YouSaid · the spoken record

Aleks Krotoski

lines on the record: 51
first: 2026-02-20
most recent: 2026-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They have a particular view of humanity as data objects and solvable. This is where the problem lies. And this actually is the crux of what we really need to look at if we, the plebs, the rest of us, are to go along with whatever else that they decide that they're going to put out there for us. As we have done so far with all of the problems that we've experienced with digital technology. So that's how belief and the kind of the cultish behavior arrives around this singular point of the singularity.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today. And so they're making extraordinary decisions that are in one case, Sam Bankman Fried, who was a cryptocurrency king, has caused people to make decisions that effectively make them fraudsters, put them in jail, and steal millions of millions of dollars for this particular cause. So we're starting to see these ideologies really, really truly bubbling up. So the issue that I see with the technologists of Silicon Valley is that their sort of midlife crises, as it were, because they have the power, because they have the ear and influence of powerful people, because they have the finances to do it themselves, and because they have these fundamental beliefs that are unshakable. And because”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Considerably problematic decisions when it comes to, as one of my contributors said, sort of ableism, they're not looking at different religions. It's very much coming from a white Western savior point of view. Add to this this notion of long-termism. So here you have your kind of like, what is the most effective use of your finances or your altruism right now? There's also a group that are adamant that we shouldn't just look within our lifetimes, but we should look billions of years, sorry, not sorry, we should look generations hence for the billions of lives that have not yet been born. Because, you know, when it comes to straight utilitarian philosophy, every life is flattened out as a unit of value and are those not as valuable as the ones.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether that's time or money, preferably. And they decide what that is on the basis of hyper-rationality, right? This is the rationalism aspect. They use unbelievably complex algorithms effectively or equations. It's so thrilling to be lost in the debates around this because you just get like philosophically massaged. The whole thing is really exciting. It is way out of reality though, right? It's really, it only looks at, it doesn't look closely, it doesn't look locally, it doesn't look, it looks at like, you know, very, very important issues like malaria. So they're looking at mosquito nets in parts of West Africa. Absolutely put your money into that, but they're not supporting, you know, the local food bank, right? Not thinking locally. They're also creating quite”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The future of bliss, delight, and incredible power and wonderfulness will exist. We just happen to be consciousnesses on server farms and Jupiter, if we wish. The second group is you mentioned the effect of altruists and their sort of buddies in arms of the long-termists. These folks are actually a little bit more concerned about what happens after. They're not like, hooray, that's it, bliss and delight. They're like, oh my God, what happens when? How do we ensure that we can operate to the best of our ability? Effective altruists are looking at that in the relatively short term, trying to figure out what are the most important things that can be funded. What are the most effective ways that you can distribute your altruism?”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happening and how best to ensure that we as humanity can survive in tandem with technology. I find it Improbable. Also, the science fiction geek in me finds it very, very exciting. So, yes, there are factions that are looking at the singularity, the inevitability of the singularity that do fall along different ideological lines. We have our transhumanists who believe that we have the fundamental right and obligation to put technologies, to augment ourselves with technologies. These are the folks who are really looking forward to the time when we can upgrade our consciousness to server farms that will occupy Jupiter. This is part of the plan, right? This is absolute, this is not a small group of people. This is the transhumanists. And they're looking towards a singularity as a moment almost like a messianic experience, right? The apocalypse will come, everything that we know from the past will be gone.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From a server which is effectively implanted on the neocortex. Bliss and delight is the positive. Like lots of people are looking for bliss and delight. I'm not kidding. This is, I am not genuinely not crazy when I see that I saw this in 2002, 2003. I thought it was wacko and I'm hearing it today. I thought to myself, this is too crazy. These technologists are too wild. There's no way this is going to peter out. It's just going to go away and it hasn't. And I wasn't looking at it. And like QAnon or any of the other conspiracy theories that have happened over the last 20-odd years, right? It's still bubbling and there's a really strong community. And this idea of the singularity has taken over so much that we now have entire institutes that are based around it. We have learned institutions that are absolutely focused on this.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the shoulders of giants vibe, but with a kind of like a notion of how quickly new knowledge, new information comes along. Because of the law of accelerating returns, we will within 15 years, it's always 15 years, it doesn't matter what year I'm telling you this, right? It's always 50 years ago I heard it was 15 years, but whatever. Within 15 years, we will have a technology that is so powerful that we will be able to integrate with it. And at that point, we will become a single consciousness. Usually artificial intelligence is involved. Today, artificial intelligence is involved. It used to be that nanotechnology was more prominent in this story, but nanotechnology is now just part of the story. We put lots and lots of little robots into our bodies. They continually fix us based upon upgrades.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I remember hearing about this, and this is where I am eating my humble pie. I remember hearing about this in the early 2000s as I was covering, as I was writing for The Guardian. And I remember hearing about these wacky people in Silicon Valley who had this crazy idea called the singularity. And the singularity is this idea that at some point because we have a kind of we have technology and science that produces and provides accelerating returns, right? Accelerating returns in our investment. Every time we build something, we are able to then build on top of that. And our ability to then get things that are faster and more powerful, et cetera, become shorter because these new technologies, these new discoveries are actually, you know, they make it easier for us to create things that are then even faster.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ultimately, you know, what we've been talking about is very much the kind of the examples of and how do you do it. But behind the scenes, behind all of this is basically this is a book about belief, right? It's a book about what do I believe in? What do I believe the human body is? What do I believe death is? What do I believe meaning is? And for technologists, there has emerged. A very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very fundamentalist belief in technology as the Savior.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has become the term of art. And these sort of treatments, as it were, all off label, none of which have been approved by any regulator anywhere in the world for these particular uses are those that many longevity enthusiasts take.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the skin of wine grapes, which is great. You know, that's why you often hear like wine's good for you. It's not good for you. Wine grapes, blueberries, that type of thing. And that's another drug that is taken off label, right? It's not prescribed for the thing that it's supposed to be prescribed for, but regardless, it's taken off label because that's the type of thing that seems to kind of extend someone's healthy life. And that's actually a very, very important point is that here we're not just talking about longevity, we're talking about extending healthy life. Everybody now has shifted their attention from I want to be 5,000 years old, though those people do exist, but they want to live 5,000 years healthily. They do not want to be in severe decline. And so health.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that has made it a very popular off-label. So, you know, not taken for diabetes drug for longevity enthusiasts. You will absolutely find it in all longevity enthusiasts supplement cupboards. Not because it actually does or has been found to reduce aging per se, but because there are all of these associations with a variety of different studies that have suggested that metformin may actually reduce the incidence of these sort of the cluster of aging diseases. So that's cardiovascular heart attacks, etc., diabetes, cancer, and dementia. And so metformin is another thing that people are taking. People are also taking a drug that's called rapmycin, and that actually was derived.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Foreman is a diabetes drug, it is a generic diabetes drug, and it's probably the most prescribed diabetes drug in the West. Certainly in the US, and I also believe in the UK, but in the West. I mean, it's so well prescribed that, as I say, it's generic. So what happened though was that patients started to come to their doctors and say, you know, I appear to be feeling better, right? Something extraordinary is happening inside my body. Doctors started to take note. There was some research that's been done on it that suggests that it lowers the rate of diabetes. It reduces the probability of developing dementia. Like there's all kinds of things that met foreman appears to do as individual studies have. Sought to identify it.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is definitely what drives our sort of technologists is they're all about experimentation. And we should be able to experiment on ourselves and we should be able to have safe places that are unregulated where we can do experiments because we're going to do them on ourselves, not on anybody else. Metformin is a kind of like is a good example of this that happens to be within the regulated system.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh god, no, totally. Like, we actually wanted her to read the audiobook. Like, we thought it would be brilliant. She even, like, she even read through my chapters and was like, okay, so, you know, this is what it is on Young Blood. And she knows Brian Johnson's voice intimately because he did this, right? He did this with his son. It was a great stunt to get him all over the newspapers. He's terribly, terribly excited. He did. He also did it with his dad. He put his own blood plasma into his father. I mean, just peel back the layers and it's bonkerballs. So plasma phoresis is the practice of flushing out, as you say, the old plasma from your body and putting fresh plasma in.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do not do that Right, exactly. My daughter, who's 11, laughs. She's like, so I'm your young, you know, I'm your young blood vessel. I see you've already raised.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe something and you're seeing people like Brian Johnson and other Silicon Valley billionaires having what they describe as their longevity oil change on a regular basis. Seems to be actually something specifically in plasma, right? They've narrowed it down from taking out the red blood cells. So now it's just the white blood cells. It's just the plasma. We're not sure why. Can just simply get rid of the old stuff and stick the new stuff in, and your biomarkers, those little indicators of how well you're doing in life, they kind of reduce. So I'm going to massively throw out a public health safety right now.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. They're not really sure why this works, but fun fact, which didn't make it into the book, it's a little bit, what's the book with the, it's an Oscar Wilde book and it's about a portrait of Dorian Gray. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a bit Dorian Gray because the young mouse got old. So it seemed to them there's something in the blood. We don't know what it is still to this day. We do not know what it is, right? But there is something, either it's an absence of something or it's an increase of something. We're not sure what it is in young blood. Well, Silicon Valley finds out about this. They go, woohoo, and they start to pay $8,000 a liter for young blood to be pumped into their veins. It was even in an episode of the HBO series Silicon Valley. If you ever saw that, it's a very, very funny episode. That seems to”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A single mouse out of two mice, right? One old, one young, parabiosis, right? Absolutely super fun, crazy Frankenstein. This is actually the thing that got me interested in this whole thing way back. Yeah, it was their research, but it was also how Silicon Valley was effectively trying to monetize it and popularize it at the time. And this is in 2017, 2018, 2019. But what they found, and the reason why Silicon Valley went, oh, yeah, let's find out more about this and start to, you know, really research it or just sell it for a vast amount of money was what they found is that the liver tissues and the kidney and even the cognitive functions of the older mouse appeared to get younger. It appeared to rejuvenate those muscles and also those kind of brain.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seminal bit of research in which they performed parabiosis, heterochronic parabiosis. Ah, I love that word. I want to name a band heterochronic parabiosis. What that meant was take two mice, one's old, one's young, right? Create a little tiny slit in the back, the hind leg, and then suture in both back legs, suture the wounds together so that rather than healing next to one another, the vascular systems, the scar tissue, the two mice kind of become conjoined.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go to heck in a hand basket with age. He actually said heck in a hand basket. It was so, it was so great. And the fact that I'm talking to them and their dog is like chewing its leg next to me and they're both in matching tie ditishes. I was so charmed by these researchers. Why does everything go to heck in a hand basket with age? So they thought to themselves, okay, so it could be the skeletal system, right? That touches all your muscles and your brain, hopefully not too much. Maybe it's your hormonal system, your endocrine system, or maybe it's your vascular system, all the blood that goes through your body. And they realize that they couldn't actually, they couldn't really kind of mess around with or control either the endocrine, the hormonal, or the skeletal system, but maybe they could mess around with blood. And they did a very, very”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much in the kind of nobody wanted to do it because it was all about decline. All you were doing was you were documenting decline. This goes down and this goes down and this goes down. And as the sort of the genetics boom exploded with new technologies around the time of the Human Genome Project, there were some discoveries that suggested that aging in fact was not a whole bunch of different things that happened, but perhaps there was an underlying biological mechanism for aging. Why did everything suddenly start to switch? And these two researchers, Mike and Irina had come up with a research design that they thought would be quite useful to test this theory. Why is it, as Mike said to me, that all the things”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really great question. So I'll start with the two that you mentioned. The first is something called plasma foresis. And this is based upon some research that was done in the early 2000s, published in the early 2000s by a couple in Berkeley at University of Berkeley, University California at Berkeley. Mike in Arena Comboy, or shall I say arena and Mike Comboy, because Mike is like arena is the one who's leading. I'm just, I'm the support team. At the time, they were postdocs and they were working in a lab and they were gerontologists. So they were aging researchers, both literally and figuratively and descriptively. They were researching aging, but then they themselves were also aging. And at the time, aging research was”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disordered approach to the human body and sort of publicize it because all it's doing is it's feeding a kind of disorderedness associated with how we feel about our bodies and how we know if we're well or not. Not to mention the fact that it's hugely ageist, massively ableist. There's also all of these sort of societal implications for this. But yes, that's, I think that's my long answer to your question.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Separate from the feeling, the experience of wellness and the experience of reading those numbers. So to answer your question in a long way, no, I don't think that he's going to live forever or even live to 120 or maybe 150. I don't think so because I think that ultimately things are going to interrupt. Life happens and you can't always be in control and in charge of absolutely everything. So there's that. How is this sustainable? How is this manageable in those off weeks or those off months or when life just simply you take a hit? And then secondly, I also think that it's not helpful to have this kind of”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problematic to talk about the idea that this one person who's doing a very, very specific protocol for his body is indeed going to live forever because his numbers will eventually go down, how he's going to deal with that. I don't know because it's so much part of his identity. Same for all the other biohackers. That concerns me because if, you know, we live in a world in which there is not a lot of sympathy. That could come back to haunt him. And I really hope it doesn't. And I just think that there's something fundamentally...”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got pregnant and my numbers went down. Wow, did that affect me. Whoa, that freaked me out because suddenly I was not getting fitter. I was growing eyeballs to what it was that my body was doing at that point. But if you're in this number goes up sort of frame of mind, any deviation is going to really mess you up psychologically. If you're completely devoted and belief in it, furthermore, we're surrounded by a society, sort of the wellness cults, or just the wellness phenomenon tells us that we always have to be well, that we always have to, at whatever well is that's very subjective, we always, always, always have to, and we're always striving for it, but we're never actually able to achieve it to our sort of most fundamental. So I actually think that it is more.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biomarkers I fundamentally believe that physiologically, and this goes for all of the mega biohackers who live for their numbers, who use their stacks and they do protocol, blah, I fundamentally believe that their numbers will eventually go down, right? They're living according to this sort of biohacker philosophy, a number goes up, right? It's also a cryptocurrency philosophy. So, you know, you can see where the tech comes in there. But number goes up. Number always goes up. Number goes up equals good. Number goes up does not take into consideration context, right? It doesn't take into consideration stressors in life. It doesn't take into consideration illness. It doesn't take, well, obviously, it doesn't take into consideration illness in this particular case. But come on, people get ill. It doesn't take into consideration something as fundamental as pregnancy, right?”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his baseline is something that's called biological age. It is a contested measure. There are lots and lots of measurements for it out there. There's none that have been sort of fully scientifically evidenced. But there's a lot of them out there. You probably will have heard of them. And so he measures his biological age at one year, and then he measures it again after he goes through this protocol. And when I had interviewed him, he was just sort of basically starting on this path. And he claims that his biological age is actually going in reverse now, that he actually has achieved longevity escape velocity. Don't think it's a particularly joyful life. I would not do it because I don't have the willpower, nor do I have the kind of the motivation to do such a thing. But for him, it seems to be working. Seems to be working.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that he's done it is he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into devising an algorithm, a recipe making machine that spits out, not just recipes, but also recipes for life, the different types of supplements he should take, the different types of treatments he should do, the different types of exercises he should do, when he should sleep, when he should have sex, all of these things”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, that's a kind of basic. But his argument is that if he can somehow escape the chronological pull of age, then he will live longer healthier because by the time his body gets to the place where it gets to the thing, the disease, you know, the syndrome, whatever, that would have killed him, they've already figured out how to fix that. And so he's not going to die from the common cold, or he's not going to die from the flu or he's not going to die from diabetes or heart disease or any of the other things that are going to end up taking all of us eventually. So he's trying to outrun death by either keeping his age the same or preferably reversing it. There's a lot of assumptions in here, right? Aren't there? There's a huge number of assumptions, and I'm sure you have questions about like this.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he tried to put this into practice. The idea is that you don't die tomorrow, right? You don't, the idea is that if you continue along the same chronological path with the same chronological inertia as most of us, I would say all of us do, then we will die of a thing that has not yet been cured, right?”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got hundreds of millions of dollars. Like anybody's gonna have a rethink, shall we say, about their lives. And what his rethink ended up being was, I am going to become the healthiest person on the planet. I am going to be the person that is going to prove a theory true. And that theory, I need to explain it. The theory is something called longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is the idea that you can outrun death. And the way you can outrun death is a bit like how a rocket needs to have a particular amount of velocity to escape the gravitational pull of Earth, right? You need to have more, let's just say few in order to escape the gravitational pull or the chronological pull of aging.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loads of startups, and he finally lands on one, which suddenly is, you know, it's really, really hard to do a startup. It starts to make him cash. He sells it to, I'm sorry, he buys Venmo, right, because he's got that much Wanga. He's got that much cash from this company that he's built. And then he sells on to PayPal. At that point, the world is open to him. The three young boys, which they're exhausting him, his partner, unfortunately that relationship falls apart. And he finds himself in the same situation as his dad without the addiction. He leaves the church. And so he's freaking out because, oh my goodness, you know, history is repeating itself. It's like he might lose his children because they see him as the devil. And he's just had this divorce, which is, you know, challenging. Any kind of breakup is challenging. And he's just sold his company.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where his dad struggled with addiction and was absent. When his father became absent and left the Mormon church, Brian told me that his father became like the devil himself. He became other. And he had to entirely reject his dad in order to preserve his belief in his Mormon religion, the dogma associated with the Mormon religion. But as he grew older, and he tried to reach out to his dad and all kinds of things happened over the years, he and he got married within the faith. He had these wonderful experiences of going off in his mission and sort of discovering how people live and what makes people happy and unhappy and healthy and unhealthy. He came back. He had three young boys and his partner, he was trying to be an entrepreneur. He had loads and”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, good old Brian. Everybody's fascinated by Brian Johnson. I would say that it's, I don't think that I have had a conversation about this book in development or the podcast, in development without somebody talking about Brian Johnson. Brian is a very, very interesting person. Very nice guy. I know a bunch of people like Brian. They're not nearly as successful as Brian in terms of financially successful, but I know a bunch of people like Brian, super geeks, right? Had a bit of a breakdown and decided that they were going to change their lives and leaned into what it was that they knew, right? And frankly, that he accepts that that is what happened. So Brian Johnson grew up in a Mormon household, a very sort of dogmatic Mormon household with a dad who all of this, all of this he's very open about, both of them, including his dad, very open about. He grew up in a household.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just because you do something doesn't necessarily mean that you think that's good or you think it's bad. It means that there's a decision that's been made to either stick with your attitude or not stick with your attitude and do the thing. There's other stuff that we can't see inside of our minds. And so to purely look at the human experience as data and believe that that data can be fixed, that the entropy associated with our bodies can simply be fixed by usually inserting more data. Well, I think that that sort of falls short of the human experience.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seeing this socially, right? We're seeing how relationships can be embedded as information. We're seeing how news and knowledge and language can be embedded as information. We're seeing how behavior is embedded as information. Now, all of this can be, but really ultimately you're only seeing part of the story. Now, add to that human beings Everything to do with our physiology can be seen as information and can be reduced into effectively these bits or these bites, these ones and these zeros almost of binary code. And that's really kind of where you're seeing the motivation and the desire to unpick and to figure out the puzzle of humanity. If it's as simple, Elon Musk said at Davos, Just a few weeks ago earlier in 2026. If it's that simple, then we should be able to figure it out, throw more technology at it, throw more AI at it.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is something that has been embraced by the computer science community. And in fact, we have information theory to thank for a lot of the contemporary system, the communication systems that we operate on. You know, it's the thinking behind the World Wide Web and the Internet itself, right? How to reduce the entropy in order to ensure that the information that is sent from one place arrives in the other place without turning into a game of telephone like we had when we were kids in the playground where somebody was for something. And then, you know, as it sort of goes around the circle, it devolves into chaos. So we actually do have a lot of benefit for understanding information theory. Now, what has happened now is that technologists have become wed to this idea of everything can be information. And we're seeing this.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. 100%. So, information theory was developed in the 1950s as a mathematical theory by a theoretical mathematician named Claude Shannon. And the idea that Shannon devised is that information, whatever that is, can be reduced all the way down into what we would describe now as bits, right? Information or not information. And if you do that, the information goes out into the world, but it doesn't stay static, right? It is dynamically reduced in different ways. It bumps up against friction or it bumps up against, you know, if you want to think about concepts, it bumps up against other ideologies. And it starts to be degraded, right? It suffers and struggles from absolute ultimate devolving into chaos. And that's what's known as entropy. Now, this is something that has been very”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if they think that they can kick death's butt, if they think that they themselves are the most uniquely powerful people and can do this thing that, as you said, this profound transformation of humanity that people have been chasing since time immemorial, then who the hell are they? And what is it that they think? So that was really what kind of connected me to Silicon Valley.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the power to fix or correct or solve the problems of humanity. So, yeah, I see these folks as not just technologists, but simply a powerful cohort that nobody is really trying to understand. Nobody's really trying to get their motivations. Nobody's really trying to witness how they're embedding their ideas into their technologies because most people don't actually think of technologies as something that can have an ideology or can be embedded with a particular design that takes us through the world and enforces a particular worldview. And to become a kind of a modern day digital citizen, we have to recognize that these technologies are built by people. What is it that those people think?”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On building technologies that they think are going to outrun death, right? Well, I'm sure we can talk about that in a second, that they think are going to outrun death as well as populate whatever that next phase of humanity is. They share as hell better be thinking about those unintended consequences. That was what I was looking for to see if they were. And unfortunately, they're as myopic as they always have been. Those ethicists have been kind of pushed out of the large companies now. People aren't interested in thinking about the consequences. The bubble of the valley is so profound, like it's impermeable. And the ideas that ricochet around these spaces are simply reinforced about ultimately what humanity is and how they unique.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll just leave it at historically. Let's hope that they're learning, but they have historically transformed the world because they have not recognized the unintended consequences of their actions, of the technologies that they are building. It's only relatively recently that they've included ethicists in their designs because ultimately they didn't realize that when they started a dating site at Harvard, it was going to affect democracy and it was going to affect political economies. When somebody decided to throw together a modern day chatbot, they didn't realize that it was going to evolve into a megaphone that was actually going to start to crumble the notion of information and truth and information. They didn't realize these things. Now that we realize these things, though, they cannot claim ignorance. And if they are hellback,”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is. But the thing that I found particularly interesting about Silicon Valley is, as I mentioned, I've been a tech reporter. I've been looking at society and technology since 1999, if you can believe it. I've watched the first dot-com bubble. I've known so many of the people who have become the leaders of Silicon Valley. And I've watched And more specifically, now that we're living in a very digital world, you know, when I started, we weren't, but now we really are. I've witnessed the not just the financial power of this cohort, but also the social and political power of this cohort. They have historically”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discovered something to do with what this book became and also the podcast for BBC, Radio 4 became in 2021, which was Silicon Valley's obsession with trying to stop death. I had been a tech reporter for 20 plus years. And so the combination of coming out of the grief, really kind of building an understanding, wanting to build something. And I thought, okay, I'm not afraid of it. I don't want to stop it. But here are people who are identical to people throughout history who are pushing it away and they have so much money and so much hubris that they think that they can what's going on here. And that's really, that's like the genesis of this idea.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To pull myself out of it. And off the back of that, what I tend to do if I'm going through a big emotion is I tend to externalize it. And I started to study some of these things that I'd learned in death studies way back in the day. I started to speak with death doulas and I started to meet people who worked in death. I started to develop relationships with people who worked in hospice and I started to recognize again rather than feeling the death inside of me, seeing the death as an extraordinary moment of opportunity and celebration, a place which I believe is inevitable and something that we don't know what's going to happen on the other side. But that really was the genesis of this book. So that was in 2017. I actually originally”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Born within five years of her birth, if not four years of her birth, I lost my stepmother, my dad, my closest aunt, my closest uncle, my dearest grandmother, not to mention my dog, two dogs, excuse me, two dogs and a cat. Like everybody died. And I started to kind of really feel death for the first time rather than as a conceptual idea more like a lived experience. And grief consumed me. And it was, I would say it was probably problematic grief. And I'm sure a lot of listeners out there have experience of or have heard about problematic grief just being unable to pull yourself out of this extraordinary sort of obsession. And at that point, I think it became problematic. Thankfully, I was able.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Religious, the economic, the political aspects of death. And it really opened my eyes to such amazing aspects of how we build society around the end of life, how we build ideas about how we want to live, what a good life is about what we want to do with our lives, knowing that there is an ultimate end. All of this was theoretical until I had a very difficult few years, ironically immediately after my daughter.”
2026-02-20 · Intelligence Squared · Could Silicon Valley Billionaires Cure Aging? With Aleks Krotoski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT