 Ladies and gentlemen, we are live today on October 1st, 2015. This is International Longevity Day, and this event is one of many events, celebrations, demonstrations, discussions that are occurring throughout the world. This is a panel in conjunction with MILE, the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension, on the question of, how can life extension become as popular as the War on Cancer? My name is Jannati Stolier of the Second. I am the author of Death is Wrong, the illustrated children's book on indefinite human life extension. I will be the host today for this panel, and we have a very interesting, diverse group of panelists here today, six individuals who have all been extensively involved in activism and advocacy for life extension, who each have their own perspectives to share on the central question. So let me introduce them to you. We have Adam Alonzi, who is the author of the fiction books, Praying for Death, a Zombie Apocalypse and a Plankin' Reason. He is a futurist, inventor, DIY enthusiast, biotechnologist, programmer, molecular gastronomist, consummate dilettante, and columnist at the Indian Economist. He has a blog at adamalanzi.wordpress.com, and he has a podcast website at adamalanzi.libson.com. We have Sven Bultaris, who is a founder and member of the Board of Directors of Heels, the Healthy Life Extension Society, based in Brussels, Belgium. He has worked as a postgraduate researcher at the SENS Research Foundation and at Yale University. Moreover, he is an advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation's A-Prize, whose purpose is to put the development of artificial life forms into the open. Then we have Keith Kamito, a computer programmer and mathematician whose work brings together a variety of disciplines to provoke thought and promote social change. He has created video games, bioinformatics programs, musical applications, and biotechnology projects featured in Forbes and NPR. And Keith is very active right now in advocacy and crowdfunding for life extension research. He runs the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and the crowdfunding site, lifespan.io. He just recently concluded the Mitosens Research Fundraiser which met its $30,000 goal at lifespan.io. Rowan Horn is a philosopher and lecturer on the importance of trying to live forever. He founded the Eternal Life Fan Club in 2012 to encourage fans of eternal life to start being more strategic with regard to this goal. And Rowan and I have had many conversations over the past few years. I have interviewed him, he has interviewed me, and it's always just a great stimulating discussion. B.J. Murphy is the editor and social media manager of Serious Wonder. He is a futurist, philosopher, activist, author, and poet. He is an advisory board member for the Lifeboat Foundation and is a writer for IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. And we also are very pleased to have Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, who is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, and a leading voice for genetic cures. She is a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine modalities. And she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. But I also want to note she sits on the board of the International Longevity Alliance, which is the group that has been advancing the idea of International Longevity Day and has been helping to coordinate these presentations worldwide. So welcome everybody to this panel discussion. I would begin with an expansion upon our central question. And that is, what can be done to raise public support for the pursuit of indefinite life extension through medicine and biotechnology to the same level as currently exists for disease-specific research aimed at cancers, heart disease, ALS, and similar large-scale nemeses? So it's not just the popularity of cancer research that we can discuss today, but the popularity of disease-specific research more generally. It seems like the majority of people would agree. This is a good thing. It's a good thing to research cures for cancer or ALS or heart disease, and how can we get that same mindset of this is a good thing to be applicable in the eyes of the public to life extension, by which I mean methods, techniques to dramatically increase the average human lifespan and the maximum human lifespan. So Sven, we understand you had some prepared presentation slides you wanted to share. So let's start with you and with your comments. And our listeners can also download the presentation slides from the event page and the event description if they want to follow along. Yes, thank you very much. So this was actually a presentation I made several years ago for a Heels meeting. And it was after I read this book, which I will show later in English. It's a really good book. I recommend everyone to read it. It's about cancer, and it details the history of how cancer research was made popular. So let me start my presentation. Okay. Can you see this? Yes. Okay. Okay. So this is the book, the English version, The Emperor of All Maladies. You can see the author. I'm not going to try to pronounce it because probably people will laugh with my pronunciation. So here this is the history of the National Institutes of Aging that was established in the US. And one lady, Florence Mahoney, played a very important role in pushing this struggle to have the institute started. She got support from Mary Lasker, and we will see that name coming up later again. And from several other people, such as the Senator Claude Pepper, we will see again later on as well. The creation of the National Institute of Aging was opposed by the NIH, and that was probably because they didn't want to have research money funneled away from the NIH budget. The creation of the NIH was established in 1972, however it was opposed by the Office of Management and the Budget. And you can read here their statement, it could raise false expectations that the aging process can somehow be controlled and managed through biomedical research. And so following this suggestion by the Office of Management and Budget, President Nixon vetoed the bill. However, in 1974, by pressure from Florence and other people, eventually Nixon signed the bill and the National Institute of Aging was established. Okay, so now we will talk about the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. So in 1910, the American Association for Cancer Research convinced President Taft to ask Congress to build a National Lab for cancer research, however it ended up in a failure and nothing got done. In 1972, Senator Needley asked Congress $5 million for research on cancer and they eventually gave him $50,000 to please him while basically not giving him anything that would establish much research at all. He tried again 10 years later and then the National Cancer Institute was founded. However, due to the war that broke out a few years later in Europe, the funding for the Institute was completely abolished. And so in 1946-47, he tried again to have funding funneled back to the Institute and his proposal again got rejected. So here we can see that it wasn't easy to establish a National Cancer Institute. And so we experienced this struggle every day when we tried to do it for aging and we might somehow think there is some type of bias against aging research but in reality that bias also existed against cancer research 100 years ago. So then there was this other institution, this non-profit institution, the American Society for the Control of Cancer and it was an organization by doctors and researchers and they didn't really do much more than talking with each other. So they didn't reach out to the general public, they didn't have much of fundraisers going on and as a result their budget in 1943 was only $230,000 a year. Then this lady who you can see on the picture, Mary Woodward Lasker got involved and she was a society lady and she knew a lot of important people and she started writing articles in readers' digests trying to attract people's attention and to get funding for this society. And in one month she raised $300,000 US dollars compared to the budget before her which was only $230,000 over the whole year. She hired a publicity expert and she also changed the board away from doctors and researchers to business people, movie producers, publicity agents, lawyers, people from the pharmaceutical industry and so on. So she brought together many, many more different people with different backgrounds who could help to reach out and share to their network information about cancer research. And eventually the name got changed to the American Cancer Society and to give you an idea of one of their outreach is they spread 9 million flyers, 50,000 posters, 1.5 million stickers, 165,000 collection boxes to raise funds, 3,000 displays. And here you can see the result of that promotion campaign. So the line represents the time when Maria Lasker became involved before her, the budget as I already said was $230,000 US dollars, it increased to $832,000 one year later. Then it became over $4 million and two years after that it became $12 million. So a gigantic increase in the budget. Now let's look at the National Institute of Aging, its budget has also been increasing over the years. In 1996 it had a budget of $451 million and this is more recently in 2003 to 2004 it reached the goal of $1 billion and in 2012 it's $1.13 billion. So a gradual increase but very, very slow. And if you then see how that budget has been spent you can see that of the over $1 billion in 2012 only $166 million got spent on the aging biology. And that is actually less than behavioral and social research, as you can see below it. The largest amount is spent on neuroscience which is almost half a billion. And so Gafilov said in 2008 that of all the research proposals that were approved by peer review only about 20% actually got funded. So switching back to cancer research we see that one of the things that was very important for cancer research to be promoted to a general audience and to the politicians was to have a famous scientist standing behind the goal of defeating cancer. And that became Sidney Farber, the person who invented the first chemotherapy drug aminopterein. And I suggest here that this drug aminopterein which you see at the top and the sign for cancer research that what this drug did for cancer research in the sense that it showed people well actually it is possible to cure or at least to slow down cancer is what we can do similarly with longevity mutants or with rapamycin for aging research. So aminopterein wasn't a cure for cancer. It only extended lifespan by a few months but it inspired people. It inspired people that actually cancer is not an insolvable problem. It could be tackled and the same with rapamycin it won't solve aging but it can inspire us to look for cures for aging. So here again you can see this is just before 1970 where the big obstacle for the fight against cancer is a severe lack of money that they had. And so here this is one famous ad that appeared in the newspaper that was very important in trying to convince the public and convince President Nixon to launch a real war on cancer. And that was by pointing out to the president himself in the newspaper that you can cure cancer. And so you know if he then didn't want to do it he will basically say he didn't want to cure cancer if he didn't give money to it. So they put him in this difficult situation where he had to accept. And one person wrote that if you were against cancer research you were against mother, apple pie and the flag, the typical symbols of the US. And so that also put him in a difficult situation. So in 1971 the Conquest of Cancer Act was approved by Congress and that happened after one million letters got sent urging the people in Congress to vote for this act. This is also coming from the book with which I opened this presentation. And in the book the author asked why is it that certain diseases really seem to have a big impact in a certain era. And he says that it's coupled to a certain psychological crisis like cancer for example he says really became famous in the 1970s when our fear changed from external fears over a war with the Soviet Union to internal fears. But at that point in time it was clear that the Soviet Union was losing and so people's fears changed they weren't so much afraid of the Soviet Union or nuclear war anymore and they started to think about internal problems. The same happened with AIDS which coincided with the sexual revolution in the 1980s there was more sexual freedom but then this disease turned up. And SARS coincided with the fear of globalization so somehow certain things that happen in society outside of a certain disease can help catalyze the public interest in the disease. And so my question is is there anything happening that we can use as a catalyst to make aging research more popular. And so in more recent times we see that several authors including myself have argued that aging should be recognized as a disease. And I want to say that very soon well at the moment the WHO is working on the ICD-11 so the international classification of diseases and there is a push to at least open a debate to include aging as a disease although it may not be successful it's still going to be good to be shot and maybe then for the version afterwards we could succeed in having aging classified as a disease. And so yes that's my presentation thank you. Alright thank you Sven very informative and it definitely gives us a lot of historical context to think about particularly it was interesting for me how slow in historical terms the ramp up was to this current state where the majority of the public recognizes that fighting cancer is worthwhile and I wonder if the ramp up to getting aging recognized as a disease and getting the public to combat it would be any faster than this I certainly hope so. So Elizabeth we would be interested in your thoughts on the central question of the discussion. Oh sure so I have a lot of thoughts on that and thanks Sven. And I think that that's a fantastic introduction to the tie-in with cancer. So my company Bioveva we actually consider aging a disease biological aging of course we want you to get chronologically older just not biologically older and I kind of wonder if one of the catalysts to this could be the fear of getting older campaign that Pfizer actually believe it or not started a couple years ago so just the sheer cost in getting older and the detriment of these diseases of aging. So treating aging as a disease actually encompasses cancer so it's not independent of that so cancer and nephropathies and heart disease and Alzheimer's and things like that dementia these are all aging diseases and so I think that they can be put into one area and we certainly look at all of those so we're working on therapeutics that might in fact help each one of these and all of them as a whole by looking at the biological aging of the cell. So anyway I think that they tie in I don't think that they're independently separate I think that maybe the call to action is the demographics and the large costs of aging as a disease. We certainly have hit the silver tsunami in every industrialized country we're about to hit that worldwide in 2020 there'll be more people over 65 in the whole world as there are under five and that includes every country in the world and when you think about that the under five become the 15 then the 25 and the 35 as this 65 year old population ages and they can't afford the health care costs of the over 65. So it's a social and it's demographic and it's a political action that I think that we could actually be very successful in gaining momentum on. It affects everyone it's not a disease specific if you will even though it's aging as a disease specific. I think a lot of cures for childhood disease lies in these therapeutics as well so it's not just a therapeutic of an aging population. So our company has interesting news that we'll go ahead and talk about today on international longevity day. We have successfully treated our first subject with not only one but two gene therapies to treat aging as a disease and we await the outcome we may have no outcome or we may actually have a great outcome to talk about in the following months. So we have we are definitely doing our part we're a very disruptive little company and we're very tenacious and so we're excited to be part of this charge of making a more humane world and a world that hopefully we can live without these diseases that cause a lot of suffering. Well thank you Elizabeth we are honored to have you make your announcement here on this panel. Best wishes to you I hope that this treatment shows every success in reversing senescence that would be momentous. I think history making if that's the result and I think one very important point you made to hammer home is by fighting biological aging we are also fighting all of these specific diseases that people are concerned about like cancer and heart disease. We greatly reduce the underlying probability of people getting those diseases if they are biologically younger. So I think that's something that every member of the general public should understand. Now B.J. what are your thoughts on our central question today? Well my thoughts come from my background in activism. You know I've had to deal with a lot of political pushback on a lot of different issues and aging is really it's not different from any other major issue. There's going to be a strong hand of bureaucracy that will try and push the war against aging as being something that is not tantamount to fighting against cancer for example. And this could become an issue and we need some kind of a movement that will emphasize on fighting against aging that is in tantamount with fighting against diseases like cancer. Because as Sven showed the war against cancer itself had a lot of political pushback against scientists who are very concerned about a disease that was so dangerous like cancer and people already knew just how dangerous cancer was. But it wasn't them that was withholding the fight against cancer it was those in power who would be able to provide the funding and the necessary traction that a movement like that would need at a global scale. And whenever we talk about the fight against aging as Liz pointed out you know this is the same as fighting against every other disease that we have been emphasizing on from cancer to Alzheimer's any kind of diseases that is age related we're just trying to couple all of these and put it in as a single movement. And how we do this you know there are different ways and mostly from my background I try looking at it from a more technological point of view in terms of you know little niches of technologies that are helping us you know take that incremental step by step process towards it you know but even then even with these new technologies coming out that are helping us fight against aging you know we're still seeing an unfortunate political pushback and a lot of that is also being guided by the hands of corporations who profit off of certain unfortunate facets of our society that are actually increased in the likelihood of cancer or at least increase in susceptibility of cancer to our major populace and a lot of that has to do with like the tobacco industry. Any kind of technology that comes in that provides a better alternative to tobacco smoking which is one of the leading causes of cancer you know whatever someone pushes something like you know the e-cigarette we've seen that been gaining a lot of traction here lately but it's also gained a lot of political pushback by the tobacco industry because it does provide an alternative and there was a recent study by the public health England who provided a comprehensive study that showed that e-cigarettes or what it's called now is vaping has a detrimental decline on tobacco smoking at least in England and we're seeing the same thing here in the United States and that actually scares industries like the tobacco industry because they know that people do not want to get cancer they do not want to get these detrimental diseases that will decline their health it will increase their likelihood of aging at an earlier age and whenever we are dealing with those kind of issues we're always going to get that kind of political pushback and corporate pushback and having a movement that will emphasize on new technologies to help us fight against these things to have a movement that emphasizes on technological advancement above political bureaucracy will be equally important as that of the technologies themselves we're seeing the same thing with technologies like genome editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 and that is getting a lot of heat on being used in terms of genome editing for our own biology for human biology because we believe that it would be dangerous and that it would result in increased at least an increased disproportion in terms of revenue between the rich and the poor they make it sound like it's only the rich who are going to benefit from the war against aging which is absurd because the war against aging everyone here ages it doesn't matter whether you're rich or you're poor we are all going to be affected by aging we're all in with aging comes cancer with comes with Alzheimer's diabetes all sorts of different diseases and we already realize just how important it is to fight against the diseases so why not go to the source of the problem why not start combating against aging and it isn't going to you know we're going to have poor people going to have rich people it's going to vary throughout the entire demographics so having a movement that will emphasize on this fight and who is willing to fight against political pushback who's willing to fight against corporate pushback that will help us ensure that the fight against aging will be as popular as the fight against cancer very important insights thank you B.J. I do think it is quite worthwhile to delve into the question of large institutional resistance be it from political institutions or from large private institutions that have a certain entrenched way of operating and that may be threatened by emerging technologies from e-cigarettes to gene therapy so I think this is an area that we will want to revisit later on in the discussion as well along with it a corollary question is it on net beneficial to have large public institutions fund aging research or does that lead anti-aging research to essentially be captured by these types of rigid arrangements that don't want to change and might resist actual innovations so that's something for everyone to think about but in the meantime let's hear some thoughts from Rowan Horne okay everyone hear me yes okay cool so the biggest difference okay I think in people's minds as a lot of people here were saying is the that people when people think of cancer Alzheimer's disease and other diseases they think it's possible to actually cure those diseases whereas aging they just think it's completely inevitable right they just think there's no intervention that could ever be done that would actually stop aging so there's a hopelessness so I think one of the big things we have to do to make aging as as a prominent as the war on cancer is just instill hope in people like get educate them that like Aubrey de Grey is doing you know so just more of that and I think that'd be very helpful and also something like the immortality bus which I've been a part of I've been very lucky to be a part of the immortality bus it's going around spreading this message you know that to two young people we're going to colleges and Zoltan is fun on this last leg of the tour he talked to university students and they really the idea was very well received and it's just inspiring I think targeting the youth of America because a lot of the older people they're very kind of closed minded to a lot of things and because they have a lot of there's a lot of religious ideas that I think directly oppose at least in the minds of many religious people if the religious ideas oppose the idea that we should even try to stop aging because I've actually talked to a lot of religious people and the attitude that comes across often is that God almost like wants us to suffer like it's part of the plan and this idea is very it's hard to combat because you know they look at their Bible they look at their Bible verses they interpret it in such a way and so how you can argue with that so religion is in a lot of ways very destructive to this idea that we should just cure aging especially because if you cure cancer you're still going to die if you should cure Alzheimer's disease you're still going to die so religious people that's more acceptable to them when it comes to the issue of aging the big the big difference here is that if you cure aging you don't even necessarily have to die and that runs very opposed diametrically opposed to the message the overall message of Christianity which is that you know you're you have to die like you have to die and then you're going to face the judgment like that's a big part of Christianity and so hopefully as our society becomes more secularized there's less religious ideas and I think naturally people will seek out an alternative salvation you know more and more secular people will be like hey you know we don't want to die you know we want to live and naturally we have to I guess we have to I think we have to inspire people like the future is going to be so great it's something you want to be alive for there's so much dystopian you know messages and move in movies we have to counter that and the people like no no no future is going to be awesome you want to be there for this and the only way to be there for that is you got it we got a cure aging and it's going to be a blast and also we have to and I'm I'm sure like everyone here agrees that we have to really show the atrocity of aging like really show it in detail get people to see the extreme suffering the aging causes we need more films that just expose this again I'm going to old folks homes and like that's something I want to do like make like films that's really showing horrible the horribleness of aging like what's going to happen to them so we can play a little bit on people's fears and that's I think that's very important and also play on their tuck on their heart strings like hey you want to alleviate this suffering like that's what that's what the cancer movement has done right it's like shown all these pictures of little kids with bald bald little kids and like it's trying to make people feel guilty in a sense right for not donating to that cause I think we have to do the same thing we have to show the people are afraid to show it like just how bad aging can really get like it's what's a nightmare we got to show it and get people to feel guilty for not being for this idea that we can end this and another thing we can do to make this as powerful as the war on cancer is you see what the war on cancer people are gathering together in large groups there's races like run for the cure there's like these huge races people are getting together and like they're like there's power in numbers so the transhumanism movement totally has to take advantage of you know meeting together in person having huge protests huge rallies as we've we're starting to do we did a rally we did a protest demonstration on the last leg of the mortality bus with existential threats that was an amazing success and we just need to have more of that and specifically about aging and specifically about how we don't need to die that death is not inevitable we have to destroy this idea that people have it's hard because people have been brainwashed at a very young age to like they think they have to die there's no way out of it and we have to we have to give them hope we have to reverse that thinking deep program them and we're gonna have to use every every means possible movies music celebrities everybody who has a talent it can be used to promote this message that we can cure aging and live indefinitely the mortality bus is doing a great thing sense.org is doing a great thing you guys are and I thank every one of you guys for being a fighter for aging this is definitely the most important cause let's do this so we don't have to die because life is awesome all right that's that's my intro there thank you thank you and life is awesome and I think you made a lot of important points I completely agree with you about the unfortunate preponderance of dystopian science fiction today that prevents people from seeing the hopeful possibilities of emerging technologies and in terms of how anti-aging research is perceived right now an acquaintance of mine whom I've known for a while who was also a science fiction author Joshua Dunn he wrote a book called exile empire so he's no stranger to science fiction he's not a transhumanist but he's at least within our universe of discourse what he says is most people don't envision life extension research is real they see it as sci-fi cancer on the other hand seems easier to attack so I think that's a perception that we need to challenge and that we need to counter and what you said with regard to that getting people hope that this is a problem that can be overcome within our lifetimes is very important Elizabeth Parrish just told us today that there was a successful gene therapy trial that may yield fruit in a few months time so that's no longer science fiction it's a real possibility within the proximate future and that's something people need to know about and there are a lot of other points that we'll want to touch on later the immortality boss campaign of course is going to be a major focus of our discussion as well I'm a supporter of this campaign I'm a supporter of Zoltan Eastvahn's candidacy for US president later on today I'll read a statement from Peter Rothman who takes a different perspective on the immortality boss but we can discuss it and we can see what we all think about this campaign and its impact but Rowan I appreciate your activism and your extensive involvement there thank Adam certainly Adam let's hear some thoughts from you on our central question hello everyone we have covered quite a bit of ground here so I will get into the meat of the matter as I always do we're operating under the assumption that human beings are essentially rational which I think is a horrible mistake to make smoking for instance has declined as much due to social pressures as the fear of cancer the person does not want to be perceived as low-brow or low-class this ties in with the concept of conspicuous consumption Thorstein-Velben-Veblen my mistake apologies when I was listening to Rowan talk about fear-based campaigns this is something I was utilizing in a commercial I was putting together for bio-viva and one of the surest ways to strike fear into the heart of modern Americans is to talk about the economy and how it will likely tank as a result of aging populations of course unlike the many thousands and thousands of doomsayers who've been talking about inflation deflation unemployment this this and that this is something that will happen as surely as the sun will rise yet when I look at the problem I see roots that go back many hundreds of years well a hundred years with frankfurt school and then many hundreds of years with rousseau we have people who are perennial technopessimus who believe we ought to go back to a state of nature this comes about in the neo-malthusian movement you have folks like paul erelech who say well you know all precious metals are going to go through the sky in another year and he lost that bet what do you know he was wrong consistently and so are many well-meaning but ultimately misinformed environmentalist who fail to take into account the power of exponential progress and this is a concept that's difficult for people to wrap their minds around because you have to scan many many fields at once and see how all of them connect together there our education system does not promote the proper skills that people need now to contribute to biological sciences to computer science which is becoming more and more entangled with biology as time goes on the frankfurt school with the idea that we're essentially equal that cultures are equal that you know this is wonderful margaret me talking about the samoans who are liberated and wonderful because they're primitive and then we go back and see oh wait they're not so liberated not so wonderful there's ritual rape and murder there and steven pinker's book the planks there the blank slate is wonderful excretion of that cherished myth so going back to the topic of aging there are these destructive means that are very old and some of them are as ancient as civilization itself if you look at greek vedic most indoeuropean cultures talk about or even non-indoeuropean cultures talk about a golden age that preceded civilization of course archaeology tells us that this age never existed and the stone age people would die at 35 30 of some infectious disease if they made it through childhood or made it through infancy so combating it comes down to comes down to slowly changing the means robert caldini talks about the methods used by chinese communists in the korean war they didn't torture american prisoners rather what they did is they slowly acclimated them to their way of thinking by making them make progressively more extreme statements so they may say well say the u.s. is not perfect they would say that and then they would ask them why steadily but surely it would happen so the problem has to be attacked in a subtle manner and from many directions at once going back to the fact people are not rational if you appeal to their vanity to their need to improve themselves to one up their neighbors going back to that one why his spirit is here in this room i'm not sure but i'm glad he has joined us you can get them to do almost anything gene therapy may be a luxury good for some people or may seem to be a luxury good at least if it's being used for sarcopenia or for aging skin for collagen production which of course i mean stimulating chondrogenesis or collagen production would also have some very useful applications besides making you look younger so the acceptance has to be thought about critically and we have to consider our audience and there are many different audiences making it seem possible or realistic is something that you and i have talked about an institutional sluggishness is also something you and i have talked about i'm not entirely sure how to address these problems besides a slow and steady dig at them all right thank you adam this was an excellent overview from a philosophical standpoint and from the standpoint of the history of philosophy i can add a few comments to that but i think there is an ongoing debate about the extent of human rationality on the other hand a major leap forward in human progress occurred during the 18th century age of enlightenment which was premised on at least the potential for human rationality and the potential to apply reason to dramatically improve the human condition on the other hand we still have these deeply irrational strains of thought present and in some cases dominating human societies and the large institutions that bj discussed during the malthusian strain of thinking i really like the example you used of paul erlich losing his bet with julian simon who is the author of the ultimate resource and julian simon's point was the ultimate resource isn't anything in the ground it's the human mind the ability of the human mind to come up with new solutions for tackling age old problems and expanding the range of possibilities of what human beings can accomplish so there's definitely a lot more to be said on this and i hope we return to these themes as well in our conversation but for now let's hear from keith comito and his thoughts on our central question hi firstly i want to say thanks for everyone putting this together and all the work that everyone is doing echoing some earlier sentiments and uh you know i'm kind of pleased with what i'm hearing already in that there's a lot of more nuanced discussion about the philosophical backgrounds and psychology and that angle which i really do think is one of the more important things that we should look at in how to to make the war on cancer uh effect for the war on aging so i want to go back to spence um initial sort of um slideshow there and and point out something that was also in the book the emperor of all maladies which is great there was also a tv special that was made that people can watch um and it was about the jimmy fund which was made by um the chemotherapy researcher who uh was mentioned there and basically what they hit upon is essentially a study of sort of cognitive biases about how people uh have you know hardware built in issues with how to perceive about uh certain things so the cognitive bias that they were exploiting there is scope neglect that people can't uh really wrap their mind around cancer this amorphous thing that affects millions of people so they found this one boy that had cancer jimmy and made this whole fund in pr campaign about you know how do we help save this boy jimmy and always telephone you know telephones and that kind of stuff and they raised a ton of money got all this public support and then we're able to use that public support to kind of leverage um against the government to try to get them to release funds and that kind of thing so i think that's very important so we need to kind of think about you know how what is our jimmy fund what can we do with aging that will have that same effect and i think the transhumanist movement in general can can can benefit a little bit from some remessaging i think in certain spaces where there's a little bit in some areas uh comes off as maybe uh bit condescending a bit um a bit committing the same error that we want to disabuse people up which is over certainty for example say brain uploading and that kind of thing that kind of far ends of transhumanism i think at this point in time it's disingenuous to try to convince people that that is absolutely going to work and is absolutely going to be a good thing there's still a lot of open questions there so i think almost that kind of thing should be left to a little bit later in the mission where we should focus on like uh eliz had mentioned the silver tsunami and and how that's going to affect pretty much every family in america in the coming decades because of the baby boomers and you know everyone's going to know someone who is suffering horribly with alzheimer's disease and i think it's much easier to position it as you know these things are objectively bad real art regard regardless of your religious background except etc don't you want to help with this and the quickest best way to help with that is to attack the root causes of aging and i really don't think there needs to be a conflict with uh certain forms of religious thought because i think you can position this in a very friendly way uh for example uh i've had a lot of discussions with people in in the clergy and that kind of thing and i've been able to sort of bring them around softly to accepting this as a good thing because you can really convince them using uh their own logic like say if you believe in an all powerful all benevolent creator um if you believe that nothing that we can do could ever be outside of his plan or her plan so if you know if you have faith if you have conviction of your own faith and your god believes that this isn't a good thing he'll find a way to make sure that it doesn't happen till then why don't we all work on trying to alleviate suffering and that's something that a lot of religions uh you know help the poor help suffering so i think that we shouldn't be hasty in making enemies of potential allies um if we can position this the right way um to piggyback on some earlier discussion too where uh there was some talk about you know what's the zeitgeist of the time and are there any elements of that that can be compatible with uh aging you know i think the the major idea that's really coming out right now is income inequality and i think that there definitely is sort of a way to parlay that into aging because you know the health care bomb that's going to happen and that might disproportionately make poor people suffer and that kind of thing so i think there's a way to take this into sort of an income inequality or equality angle to help bring this into a bit of a more mainstream uh sort of elements and as far as the final point that i'll make is as far as tactics of how to actually do this right so i obviously think you know things like the al s uh ice bucket challenge was a good thing it had a little bit of a gimmick but it worked so i think we should try to think about pr endeavors like that like right now uh i'm trying to do something with the life extension advocacy foundation called the lifespan challenge where people hold up a sign like this and give a personal reason why they care about this like for me you know i personally took care of my grandmother for many years with severe alzheimer's uh so you know that's what i talked about um crowdfunding i also think is another you know kind of sexy hot thing now and that's why we created lifespan.io to try to bring a broader demographic into this to try to get people excited because it is exciting like adam mentioned you know there is great historical precedence for this and i think if we can do a little bit more a better job of positioning this movement you know transhumanism even the word comes off as somewhat scary you know beyond human to the lay person it's it's almost an assault but i think we should focus on sort of the other side of that trans as in transatlantic you know across through you know this is something this is a quest that humanity has been on since literally the first thing written ever the epic of the ogamesh right and you us we all get to be part of the first hero's journey you know uh hero with a thousand faces style just a camp you know mythology like we get to be those people right now and that's pretty damn exciting and i think we can convince people of that um and i think that's that's a very important thing to do and again as adam mentioned you know they're people forget now you know we have those dystopian kind of viewpoints but there was times in history where people thought the future was going to be awesome you know the enlightenment then to romanticism and modernism in particular you know transhumanism in this is in a sense kind of like new modernism and then you know world war two happened and all that stuff and then there was post modernism and all this critique of progress and oh you know what is what is progress even mean is science even good and i think we can do a lot of work to help society not just transhumanism move beyond this point by just clearly kind of defining our terms here uh you know what is progress let's define progress simply as the continued survival of the human race in a changing and uncertain universe and the you know maximal happiness for the most amount of people even at that base rudimentary definition of progress i think you can reasonably prove that certain therapies and and endeavors are objectively uh good things for society to pursue and i think if we can kind of coerce some thought leaders in modern media you know youtube celebrities uh cosmetics leaders like for example one person that combines that is michelle fun she's a youtube celebrity with 10 million uh followers uh all that makeup you know liz if your therapy uh makes the skin actually better i'm going to share that with her and then have her share that to her 10 million people on youtube and i think things like that are like to be game changers overnight and that's personally like what i want the life extension advocacy foundation to focus on so we're working with a lot of kind of youtube science communicators uh we have endeavors in the works with you know like asap science um vsauce uh channels like that if you're familiar with the youtube space these science communicators that have huge followings and they talk about topics that are very close to this in a very engaging way you know like for example one video like that could be will overpopulation be the issue that we think it's going to be if people live longer and have a fun engaging talk about it and invite people it's not talking down to people saying you know here's this idea here's what we think will happen what do you guys think let's have a talk about it and i think that's the way to really sort of get this movement to take off by itself instead of us preaching we want to engage people and get them to talk about it and bring this initiative truly to the people so that's kind of my elevator pitch there excellent well thank you keith very much by the way uh i tremendously admire what you're trying to do with lifespan dot i o and the lifespan challenge uh i myself contributed to the mito sense fundraiser that just uh hit its thirty thousand dollar goal and i hope you have many more other such projects available on lifespan dot i o in the future it's really great to have a site that focuses specifically on research that's relevant to longevity and brings in ordinary people people who aren't institutional investors but might be able to contribute five ten hundred a thousand dollars sometimes that can make a real difference and anyone watching this can make a real difference by contributing to these kinds of campaigns i will also add the marketing aspect the aspect of building bridges with people of various world views and persuasions i think is an important one to consider and we can go into also the discussion of religion its relation with transhumanism i think there is a quite a bit of validity to what roan said at least with regard to a lot of prevailing interpretations of religious belief however it doesn't have to be that way in fact i always like to say religions evolve the christianity the types of christianity that are prevalent today are nowhere near the types of christianity that were prevalent in the third century ad and religions evolve in response to technological societal political realities i think in order to stay relevant in the twenty first century religions will have to increasingly move in a more transhumanist direction and do some serious theological interpretation about the desirability of extending lifespans on earth and the desirability of alleviating suffering through research into specific diseases as well as the underlying causes of diseases like senescence so with that let me also bring into the discussion peter rothman who is a well regarded entrepreneur one of the pioneers of virtual reality technologies he's also the editor of h plus magazine and i had originally wanted him to be one of our panelists but he had a time conflict however he was generous in providing us a statement that i could read and solicit everyone's responses to and i think this statement also makes a lot of compelling points it's provocative in certain respects and i think in some areas some of you will agree in some areas some of you will disagree but let me read what he says and then anyone who wants to can jump in with some comments so peter says i have a few thoughts on this central question of our discussion perhaps ironically they're in the form of more questions what exactly is the war on cancer how did it start how quote popular is it this popularity in this sense correspond to funding research results or any meaningful metric is this approach something we want to emulate wikipedia reports quote the war on cancer refers to the effort to find a cure for cancer by increased research to improve the understanding of cancer biology and the development of more effective cancer treatments such as targeted drug therapies the aim of such efforts is to eradicate cancer is a major cause of death the signing of the national cancer act of 1971 by then us president richard nixon is generally viewed as the beginning of the war on cancer though it was not described as a war in the legislation itself end quote the war on cancer is referring here to the passage of a law and does not really a war in the conventional sense the popularity of the idea is a bit of a misleading thing i'm not sure what this means here how many people supported the law back when it was passed how many people think it is a good idea now how many people search for this phrase on google popularity in the sense of the general public liking an idea had little or nothing to do with the passage of a law like this so to summarize the war on cancer required the passage of a law allocating funds the popularity of the idea had nothing to do with it the idea of a war on disease or an abstract concept such as terror is problematic war suggests enemies to attack and weapons to deploy but these metaphors are not always correct in reference to curing an illness like cancer or solving the complex problem of aging after all the enemy in cancer is our own dna how can we attack it with aging the issue is even more dramatic a war on aging suggests eliminating older persons perhaps the war metaphor is at least overused and deserves to be questioned has the war on cancer been won wars are won and lost but our scientific investigation of methods to cure disease goes on just because a disease is able to be cured in some cases does not mean we have quote one curing aging is in fact not entirely separate from curing cancer cancer is largely a disease of older persons especially certain cancers so any quote war on aging would at least overlap with the war on cancer creating a new war is always problematic however declaring war does not produce funding successfully defeating aging requires funding of research and development of medical techniques medicines etc it isn't a PR campaign like say no to drugs during the Reagan era and the same methods of communication do not apply but transhumanists are notoriously bad at marketing for example consider the failed immortality bus campaign which draws crowds of less than half a dozen people again Peter's words here sure it is weird enough to get written up in vice but does it convince anyone that controls funding to support our efforts name one person or organization that has funded some scientific research as a result of this campaign there isn't one to move forward we have to focus on the efforts that matter and that means getting research funding a realistic approach to increasing research funding is forming a political action committee to promote the idea in congress and in dc more generally this is where the decision will be made as it was with nixon's 1971 cancer act all other efforts are at best distractions and at worst make our cause seem weird or out of the mainstream weird fringe causes do not attract funding in summary i want to suggest to the panel and audience that they go all in for longevity research this means doing whatever you can do yourself to achieve longevity eat right get enough sleep avoid junk food exercise transhumanists that do not do these things are not in a good position to talk to the public about longevity at all in my view beyond this we need to directly support research ourselves crowdfunding is one avenue but realistically crowdfunding is a drop in the bucket and will remain so when compared to the u.s. annual research budget of sixty five billion dollars volunteer yourself so that was peter's statement he touched on a lot of areas a lot of points i think in many ways what he says will be controversial within transhumanist circles but i would welcome any thoughts from any of you on any of the points that peter made if you want to agree with anything or offer a rebuttal this would be a great opportunity to do that i'll give my rebuttal on the immortality bus because yes let's do that first let's do that first so i have the first-hand experience and uh no it was not a fail it was the immortality bus is uh if you just look at the numbers the crowds drawn in you know in physical places maybe it's not you know a huge success on that metric but actually a quite a few of the events there was a way more than like it was like 30 people at least at some of the events especially the protest the university that we went to where's alton talked to the students there was a lot of students that entered the bus i have footage of it i'm going to be more releasing more videos of that um on the eternal life fan club youtube channel but um also you have to look at how much numbers of people were reached through articles that have been about the immortality bus and so that that's huge hundreds of thousands of people tons of journalists there's documentaries that are going to be made about this this bus tour so him saying it was a fail was completely ridiculous no it wasn't the immortality bus is one of the most epic uh things that ever happened in the transhumanist movement and and we're going to see we're going to be seeing a big ripple effect from this and hopefully you know it's not gonna it's not going to end the the idea for the immortality bus as zoltanist von says is that it's going to be an ongoing campaign that's going to travel all across the country hopefully this is not going to stop at the end of his campaign uh presidential campaign it's just separate from that and it's going to keep on going and it's going to inspire people of a techno positive message that we can cure aging it's going to tell people look you don't have to die it's going to basically give present transhumanism as a type of salvation from death give people hope because right now what do have what do people have they have religion to go on for their eternal life we need to give people hope that they can have physical eternal life on this planet with the help of technology and that's the message of the transhumanist bus it's that we can live forever we don't have to die and and i think it's it's doing amazing things and i'm so so pleased that that uh that it's happened and i've been able to be a part of it thank you for your response roan and i do think you've made an important point in that the physical attendance at an event does not necessarily fully reflect the reach of that event especially in the age of social media very easily available video recording technology you're a great example of roan you have made so many videos that have extensive reach beyond the context of the event in which they were recorded so potentially hundreds or thousands of people could see video of a rally where 15 or 30 people attended and then uh sultan's focus on the media has also been impactful in the sense that a lot of articles have been written and they've reached tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of people uh so with that uh who else would like to respond to uh peter rothman's statement uh yeah i'd like to respond to um the crowdfunding angle and also about the public's involvement in the war on cancer um spen you can correct me if i'm wrong but i believe in the emperor of all maladies the public was a vital intermediary step there between you know that was it allowed them to form that action committee allowed them to then talk to limit johnson and then nixon so i think it was actually the crucial piece so i don't think that yes you are you're correct indeed it's the they didn't succeed in convincing the politicians directly although they did have some support of certain politicians as i had shown in my presentation before but it was really when they talked to the public and the public sent for example like one million letters to congress urging congress to work on aging uh so young that's really when things started to go off so you're perfectly correct here thank you and related to that um at the sen's uh 20 rb 2015 conference uh frances cologne was there who works for the state department for uh the secretary of state um and i talked to her basically because she said you know she tries to advocate for aging but the politicians don't listen so i was asking her you know what is it that those people in that room need to hear to get serious about this and what she said was basically this we need to get millions of people writing their congressmen we need to have one thing that she said that's very interesting is to have many different voices in many different areas i can't just all be coming from sen's or etc otherwise it's easy to dismiss as a fringe thing so we need to try to outreach to as many different groups uh not just in the research community but you know different sort of uh you know advocacy groups for you know again income inequality maybe uh certain kind of uh celebrity kind of endorsements you know house parks were probably a good one because he helps out sen's and has a science tv show for kids um so that's that part and as far as the crowdfunding uh i agree with what he said um crowdfunding will never be able to match the amount of funding that the government could eventually release but the whole point of lifespan that i owe for example is not really about the money it's about this pr it's about exposing this to other people and pulling more people into the ecosystem that's the real mission absolutely uh i think in terms of sending a signal a crowdfunding campaign that succeeds in raising several tens of thousands of dollars is very powerful because it says here ordinary people are aware of and interested in helping with this research which is not the case for the vast majority of academic research projects indeed most academic research projects historically have been uh done in environment of complete disconnect from the general public and that's unfortunate uh because ultimately the general public would be the beneficiaries of these research efforts uh so i definitely agree with you keep crowdfunding can be a powerful impetus uh now uh before we go on to the question of institutional support in greater detail i wanted to ask if anyone else had other responses to peter's statement yeah i do i think that um i really like peter but i think that sending 20 questions instead of an actual statement was uh probably not a good idea since um sven actually answered a lot of those questions at the get-go and so a good logical presentation took care of that i outside of the immortality best i i'm not into that i'm not on on that side of it things but i do agree that the group in general doesn't just have to be transhumanist it needs to be the whole world everyone needs to get up and say we're dying of biological aging and we need to get behind an effort to cure this disease and if we can mitigate the diseases of aging then we've created a more humane world and actually this is a lot more doable than curing cancer all timers independently because they all have to do with the aging cell and so um anyone who's not up to date on that should be brought up to date and that doesn't mean that they're stupid people don't have time in their lives we need to educate the world and we need them to get to stand up and to demand aging be considered a disease and that funding goes to the to the right places and that's why our company again is going for physical proof we feel like this is what has been missing so we're not you know saying well we're uploading a brain or whatever uh tomorrow but what we are trying to do is work on the intermediary steps and i think that if we can educate even people within the transhuman group of what's happening in biotechnology so that they can have a conversation with the rest of the world that actually shows the steps to getting there it creates a logical conversation it gets people really excited about it instead of thinking well you know you've taken too big of a step for me and that doesn't make sense uh we can make logical steps and we can make them now i want to go back a little bit to religion i've talked to a lot of religious people i'm not religious i wasn't raised religious but i've talked to a lot of religious people and i've never gotten fallback um for these ideas and i think that shutting those groups out is just wrong um that they are in a human state of culture and um and is valid to them as it is to anyone else uh people who are religious love the idea of gene therapy they love the idea of life extension um with an international longevity alliance we actually looked at a myriad of different religions and as far as christianity itself you know god says at some point if you follow my ways you'll live 800 in some years and we believe that's through science and technology also jesus went around curing disease which is pretty um upstanding as far as uh we're concerned so i think that what could really ignite this industry is actually its first human proof uh we don't know if we'll be part of that we have to wait and see but we sure hope that we will be and we do want to push uh peters thoughts on become involved uh become pioneers uh we don't know uh what will happen but we certainly want to find out put your arm in donate uh we need to become the people that looked across the sea even though we thought the world was flat and we need to sell that sea uh there's no other way to get there we need to make a better world for tomorrow if not for ourselves and we can't do it in fear and um without actually getting our skin into the game so you know we do realize on the the economic side of this initially uh this will be funded by people with a lot of money especially gene therapy but those technologies will trickle down i believe that these people want a healthy uh active uh workforce just as much as they want to be healthy and active themselves and you need to let these people take the risks the big risks so that by the time it gets to the general population we know exactly what we're giving you and how much and we know how to fix the problem so it's really not an issue of have and have nots we have to build the supercomputer for everyone to get an iphone or a laptop or whatever it is uh that that you cherish as far as your technology so i mean those would be my thoughts i'm really thankful that uh peter put in his statement i really wish that he would have been here um i think that again we covered a lot of of the questions already and and that he did have a lot of a valid input on maybe you know everyone doesn't have the right way to do things but at least uh they're doing things and um i think that the the only uh thing that i can say is that i do know people who have gone to congress and they have tried to get laws passed but without the grassroots movement of the world saying that we want this or at least a million people uh you're you're you're just not going to get it passed what pushes it is the people demanding it and i believe that if we can reach the people uh that's what i do i try to talk to average people i'm not qualified to talk to anyone else uh and tell them you know what we're actually doing in science we have reversed aging in animals we have reversed aging in every human tissue um you know these it's not it's not a vanity thing this is actually if you don't look younger then you are not younger and you will die of of biological aging cellular degeneration what's happening at the cellular level so you can combine those two things and get excited about that uh but it's it's not it's not science fiction it's science fact and uh you know i hope that all of us will be a part of of making this big effort and i know that peter will himself thanks absolutely and i do think it's important to note politics is a lagging indicator rather than a leading indicator of societal attitudes i think you very importantly pointed out you need a groundswell of public support and keith has emphasized this as well before politicians can take action uh because otherwise they just don't see the point they don't see how it's relevant to their reelection or how it's a priority for their constituents uh so definitely in my view more of a hyper pluralistic approach than uh what peter described would be better peter seems to say yes you take care of yourself you volunteer you get involved but uh all the efforts should focus on this kind of institutional advocacy and i don't i i don't agree with that either i think there is room for diversity of approaches in seeking uh life extension goals and seeking to raise public awareness uh so let me open this up to anyone else who wants to make any statement about of what peter said and then we can discuss uh the role of large institutions more generally um i have a reply to what peter said not just what peter said but also to some points raised by other people during this panel and so there was a question about court funding and uh you know i'm a director of uh imins and we have been funding uh doing court funding projects for many years now and i believe that court funding can help to do certain key projects um anyone who is involved in science will know that it's often hard to get funding for projects that may be too far out there projects that are too new that are too speculative but that nevertheless may be proving to be great advances and i believe that court funding is able to fund certain projects that may you know open up a whole new insights and that would not have been funded through the more traditional uh grant agencies um also there was you know there is some talk about transhumanism here immortality and things like that and that's something that uh you know has been going on for many many years uh you may have known that um long justy uh the former immortality institute changed their name um and that was after years of debates on what the name exactly should be and you know it's felt by me and and other people that we should be careful in the way we reach out to the general audience um reaching out with a too extreme vision is not good like i i personally you know while while i admit that i want to be mortal um it's probably not the best marketing strategy to talk to people about that in that sense rather it's a good idea to talk about healthy life extension letting you live 10 years 20 years 30 years longer in good health making you younger talking it in that way i think it's it's it's much better you are probably going to scare away some people by using too extreme terminology um bg also mentioned about the risk of having pushbacks from large organizations and companies and that may indeed be true when it comes to smoking it's definitely true when it comes to to diet for example where there is a lot of vested interest but when it comes to to aging research the biomedical side of things uh i rather think that large organizations can help us accelerate so like last year i was at the miip tech conference in basal uh which is organized mainly by novartis and novartis is really working these days on aging research it's uh it's incredible um so the keynote lecture of that conference uh was given by the chairman of the board of novartis and something like a third or so of his slides were mentioning aging while he was presenting more general outlook for the future of pharmaceutical research and like a third or so of his slides were mentioning aging research um there was a whole aging forum uh last year and again this year at the conference i'm sadly not able to i wasn't able to go this year it was last week um so so it shows that within pharmaceutical industry things are changing novartis did a trial in humans with rapamycin uh where short term rapamycin treatment was shown to improve immune response in elderly people to vaccination and as you might know that um you know pneumonia and and other infectious diseases are a big problem in elderly people they have a weakened immunity and and they also often respond much less to vaccination and apparently an anti-aging drug for a short period of time is able to reverse that action so um i think we can actually really bundle together our forces with pharmaceutical organizations and other institutions uh to push forward the goal of extending lifespan then uh run also mentioned um that uh we need ways to show to the public um that aging uh you know is something that can be uh impacted upon and um it's uh important to note i did it already in my presentation that um you know uh genetic interventions mutations that extended lifespan they were really very important in the 1980s 1990s to convince the scientific community that aging could indeed be impacted before the 1980s uh if you would have asked almost any scientists any biomedical scientists they would have said that aging was a too complex problem to ever have much uh impact upon and people who were studying it were looked at as weird strange at a fringe uh and then came uh uh tom johnson we discovered the first uh mutation and later cindia canyon we discovered the second mutation and it was really around the time of the second mutation that was discovered that people started to to in the scientific community understand that aging was indeed open to biomedical intervention however i think that even until today the public is not aware of all of these things and that's a problem we need to reach out i think and tell the public look we have made all these interventions and we have made so much success for example with gene therapy you probably remember the study from maria blasco with telomeras gene therapy which is incredible because it was a single injection done in a mice that was a year old and suddenly you had lifespan extension and you know that that's in my opinion it's incredible that you can do a single injection and have a 30 to 20 percent life 13 to 20 percent lifespan extension um oh yeah i should also mention um keith mentioned the alas ice bucket challenge and a friend of mine victor bjork has uh started the chancelman day which is a little bit it's not the same as the ice bucket challenge but it's a little bit similar uh it's calling upon everyone to post a picture of themselves with uh some chocolate and olive oil because those are the famous foods of chancelman to which she attributed her longevity um to post a picture on the 21st of february which is her the birthday of chancelman uh and and and call upon the world to extend lifespan and um earlier this uh this week on monday uh i was at a lecture so now i'm coming to to adam who mentioned um the ecology movement and um you know that that there is like some pushback there of people who think we should go back to nature and we don't see that technological progress can actually set us free um from uh many of those those problems and on monday i was at lecture of eco modern modernists and this is a complete new movement in the ecology movements uh we actually advocate that uh science technological progress can actually improve the ecosystem and we actually show that um contrast to many people what many people think today actually we are uh you know living you know doing less um you know we are less severely impacting the environment than we did in the past you know uh we are with more people but we are less severely impacting uh per person if you look for example you know in the middle age is how much you know it you know uh when people were uh heating and cooking and doing all of those things by uh you know wood with wood how much uh you know pollution that created and how much uh wood that was being cut away forests that were cleared away to support people that was way more severe than what we are doing today and that's due to improvements in technology um so it's i'm very glad to see that there is this more new movement that is trying to see that technology is for the better uh betterment of humankind yeah that's where my remarks all right thank you sven uh again a lot of important areas you delved into uh i also think it's encouraging to have a strain of uh more technologically friendly environmentalism because certainly the more traditional 1960s era environmentalism was very hostile to technological progress and development and in many sense in many senses reflected this post-modernist reaction against progress and the enlightenment so i have had to be personally opposed to that kind of environmentalism but the kind of environmentalism that embraces technology as the solution to many of the existing problems encountered in human societies that is definitely an approach that's compatible with life extension research and with progress more generally so i'm very open to that uh now with regard to the role of large institutions i think you touched on that you gave an example of novartis whose uh chairman seems to be quite progressive in his outlook on combating aging and that is encouraging of course not every large institution operates that way i think sometimes the sheer weight of bureaucracy and established processes and protocols uh can greatly impair the progress of life extension research see the food and drug administration and how it might take 10 to 15 years to get a treatment or a drug from discovery to availability to the general public and i think there's a quite a bit of difference in perspectives among people who are friendly to life extension on this and even in the comments that i've received so far there are very different points of view that have been emphasized for instance michael bryant who is one of the members of the nevada transhumanist party states if our government would have paid uh for those stem students to complete their degrees and fund the research we would already have defeated aging and the problem of energy this is not a question of social necessity it is a social travesty not to so here is a strong advocate of uh government funding in particular for uh life extension for uh training of science technology engineering and mathematics students and for other types of scientific research on the other hand uh i also received a comment from uh c james townsen uh who states that the history of government supported research is not a great one most new treatments for cancer that are now arising are coming from private institutions as technology advances the cost for doing private research will keep falling and the number of people who can look into this research will continue to expand an x-price format along with interested billionaires i see as the best chance we have to break through the neo-malphusian roadblock that infuses government and ngos that keeps aging research back so uh what's interesting about his comments is he tied it back to this neo-malphusian attitude this 1960s 1970s era environmentalism that scared a lot of people off of the thought of technological progress and he thinks unfortunately established institutions are characterized by this kind of thinking on the other hand he just distinguishes those kinds of institutions from individual philanthropists perhaps people like peter teal or larry page and sergue brin who have put in large amounts of money into life extending research i think he would also distinguish that from small innovative startups that are trying to disrupt uh the research scene and uh the types of projects that get funded for instance bio viva i think he would agree is one of the initiatives that is trying to break through that let's say stale mindset of the existing institutions so i would open it up now to your thoughts on this question is it a good thing to have support from large established institutions or are they just obstacles in the way of progress for life extension research well i have a i have obviously some input on that and uh we we did look at a lot of different places i i sat down with people at universities i sat down with governments and around around the world and actually things move very slowly at their pace and and this is actually one thing that i would really like to point out and i think this is one place that we can have leverage with the with the average public is that you know we have to put everything into account we have to put in a hundred years to a drug discovery is not acceptable we have to put into account that we're sitting on the top of research 30 years of research that shows good outcome and that has never been used in a human uh we also need to do things like we need to look at the u.s system we need to look at this 15 year billion dollar plus process that in fact does not mean that you have safety and efficacy they would say you have safety and efficacy because the person doesn't die right away but in fact every drug that your doctor can prescribe you you're almost guaranteed to die of the very disease that it's going so we have to get people really excited and and leverage the idea that there is really no safety and efficacy every one of those drugs is an experiment and every small molecule you take it's nothing but side effects so the side effect may be uh something positive that maybe you breathe a little bit better but then there's going to be a side effect of liver damage a side effect of kidney damage and and a myriad of other side effects the reason we like gene therapy is because we're doing it right at the cellular level and so we're trying to make your cells the drug factories that they need to be to create what you need to create and just solve the problem in one fill soup this is going to take us time but you know gene therapy is grossly considered an experimental medicine but we would say the experiment is still out uh we would like to change uh the way that that you'll die in the future that sounds really rough we study death we know how you'll die right now we know how everyone watching this will buy the numbers by the percentages and we'd like to change that to an unknown and and save that off as long as possible save off suffering as long as possible and that's going to take us becoming pioneers and and creating a new mindset of being willing to jump into a new future a future that we won't know what's going to happen over time but I can guarantee what's going to happen to you if you continue to take uh the pharmaceuticals that you're taking you you will die there is nothing on the market that's going to uh to keep you from dying of the probably the disease that you're actually treating uh so uh you know that is is exciting in itself and and I probably got a little bit off topic with my tangent sorry I think you addressed a lot of the central themes of the question and from more of an economist's perspective I have often encountered arguments that the FDA has an incentive to be hyper cautious hyper conservative in what treatments it approves because of what will happen if a treatment approved by the FDA actually ends up having severe undesirable side effects the FDA or the officials performing the approval will get blamed on the other hand if it's just a lost opportunity a treatment that never gets out there that people don't have a chance to evaluate and see if it works or doesn't work it could have saved hundreds of thousands or millions of lives that could have expanded life spans dramatically but nobody knows this so no official gets blamed right so I think that precision medicine is going to help us a lot you know obviously the expansion of genetics is going to help us a lot so that we're treating patients with the the molecules that they need to be treated with or the gene therapies that they need to be treated with but this whole not being held accountable thing is a really important point because actually more people die every year you know actually tens of thousands of people die every year with adverse drug effects that means an adverse effect to the drug that they were taking to treat their disease that's outside of them even dying of that disease and no one's held accountable everything is held behind money walls and big corporations we're not you know here to start a fight at all we're here to work with the system but we would like to be welcomed into the system as being actually a viable alternative and to be accepted quite quickly in disease mitigation you know we would like to do our work within the U.S. we would like to start working with compassionate care patients people in end stage disease so that these patients can start taking some of these gene therapies now that might not only reverse their aging but reverse their disease I don't suggest that anyone stops taking their prescriptions as prescribed I'm not a medical doctor and I wouldn't suggest that but I really think that we have to question the system and we have to question it hard now if we want to make change each one of us has to question that system I completely agree with you let's see if anyone else has some thoughts on the question of institutions how they tend to act could they be helpful or are they primarily posing an obstacle right now and if they are primarily posing an obstacle right now how could that be changed if at all yeah I'd like to discuss about that you are right Liz about we need to work within the system here because you know these are going to be certain obstacles and if we can figure out ways to get them involved this would definitely be very beneficial to us but it's not just so much of getting other institutions major institutions involved in helping us but also involved in pressuring other institutions who may not be as forthcoming and we have big problems with a lot of greedy corporate types industries especially more recently we saw the unfortunate price increase of Dariprim by Turing Pharmaceuticals by their CEO Martin Screlle and that caused a lot of anger almost universally throughout the board from a lot of people because this was something that helps treat protozoal infections and it was at a very cheap price and then it was brought up and now it's been brought back down unfortunately thanks to a lot of pushback from the public itself but we do need to be cautious about those kind of institutions and as Janada has mentioned like the FDA they have a notorious record of being far too cautious they are pretty much the epitome of the precautionary principle where like for example you know their 18 year I think it's a 19 year war now against a simple thing like GM salmon it's a genetically modified salmon that helps you know it helps the efficient industry and it helps bring more freedom and yet when after 18 years of safety precautions brought into it and all the research brought in saying that it is most definitely safe we still don't have a full endorsement by the FDA and then we have the infamous attack on 23andMe by the FDA so we're going to have to be very cautious about those kind of institutions and figuring out ways of getting them involved it'll definitely be a tough fight but if we can get major institutions on our side and have them actually start pressuring other major institutions we could see a sort of domino effect in terms of you know increase in the popularity and in terms of fighting against aging and having all these major major institutions fighting for us but even when they're not we do have other technologies at hand to help us with that which others in this panel have mentioned several times and that is like crowdfunding that will help definitely in the funding process but even in I noticed that Sven mentioned that if there is an idea that is big and new that might be a lot more difficult in getting a progress or any success in a crowdfunding but that's not necessarily true it just requires a lot more effort and a bit more of an open box thinking I say this because when I was working with planetary resources the asteroid mining company I was helping them under the planetary community vanguard and the entire point was to try and get outreach campaigning for the arctic 100 space telescope and we were we put it through a crowdfunding phase to try and get as many people involved as possible and we needed a million dollars in funding that was a big price especially for crowdfunding but the way that we did it was getting not just people involved which crowdfunding is notorious for and it's very beneficial and it gets a lot of people to be involved in projects major projects but we also got celebrities involved we ended up getting Brent Spiner involved who is the infamous actor as data from the Star Trek next generation we ended up getting Seth Green who another notorious actor is the voice of Chris from the famous cartoon show Family Guy we got these people involved and this helped convey this popularity this idea of this is something that is a popular idea that needs support because people whether you agree with it or not people look up to people like celebrities they whenever you see someone say we're going to go fight this war here or fight war on cancer millions and millions of people follow suit and if we can get people like that involved in crowdfunding projects against aging you know no matter how big of an idea it is no matter how new of an idea it is we can definitely achieve a lot of success through that boundary whether or not certain institutions are on our side or not absolutely and I definitely think with crowdfunding having celebrity endorsements helps another tactic that might help would be more of an incremental build up for instance you might require X dollars for a particular phase of the project to be implemented you could crowdfund that show a success of that and then launch the next phase of it through some combination of crowdfunding and let's say larger donations or even institutional investments so that's a possibility one other development that I think is quite promising it has already happened in Japan is some possibility for treatments to be able to be marketed to the general public without yet having received ultimate approval from the regulatory authority so Japan implemented this very recently where there is now essentially a seven year period where while a treatment is undergoing the review process by Japan's equivalent of the FDA the company could still market it and gather data the data could be used as input into the trials for safety and efficacy and then if at the end of the seven year period approval is not granted the treatment would have to be withdrawn from public circulation but at least there's the opportunity to try it and see whether it works or not so I think that's a tremendous step forward another similar approach that I've advocated in an article of my titled six libertarian reforms to accelerate life extension is essentially to allow for a separate category of treatments that can be marketed with informed consent by patients and perhaps with a disclaimer saying this has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration or it's equivalent in another country use at your own risk make sure the disclosures are very prominent very effective so people know what they're getting into but on the other hand if they're terminally ill if no established approved treatment can assist them then I think it's a travesty to deny them the opportunity to try something that might work so that's one idea I have several others along the same lines in that article you mentioned BJ the recent increase in the price of an essential drug by orders of magnitude I think this has to do with the current state of the patent system and the exclusive monopolies that a lot of companies can enjoy in no competitive market could a provider ever raise the price by that much without going out of business almost immediately because there would be others offering the product so that's another thought to consider but I would like to hear from more of you as well about this issue can I just make a small correction I was not saying that a crowdfunding is not so good for things that are too far out there I was just saying the inverse I was saying that crowdfunding is something that can actually provide funding for things that are too far out there for traditional funding for sources to fund yes absolutely yes sorry I was just going to say that I really liked what BJ Murphy had to say about celebrities I think that point cannot be overemphasized enough like let's go to Hollywood let's get like a team of transhumanists to try to like find some amazing you know celebrities that would like promote anti-aging but also I I'd like to point out about what Keith and Liz were saying about inclusion the inclusion of religious people like I completely agree though I mean I'm probably like the most of my estimation I'm probably the most outspoken person against religion here but I I just want to emphasize that I want to include religious people as much as possible what I'm just I'm concerned about though is that we're not that we don't become so over optimistic as far as how religious people will receive these ideas that we fail to reform the religions so that they're going to accept anti-aging and transhumanist technologies more because as I see it right now from the religious people I have talked to there is this attitude that like curing aging is kind of like going down that road kind of like the Tower of Babel you know like you go down that road you're like you're like reaching too far you know there's that kind of attitude in religion and that the attitude that we should accept death and that and that aging is all part of the plan these kinds of things they need to be reformed like almost like when you have like a team of transhumanists like dedicated to like reinterpreting the bible and like coming up with a whole reformation that would make transhumanism way more digestible to the average average religious person so it's not that I don't want to include religious people I totally do and I don't think we should you know go out of our way to you know offend them or anything like that it's just that I'm cautious about how are they going to receive these ideas so let's focus on that that's kind of what what I want to say about that and that's a great bridge into the subject I wanted to discuss next which is just that the interactions possibilities for let's say compatibility between religion and transhumanism and I am an atheist myself I've always been an atheist on the other hand there are some explicit transhumanists who are religious there's the Mormon transhumanist association in Utah for instance which is very well organized and I actually had an extensive exchange yesterday evening with Lincoln cannon who runs the Mormon transhumanist association about inclusivity of religious transhumanist perspectives and to some extent I agree with him there's no need to fight battles that don't need to be fought on the other hand there are also a lot of other theological frameworks that are deeply hostile to transhumanism think of Wahhabist Islam for instance people who will behead you if you disagree not just with some aspect of their belief but if you disagree with the seventh century lifestyle so there's that other extreme and I wonder if it's not so much a question of religious versus non-religious dispositions but something else something more fundamental I had this discussion with Ilya Stombler who is also a leading activist for the international longevity alliance and an expert on the history of life extension thought including how individuals of various religious persuasions have interpreted it and he points out throughout history there have been strains of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism that have been very receptive to exceptionally long lifespans but certainly not all of them Russian Cosmism is a great example Nikolai Fyodorov or in English Nikolai Fyodorov was a thinker in the 19th century who essentially thought that resurrecting every single person who ever lived was part of the great task that was commanded by God the God of the Russian Orthodox religion and he was a great inspiration to Russian futurists in the 20th century even during the much more secular communist era so that was very interesting and the thought I offered to Ilya was perhaps it's not so much do you believe in a God do you believe in the supernatural that is the determining force but some more underlying view of the desirability of life whether it's desirable to keep striving for life or whether it's desirable to resign oneself to a perception of inevitable fate and I talked with you about this some time ago Rowan and I asked you well what do you think this more fundamental motivation is and you said something very interesting it's that the people who want to live longer the people who are receptive to indefinite life are people who have a better opinion of themselves and a better opinion of how good their lives would be if they kept living them whereas the people who don't want to dislike their lives to some extent and see a finitude as somehow desirable for whatever reason so I would welcome everybody's thoughts about this maybe we can transcend the questions of religion and look at more of these fundamental motives about how do you view yourself how do you view the desirability of continuing to live the let's say more primary drives and inclinations that people have I have one more comment right right from what you just said there about the people who want to live are the people who like really love themselves have a good opinion of themselves and have a high self-esteem and I see another problem of religion is that it's like taught that we're inherently sinful and that you know it's like it's like we have a sin nature a lot of religions teaches and it's something you can't really stop like it's like it's forced on you and kind of a that attitude and also that you like deserve to be punished with death in fact that's that's the teaching of Christianity is that death is literally the punishment of sin and so when that's being taught you can see how the idea that transhumanists are talking about where we're going to cure aging and live indefinitely and potentially forever you see that that into the Christian mind a lot of them wouldn't say well that's like circumnavigating God's plan of punishment like we're supposed to be punished with death like in the Garden of Eden you know we ate the fruit and we deserve to die now so that's kind of another conflict I see and I'm not saying and we just need to like try to reinterpret these books for Christians so that maybe they can get around that somehow and they can justify the thing forever physically on this earth living indefinitely and not being forced to die because right now I think that they think that God wants to force us to tie and that that's that's a problem so while there are substantial differences between the world's religions we find in thinkers like Maestro Eckhart, Rumi, Sri Aurobindo, Adi Shankara, the Buddha, this recognition of essential sameness and there's a wonderful book by Aldous Huxley on this topic and you can find it in Ken Wilbur's work as well so when you're appealing to the highest parts of the human intellect the highest drives that we have it doesn't have to be cloaked in any particular symbolism it merely needs to be compassion kindness and goodness now this goes back to what Peter said Peter Rothman who I am very fond of and I respect a great deal and frankly I think he was just playing devil's advocate I think he was trolling us so Touche Peter I wish you had only phrased it in maybe three or four questions instead of 20 now any particular idea is going to come about in many many different regional manifestations it's also going to manifest itself in different ways in different people this is the qualia problem right when I think of an apple it's different than when you think of an apple you might think of a green one instead of a red one so these different approaches are by no means mutually exclusive you just have to target different groups in different ways C. James Townsend was a fellow who I invited here because he's also an Austrian economist and a transhumanist so of course I knew you would love him Janati and you will also love his book which I'm sure you I will send you the link to it please do and when we're talking about government versus business that's another really unnecessary dichotomy for better or worse they are bound together at this point in history and we can't avoid it now as much as I despise regulation and the heavy hand of government Bell laboratories for instance created a number of wonderful discoveries and they were essentially a government run or government condoned monopoly NASA is another government sponsored program and we've gotten some good stuff out of that too so I don't think we should cast aspersions on them and I don't think we should become horribly melancholic over regulations themselves because regulations are there to be broken of course a law is only as good as someone's ability to enforce it and since our ability to synthesize DNA has become I mean we can synthesize it for dollars we can edit genomes we can analyze them for very little amounts of money fact for two thousand dollars I could build a pretty sophisticated supercomputer with raspberry pi units and that price has probably come down since I read that article so I might be mistaken there of course I mean Liz has the most experience hands-on experience with this with getting a product through all of these agencies and she's trying to go through the proper channels but in the not so distant future people may just say well I have this a as virus here I have my I have my vector I have my gene of interest I'm going to shoot grandma with this stuff because hey if I don't she's going to die yes well I think you've made an important point about different let's say local variations on similar essential themes how different religions and philosophies draw on the same common elements of human existence but package them differently and sometimes that packaging might get in the way of the underlying truth the underlying realities that are common among religious people and atheists and I do think it's important to expose those underlying realities and try to get common ground on achieving specific aims in my view this is the only world there is and I want indefinite life extension here whoever helps me in that endeavor is an ally irrespective of how they come about that motivation to help I really do wish sometimes one had crystal clear insight into every individual's worldviews and motivations and of course to do that in a way that somehow respects their privacy and autonomy so I can relate to that person exactly in the way that that person would find persuasive and genuinely helpful and in a way that helps advance that person's thinking in a direction that would embrace indefinite life extension unfortunately we're still only human and we do not have that transhuman ability and I regret that to a certain extent and various multifaceted marketing and messaging efforts are probably the best we can do at this point which is why hyper pluralism is a good idea in my view may many people try many different approaches and may the best approaches succeed so we are running close to our two-hour time frame I don't mind going over a little bit if people have thoughts they want to share but I also want to give the opportunity for everyone to make a statement that encapsulates their impressions of this discussion thus far so that we can hear from everyone at least one more time so let's start with Keith okay I'll do kind of both things I want to quickly hit some of the topics that were just mentioned and then you know tie it together firstly there was a mention of kind of the democratization of science and that's something that I also personally work with I do a lot of work in the citizen science laboratory gen space in Brooklyn and there are a lot of analogs around the country like bio curious and and that sort of thing and I think that whole movement of DIY bio and bio hackers could be a potential ally for for many reasons but also also longevity for example the iGen competition just happened the international genetically engineered machines contest that's for synthetic biology a lot of high schools and colleges compete I personally would like to see a version of that kind of competition created that's themed around solving actual real world problems one of which can be longevity and I think that would be an excellent way to sort of outreach and also get research going on if you have teams of high school students and college students working on different kind of longevity research as part of a competition that's a citizen science competition so I would like to see that and I think that could be big going forward to address kind of the religious issue and and how we approach it quickly again I think as a movement you know transhumanism we could do better at sort of coming together and figuring out exactly what it is that we want to critique and I think we need to get better about critiquing certain aspects of religious logic let's say without demonizing the whole religion and traditions and also just by the nature of our our meat of living in this body in this brain you know people have an innate desire to want to feel a spiritual connection to the universe to a force like the Tao in Chinese or some creator and I think if we try to remove that from people we'll experience a lot of pushback so we want to still be able to like like you said you know like as long as they're you know willing to be open about this idea they're allies and I think we need to come at it with a much more open-minded genuine interest in people like when you're talking to a religious person don't have in your mind this person is an idiot let me try to convince him have in your mind like I'm interested in what you want to say let me hear your opinion you try to convince me and let's talk about it like really genuine open-hearted discussion because I feel like when that's not there people will perceive it and it will turn everybody off and I notice a lot of that going on um so now to kind of parlay that that into kind of my end statement it's generally about this is I feel like uh we are at a really exciting time right now if we can get a few actual therapies you know Liz so so uh get on that uh you know if we just need like one or two of these things and I think that will be that coupled with a really you know positive message of this is exciting this is about increasing choices you know even if you personally don't want to live forever or live longer odds are somebody you know somebody you love would really like that chance so why not help give that person that chance and I think we can really we can reach a lot of people with that absolutely well thank you Keith uh Elizabeth uh let's hear some of your impressions of our discussion and follow-up statements I would love to so uh number one I would like to open everyone's mind to an idea and it is the idea that well inherently uh most people are spiritual um from the get go at least most uh cultural uh civilizations before there was um what we call religion which is a little bit more government run but these are kind of the the original immortalists and I know you don't want to hear that but they are almost every one of these religions touts immortality even if it's after death because it was the only thing that could be offered okay uh these are the same people who get pig heart valves put in their body they get immunizations many of them outside of you know groups that are very rudimentary um these are these are people who are there there is no species on earth that I know that is just a pure lemming that jumps off a cliff except for very depressed humans which is a medical condition uh it is the drive of every species to survive and I really don't think that this is outside of the realm of these people's thinking okay this is why they go to church because it's actually all about immortality in one way or another so I don't tout immortality I tout disease mitigation but I want to give a cute little antidote so while I was at the SENS conference I made a new friend named Chase Perkins and he's the CEO of a company called Thoughtly and they have an AI that basically scans text and you can tell it to limit how many words uh what that text is about so you could say put it into a paragraph maybe you put through a scientific document and it would come out and it would say you know about senescent cells telomerase induction and blah blah blah well he put it the bible through this process and he put it down to two words so they could only spew out two words and and this goes to show that we've been at this for a long time the two words that it came out with the bible was insurance policy so the bible is your insurance policy that you will actually go on to be immortal okay so let's consider this when we think about religion let's not shut people out and let's remember that there's a lot of ways to die and one of them is through negativity okay so let's be positive let's try to uplift our our brothers and spread the good word of longevity because dying of disease sucks whether you do it at 10 or you do it at 99 okay so that touches me uh so we want to we want to end that and everyone is actually in this everyone's got skin in the game and everyone's got somebody who who's going to be dying soon and as a reminder something that lights a fire under me um this is uh not just old people but children too but a hundred thousand people are going to die today and um you know while we think that we're wrapping our head around bigger situations they're they're they're wrapping their head around the biggest situation of their life and we have to work really fast and so if we have you know good research that that shows good evidence we should be moving forward on this and there there's no there's no regular regulation that should stop us past a safety and efficacy and we're happy to prove that ourselves okay so you know definitely get behind your small biotechs uh you know it's true that big institutions move very slowly and it's one of the reasons why my company was able to uh collaborate one of the best scientific advisory boards in this industry with uh George Martin and George Church and other people well respected in the industry it's because we're able to move fast and and there I believe that they're hopeful that we will um so um I just want to encourage everyone to uh stay involved this isn't science fiction it's science fact help us move forward get excited about it don't be afraid to tell somebody who uh you think that won't be able to get their head around it if they've gotten their head around uh things like religion and other things they can get their head around one more thing they're not stupid they're smart they they want to ensure their existence as well uh let's think about it that way and let's open it up and um I don't know what else can I say thank goddess everyone thanks god thank goddess and let's move this this thing forward and yes Keith we're we're going to try to move forward we're definitely going to use lifespan IO when our when our company is well enough known so people will get behind it right now gene therapies are super expensive so just one person is hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat okay and so we know as a really small unknown company right now that we can't get that sort of leverage but we hope to get that in the future and so people keep spreading the word again we're a very open-source company uh we're interested in sharing uh what we do with the world our our results with the world we we will open our uh test subject up to labs around the world if they're interested in getting involved we want to open this thing up and we want to become the biosimilars and gene therapies so that we can drive those costs down immediately and get yours to you well thank you very much and we are I think all quite excited to see what's going to happen in the next few months with your trial and hopefully yes hopefully uh the more individuals companies undertake these kinds of efforts with visible consequences visible results uh that switch in many people's heads will be flipped and they will realize oh yes I have actually wanted to live longer all this time whatever my world view and now it's possible now it's not science fiction anymore so yeah and you know a lot of people that said you know you should wait until you get results and you know to say anything and you know that's a very valid thing but on the other hand any result is important so if we don't uh that's important too and so you know we want to be part of the science and not part of the occlusion of of data absolutely well thank you uh Rowan uh would you like to offer some impressions of this yes I love what Liz was just saying about the uh religious people being like the original immortalists that's so true and in many ways and in many respects I actually feel a more common bond with religious people despite being an atheist just because when I talk to religious people their motivation so much does seem to be about living forever and I find that lacking in the atheist community and so then it's like they are really the original immortalists and I wish like like I talked to atheist people and like sometimes you ask them and they say they don't mind dying and ceasing to exist they've really made peace with non-existence where that is not true with the religious person so it's kind of like uh I guess with the problem with religion is where their insurance policy becomes a false certainty of heaven and that's what I see with religion it's not just an insurance policy like okay maybe this is plan B if you know it's more like they're so sure of it they're so sure of heaven that they lose their fear of death they have no and it's like they want to die even and I've talked to religious people they're like eager to die so that they can get heaven and I think that's really the problem because then they lose the attachment to this world and um and it's like they're gambling like for being an immortalist for being for claiming to love their eternal life so much they're gambling with their eternal life because everyone should admit that this is the only life that we know for sure exists and that the afterlife is just a hypothesis that's never been proven and so if there's any religious people that are watching this or watches that's the message I'd like to leave you with is that I get that you want eternal life but you don't know that there isn't any that there is any afterlife and so consider that in order to get eternal life you might need to get that physically on this earth um and also I would like to say to religious people is that I don't judge anyone for their beliefs you can believe in God you can believe in an afterlife I don't judge you for that beliefs I think we should judge people based on our behaviors I think that's way more important than judging people on their beliefs because I don't even think people can choose what they believe if you're a religious person I don't think a person chooses to believe in God their brain is just convinced of it and it's not their fault just like I'm convinced that there is no God it's not my fault and um the other thing about another way we can maybe bring this message to religious people and get them to care about curing aging is an idea that Aubrey de Grey talks a lot about which he said that it's a sin not to cure aging from a religious standpoint if you're taking your bible seriously there's all kinds of bible verses that suggest that hey you know you're you're it's your duty to alleviate suffering and well old people are suffering incredibly so and so let's let's let's encourage religious people to think of aging in that way where it'd be a sin not to cure it um you know just like you'd look at a child with cancer you'd feel empathy well why wouldn't we have those same emotions uh with uh an old person and so there's a lot of ageism in the world there's an idea there's a lot of just like oh well they're old they've lived their life and it's time for them to die we need to get rid of that and say old people have just as much of a right to live as younger people um and as far as the idea that immortality is a scary word uh i agree that that can scare a lot of people away and even the even the words eternal life like i use for the eternal life fan club that can scare people away um but also there's an idea that words like immortality and eternal life and living forever these words also inspire they're just more inspirational it worked for religion right as far as marketing religion probably wouldn't have gotten popular if it was just like but let's extend our life a few hundred years you know what i mean no religion is popular because like liz was saying religion is wrapped up in the idea immortality eternal life living forever that is what's inspirational so we can't lose sight of that you're not living forever that's what people want i think in their their deepest heart that's what people want like i was i lectured i gave a speech at people's unlimited and these people they are inspired to live forever and i know that liz gave a lecture there too and these people are so amazing right because like wow they don't really want to live forever and i think that more people are like that than we even know there are people out there that really are inspired by eternity not just living 200 years not just 500 years they want to live forever so i think that's one of some of us transhumanists couldn't reach out to those people i think that's that's important also and then i just like to mention that a lot of people are afraid that these anti-aging technologies are not going to be available to everyone and that is a huge deterrent that's a people they're like why bother well that's just going to be for the rich people so i think that the more we move towards a socialism or at least a medicinal um medical socialism so that everyone at least has their medical needs covered i think that's going to alleviate a lot of these fears and that people are going to realize okay if these technologies do come there are going to be for me the government's going to take care of me i'm not going to be left out while the rich people are getting to live forever so we have to address those concerns um like sultan isfon if he was president he talked about having a basic income and under the basic income it would be covered like your life extension treatments would be covered and that's i think the good news that that this is for everyone nobody has to die that we're going to be reaching towards a future where there's going to be less war less violence global a global government where people are in peace and we can all just live and have fun forever and i think that's the message we have to inspire people with and um let's vote for sultan isfon uh maybe he probably won't become president this time around but maybe 10 years let's uh i think he's doing amazing things i think his message is super inspirational what other president is what other presidential candidate has been you know really promoting transhumanism and you know the idea of curing aging as much as him nobody so let's let's really get behind him i think that it's important thank you well thank you roan a lot of interesting ideas here now i will say i myself i'm a libertarian i am not a socialist but i know someone on this panel who is uh whom i'm going to offer the opportunity to make uh the next statement and that is bj murphy uh pretty shady genaille uh well you know everyone here has made several great statements especially in terms of trying to integrate transhumanism with the religious community and this is a very important uh thing for the transhumanist community and the longevity community even as an atheist myself uh and i and i have a lot of uh respect for people who are uh dedicating their times to uh emphasize on this integration of religion and transhumanism people like linking cannon from the mormon transhumanist association he's doing a great job on he does a lot of interesting work where he uses uh bible quotations to try and help uh convey that sense of uh defeating aging and uh transcending our biological limitations and i have a lot of respect for that and respect for researchers like franca courtese who's written about religion and its integration with transhumanism and martin rothblood you know these are people who really see the importance that religious community could have with uh the uh transhumanist community and the community who are fighting for longevity and against aging so we you know pushing them away would be a detrimental effect to our movement and figuring out ways where we can iterate them will be uh a great success in our part you know even even if we can just use certain quotations from the bible and you know from the bible or through the holy karan there are many ways of which we can convey to them uh you know they're easily uh differently like when carinthians 1526 the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death now that's a powerful statement to make and if we can somehow convey that to the religious community we could uh get a huge movement because the vast majority of our population are religious whether we like it or not and uh but then our emphasis on uh the the term immortality and i i do appreciate uh roan's uh uh statement about how immortality the word itself it really drives a lot of people to want to be uh i suppose supportive or optimistic about where we're heading in terms of fighting against aging but then uh i also tend to think that immortality can also be in in certain contexts could be uh a detrimental term uh to certain people as a linguist like steven pinker or nom chomsky uh would note you know terms certain terminologies have specific definitions and with immortality there are some people who i've had to deal with who have emphasized that immortality is a very authoritarian term because it emphasizes the incapability of death incapability of death and that is the authoritarian hold of one person cannot die no matter what and that's not necessarily what we're saying we're saying that each individual will have the choice to live as long as they wish even if that includes eternity so immortality could be specific it could be considered a red herring uh in terms of what we're trying to say and i appreciate other organizations trying to figure out of uh different terms to use like groan he uses eternal life uh for the mild movement it's indefinite life extension for uh obrity gray it's negligible senescence uh you know there are many ways of which we can convey this kind of movement and excite crowds for immortality isn't necessarily the only term but we it could be used in our arsenal of terms to be used uh increase in popularity it just depends on the context so we definitely need to emphasize on that on who we talked to because certain certain people are different in ways of which we have to strike up a conversation with and for my final statement i just want to uh emphasize on building a movement behind this and because there is there is going to be a lot of political pushback that is inevitable and the only way we can succeed is to push back ourselves and we need a mass movement with that and if we can figure out ways of creating a mass movement and as an activist and as janati mentions i am of a socialist background so i've done a lot of work on trying to create mass movements for certain social justice issues and my experience is you can't succeed without the power of the people behind you fighting with you because once you have that kind of power then governments corporations they tend to fall back on their original statements or original actions and if we can do that with ageing we will finally succeed in what we've been fighting for so long since the history of man itself and that is to give us indefinite life so thank you janati absolutely thank you bj as well for that statement one thing that has always amazed me about the life extension movement is how it has blurred these kinds of traditional political distinctions we have so many people of different political persuasions agreeing on this goal and willing to collaborate toward it and on the other hand how do we characterize the people who are resistant to it they're not left-wing or right-wing or religious or atheistic perhaps the best way to characterize them is status quoist for lack of a better term these are people who in my view are characterized by a certain status quo bias an idea that the way things are right now is somehow inextricably tied to human nature and insurmountable so maybe that's the barrier we have to overcome but i wouldn't be surprised if we have people of a thousand different political persuasions helping us out and agreeing on this common task in a nicolai fjodoros language of overcoming the perils of disease and death so sven let's hear your final statement so i'm not a socialist but i agree with what bg just said and that is that we need to first have society change and society will then push to have politics change and we have tried in the past to change politics for example he also has lobbied with the european innovation partnership on active and healthy aging that has failed miserably so the part about the biology of aging is completely missing at first there was a small part about it included and then it got overtaken and now it's about making sure you take your pills because keeping your pills one day might be harmful preventing falls how can we build age-friendly cities and you know like that's not going to bring us anywhere near to have healthy life extension so first the public needs to change the public needs to say we want to have healthy life extension and then politics will follow what the public demands with regards to religion i'm an atheist but i also think that when it comes to healthy life extension we shouldn't try to push people away we should try to include so if people are religious and you know they are in favor of healthy life extension let's make allies of them um and work together to have aging defeated um for um yeah coming back to the thing that i say we we need societal change first well for that i think it's very important that we show that aging is a malleable process that we are able to extend lifespan that's really crucial because too many people today are still believing that aging is a process that is too complex for us to intervene in and that's something that has to change now of course i fully admit science is very hard to do uh so it's not going to be easy to solve aging but it can be done i believe and we need to tell the people that it can be done um we need definitely more funding for aging research i think that can be come from all sources private government a crowd funding and i think all of these sources have their own pros and cons attached to them uh government funding is of course huge compared to any other source of funding but it tends to go to more incremental progress projects uh rather than the far-off projects that are tend to be more funded by private core funding type of sources which are smaller but available to different types of research uh so all funding for life extension research is positive that's the conclusion of that one and when it comes to to the problem of our um fear of uh that things that we might do are harmful the precautionary principle it's very important to tell the public there is a much bigger fear a much bigger risk of not doing something right we all have a terminal disease aging right and and so the risk of not doing anything is certain death that's something that we should understand uh and that the public should understand and to end i just want to again remind the people to participate in kalman's day on the 21st of february as another defense to push forward this important uh topic of life extension thank you yes thank you spend chocolate and olive oil i'll keep that in mind and i encourage our viewers also to partake and consume these items uh even if you don't usually consume these items that won't hurt on that particular day uh i will definitely and i definitely appreciate uh your extensively research presentation and your measured objective remarks today spin i think you're doing a great job in terms of advocating for life extension and advocating for a greater public support for life extension research so please keep up the good work now uh i left the opportunity for the last word uh to a person who i know has the ability to conclude with a flourish so adam elonzi let's hear your concluding flourishes on our discussion sorry the microphone was off i didn't want any background noise uh ruining the recording but what i wanted to tell everyone is that these networks we have now have enabled us to do amazing things had it not been for the internet and for facebook i would have never discovered life extension movement you and i would have never met had it not been for my podcast which i created on a whim and kira's post on linkedin i would have never met liz and she wouldn't be here on the panel right now what i'm saying and this is also in rebuttal to peter's questions or comments or whatever you want to call them is that small things can make an enormous difference in the long run and this is the beauty of emergent properties in any system and that's why we well why freedom is such a wonderful thing and why we should do everything within our power to guarantee liberty but also use our powers of freedom to persuade others and realize what they should be doing and what they should be thinking now they're free to disagree of course but we have logic reason and virtually everything on our side except for time and this is a very time sensitive issue which is why the urgency that's been expressed here by all of the panelists is so appropriate it's not a joking matter and unfortunately we have to joke about it just to get through the day get through our lives but when we sit down and we begin to think about it we realize it is the sort of damocles that hangs over all of our heads absolutely well adam thank you very much i couldn't have said it better myself i really appreciate everyone coming on this panel and spending two and a half hours discussing the extremely important topic of how can we get more public support and acceptance and progress in the area of life extension so thank you very much with that i bid my panelists and my readers a good day