This Man Thinks "AGI" Could Allow Humans To Live Forever, With Dr. Ben Goertzel

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (0:05)

But how accurate do you think the current biological testing landscape is?

Ben Goertzel (0:08)

Oh, not very. When I really looked at the data underlying any of these biological age estimates, I mean, it's a little dodgy. I mean, we've all met people in the longevity field who are like, well, I'm 75, but I have a biological age of 43 But you're like, well, why do you look so old then? And then they get a heart attack the next year, right? The long-lived flies have several snips in a certain gene that the short-lived flies don't have, and you can map that into humans.

Ben Greenfield (0:37)

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield (0:58)

My guest on today's show is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur, author, and a musician. Stay tuned for the end of the podcast for a very interesting anecdote about his band. His name is Dr. Ben Goertzel. He's the founder and CEO of Singularity Net, a decentralized AI network. He's the chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society. He came up with the term AGI, invented that. He's the chief scientist of robotics from Hanson Robotics and has a PhD in mathematics. So we have a wide-ranging discussion, especially as it applies to AGI, AI, and longevity. So all the show notes are going to be at bengrootandfotolife.com/agipodcast.

Let's go talk to Ben.

So Ben, I until like a month and a half ago hadn't heard that much about you. And I was at dinner with one of my buddies and he's like, you got to check out Ben Goertzel. And he's got all sorts of super fascinating work, particularly related to AGI, artificial general intelligence and health, longevity, a lot of the things that we talk about on this show. So I left that dinner and I looked you up, including your interviews with Lex Friedman, with Joe Rogan, a few other shows you've done, and realized that I must be hiding under a rock because there's a very prolific guy out there with the same initials as me, but way smarter, doing some pretty cool stuff. So welcome to the show, man.

Ben Goertzel (2:25)

Yeah, good to be here.

Ben Greenfield (2:28)

In my stalking of you, I saw that your dad actually apparently spent years writing a biography of Linus Pauling. He's come up on the show before related to vitamin C.

Was that your dad's interest in that? Got you interested in nutrition in the first place?

Ben Goertzel (2:48)

No. Although that was an issue that was around our family when I was a kid. In fact, that book on Pauling was my grandmother's passion, my father's mother, and she worked on that book for a long time because she and Pauling were involved together in the nuclear disarmament movement in the 1960s.

Then she got Alzheimer's and started to lose her mind and couldn't finish the book. My dad stepped in to finish the book for her. He's a political sociologist. Pauling wasn't his main thing.

Then my dad pulled me in to rewrite the parts of the book about Pauling's chemistry because neither my grandmother nor my dad knew much about chemistry. The thing with Pauling's interest in ortho-molecular medicine and the potential health impact of vitamin C is my grandmother didn't believe it. She thought it was a bunch of quack nonsense, so she was disappointed. This great scientist she had admired had gone down a fucked up path of promoting vitamins to cure everything. She was like, Pauling says, he never gets sick because vitamin C, but when I called his assistant yesterday, she said, no, he's a little bit under the weather today. Vitamin C, he never gets sick, he just gets under the weather.

Ben Greenfield (4:18)

Maybe you forgot his vitamin C that day. It is interesting though, because I think it's kind of nuanced, like it's such a potent antioxidant. There's been some studies that have shown that it can blunt, for example, the hormetic effects of exercise. Like if you take high dose vitamin C, you might get less.

Ben Goertzel (4:34)

Yeah, in that context, which was a long time ago, I mean, that would have been like the early 90s. In that context, I did look at the data about vitamin C, and what I saw was it was more positive than my grandma was thinking. Like it actually did have significant value.

On the other hand, the dose is a vexed question. Like some of the dosing that Pauline and others were suggesting may not always actually be beneficial to take that much. So it was interesting to look. I think one of the main habits or lessons I got from my dad over the decades, and we're still working together, we're working now on a book about the social and economic implications of AGI, actually.