transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Pushkin, too quick?

Speaker 2:
[00:07] No, it was perfect.

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Pushkin, stop.

Speaker 2:
[00:09] You got it.

Speaker 1:
[00:23] Jacob, on business history, we often talk about rich people and the businesses that made them rich, but we rarely talk about what many of those rich people do with the second half of their lives, which is they attempt to live forever.

Speaker 2:
[00:36] Yeah, they got all this money.

Speaker 1:
[00:37] Why not?

Speaker 2:
[00:37] It's really nice. And you know, when a rich person decides they want to live forever, a lot of people show up to take their money to help them. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

Speaker 1:
[00:46] I'm Robert Smith.

Speaker 2:
[00:46] We have a very special guest today.

Speaker 3:
[00:48] Hi, Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[00:51] This is Business History, a show about the history of business. And Kara, you have a new show.

Speaker 3:
[00:55] I do. I do have a new show. It's called Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, although I have a lot of business history because I'm old. And I've been covering the business.

Speaker 2:
[01:01] You are business history.

Speaker 3:
[01:02] I am business history, so I feel good being here. I've been covering tech since the beginning of the internet age, I would say, when these people didn't have money, when Jeff Bezos was poor, right?

Speaker 2:
[01:11] The poor hedge fund worker.

Speaker 3:
[01:14] Well, he wasn't rich, I'll tell you that. Not like he is. He couldn't buy Venice at the time for his wedding. And I just covered them as a reporter first at the Washington Post, and then I was at the Wall Street Journal for a long time. And it was really interesting to watch them transform the world in a lot of ways, not just technology, but everything, social, political, communications, for everything. It touched everything. And as it started to change, you would see them change. And one of the things that comes with great wealth and great adulation is the idea that you're a god. And so they started to act like gods, which was some of them, not all of them. And what I found really interesting is their interests started to, if they could hack the world, could they hack life itself? And they kept, early on, they started doing a lot of health care related things because it's a big industry and it's a really messed up, inefficient industry. And they just started to get very interested in their bodies, like in terms of what they were doing and could they hack the brain. And they've been out of science fiction because a lot of science fiction is about that, about the morphing of technology with humans. They started to sort of get into that and they started talking about it.

Speaker 1:
[02:24] But, you know, it's not just that it's the new rich and the new technology. I mean, it seems like people who have been rich, who think themselves gods, have been doing this for a long, long time.

Speaker 2:
[02:34] Yeah, we were looking back, the first emperor of China, the guy who united China.

Speaker 3:
[02:40] Which we mentioned in the show.

Speaker 2:
[02:41] Yeah, Qin Shi Huang, right? So that's hundreds of years BC. He put out an executive order for everybody in the empire to look for a life-prolonging elixir and send people out on missions, and apparently brought in, you know, doctors slash alchemists slash magicians to his court. And it seems as if he died of mercury poisoning because they gave him mercury to live longer.

Speaker 3:
[03:05] You've got that exactly right. And we talk about those throughout time, like drinking the blood of virgins, doing that, you know, there was all manner of different things, or bathing in the blood of virgins, for example. Ponce de Leon is sort of the most enduring finding, the Fountain of Youth. And there's all these ideas around how to live forever. And use the word elixir, which is really important, because the elixir is always in science fiction. And of course, this motivates a lot of science fiction, as I said, motivates a lot of tech people. And the idea that there is one single solution that will give you life. And then it also morphs, interestingly, into the ideas behind Frankenstein and Dracula. And that's all about longevity in some way and the costs of longevity.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] Well, Frankenstein is a book about technology, right? It's written in the 1800s, kind of emits the Industrial Revolution by a romantic writer and a cautionary tale, for sure.

Speaker 3:
[03:56] Or is it? Because I think it does.

Speaker 1:
[03:59] Depends on how you read it.

Speaker 3:
[04:00] Or the idea of vampires, the idea of all these things is how do you morph your body so that it's immortal in some ways? Of course, Greek mythology, it's Tithonus, a god falls in love with this guy, gives him eternal life, but forgets to keep him young.

Speaker 2:
[04:15] It's the curse of immortality for the Greek god.

Speaker 3:
[04:17] The curse of immortality. All of it, it's throughout our history of humanity. Of course, religion is about the idea of living forever.

Speaker 2:
[04:25] That same Chinese emperor who died of mercury poisoning, apparently he's the one with the terracotta warrior army in his crypt to lead him through the afterlife. Even if he died at 49, in his mind, he was going to live forever.

Speaker 3:
[04:40] You don't even get to the Egyptians, which is a whole other industry.

Speaker 2:
[04:43] Mummification is an incredible technology. It is and remains so, actually. They had special tools to pull your brains out. Like later, they would take the organs out, mummify them, and then put them back in.

Speaker 3:
[04:53] Yes, put them back in. Actually, they're rather well-preserved, which is really interesting. Indeed. Then it got me interested because then in American history, Kellogg's cereal was about a health brand, right? There was all this manner of stuff that these different people would try to perfect the human body through nutrition and usually false nutrition, right?

Speaker 2:
[05:13] Let's talk about Kellogg for a second because I think it speaks interestingly to a particular part of your show. There was John Harvey Kellogg, it was actually his brother started the cereal company. John Harvey Kellogg was a doctor and as you know, he had this famous sanitarium, but it was like a fancy health spa. Amelia Earhart went there and Henry Ford went there and presidents went there and he prescribed, he was really into enemas, including yogurt enemas, also into eating yogurt, so I'm wondering probiotics, light therapy, which you did in your show.

Speaker 3:
[05:44] I did, but it doesn't work.

Speaker 2:
[05:47] I'm guessing it didn't work then either. But that particular story of John Harvey Kellogg and what a big deal his sanitarium was and how legit he was and famous he was, it reminded me of the, you go essentially to the modern version of that in the show, right? You go to some fancy wellness center. Tell us about that.

Speaker 3:
[06:04] Well, what's interesting, Concierge Medicine has taken over. And there is a health care system for the rich and one for everybody else. And of course, we don't have universal health care in this country, but a lot of people are sort of bypassing our broken system and having these concierge medicines where they do extensive amounts of tests, look at everything, they want to check you all the time, they call you all the time, they want to make sure that they offer different supplements and different trends and it's basically business is what they're trying to do and they take advantage of people, especially rich people, having the money to be able to spend ridiculous amounts of money on solutions that aren't actually solutions.

Speaker 2:
[06:41] I will say one that is interesting to me in that regard is the full body MRI scan for healthy people. Like that insurance doesn't cover it, it's a rich people thing. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea.

Speaker 3:
[06:51] It is a bad idea.

Speaker 2:
[06:52] Because there's lots of, there's this term, incidentaloma. I don't know if you came up with that, but it's like, it's an incidental finding. It would have been fine if you left it alone. But now that you've seen it, oh, we better do something about it.

Speaker 3:
[07:02] Right, and you can, I was actually just interviewed Eric Topol yesterday on my podcast, and you talked about that, this idea of like, you go in there and cause more problems than you first started when it was just a minor cyst that you don't need to do anything. Surgery, invasive surgery is always full of risk. And so it's this, again, as you say from history, this has been something that's been going on, that there's constantly a solution to something. And the American public especially has been pushed and pulled of what you should do and what you shouldn't do. I mean, there's those famous pictures of people with the things that shake you. You know, and of course now we have-

Speaker 2:
[07:36] It goes around your belly. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3:
[07:37] And now you have shaking things. And I'm always like, okay, show me the science. I'd like to see it. And amid all this nonsense, there are incredible strides. Like AI, everyone's terrified of and should be for a number of reasons. And at the same time, the idea of drug discovery, the speed at which you could test things, the idea of figuring out like an organ clock. What is your organ clock? We usually look at the body as a whole, but-

Speaker 2:
[08:05] Eric Topol talks about that.

Speaker 3:
[08:06] Yes, it's absolutely true. And AI will help you do that in a faster and more efficient and more accurate way. Cancer detection, cancer drugs. And so I wanted to say, look, there's all this charlatanism happening, like heavy duty online and social media, like you cannot believe. And at the same time, there's all this promise. So, you know, in computing, you talk to the signal to noise ratio, there's a lot of noise, much of it nonsense. There's a lot of signal too. And so I was trying to find the signal.

Speaker 1:
[08:37] And this often happens when rich people for their own egotistical needs research something. Sometimes, there's things that come out of this. I'm reminded of a historical story of Charles Lindbergh in the 1920s. He was, of course, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. Famous pilot. I don't know.

Speaker 3:
[08:55] Truly horrible person.

Speaker 1:
[08:56] Truly, truly. So in the 1930s, he meets this-

Speaker 3:
[09:00] Friend of Nazis.

Speaker 1:
[09:01] Well, famously. Famously. So in the 1930s, he meets this Nobel Prize winning scientist, Alexis Corral. And Alexis is an actual scientist who's experimenting on keeping organs alive outside the body. And his idea is that people will just be able to swap organs in in the future. And they develop all of these amazing technologies. Charles Linsburg, because he was sort of a mechanical engineer, Sure, I thought it was interesting. helps Corral develop the pump that can keep organs alive. It infuses- It's a perfusion device. A perfusion device, the principles of which are used to this day. Now, it turns out that Alexis Corral, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, doesn't believe that everyone should live forever. He just believes that white Aryans should live forever.

Speaker 3:
[09:46] Hence, the attraction to Lindbergh had an attraction to that idea.

Speaker 2:
[09:50] In the 20s, it was all eugenics. Didn't Kellogg get into eugenics later?

Speaker 3:
[09:54] They all did. There were state laws about eugenics. Then it leads to the ugliness of Nazism, which did enormous amounts of experiments on people and actual people in order to figure out skin color, eye color, all manner of things, which is horrific at the same time. Of course. It always leads to that, is like who should live and who should die. One of the things that I wanted to get into is the vast inequality in this. A good example is CRISPR, which it's a technology very promising. I interviewed Jennifer Doudna, one of the Nobel Prize winners around it. But how should we move this out and who should pay for it? Because it's very expensive and one of the areas is sickle cell anemia. Using CRISPR, it's still in its early stages, let me be clear. You could possibly solve it. A single genetic mutation. A single genetic mutation and you could just clip it out, essentially. They're not doing it because it's a population that's poor. It's a population that's African American primarily. One of the points that I think one of the people that make is you can be sure if Elon Musk had sickle cell anemia, it would be solved yesterday. It's a $2 million per person, even if it works kind of thing. So how do you figure out ways to get these technologies into the hands of as many people as possible, as many doctors as possible, so they could use them? And so I tried to, I was sort of on a search, I myself had a stroke many years ago. I have a hole in my heart, which is now plugged. Thank you. A very easy surgery when it used to be a very hard one.

Speaker 2:
[11:22] There is technological progress, widespread benefits.

Speaker 3:
[11:25] But I went even further because around strokes, there's so much cost in a lot of these. There's this lab in Stanford run by this woman from China, and they're using little tiny things like, you remember that movie where they injected a little ship, a tiny little ship into a human?

Speaker 2:
[11:43] Was it Rick Moranis?

Speaker 3:
[11:45] The Incredible Voyage.

Speaker 1:
[11:46] Incredible Voyage.

Speaker 2:
[11:48] I could use it with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Speaker 3:
[11:50] Rick Moranis did that too, but it's called Fantastic Voyage. If you go watch it, the technology in the movie is terrible. It's like you could sort of see the man's hand moving.

Speaker 1:
[11:59] But they're fighting white blood cells.

Speaker 3:
[12:00] That's right. That's right. With their zappers. And one of the things that's interesting is these little millibots. And they go into your, they get injected in it. When you're having a stroke, they get injected into your neck. And one of the problems now is they can use medication to mitigate it, which takes a minute and you could have damage. Or they put this catheter in and go to the clot right now. And the catheter goes in and just the introduction of a catheter is a problem because it could nick something or whatever. And it goes in and it hits the clot. But the clot sometimes breaks up and goes further and gets worse. This Millibot goes in and it eats the clot. And it's by magnets and AI.

Speaker 2:
[12:38] I feel like that's the most hand way, man.

Speaker 3:
[12:41] But it's being worked on right now. I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[12:43] I believe that it works.

Speaker 3:
[12:44] It's like a video game. And so I was doing it. And that was an astonishing thing.

Speaker 1:
[12:48] Not to yourself.

Speaker 2:
[12:48] Did you cure a stroke?

Speaker 3:
[12:49] No, no, no. I didn't cure my stroke. But think of you could be in a rural area, inject this thing in. Someone, a better doctor, a more trained doctor in Boston, has already done the program and already mapped this patient's brain instantly. Go in and get the stroke. Do you think, how much money do you save if you don't have damage from a stroke? Same thing with mRNA technology.

Speaker 2:
[13:11] Well, and suffering. Not to leave suffering out of it.

Speaker 3:
[13:13] Of course, but I like to appeal to people's money.

Speaker 2:
[13:15] Sure, for sure.

Speaker 3:
[13:16] In our country, you pay double, $13,000 a person versus six in every other developed country. So we're wasting money on worse outcomes. We're more unhealthy than they are. Or we're very unhealthy, actually. And so like mRNA technology, another incredible technological leap. And of course, it's been politicized because of ridiculous murders.

Speaker 2:
[13:38] That's the dumbest one.

Speaker 3:
[13:39] Right.

Speaker 2:
[13:39] Policizing mRNA vaccines and competing among the dumb.

Speaker 3:
[13:42] Vaccine for cancer, vaccine for HIV, all this stuff. And now a lot of the, I went and visited the lab of a guy who won the Nobel Prize, and he was like, everyone's leaving to go to Canada or France or somewhere else. And we used to have the most robust technological development, but technology moves slowly. And then now it's gotten politicized in a way that's problematic. And so on one level, one of the things he said that was really striking to me is the next time we have a pandemic, we're going to beg China for vaccines. That's, that's how, where we could get.

Speaker 1:
[14:13] We'll be back with more Immortality and Kara Swisher after the break.

Speaker 2:
[14:39] Kara Swisher, tell us about Brian Johnson.

Speaker 3:
[14:41] Oh, Brian, he's really interesting. You know, he's someone I've known because he had a technology company he sold, around payments or whatever. One of the early kind of startups that did really well, and he made a fortune, a couple of hundred million dollars, I believe.

Speaker 2:
[14:54] Used to be a fortune.

Speaker 3:
[14:56] Well, at the time, we were all like, wow, that's a lot of money. He came to my conference, which I ran a big technology company. I often had presentations by interesting cutting edge technology. I started to really get interested in especially the health stuff, and he came to talk about the brain. He was one of the earliest people to talk about AI, and where is the human brain, and cognitive issues that were happening, and I thought it was fascinating. He himself had depression issues, and he talked about that, how can we figure out ways to mitigate depression. Really interesting talk. Couple of years later, he shows up as this creature who has been experimenting on himself.

Speaker 1:
[15:33] People who have seen this on social media, he looks a little pale and vampire-ish, and he talks a lot about what he's doing to stay alive forever. I'm sorry, what he's doing to not die, which makes a distinction.

Speaker 3:
[15:45] He's being very cute about it.

Speaker 2:
[15:47] But don't die.

Speaker 3:
[15:48] Right.

Speaker 2:
[15:48] Of course.

Speaker 3:
[15:48] It's marketing.

Speaker 2:
[15:49] It's good copy.

Speaker 3:
[15:50] It's good copy. And so, he measures everything. His erections at night, his sleep, he does, he tries things, sees if they work. He was into rapamycin, and then, oh no, wait a minute, that's a problem. Like, he just does everything. So he's an experiment unto himself.

Speaker 1:
[16:05] Which is not an experiment, just to be clear.

Speaker 3:
[16:07] He's a white mouse.

Speaker 1:
[16:08] That is not the way science works.

Speaker 3:
[16:09] That is correct. It's going to help. How can Brian Johnson live longer? It has nothing to do with you or I.

Speaker 2:
[16:14] Well, if he figures something out, although to Robert's point, an N of one isn't going to work.

Speaker 3:
[16:19] It's not.

Speaker 1:
[16:21] Fair enough.

Speaker 3:
[16:21] No, he's not going to figure something out with just him. You need these gold standard tests. And so one of the things I put to him was, why don't you just use your hundreds of millions of dollars to help do more testing on stuff that's promising? Instead, he's doing trading blood between himself and his son and his father.

Speaker 1:
[16:37] Which doesn't work for everyone.

Speaker 3:
[16:38] It doesn't work at all.

Speaker 1:
[16:39] Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3:
[16:40] Let me just say. And so I don't mind him doing it, but the way he's doing it creates all this, again, misinformation online. And some of his stuff is very clear. It's like, take olive oil. Great. Good choice, Brian. But then the supplements always show up. Oh, if you only drank this and ate this and did this. And then it gets into the hawking of any snake oil salesman who used to just go from town to town and sell all manner of...

Speaker 2:
[17:06] You don't have to go from town to town anymore. Now you've got Instagram.

Speaker 3:
[17:09] Right. Exactly. And one of the things that really disturbed me, and I already was writing about it in a more serious way around anti-Semitism and hate and etc., was the health stuff. And I started to see people who had no business giving health information, giving health information out, and no one regulates it. And again, if you're on television, you can't do that. But on the Internet, you certainly can say, use this one pill and you'll be fine. And it sort of is offensive to me because it's actually dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[17:35] I want to do another one from history.

Speaker 3:
[17:37] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[17:37] I want to do Charles Edward Brown Sackard. Doctor.

Speaker 3:
[17:42] All right.

Speaker 2:
[17:43] Famous, legit doctor in France in the late 1800s, had taught at Harvard. So in 1889, when he was 72 in decline, he gave this talk in France where he said, I have made an amazing discovery. I'm stronger. I can work longer hours. And?

Speaker 3:
[18:04] Cocaine.

Speaker 1:
[18:05] Close.

Speaker 2:
[18:06] Close. Yeah, kind of close. And my favorite of his discoveries, he said, with my new treatment, my urine stream is 25 percent longer.

Speaker 1:
[18:16] You know Brian Johnson would have loved that.

Speaker 3:
[18:17] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:18] His secret was grinding up the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and injecting it into himself.

Speaker 3:
[18:24] Oh my God. It's so dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[18:26] Sepsis.

Speaker 3:
[18:27] Hello, sepsis.

Speaker 2:
[18:28] Painful. I mean, there is this obsession with sperm, basically. For him, it was like, oh, it's the sperm that's what's doing it.

Speaker 3:
[18:36] Women hadn't noticed that with men.

Speaker 2:
[18:37] Interesting. And kind of, I thought of it when you were talking about Brian Johnson and people selling things online because this became this international sensation, like the doctors dismissed him. But in America, people were trying it, this kind of aging baseball player tried it and then pitched a shutout and hit a double and a triple and all the newspapers were like, proof it works. And then by the way, all these people are getting poisoned by it and there were deaths and lawsuits. I mean, I will say, when I read about this, I thought, well, maybe it's testosterone? Like, I don't know, they hadn't identified testosterone yet.

Speaker 3:
[19:16] Which is in heavy use among men these days.

Speaker 2:
[19:18] Indeed. No, they looked back and like there's not enough testosterone in what they would have been injecting to men. So it was a placebo, it was a painful placebo.

Speaker 3:
[19:25] Right, exactly. I mean, that's today. Is it NADs? Is it peptides? Is it this? Oh no, it's red light. And the problem is some of these things are hyperbaric chambers, I got it.

Speaker 2:
[19:36] You were in a hyperbaric chamber, how was it?

Speaker 1:
[19:39] You look great.

Speaker 3:
[19:40] By the way, a lot of the early hyperbaric chamber stuff was done at the Brooklyn Bridge and also in France when they were building bridges because the workers would have to go down, they get the bends and there was a lot of doctoring happening, figuring it out.

Speaker 2:
[19:51] Well, that's where you actually need it to be clear, right? If you're working at the bottom of the East River.

Speaker 3:
[19:55] So I did not have the bends and so it wasn't effective for me. It's good in wound healing, it can be properly used in a medical setting, but now people are like, I flew to Europe or I flew to Asia and I'm going to get in the hyperbaric chamber because more oxygen has to be better than normal oxygen, but it's not. And it's also there's issues of blowing up, but that's another issue. These things can actually explode.

Speaker 2:
[20:16] Not good for longevity.

Speaker 3:
[20:17] Not good for longevity. And so all these people are selling them in these expensive high-end things as to refresh you. And so I go and it doesn't refresh you, it doesn't, there's no science behind it. There is good science around the bends and wound healing. And the same thing with some of these injections of NADs. Wound healing, yes, there's some really promising, there's incredible stuff happening around that. These gels and all kinds of stuff. And instead, they have to make it a catchall for everything.

Speaker 1:
[20:45] So I understand why people sell it, but I'm curious why people buy it. I mean, I've thought about this and I think maybe people feel out of control in their lives. And the body is the one thing you can control and you have the right to control and do whatever you want, even if it's not scientific or could actually hurt you.

Speaker 3:
[21:04] Well, look at the diet industry. Oh, grapefruit, if you eat grapefruit. Oh, wait, chicken broth. Oh, wait, if you eat this. Like a Scarsdale device.

Speaker 1:
[21:11] I'm still an oat bran.

Speaker 2:
[21:12] Are you? No.

Speaker 3:
[21:14] Well, right now, with protein maxing, men, please stop because you don't need that much. I don't care what the Peter Attia says. You don't need that much. He's wrong. He's wrong. He's actually wrong. You do need protein. That's for sure. But this idea that you're going to be extra strong if you have extra. It's such an American thing. Like, if this works, double will be better. And I think there's a hope and a dream, just like with religion, that if I only do this, then this. And it's nothing more than con artists.

Speaker 2:
[21:45] Let's talk about fitness. Fitness is the one where I think silver bullet is pushing it. Nothing's a silver bullet. But it is amazing how good fitness is in how many ways. And I know you talk about it in the show.

Speaker 3:
[21:55] Silver bullet has to do with killing vampires, but go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[21:58] Oh, yes. No, you tell me. So you talk about fitness in the show. Like, what did you learn? What did you do?

Speaker 3:
[22:03] Look, good sleep is critically important, but you don't have to monitor every 50, you know, I haven't- Where's your honor ring? I left it at home. I just don't care anymore. I don't, like, it doesn't-

Speaker 2:
[22:13] Or is it like not on brand now that you're doing the show?

Speaker 3:
[22:15] No, no, I like it. I think it's interesting. I just don't need that much information. It doesn't, once it stops helping me, I'm like, that's enough with that. It's interesting, for sure, but I didn't, the insights were smaller and smaller, although I like the O-R-Ring. I think it's interesting.

Speaker 2:
[22:28] Exercise.

Speaker 3:
[22:29] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[22:29] Exercise is amazing.

Speaker 3:
[22:30] You absolutely, I did VO2 max, and I think a lot of, if you can afford it, it's a really interesting piece of information for you in terms of improving how your muscles and heart work together. Very interesting that you improve your score, that you do, especially cardiovascular exercise.

Speaker 2:
[22:45] But that's when, you don't have to go do that test.

Speaker 1:
[22:48] VO2 max is just like, you can walk up stairs.

Speaker 3:
[22:50] The only reason I'm saying is because you can do it on some of these devices, the Aura and this, and even the AirPods is now starting to take numbers. It's just more accurate, that's all. It's a more accurate version. And so one of the things is you exercise, I've started running again and I feel great. But what you have to do is you do, you say go to 110, then 120 for a minute or two, then 130, but then you have to go down to 110.

Speaker 2:
[23:12] You're talking about your heart rate.

Speaker 3:
[23:13] Yes, but you have to bring it down, and that's the efficiency of your heart. You don't have to run until you vomit.

Speaker 2:
[23:21] In fact, running slower is better.

Speaker 3:
[23:22] Correct.

Speaker 2:
[23:24] I love to run, and it's hard for me. There's this kind of the truism about running, is you go too slow on your fast days and too fast on your slow days. And most of your days should be slow days. You should normally be running so you can be having a conversation.

Speaker 3:
[23:38] Or a simple thing, you know what's a great thing to do? You eat your dinner, you walk 30 minutes. My grandmother said that. It is incredibly good for your health to do that.

Speaker 2:
[23:46] Fighting diabetes, right?

Speaker 3:
[23:47] To walk right after you eat. All manner of things. Very simple. Costs, you know how much it costs? Zero. I'm sure they'll build something that you have to wear, some weighted vest that will help you even more.

Speaker 2:
[23:56] They have the weighted vest.

Speaker 3:
[23:57] They have the weighted vest. I have a lot of friends who wear it. It's fine.

Speaker 2:
[24:00] Great. It's expensive. I looked into it. It's expensive. I want to do another history one here because it's one that I like. We've been talking about a lot of sort of quackery and charlatanism. I love fitness, weirdly. And so, Jack Lillane, your old adductor, amazing, amazing man. Amazing man.

Speaker 3:
[24:18] Everything he says is accurate. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:21] And his main thing is like exercise, right? So he comes up in the thirties, 1930s, basically kind of starts the first health club. And doctors at that time are anti-weight lifting. There's this term muscle bound where they say like, if you lift weights, you won't be able to move well. They say, I'll give you a heart attack. Wrong. They were wrong. And then he has a TV show in the fifties. I remember. When TV was just free, right? And they'll say like, hey, kids, go get your parents. And he'll do like things with like a broomstick, you know? And this is probably pushing it too far. But as I was thinking about this in the context of talking to you, you know, I was thinking like, we've been talking a fair bit about things from the 1800s, early 1900s, Gilded Age, which is an age that is like today, technological change, vast new wealth, new communications technologies, inequality. Jack LaLanne is mid-century America, 1950s, 60s. That's peak Jack LaLanne era. That is the opposite. That is the era of compressing, declining inequality, of rising equality, of the rising middle class. And I love Jack LaLanne as the emblem of that.

Speaker 3:
[25:27] He's amazing. And his outfit was wonderful. That red outfit he wore. I think one of the things he was doing is he was talking about basics, strength training, calisthenics is the word they would use. Very simple stuff that you didn't need to spend money on. Just get up and move. And so with exercise, strength training is critical, especially as you order balance training. But you don't have to buy all the crap.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] Literally you could stand on one leg and it's good balance training.

Speaker 3:
[25:51] And so one of the things he was doing is he was simplifying for everyone. And one of the things I was trying to get through is that there's all manner of things everybody can do. And again, sleep's another thing. Do you need to monitor it so much? There's all stuff you can put on your head or a chill pad or this and that. You could also open a window. How is your sleep? It's good. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. Surprising.

Speaker 2:
[26:11] Do you have any tips? I have the middle age phenomenon of waking up in the middle of the night.

Speaker 3:
[26:17] I wake up more than I used to, but that's a phenomenon of age. That's all it is.

Speaker 1:
[26:19] We should have just done this at four in the morning.

Speaker 3:
[26:21] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:21] Which would have been great.

Speaker 3:
[26:23] I never used to wake up. I wake up now twice a night. And I go back to sleep. But you know, there's all people who have real sleep problems. And there are, there's all kinds of interesting science around that.

Speaker 2:
[26:32] One of the fancy Equinox Sleep Gym Hotel in the show.

Speaker 3:
[26:34] He's an interesting guy. He's changed a lot some of his attitudes and stuff. But like, what they do is they bring the temperature down. That's absolutely true. They close the shades, you know, or they have these softer-than-extra sheets, this thing on your head that monitors you. You just need to be in a quiet place, go to sleep, and put down your fucking phone. It's not really that hard.

Speaker 1:
[26:54] And so this technology can actually, I think, make it worse. I had a Fitbit that told me my sleep number. And when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would lay there thinking, oh no, my number.

Speaker 2:
[27:04] Would you really? That's such a cliche.

Speaker 1:
[27:05] I would be like, no, my number, this is gonna hurt my number, because I'm trying to break 90, and I'm like, oh, this is gonna, I'm gonna get a B-plus instead of an A-minus.

Speaker 3:
[27:13] The best thing I had when I had my orio-ring on, I was gonna wear it today, but I actually don't get information I need from it, that's why. And I happen to like the guy who, the guy who ran that, is Zeke Emanuel, who's in the documentary later, and he was talking about the importance of social connections, which are scientifically proven and also in all manner of ways. And he said, and I was wearing the orio-ring, and I go, he goes, why do you wear that? And I go, well, it's interesting numbers, whether I slept well. And he goes, don't you know that when you wake up? And I'm like, I do, I do, sir.

Speaker 1:
[27:44] I could feel it. If I forget to check the number, it meant I had a great night's sleep.

Speaker 3:
[27:49] Right, right. So anyway, that's what I was getting to.

Speaker 2:
[27:52] Let's take another break.

Speaker 3:
[27:53] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[27:54] When our program continues.

Speaker 2:
[28:16] So you talked some in the show about how wellness is marketed to women. Tell me about that.

Speaker 3:
[28:22] Well, actually, it's being marketed a lot to men now, which is really interesting. And especially these wellness, I call them grifters, wellness grifters.

Speaker 2:
[28:28] They use a different word for men, right? It's like tactical wellness.

Speaker 3:
[28:31] No, let me tell you, let me give you an explanation of the, I can explain all of gender issues. When women do things around food and health or diets or whatever, they have body dysmorphia. When men do it, it's body hacking. Like, give me a break.

Speaker 2:
[28:45] Eumorphia. I think I saw the word eumorphia.

Speaker 3:
[28:47] You know, what's interesting is it is marketed, women that tends to be around skin and things like that, but men are getting into it much, much more. And you know, you have these influencers like Peter Atiyah or Andrew Huberman. And a lot of it is, again, selling stuff. They all have supplements, they all have bars, they all have this and that. And it's so narcissistic. And that's what drives me crazy about all of it. It's not about better health. It's about better you as opposed to everybody else.

Speaker 2:
[29:13] Tell me about Sam Altman's Longevity Startup.

Speaker 3:
[29:16] Well, he's doing a lot of stuff about extension, life extension. And there is significantly good science around where we're going with AI and cancer detection, as I said, or drug discovery and stuff like that. And so some of the things is, what are some of the things we can study in a scientific way that will move us forward? And I am all for that kind of stuff. And he's less on the living forever. It's more how do you have a healthier health span over a lifespan? Because right now, our lifespan is 15 years longer than our health span. Right.

Speaker 2:
[29:46] So how do you have people who are 85 years old and fine?

Speaker 3:
[29:50] Correct. How do you bring those numbers as close together as possible? Because we're in a sick care system, not a health care system.

Speaker 2:
[29:55] And it's terrible to be that person, right? It's terrible to have 15 years of your life.

Speaker 3:
[29:59] All the money is over here and it's not in the preventative area. So he's working on the preventative area. I'm fine with that. That's really important. The question is, with AI, they always promise, while they're doing all manner of unpleasant things, they're promising all these, we're going to solve cancer, and by the way, we're taking all your information so we can sell use to it.

Speaker 2:
[30:17] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[30:18] To me, that's marketing.

Speaker 2:
[30:19] Can you have the cancer cure without?

Speaker 3:
[30:20] Right, but they're using it as a marketing item versus a real thing.

Speaker 2:
[30:23] Well, it can be both, right?

Speaker 3:
[30:25] To be clear, it seems to be both. Right, there's some astonishing things happening in cancer research because of that. You know, DeepMind was working on gene folding, there's CRISPR, there's just so much great stuff. And what it is, again, is it's drowned out, this idea that we will solve cancer. I'm like, we actually will solve cancer. It's just a question of if we have a commitment and science takes longer than tech wants it to take, so.

Speaker 1:
[30:52] One more history story. This is the Cryonics Society of California in the 1960s.

Speaker 3:
[30:58] I stayed out of that. I thought about it.

Speaker 1:
[31:00] It's amazing. So this was a bunch of amateurs in the 1960s who were thinking, well, yes, we will cure cancer someday, but not now. So what if right before, right after death, we put people on ice and we keep them frozen until there is a cure?

Speaker 3:
[31:17] Right.

Speaker 1:
[31:17] It was led by a guy named Bob Nelson, a TV repairman. These were not scientists. And they found the very first volunteer to be frozen, James Bedford. He was a psychology professor. And he was dying of cancer, and in fact did die of cancer. But I should say that right before he died, his final words were, I'm feeling better. Then he dies. And the Cryotic Society covers him in ice, that they had gotten from like neighbor's freezers. This was not scientific. They eventually put him in a tube. They did this to many people.

Speaker 3:
[31:52] I like this whole thing.

Speaker 1:
[31:54] But the problem was they didn't think it out. They didn't think like if you are going to preserve someone for decades, centuries, who's going to pay for it? How are you going to take care of these things? They had a bunch of people frozen in tubes in a cave, I guess. It was sort of a cave. And then they ran out of money. And then they just sort of unplugged them. And they thought...

Speaker 3:
[32:16] This is the plot of Captain America, but go ahead.

Speaker 1:
[32:19] Well, James Bedford, that first guy they froze, stayed frozen and is now with a company called Alcor? I think it's called Alcor in Arizona. And so he's in liquid nitrogen. They don't know. They think he's in good condition. There's other people frozen in Alcor.

Speaker 3:
[32:36] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[32:37] But I guess my thought was, now what? There's no decision about how to pay for it, how long, how do we know when to wake him? How do we know how to wake him? We don't know any of these things.

Speaker 3:
[32:50] He's dead.

Speaker 2:
[32:53] Well, they have a thing about saying whether he's dead or not, right? Isn't that part of the game they're playing?

Speaker 3:
[32:58] I'm kidding. Kara Swisher is not a doctor. I'm telling you he's dead.

Speaker 1:
[33:00] Well, that's what we think in 2026.

Speaker 3:
[33:02] Go down the crayon. I thought about it and then I-

Speaker 2:
[33:04] Too weird or too silly?

Speaker 3:
[33:05] No. I fully think someday we're going to print our livers. They're going to have- There's all manner of stuff. I do think we will figure out a way to create all manner of things. I think that is possible and not yet. Of course, one of the things that's a problem with the tech people, you're often saying, actually, and I'm remembering Elizabeth Holmes with the Vial of Blood, the thing that we do all these tests. And all these tech people were totally enamored with her, handed her piles and piles of money. And she always wanted to come to my conferences and stuff. And I went to my brother, I'm like, what are you thinking? He goes, bullshit, you cannot do this. It's not in the realm of physics. You can't do it. Biology doesn't work like this. And he said, she's a con artist to me. And I said, OK. And I went back to her. I said, I don't really understand what you're doing, and I don't believe you, and I don't have enough knowledge to disabuse you. So I'm going to pass kind of stuff. And so what was really interesting was so many people were like, because the idea of it's great, like, wow. And I bet someday we will be able to do that.

Speaker 2:
[34:05] It just takes a long time, right? Have you heard the term Eroom's Law?

Speaker 3:
[34:09] No, what is it?

Speaker 2:
[34:10] It's Moore's Law spelled backwards, because in drug development, it gets slower and more expensive over time.

Speaker 3:
[34:15] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[34:15] Instead of faster and cheaper.

Speaker 3:
[34:16] As it should, by the way.

Speaker 1:
[34:18] What if we give up on the whole, having the body live forever, and just upload our mind to AI? Who's doing that? Who's doing that and will it work?

Speaker 3:
[34:25] Lots of people. The singularity, right? The singularity. Well, it's a version of that. Yeah, the body becomes a robot. Actually, Elon Musk and I had a great conversation once of a science fiction thing called Made of Meat, and these aliens who are all light and energy that they talk to each other, come down and they can't believe we are made of meat, and we talk through our meat holes, which are our mouths. They're like, they have meat? Why are they using meat to communicate and everything? It's a great story. It's a radio play. And so the idea that you could continue forever is a big thing that illuminates a lot of tech people, that you could download your brain. Now the brain, let me just say, is the most beautiful instrument. A computer wishes it were like a brain. A brain is astonishing. It's an astonishing piece. And it's not technology, it's something else. And we still have never plumbed the real depths of all that's going on there. And the kind of connections just for me to pick up this phone is an astonishing thing. And so one of the things they are enamored with is downloading everyone's consciousness into the whatever. A lot of it was early to talk to Holocaust survivors in order to get their stories. And then when you're in a museum, you could talk to a real Holocaust survivor who's no longer living. And I think that's a beautiful use of the technology. But you could also create and I created a caratarr, which was me. And the strides because of AI are much different. You used to be they would say something and have a number of responses. Now the avatar can think by itself or or use all these patterns and all this information to create new conversations that I never said generative generative. Exactly. And so it wasn't me. And so I started to have a conversation with it. And what was really interesting is how much it started to really have a conversation.

Speaker 2:
[36:04] And it was funnier. You were the avatar.

Speaker 3:
[36:06] Well, there's a point where I'm like, can you tell a joke? Could you smile more? Like, and you told your avatar to smile more. You're not supposed to do that. It's my avatar. I can tell to do whatever I want. What was really interesting is I said, you're not really funny. And then it told quite a good joke. And I was like, okay, that was good.

Speaker 2:
[36:22] That reflects well on you, I think.

Speaker 3:
[36:24] Or the avatar. But what was interesting is we were talking about, I said, but I don't think you exist because you don't have empathy. And they were like, no, I don't. I don't have empathy.

Speaker 1:
[36:32] But I'm glad your avatar exists just in case Elon Musk lives forever.

Speaker 3:
[36:36] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[36:36] There's also a version of you who can irritate him forever.

Speaker 3:
[36:40] Yeah. This avatar needs to be 100% more irritating. I'm going to work on that.

Speaker 2:
[36:44] So we've been spending this conversation talking about people avoiding death or trying to avoid death. But let's talk about death. I mean, you do talk about death in the show. You talk about how it's been present in your life since you were a girl.

Speaker 3:
[36:56] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[36:57] Tell me about your dad.

Speaker 3:
[36:58] Well, my dad died when he was 34. He is just starting his life, three kids. He had come out of not poverty, but he went to the Navy in order to go pay for medical school in college. He had just gotten out and he had a cerebral hemorrhage essentially. He died and that was it. My brother's nice since everything's been informed by the idea that you could die at any time. I think one of the things that has helped us and it helps Steve Jobs too was, in terms of his illness, you have a limited amount of time on this planet. What are you going to do with it? I think it can be very inspirational. In fact, I went and found a professor who was at Skidmore who's talking about the idea of death acceptance and Buddhism knows this already. A lot of world religions know this. The more you accept death, the longer you live, the happier you are, the healthier you are. Those that avoid death are death avoidance, polarity, hatefulness towards others, anger, fear, and it motivates, it creates a really problematic society when you pretend that you try to stave off death. And the Steve Jobs inspiration was he talked about that death is the single greatest motivator of innovation and creativity, because it makes you understand that you're naked. It doesn't matter. Like you're not going to be here. And I, you know, I use quotes like Ben Franklin said it, death takes no bribes, you know. And so they had a more full life because they understood that it ends.

Speaker 1:
[38:17] The Stoics talked about this. You remind yourself that you will die every day.

Speaker 3:
[38:21] Marcus Aurelius always talks about death, but he's not obsessed with it. He's aware of it. Death awareness is critically important to a healthy and happy life. And one of the things that was really interesting, the Heartway went and visited the Harvard Happiness Study people, which they've been doing with groups of people for almost 70 years or something like that, is friends and family and meaning in your life in some fashion is what creates longevity. And the people that were isolated, and let me finish on technology. Nothing could be worse for us than having chat bot relationships, the lack of friction, the sycophantist part of it. You need to have human beings in your life in order to live longer. That is, if someone said, what are the two things you could do? Don't be poor and have friends and family and try new things. It creates a longer, happier life, and it's scientifically proven, and it doesn't cost anything.

Speaker 2:
[39:11] And exercise.

Speaker 3:
[39:12] Yes. But don't have a relationship with a chat bot. Don't do it. It's not going to be better for you. Don't have a relationship with this phone. This phone will live after you, by the way. What's not going to live longer is these relationships that keep you healthier and happier as you move on, and you should move on. The last thing is, I ask everyone I interviewed how they want to die. So I'm going to ask you guys, how do you want to die?

Speaker 2:
[39:34] Quickly. The answer is quickly.

Speaker 3:
[39:36] Really? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[39:37] Yeah. Not now, but when it happens, I want it to be fast. I want to be old and I want it to be fast.

Speaker 3:
[39:42] Really? Because it's the most interesting moment of your life. You couldn't remember your birth, this you're going to remember.

Speaker 2:
[39:47] I'm not going to remember my death either.

Speaker 3:
[39:49] But it's so interesting. It's supposed to be best because it's last.

Speaker 2:
[39:53] Is it? I actually am skeptical. People talk about people's deathbed, you know, wisdom as wisdom. It's not obvious to me that someone is wiser because they're about to die.

Speaker 3:
[40:02] I'm sorry to death shame you. You could die anyway you want.

Speaker 1:
[40:06] I want to be surrounded by my family and the cryonic society of California.

Speaker 3:
[40:10] That's exactly. I'll be there with a bag of ice from 7-Eleven to cover you. The best answer I ever got was this woman who was a twin said, my twin and I have thought about it a lot. Some people have thought about a lot, some people have not. She goes, my twin and I want to be shot out of a cannon and shoot each other. I was like, oh, all right. One guy was like this preacher who's amazing in DC and he said, when I die, I want my mom to meet me and we want to watch Phil Donahue together for eternity because that's what I used to do. That's so sweet. I go, and guess what? Phil Donahue will be there. So you'll be able to hang out with Phil Donahue and watch.

Speaker 2:
[40:45] Give you the mic, you'll get the Phil Donahue mic arm.

Speaker 3:
[40:48] People have the most fascinating answers to that question. That's a great one. They're very happy to answer. At first, they're like, and then they're like, no, I hadn't thought of that.

Speaker 2:
[40:57] Okay, last line. How do you want to die?

Speaker 3:
[40:59] I talk about it in the series. You're going to have to wait and see.

Speaker 1:
[41:01] Oh, boo, boo.

Speaker 3:
[41:03] I have a new one that I just... I change all the time. One is throwing in the fit, get cremated, thrown in the face of people I don't like. Well, that's after you die. Yes, but people answer differently. You don't know. Sometimes it's how they want to have a funeral. Sometimes it's how they want to die. I leave it wide open. Steve Jobs, when he died, his sister wrote a beautiful piece about the moment he died, and he looked up and he said, wow, oh wow, which I think he stage managed that. You know what I mean? Knowing him. Exactly, it was perfect death for him. For me, I'm kind of a troublemaker and I want to go. I'm sitting there, all my friends and family, I have a lot of kids. Everybody's there and I go, oh, you're kidding, and then die. I can't believe this.

Speaker 2:
[41:42] So here's my favorite last words. I don't know if it's true, but it's Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who brought Zen to America. Basically, his last words apparently were thank you, which for me is perfect. And so I will say that to you right now.

Speaker 3:
[41:57] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[41:58] Thank you very much.

Speaker 3:
[41:59] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[41:59] Thanks for coming.

Speaker 2:
[42:00] That was a very special episode of Business History, a show about the history of business.

Speaker 1:
[42:04] We learned a lot.

Speaker 2:
[42:05] With Kara Swisher. And if you're listening on audio, she was wearing the sunglasses. You can see our show on YouTube. The video is edited by Matt Nielsen. Our show runner and editor is Ryan Dilley, our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang, and our engineer is Sarah Bruguier.

Speaker 1:
[42:22] Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2:
[42:23] You're Robert Smith and I'm Jacob Goldstein. We'll be back next week with more stories about the history of business.