The Life Extension Podcast - Technology & Magic, Society & Business: Recent Episodes
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The Life Extension Podcast discusses current efforts to significantly extend human live spans beyond normal medical progress. Science & technology, philosophy, politics, and business are together weaving a new posthuman mythology about our individual and social existence. Episodes present cutting-edge biomedical research, the status of various longevity therapies, and progress in replacing, enhancing, and possibly overcoming human biology with artificial intelligence. We are looking at underlying questions of aging and death, the way how science-based promises are often indistinguishable from magical practices, what it means to be human in this new technoscientific culture, and in what kind of society we are preparing to live in the future.
Senolytic drugs are hoped to slow down and reverse age-related diseases by killing senescent cells. Zombie cells and their creepy behavior. Businesses and scientists are aiming to create life extension pills within a few years.
About a method of life extension which really works. Benefits, challenges, and the supporting science. The medicalization of a cultural problem.
Apocalyptic fears and new utopian aspirations before the backdrop of digitalization, globalization, and urbanization. How environmentalism and transhumanism deliver opposed versions of a posthumanist worldview, and how they determine our political and social future.
Mythologies, symbolism, and gruesome practices involving young blood for rejuvenation. Surprisingly the practice works, but seems ethically unacceptable. The hunt for anti-aging therapies based on blood components.
A debate about the nature of reality. The Matrix. Significance of the simulation hypothesis for transhumanism.
About the most promising drug against aging. Also about regulatory constraints and how they are being bypassed.
The business drivers of BCI technology. How mind control will enter consumer electronics. A discussion of personal identity and ethical concerns, and how we will need to redefine what means to be human.
How BCI technology will change our life in the near future. Applications, the underlying science, and technical processes.
The different meanings of cryonics as cultural practice: as post-humanist death ritual and expression of faith, as speculative investment and as a business proposition to consumers.
An introduction to the science and technological practice of cryonics. Futurist cryonics, mainstream cryopreservation, and an example of shifting ethical judgements.
About epigenetic clocks and biomarkers of aging, their applications, and how they work. My personal experience.
An existentialist perspective of death. About society creating mythologies to accommodate personal hero-systems to suppress our fear of death. A view from anthropology and psychoanalysis.
A discussion of consciousness in philosophical and scientific thought and its relevance to how we are going to live with A.I., if humans could become machines, and machines become human. Also, about the irrelevance of that question once robots start to participate in social life.
The promise of gene therapy and regenerative medicine. What is the status? The key technologies. Hopes and magic, hard choices to make. The business of regenerative medicine.
Cyborg as a real figure (we are all cyborgs already). Cyborgs as symbolic projection of two radical worldviews shaping our future. Utopian visions, political relevance.
The science behind NAD+, NMN, and NR and the status of research and clinical trials. A comparison of claims by scientists with claims by supplement suppliers. Should you take it?
An introduction to mind-uploading at the crossroad between A.I. and biology. Neuroscience is merging with computer science. The motivation and the promoters. The mind-body problem in philosophy, personal identity, and the echo of a religious narrative.
An introduction to cell biology, types und function of stem cells, potential and status of stem cell treatments in regenerative medicine, grey markets, opportunities and risk.
The Christian-Judeo master-narrative reformulated as a modernized quasi-religion without the spiritual mood, infused with humanism, technoscience, and Gnosticism. Science and magic. Engineering god and paradise.
A movement of radical technologists, scientists, philosophers, politicians, and business people is renegotiating the human condition. Information technology is taking over biology. Implications for consciousness, personal identities, cultures. Origin of beliefs.
An introduction to alchemy and modern science as rational modes of inquiry within given worldviews. The longevity industry between worldviews. The function of magic.
An introduction to what the longevity industry is promising to solve for us: the problems of aging and death. Existentialist human condition, cell biology, evolutionary theories of aging, mythological quest for immortality.
Episode zero is meant to introduce the Podcast series. Start here to obtain an overview of what you are getting into by listening to the following episodes.