⚫ Introduction to episode 33 with Nicholas Agar. ⚫ Show notes. ⚫ Why we invited a pro-deathist to the podcast. ⚫ Is inequality a reason to stop curing aging? (No.) ⚫ What it means to “make room” for the next generation (and why that’s absurd). ⚫ The frailty illusion. ⚫ “In general, it’s bad for a debate when there are too many enthusiasts.”

New to LEVITY? Start here! Want to know more about who’s behind LEVITY? Check out this page. 🙏🏼 Not subscribed to the LEVITY podcast on Youtube yet? Do it here. 🎧 More of a listener? The podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other places.

How it feels being kicked while you’re already down? Well, invite philosopher Nicholas Agar to your podcast and find out. According to Agar, the world already has too many longevity enthusiasts - too many people selling shiny futures, convinced that technology will fix everything. And there were ever-so-subtle digs suggesting that LEVITY is part of the problem.

To which I argued the opposite: there’s no real enthusiasm outside the niche; funding and public interest are abysmal. There are probably more people interested in bobsleigh (no offense) than in actually solving aging.

It’s like when mainstream media claim that longevity is mostly pursued by billionaires. It’s a flat-out lie that keeps being repeated. “Despite media clickbait,” Adam Gries wrote last year, “only around 1% of billionaires have invested anything into science and technology to solve aging. And of that 1%, the vast majority invested less than 1% of their net worth. Peanuts.”

Of course, Nicholas Agar is a provocateur. He’s a (often very funny!) philosopher who thrives on being the lone skeptic in a room full of believers. A professor of ethics at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, he’s written a string of books questioning humanity’s relationship with technology - Truly Human Enhancement and How to Think About Progress: A Skeptic’s Guide to Technology among them.

Agar’s method is familiar to anyone who’s spent time with philosophers: push an argument to the edge of absurdity just to see where it breaks. This is the guy who once defended “liberal eugenics” - the idea that parents, not the state, should decide which genes to edit - mainly, he admits, because adding the word liberal to something everyone considers evil was the surest way to make people think. That impulse hasn’t faded. His latest mission is to puncture what he sees as techno-utopian groupthink - whether it’s Facebook ending war, AI ending work, or biologists ending death.

He’s not cynical exactly; he just believes enthusiasm needs friction. And for better or worse, on this episode of LEVITY, he supplied plenty of it.

Agar questioned whether anti-aging breakthroughs could ever be distributed fairly, or whether they’d just turn billionaires into thousand-year oligarchs. We countered that inequality isn’t a moral reason to halt medicine. Nobody argues we should stop curing cancer until every treatment is free. To which Agar replied: “Maybe Peter Thiel and his friends get a thousand years - and I hope that includes you guys, since you’ve helped him - but others get shorter lives.” Yes, it was like beating a dead horse.

Then we moved to the value of life itself. Agar spoke of his father, now in his eighties, who feels he’s “had enough life.” To him, not every additional decade is automatically good.

A textbook example of what I like to call the frailty illusion: frailty distorts perspective. If his father were biologically thirty, he’d be making plans for the next day - looking forward instead of back.

By the end, we’d sparred over funding priorities, intergenerational “killing programs,” and whether enthusiasm is a moral flaw or a survival instinct. He teased that he’d happily “take the side of death” in a future debate book. And you know what? We just might do one of those - and win the argument one more time.

Finally, you might wonder why we invited Agar in the first place. I’ll let my co-host Patrick Linden - also a philosopher, as many of you know - answer that one:

“As J.S Mill teaches us, we should be grateful to those who disagree with us, because they helps us understand our own view better. Also, seeing that very smart people like Nicholas do not agree with us, shows us why our work is so necessary”.

You can watch the episode below or listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other places, like PocketCasts. Please follow, like and subscribe! 🙏🏼 This will boost our chances of reaching a bigger audience.