1
00:00:13,079 --> 00:00:16,709
So, I know most people 
are terrified of death,

2
00:00:16,709 --> 00:00:18,938
but I’m terrified of cocktail parties.

3
00:00:19,458 --> 00:00:21,878
(Laughter)

4
00:00:22,378 --> 00:00:24,968
I'm not much good
at the usual social chatter,

5
00:00:24,968 --> 00:00:27,168
so if you put a couple
of drinks inside me,

6
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there's no knowing 
what I might come out with.

7
00:00:29,559 --> 00:00:31,210
(Laughter)

8
00:00:31,750 --> 00:00:34,123
Like what happened at one such event,

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halfway into a second martini.

10
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I got into a conversation

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with an ardent fan 
of the "end to aging" movement -

12
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you know, the vision
of a radically enhanced life span

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big with Silicon Valley billionaires
who think they should never die.

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One of them was actually
boasting at the time

15
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that he was taking
150 nutritional supplements a day

16
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to ward off death -

17
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an activity that must have consumed
the better part of an hour,

18
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let alone the lining of a stomach.

19
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(Laughter)

20
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The guy I was talking with

21
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didn't seem to think
there was anything weird about this.

22
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He was about half my age -

23
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less than half, in fact.

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As his death was clearly more of
an imminent reality for me than for him,

25
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he made the mistake of assuming
that I'd be living in mortal fear of it.

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He seemed quite shocked that I wasn't.

27
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In fact, he seemed to take my
equanimity of the prospect

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as an admission of some kind 
of failure on my part.

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“How can you accept limits
that don't have to be there?" he said.

30
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"Biotechnology could mean an end to aging;

31
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it could even mean
an end to death itself."

32
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And that’s when it came out.

33
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(Laughter)

34
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"But what's wrong with dying?" I said.

35
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The question startled him into silence,

36
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and the truth is it startled me too.

37
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I'd never thought to ask
this specific question before.

38
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I never put it quite so bluntly,

39
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but now that it was out there -

40
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hovering in the alcoholic 
fumes between us -

41
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(Laughter)

42
00:02:23,037 --> 00:02:25,369
it seemed to cut 
to the heart of the matter

43
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because it's taken for granted 
that we're all afraid of death.

44
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Ask people if they are -

45
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and I have asked,

46
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though not usually at parties -

47
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and most would say, "Yes, of course!"

48
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and look like they'd rather be
anywhere but in the same room as you.

49
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There was psychologist William James,

50
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who called death "the evil background,"

51
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and "the worm at the core 
of human aspirations to happiness."

52
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Or with poet Philip Larkin,

53
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who was very good 
at worms at the core of things

54
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and wrote of lying awake in terror

55
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of what he called
the "total emptiness forever."

56
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But it turns out, I’m as bad 
at things taken for granted

57
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as I am at cocktail parties.

58
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When something seems so obvious
it's beyond question,

59
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that's when I tend to start questioning;

60
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because what we take for granted

61
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may really be what we haven't taken
the time to think through.

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I guess you could say

63
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I haven't had much option but to think
through the matter of my own death

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since I've come pretty close to it
a number of times.

65
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In the Middle-East, I was shot at
on a journalistic assignment,

66
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bombed as a civilian,

67
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threatened by right-wing thugs.

68
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But the closest I've come
was entirely my own doing.

69
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I lost control of a car

70
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on turn three of a race track
in the American Midwest,

71
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and with what seemed immense slowness

72
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rolled over,

73
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and over, and - yes - over again.

74
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And as I rolled, a single sentence
reverberated in my mind,

75
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like some kind of mantra.

76
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"This", I kept thinking,
"is a really stupid way to die."

77
00:04:21,424 --> 00:04:23,851
(Laughter)

78
00:04:29,619 --> 00:04:30,619
My first reaction

79
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when the car came to a stop
and I found myself still alive

80
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was amazement,

81
00:04:34,882 --> 00:04:36,532
followed by a surge of gratitude

82
00:04:36,532 --> 00:04:39,790
to whoever it was 
who invented the crash helmet.

83
00:04:39,790 --> 00:04:40,897
(Laughter)

84
00:04:40,897 --> 00:04:43,069
So, it only occurred to me later to ask,

85
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"What exactly would have been
so stupid about dying this way?"

86
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I mean, what might I consider
an intelligent way to die?

87
00:04:51,082 --> 00:04:52,690
(Laughter)

88
00:04:53,530 --> 00:04:56,558
Why was I even asking
such a question in the first place?

89
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To which my only answer was:
intellectual vanity.

90
00:05:03,066 --> 00:05:07,685
I mean, surely I was
far too intelligent to die stupidly.

91
00:05:07,685 --> 00:05:10,567
(Laughter)

92
00:05:13,337 --> 00:05:17,106
It seems that not only is my life
immensely significant to me,

93
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but so too is my death -

94
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even though if I was dead,

95
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I wouldn’t be around to appreciate
the significance of that fact.

96
00:05:25,578 --> 00:05:28,539
In fact, I wouldn't be around
to appreciate anything at all,

97
00:05:29,009 --> 00:05:31,699
which makes it a good thing
I'm not religious;

98
00:05:32,486 --> 00:05:35,615
because then, apparently,
I would be around

99
00:05:35,615 --> 00:05:39,107
in something called "the afterlife."

100
00:05:40,177 --> 00:05:44,876
And this is, to put it mildly,
a sobering thought to live with;

101
00:05:44,876 --> 00:05:48,321
since the idea is not only 
that you never really die,

102
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but that what you do in this life

103
00:05:50,850 --> 00:05:55,030
determines your fate
in a hypothetical next one.

104
00:05:55,783 --> 00:05:58,738
In other words,
the life you're actually living

105
00:05:58,738 --> 00:06:02,122
has no intrinsic value in and of itself;

106
00:06:02,782 --> 00:06:04,722
or actually, not in other words

107
00:06:04,722 --> 00:06:08,635
but in the words of motivational
mega-pastor Rick Warren,

108
00:06:08,635 --> 00:06:11,035
he of The Purpose Driven Life:

109
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"Earth," he says -

110
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and I'm not making this up -

111
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"Earth is the staging area, the preschool,
the tryout for your life in eternity."

112
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Life as a practice session?

113
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I mean, that's one way 
to utterly trivialize it.

114
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And here’s another;

115
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because what’s on offer from
the Silicon Valley apostles of immortality

116
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really comes down to a secular 
version of the same thing.

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Even if for them you stay in your body

118
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instead of evaporating
into some kind of disembodied state.

119
00:06:50,032 --> 00:06:54,484
And so, we have 
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel

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saying - and I quote -

121
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"If people think they're going to die,
it's demotivating."

122
00:07:02,765 --> 00:07:05,403
(Laughter)

123
00:07:06,353 --> 00:07:07,517
There's more!

124
00:07:08,107 --> 00:07:09,247
(Laughter)

125
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"The idea of immortality," 
he says, "is motivational."

126
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As one of those people absurd enough
to imagine she's going to die,

127
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I find Thiel's glibness astonishing.

128
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He reduces human existence
to the language of corporate management,

129
00:07:32,303 --> 00:07:34,483
to motivational path.

130
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He seems to think our lives are
invalidated by the fact that we'll die,

131
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and he assumes that life
is a matter of what else but metrics;

132
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its value determined by something
as easy to calculate as years.

133
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In Thiel's world,
what gets us up in the morning

134
00:07:53,926 --> 00:07:56,526
is not the enjoyment of the life
we're actually living,

135
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but the hope that we'll go on
getting up in the morning forever.

136
00:08:04,587 --> 00:08:07,663
I for one can think of
few things more depressing.

137
00:08:07,663 --> 00:08:10,323
(Laughter)

138
00:08:13,363 --> 00:08:15,914
(Applause)

139
00:08:17,034 --> 00:08:19,607
Thiel's dream is my nightmare.

140
00:08:19,767 --> 00:08:21,004
(Laughter)

141
00:08:21,144 --> 00:08:22,819
And if you think about it a moment,

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it might turn out to be yours too.

143
00:08:26,574 --> 00:08:28,712
Let's leave aside 
practical considerations,

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like who can possibly 
afford to live forever.

145
00:08:31,658 --> 00:08:34,143
I mean, I guess that might be
less of a consideration

146
00:08:34,143 --> 00:08:36,692
if you are a billionaire,
but only slightly less,

147
00:08:36,692 --> 00:08:38,687
because any number of billions of dollars


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00:08:38,687 --> 00:08:42,444
is still barely a drop
in the financial ocean of eternity.

149
00:08:43,224 --> 00:08:47,014
Instead, I'd ask you to think
what it might mean to live forever,

150
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what it would be like
to just keep on going,

151
00:08:51,001 --> 00:08:54,631
like that pink toy rabbit
in the old commercial for batteries,

152
00:08:54,631 --> 00:08:57,266
banging away on its tin drum.

153
00:08:57,266 --> 00:08:58,382
(Laughter)

154
00:08:59,862 --> 00:09:02,756
And in fact, we do have some idea
of what it would be like.

155
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It's there in the way we talk.

156
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When we say we sat through a lecture

157
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that just went on and on
like it would never end,

158
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or we complain of incessant chatter,

159
00:09:15,236 --> 00:09:19,576
or describe a bad movie as interminable.

160
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Consciously or not,
we realize that without an end,

161
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life would become a flat,
featureless expanse:

162
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just one thing after another,
literally ad infinitum.

163
00:09:33,109 --> 00:09:36,559
Endlessness would suck 
the vitality out of existence,

164
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eviscerated of meaning.

165
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It would leave us with that sense
of tedium and pointlessness

166
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that's the hallmark of chronic depression.

167
00:09:45,899 --> 00:09:50,349
So the last thing I'd ever want
is to never die.

168
00:09:51,794 --> 00:09:54,164
I have zero desire to live forever,

169
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because immortality is not
something devoutly to be wished for,

170
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on the contrary: it's a curse.

171
00:10:02,294 --> 00:10:04,124
Think of Greek myth,

172
00:10:04,124 --> 00:10:07,234
where Sisyphus is forever
rolling his boulder uphill,

173
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never to reach the top.

174
00:10:09,394 --> 00:10:11,734
Or of ghost and vampire stories,

175
00:10:11,734 --> 00:10:16,054
where the walking dead are condemned
to spectral half lives without end.

176
00:10:17,055 --> 00:10:20,095
Or even of a comic book 
hero like Superman,

177
00:10:20,095 --> 00:10:23,945
destined never to have
a regular Clark Kent life;

178
00:10:24,295 --> 00:10:29,225
never to live, love and die
like a normal human being.

179
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We need endings

180
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because the most
basic ending of all is built into us:

181
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our ability to die,

182
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our mortality,

183
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is a defining part
of what it is to be human.

184
00:10:43,140 --> 00:10:46,980
We are finite beings within infinity,

185
00:10:46,980 --> 00:10:49,150
and if we are alive to this,

186
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it sharpens our appreciation
of the fact that we exist,

187
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gives new depth to the idea
of life as a journey.

188
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So, my mortality does not negate meaning,

189
00:11:02,692 --> 00:11:04,527
it creates meaning.

190
00:11:04,807 --> 00:11:06,837
It's what wakes me up to life.

191
00:11:06,837 --> 00:11:07,902
It's what says,

192
00:11:07,902 --> 00:11:09,302
"Appreciate it!

193
00:11:09,302 --> 00:11:10,912
Don't take it for granted!

194
00:11:11,152 --> 00:11:12,892
Write the next book!

195
00:11:13,092 --> 00:11:14,532
Laugh with your friends!

196
00:11:14,762 --> 00:11:16,082
Go explore!

197
00:11:16,732 --> 00:11:18,812
Eat another dozen oysters!"

198
00:11:18,812 --> 00:11:20,092
(Laughter)

199
00:11:20,612 --> 00:11:23,762
Because it's not how long
I live that matters;

200
00:11:23,762 --> 00:11:25,702
it's how I live,

201
00:11:26,582 --> 00:11:28,642
and I intend to do it well -

202
00:11:29,669 --> 00:11:31,049
to the end.

203
00:11:31,888 --> 00:11:33,118
Thank you!

204
00:11:33,758 --> 00:11:36,648
(Applause)