to which he has moved away from libertarianism toward a more I would characterize it as populist conservatism he certainly embraced Trump I would say right now it is not the case that there is a monopoly by any ideological segment as to how far they're willing to go to achieve their goals again I don't think that's a feature of a particular single worldview I think it's more of a human personality trait and people with those personality traits tend to attach themselves to more vitriolic variants of a given ideology I think any ideology has benign variants and has toxic variants and that's because an ideology is a broad system and people have a choice of what to emphasize within that system even if say some people revere a holy book that says kill all infidels but it also says love thy neighbor as thyself they have a choice of which one of those to favor and of course over centuries a theological interpretation for many religions the kill all infidels component has kind of receded or been reinterpreted put in context in some way to minimize the damage it would do and the love thy neighbor component has been elevated its significance but there are some people who don't want to do that and those people are in my view a great obstacle and we need to be extremely vigilant in making sure that the types of personalities that aim toward destruction aren't allowed to become predominant and then I think we will conclude I will also thank everybody for attending thank you to David Wood for your good words regarding the high quality of output over numerous subjects I was very pleased to address the many thoughtful questions from the audience today I do hope to do this again I hope to have Chris Montero again and I hope to continue to get your input about the directions that the US transhumanist party should take in advocating life extension and emerging technologies thank you very much