Our millennia-long obsession with immortality
All In The Mind
ABC Australia
4.5 • 825 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would you want to live forever? The rich and powerful certainly do.
There are numerous examples throughout history of people going to extreme lengths in search of immortality. These days, it's Silicon Valley tech bros, testing out everything from blood transfusions to merging our brains with the cloud.
Why are they/we so obsessed with dodging death? What is it about extreme wealth that makes people dream of defying biology?
Today, tech journalist and social psychologist Aleks Krotoski takes us into the world of the ‘immortalists’: what they think the future of humanity might look like, and whether the rest of us want to come along for the ride.
Guest:
Aleks KrotoskiInvestigative journalistSocial psychologistAuthor, The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life
Credits:
- Presenter/producer: Sana Qadar
- Producer: Rose Kerr
- Senior Producer: James Bullen
- Sound engineer: Tegan Nicholls
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and More. |
| 0:07.5 | I'm Peter Martin, host of The Economy Stupid, where we find economics in relationships. |
| 0:14.3 | She only wants a man if he's really, really good. |
| 0:18.2 | In the Reserve Bank Board, I knew. I knew. |
| 0:21.3 | Everybody on the board knew recession was coming. |
| 0:24.7 | And in food. |
| 0:25.7 | It's about the cup of diesel's required through the life cycle to get that chicken |
| 0:29.1 | patty on your burger. |
| 0:30.4 | The Economy Stupid. |
| 0:31.8 | Search for The Economy Stupid on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:37.8 | Okay, so I wanted to start by listing some phrases from the book that are just so bizarre. |
| 0:43.6 | They jumped out at me and made me wince, and I couldn't help but write them down. |
| 0:47.7 | And how exactly these phrases relate to immortality might not be totally clear as I list them out |
| 0:53.5 | of context, but anyways, |
| 0:54.5 | here they are. Yogurt enemas, biohackers post about their nightly erections, juice extracted from |
| 1:03.4 | a testicle of a dog or a guinea pig, transplanted sex glands from the young onto the old. |
| 1:09.6 | I could go on, but I will stop there. I could really go on. |
| 1:14.0 | What do these lines tell us about the pursuit of immortality? They tell us that we will try |
| 1:20.8 | anything and we will do anything that we're pretty gullible. I think all of those things are interesting |
| 1:28.2 | because they have a whiff, |
| 1:29.6 | just a gentle whiff of science associated with them. |
| 1:32.9 | And, you know, the aspects of grafting monkey parts |
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