Tactical business buying training and clarity

Relationships with business owners, investors, and skilled operators

Billionaire mental frameworks for unlocking capital and taking calculated risk

The best event parties you’ve ever been to

Patrick frames LEVITY’s usual optimism about radical longevity and contrasts it with today’s guest’s skepticism. He introduces Nicholas Agar, a New Zealand philosopher, professor of ethics at the University of Waikato, and author of How to Think About Progress and Truly Human Progress.

Nick lays out a meta-principle: when a debate is flooded by enthusiasts (and sellers), the philosophical duty is to push back. He cites Facebook’s early sales pitch as an example of overly positive narratives dominating discourse, arguing for a corrective role that interrogates claims rather than amplifying them.

Patrick paraphrases Nick’s book line that we shouldn’t always expect technological fixes - or wait passively for them. Nick agrees and flags “disempowering” expectations, pointing to Elon Musk and “a wonderfully terraformed Mars” as a seductive distraction that can crowd out agency and more grounded problem-solving.

Peter challenges the premise: outside the niche, he sees “very little enthusiasm for life extension,” abysmal investment, and a public equating longevity with lifestyle tweaks. Nick replies that the story is compelling, but we understate difficulty - invoking Aubrey de Grey’s “seven deadly things” to illustrate how easily vast problems can be presented as imminently fixable.

The conversation turns to allocation questions: how much to spend on living to “a thousand” versus Mars. Patrick notes a proposal around “about 1% of global GDP” for longevity. Nick praises putting numbers on ambitions, while warning that simple price tags (“a billion dollars to end aging”) reveal our tendency to oversimplify grand goals.

Peter corrects scope: SENS’ “seven deadly sins” are repair categories; “cancer is downstream.” Nick concedes but stresses that without solving cancer, added decades would be “pretty miserable,” pressing the core uncertainty - are we talking 22nd-century science or 29th-century science? Peter agrees that timeline is unknown, anchoring the exchange in admitted uncertainty.

Patrick reframes Aubrey’s approach as “manifesto science.” Nick isn’t against manifestos but resists programs that depend on “miracles along the way.” He likes tech solutions “in principle” yet insists there are many worthy claims on money - and notes societies reliably fund weapons because “at least we know they work.”

Patrick contrasts aging research against “two or three trillion dollars” spent in Afghanistan, arguing quibbles about aging budgets miss the scale. Nick agrees much war spending “set us back,” yet reiterates that finite money invites trade-offs and national needs (he jokes New Zealand “would enjoy a little cash injection”).

Patrick calls aging “the mother of diseases,” claiming huge upside versus disease-by-disease work. Nick pivots to distribution: “who gets it and who doesn’t?” A hypothetical 10-cent pill for cancer meets capitalist production realities; practical inequities complicate moral enthusiasm even for widely beneficial therapies.

Peter presses: would inequitable access be a reason not to cure cancer? Nick says no - it’d be “wonderful” - but worries about unequal rollouts. Patrick doubts that ultra-expensive exclusivity is realistic; Nick remains less confident, wary of unintended societal shaping by ultra-long-lived elites.

Peter points to cheap, broadly available medicines and eradicated infectious diseases as precedent. Nick agrees those are celebratory but suggests millennial lifespans likely won’t follow smallpox’s path, implying a different order of difficulty and logistics than classic public-health victories.

Peter notes past “impossible” claims: biologists once said intervening in aging was impossible until Cynthia Kenyon doubled a worm’s lifespan via one gene - evidence that interventions can be simpler than expected. Nick accepts uncertainty, warns against false certainty, and flags how money, desire for results, and incentives distort fields like Alzheimer’s.

He cites seductive but “wrong” paradigms such as amyloid plaques, suggesting therapies can hit biomarkers without improving life. Patrick adds institutional incentives and media hype pressures; Nick extends the worry: a sudden 1% of global GDP for life extension would attract “an army of fraudulent claimants” alongside short sellers.

Patrick connects to cancer-research history; Nick sees recurring human patterns - war, hype, overconfidence. He personalizes the desire for a cure, underscoring longing amid skepticism. The tension between need and noise animates his call for disciplined allocation, not abandonment.

Nick returns to scarcity: big claims on money should face tough scrutiny. He half-jokes about his own preferences (“New Zealand needs more cathedrals”), surfacing pluralism in public goods. Patrick asserts “not dying” is a huge priority; Nick asks whether they truly believe they will die, provoking reflection on acceptance versus urgency.

He contrasts uncertain payoffs with “building a cathedral” where outcomes are known. Patrick responds that attacking hallmarks would increase disease resistance even without radical lifespan; Nick agrees medicines “delay death” and reframes vaccines as “anti-aging” insofar as they prevent premature deaths - just “not as fun.”

Nick raises whether there’s a threshold for a “satisfactory” life length, citing his father in his late 80s who feels he’s had “enough life.” Peter counters that frailty colors such views; if his father were “biologically thirty,” he’d plan and enjoy life. For Peter, quality judgments shouldn’t dictate when people die - aversion to dying persists regardless.

Nick grants that few say “now it’s time to die” absent suffering, but suggests occasional stock-taking (“if a bus hit me tomorrow…”). Patrick calls such resignation “false conscience,” insisting death is a tragedy even when it ends suffering; he compares it to calling an amputation “good” because it saves a life.

Nick sharpens a controversial stance for debate: maybe some should die tomorrow because their lives are “pointless,” linking to intergenerational injustice (older academics blocking jobs). Peter finds the “make room” via death move absurd, labeling aging a “killing program” we rationalize because it’s normalized, not because it’s justified.

Patrick adds that a parent’s death doesn’t “make room” for a composer’s unique vision; Nick points to New Zealand’s real-estate hoarding by the old, but Peter notes inheritance doesn’t solve the bottleneck. The trio exposes the brutality of the turnover argument by pushing it to its logical, and to them unacceptable, endpoint.

Patrick asks about “liberal eugenics.” Nick recounts arguing for individual choice in genetic modification to provoke thought, rejecting state coercion. Peter queries personal choices: he’d edit out severe thalassemia; they discuss Down syndrome unease. Nick maintains removing a harmful extra chromosome is “a good thing overall,” while conceding identity trade-offs.

Nick admits using the charged word eugenics was strategic: attention matters. He links this to longevity advocacy - provocateurs can spark funding - though Peter notes grant systems punish provocateurs like Aubrey de Grey, forcing many scientists to cloak aims under conventional indications.

Nick floats a darker branch: anti-aging breakthroughs arriving for “the bad people.” He’s not arguing to stop pursuit but to anticipate morally ugly deployments. Patrick pushes: should we “stop all science”? Nick says no - pursue while being mindful of the world we’ll actually get, not just the best-case imagined world.

Peter pivots to AI: beyond extinction and abundance narratives, he fears inequality and questions assumptions that “everyone will benefit from superintelligence.” Nick concurs: distribution is the live issue. He encourages students to use large language models while worrying about “where the money goes,” sensing a reckoning on how billions get repaid.

He analogizes future life-extension and AI worlds as “probably unimaginable,” noting how even a virus like COVID-19 reshaped everything unpredictably. The pair agree the future’s contour will likely elude today’s intuitions, compounding the need for sober distributional thinking.

Asked for book recommendations, Nick touts Doctored as an eye-opener on misaligned incentives and persistent fraud in medical research, with Alzheimer’s therapies reducing plaques without helping recognition. Peter notes a “decentralized science” movement born of such frustrations; Nick endorses siphoning money from Alzheimer’s dead ends - and from war - toward life extension.

Nick floats co-authoring a debate book and, in true provocation mode, offers to “take the side of death” - a stance he’d try to render in an unexpected way to sharpen arguments and expose assumptions.