Steven Johnson & Michael Specter on the Future of Life

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Social Sciences, Education, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last month, longtime New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter released a brand new audiobook with our friends at Pushkin. It’s called “Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life,” and it’s an inspiring account of the emerging field of synthetic biology — a field where scientists combine chemistry, engineering, and computer science to develop new drugs and therapies for treating diseases of all sorts. This month, Steven Johnson, a frequent guest on this show and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is publishing a brand new audiobook of his own. It’s called “Immortality: A User’s Guide,” and it was produced by ... us! (You can get a copy here.) The premise is this: we might well be on the cusp of a revolution in the science of aging and we are not prepared for the consequences. You can see the overlaps, right? So we decided to get Steven and Michael on the horn to talk about breakthrough technologies, radical life extension, and the future of our species.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:06.4	I'm Rufus Griskym, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.9	Today, the future of life.
0:30.0	I'm here with my producer, Caleb. How are you, Caleb?
0:37.2	I'm good, Rufus. I'm busy. I've been busy.
0:39.6	Yes, you have been busy, Caleb. That's exactly why I wanted to chat with you today.
0:44.0	For the past few months, you've been working on a project that we've been gestating for
0:49.0	some months now. We're really excited about it, and it's finally ready to see the light of day.
0:54.9	Yeah, that's right. So we're about to launch our first ever
0:58.4	next big idea original, which is a short form audio book that really combines the conversational
1:05.9	energy of a podcast and the clear takeaways of a book. So you're going to get some of the bells
1:11.9	and whistles that you get in a podcast. There's archival footage, there's interviews, there's music,
1:17.1	but there's also the quality of writing and thinking that you find in a book from a great author.
1:22.4	I love it.
1:23.2	The first one that we're launching with is by an author who long-time listeners in the show
1:29.2	will recognize, guy named Stephen Johnson. It's called Immortality, a user's guide.
1:36.8	It's really about the scientific breakthroughs happening right now that may result in the radical
1:42.1	extension of human life. This is a sequel, effectively, to Stephen's last book, Extra Life,
1:48.2	which was about the doubling of the human lifespan in the last century. The question is,
1:52.7	can we do it again? There's extraordinary science coming along. Of course, it's a complicated
1:58.0	topic. People start living to 120 or 150. As Stephen points out, there will be unintended
2:05.6	consequences like upending the working world, family structures, welfare programs,
	...

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