Travis Mayes shares how a mistake made him one of the best pit masters in Texas. Then Max talks with Dr. Michio Kaku, a physicist and co-founder of string field theory, about how physics can help predict multiple futures: of aging, of dying, and of our planet.
Know someone who should be on 70 Over 70? We’re looking for all types of stories and people to feature at the top of the show. To nominate yourself or someone else, email 70over70@pineapple.fm or call 302-659-7070 and tell us your name, age, where you’re from and what you want to talk about.
transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
[OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70 … but, I am ready!
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
Travis Mayes: My name is Travis Mayes. I’m 71, and I live in Cedar Hill, Texas.
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Travis: What have I learned from making barbecue?
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Travis: Patience and respect. Barbecue is not fast food. You know, it takes time to cook. The pit that you cook on, you have to respect it, you know. It's me and the pit, you know, like we're a team. If I treat the pit right, it'll treat me right.
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Travis: When I first started cooking, barbeque, you know, I wasn’t no pitmaster. I would come in early in the morning and try to put my beef on and, you know, I was trying to cook it in like four hours--four hours and a half. But it wasn't working. So one day I decided that I was going to put my beef on and let it cook until I got ready to go home. I put on the fire and let it start cooking and I went home.
So the next morning, it popped in my mind that I didn’t take the beef off the fire. I mean I really got...I was really shook, you know. So I was like, ‘Oh, man! Golly! I left that beef on,’ you know. I drove on down there, jumped out the car, you know, and ran inside. Open the pit door up, I was like I just gonna throw them in the trash and I reached in the pit, picked it up. It was tender and juicy. I said, ‘Oh yeah’ [laughs]. They were perfect.
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Travis: This is not an easy job. There's not no backyard Saturday afternoon. This is a real job. But I'm thankful, you know, that I know how to do this. because it's a whole bunch of people that think they can cook barbecue but they cannot. You eat their barbecue, you’re just kinda ‘Yeah, ok man. Yeah, alright, yeah. Uh huh,’ You know, you don’t want to tell man this barbecuing ain’t with nothing. You know, barbecue to me is like uh…
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Travis: It took me a while to perfect it, but...now I know how to cook the best beef in Texas. [laughs]
[THEME MUSIC CONTINUES]
Max Linsky: That was Travis Mayes, and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I'm Max Linsky.
My guest this week is Michio Kaku, the co-founder of string field theory.
I'm not going to try to explain string field theory right now, but the short version is that it's basically an explanation of everything, a way of understanding how every single thing in the universe interacts with every other single thing in the universe.
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Max: It's a big idea and it’s one that Michio has been obsessed with since he was 8 years old when read an obituary for Albert Einstein. 8 year-old Michio decided right there that he would finish Einstein's work. And then … he actually did.
I wanted to know what that felt like — to accomplish your childhood dream.
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Max: And I was curious about what comes next once you do. How do you not get complacent after you’ve figured out how literally everything works?
Well, you start thinking about the future. The planet’s future, humanity’s future, and your own.
Michio Kaku is 74 years old.
INTERVIEW
Max: Michio, welcome to the, uh, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for doing this.
Michio: Glad to be on the show.
Max: I have, um, so many things that I want to ask you about, but, um, you're the first person that I've talked to who has really dedicated a significant portion of their professional lives to thinking about aging and how aging will change. Maybe you could help me understand what do you think it will be like when I'm--when I'm 70, in terms of biotechnology. What is aging going to feel like 30 years from now?
Michio: As one person said, we are the last generation to die. That's a depressing thought, isn't it, knowing that future generations death may be an option for them, because what is aging anyway? Why do we have to die? It’s because of, well, with time, errors build up, skin begins to wrinkle, muscles begin to atrophy, DNA begins to have errors in it. And when we're young, we can repair a lot of these mistakes. But when we get older, even those repair mechanisms begin to fail. And that's why we get old. In fact, that's why we die. But there are a lot of different kinds of theories now about how we may be able to reverse some of this stuff, not just the biological clock, but the actual buildup of errors within DNA. And one day, not in my lifetime--I figured that out when I was a kid [Max laughs]-- it's not going to happen in my lifetime. But I think in our children's and our grandchildren lifetime, they may have the option of slowing down the aging process and maybe stopping. They may like to be 30 years of age for many decades to come. That is well within the laws of physics. And I think it's a real possibility, but unfortunately not for my generation.
Max: That's how you think this is going to manifest, is, uh, you'll be able to just, like, pick an age and stop at some point?
Michio: I think so. I think there are two ways in which we’ll become immortal eventually. And again, there's nothing in the laws of physics saying that you can't be immortal. The first is digital immortality, which is coming actually very soon. Already in Silicon Valley, they're offering to digitize everything known about you, your digital signature, credit card transactions, all your Instagram photographs. In the future, we’ll have a very good picture of your consciousness, in fact. And for example, I would love to talk to Einstein. I would love to sit down in a library to talk to a digitized version that contains every known piece of literature, film, writing of Einstein. And that's the library of the future. We'll have a library of souls. So when we become digitized, we will be immortal. So this, I think, is something that is very feasible. The process is beginning now, and I think in that sense we'll begin to live forever. [Hm.] Now, what about biological immortality? Well, there's something called the second law of thermodynamics, which in some sense is a death warrant. Things decay. Things fall apart. Errors build up. Things rust. That’s the law of nature. For example, telomeres are like a biological clock. They're at the end of the chromosome and they're sort of like your shoe string. When you tie your shoe string often enough, the plastic tips begin to fray. And when they fray, the whole [laughs], uh, shoelace begins to fray and that's a chromosome. But you see the second law of thermodynamics only works for closed systems. But you see in open systems, the second law no longer applies. In other words, if we from the outside can use gene therapy to fix those broken genes, then there's nothing in the laws of physics preventing you from living forever. And already scientists are beginning to look at this process at the cellular level. Now, don't believe the hype. Don't believe that we have the fountain of youth now, but I think the fountain of youth, credibly, could happen in this century.
Max: Ah, kind of blows my mind! I want to ask you about both sides of that immortality equation that you just laid out, both digital and physical. You said that you'd love to have a conversation with Einstein and you have this long, long history with that. If you had the opportunity to talk to him, what do you think he'd say?
Michio: Well, when I was eight years old, I had an inspiration. I saw a photograph of a man's desk who'd just died and they said that there was unfinished book on that desk by a great scientist. I was fascinated by that story. Why couldn't he finish that book? Why couldn't he ask his mother? What's so hard? Well, that man who died was Albert Einstein, and that book was the Unified Field Theory. And I said to myself, that's what I want to do for a living, I want to help complete that book. Einstein once said that unless a theory can be explained to a child, the theory is probably useless. Now, by that, he meant the great theories are not mathematics, great theories are principles you can explain to a child. Now Einstein had two great principles. He had a picture on the first try, that gave us the atomic bomb. He had a picture for the second try, that gave us black holes and big bangs. But, there was no picture for the third try. And I would ask him, what pictures did you envision? What kind of avenues did you pursue thinking that you could complete this grand scheme of a theory of everything? [Hm.] What were the mistrials? What were the dead ends? And then I would explain to him what string theory is all about and I would love to get his reaction.
Max: What do you think it would be?
Michio: I think he would be amazed that it is in the spirit of the two previous theories. However, Einstein hated the quantum theory. String theory is a quantum theory. Sorry about that. You can't get everything. [Max laughs] So I think Einstein would have been disappointed that the theory of everything is a quantum theory.
Max: So 8 year old Michio in California sees this photo of this desk with an unfinished piece of work and decides I'm going to pick it up.
Michio: That's right.
Max: And then you actually do it. What do you do next?
Michio: Well, I like to think of this as a chess game. The destiny of humans is to, over thousands of years, work out the moves of the chess game. 2000 years later, we figure out how the pawns move and how the bishop moves. But then one day we'll figure out all the rules, the whole ball of wax, the rules of chess, and become grand masters. That's the goal, to become grand masters of the chess game. That I think is our destiny, because every time we work out a force, it changes world history. When Newton worked out the force of mechanics and gravity, that gave us the industrial revolution, which changed modern history, lifted us from poverty of Agrarian society into the machine age. Then Maxwell and Verdi worked out electricity that gave us the electric age. And then the quantum theory gives us lasers and the internet and transistors and all the wonders in our living room. Think of it, a theory of everything would give you all those things. Plus, answer the mystery of the Big Bang where you came from. Black holes--what’s on the other side of a black hole? Time travel. Is time travel possible? Gateways. Are there gateways to other universes? Ultimately, I think that the destiny of humanity will rest on this theory. We're not talking about the theory of tomorrow, we're talking about the theory of the universe itself.
Max: Yeah, it's about as big as it gets.
Michio: Yeah, that's right.
Max: But for you personally, what do you do next?
Michio: Well, you see, just because you know, the rules of chess does make you a grand master. We talked about the aging process, right? Realize that the universe is also aging. The universe is dying. The laws of physics are a death warrant for the entire universe. According to the law of physics and the second law of thermodynamics, everything runs down. Everything rusts, falls apart, decays, disintegrates-- that's the second law of thermodynamics. And the universe must also obey the second law. So one day the universe will consist of black holes, dying stars, it'll be super cold and all intelligent life will die. That's where this theory comes in. At that point we will be so advanced we will use this theory to create a bubble--another bubble-- an escape hatch, a lifeboat that takes us from this dying bubble into a young, vibrant, warmer bubble so we can start all over again and mess up that universe as well. [Max laughs] We'll have two universes to mess up. So that I think is the aging process of the universe itself.
Max: All right, I still feel like maybe you haven't quite answered my question, which is when you figured the thing out, how did it feel and what did it mean to you personally, not to the chess game, but just to you like to the grown up version of that 8 year old kid?
Michio: Well, first of all, string theory is not in its final form. String field theory, which I created, gives you an equation two inches long, but it doesn't include what are called membranes. So we now realize that strings can coexist with membranes. So we're not quite there at the point where we say, eureka, this is the final one-inch equation. We're not quite there yet. However, when I discovered string field theory, which is the equation just for strings not for membranes... it was well, it was a good feeling.
Max: Yeah!
Michio: You really feel like you're part of the universe.
Max: [laughs] I would imagine.
Michio: Now, the feeling I had was that on the other side of the galaxy, there's probably an alien on the other side of the galaxy writing down the same theory in different language, of course. [Max laughs] And you really begin to feel part, part and parcel of the universe itself, beyond any work of any particular culture. This is the universe, the book not of a human, but the book of Mother Nature itself.
Max: I love that in that moment you were thinking about someone else doing the same thing. That feels like, um, the sign of a very healthy ego to me.
Michio: Yeah, that you're part, you're not creating it out of nothing, you're part of a much larger picture. And that you’re filling one cog, one piece, of a much larger picture. So it's humbling in the sense that you realize that this is an awfully big picture, but then you begin to appreciate Mother Nature who created this theory to begin with. And that's a gratifying feeling.
Max: And it makes you want to do more work. It doesn't feel like, well, now I've done the thing I set out to do and all that's left is like, uh, sit on the beach and have a daiquiri.
Michio: Uh, as , um, Archimedes, the great Greek mathematician, when he discovered the law of buoyancy, he ran through the streets of Athens naked, yelling out, ‘Eureka! Eureka! I have found it. I have found the principle of why things float.’ So, it's not quite like that. No one is going to run around naked in the streets of New York City.
Max: What was your version of that like when you nailed the theory of everything? What did you do? Do you, like, go out and have some nachos? How do you celebrate something like that?
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Michio: No, it's just this inner feeling, this inner feeling that you've done something which is potentially universal. You feel like you're part of a much larger community. A community of conscious beings that are self-aware that dare to wonder why things are the way they are.
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Max: Do you mind quickly just giving me the, um, real dummies version of string theory? I've been reading about it for days now and I'm not totally sure I understand it yet.
Michio: Well, you know, the Greeks, like Pythagoras, wanted a paradigm, a theme, some way to summarize the rich diversity of the universe into a single picture. And one day he was looking at a lyre string and he realized that the longer the lyre string, the lower the note. Then he went to a blacksmith's shop and he saw that the longer the piece of metal, the lower the vibration. And then he said, I can use mathematics to describe this thing. So he worked out the mathematics of music. And then Pythagoras said the variety, the richness of music is rich enough to explain the universe. Well, great idea, but never went anywhere. But now we have the birth of string theory. Now, what--what does that do? Each vibration of a string from a distance it looks like a particle, from a distance the vibrating string--very tiny-- looks like a particle. And you have different particles because you have different notes. So how many particles are there? Probably an infinite number. We’ve cataloged hundreds of them. They’re probably millions of them, different vibrations of a tiny string. So what is physics? Physics is the harmonies that you can write on strings. What is chemistry? Chemistry is the melodies you can play on strings where they bump into each other. What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of strings.
Max: Hm. So when you become as comfortable as you are with the expanse of possibility and the expanse of the universe, I'm really curious, genuinely, how you navigate the day to day frustrations and anxieties and to-do lists of life when your answer to like, how did it feel was, I wonder how it felt for the alien who was doing the same thing. Like, when you're that connected to this expanse, how do you, like, remember to pick up milk on the way home? How do you deal with the small shit, when you're so in touch with how meaningless it is?
Michio: Well, the bottom line is you have to pay your dues. In order to dream big, you have to, first of all, do the small things and you got to do them well. And so, yes, it means you have to clean up after yourself [laughs]. Yes, it means if you make a mess of things, you've got to get the vacuum to clean it up. Yes, you get yelled at, if you don't do it right. So on and so forth. But that goes with the territory.That's just the way life is. You take the good with the bad and it makes you a better person, too.
Max: But how do you--how do you do that? Like you've dedicated your whole life to figuring out very specifically why things are, but then this other stuff that we all do you're kind of like, ‘eh, that's life. You just got to get the milk sometimes.’
Michio: You know, children, when I talk to them, I tell them that it really helps to have a role model. Maybe a parent, uh, a relative, maybe someone who’s already attained what you want to become. The wheels already been invented. [laughs] Why reinvent the wheel? So, I read up about Einstein and I realized all the twists and turns of his life. Yes, he had to pick up the garbage. Yes, he got fired. In fact, just before he worked out relativity, he got fired by his boss because he was an unruly tutor. He was trying to sell insurance one time, looking for a job. Can you imagine opening the door and there's Albert Einstein selling you insurance? [both laugh] This is reality! He had to pay his dues. We live in a society, right? So I began to realize that, hey, this is what you have to do. Life is not just a bed of roses. You have the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. chaos. and a certain amount of chaos makes you stronger, in fact, if you can navigate them. So I tell people look at day to day life as a challenge because it makes you a better person, a better member of society. Because for all the great ideas we can think about the bottom line if your feet are implanted in society.
Max: Do you have bad days? Like, do you have shitty days?
Michio:The bad day is when you have an equation and you are stuck. For example, people sometimes ask me how do we physicists think. We physicists think much the same way that a composer thinks. How does a composer create music? For the most part, they have melodies, fragments of melodies dancing in their head, and they look out the window. And until these melodies and these fragments come together, they do nothing. They're stuck. Then when they suddenly begin to fit together, then you go to a piano, then you begin to plunk out some of the tunes that are coming up. Then you go back and look out the window again [laughs] looking for the next passage. That's how we physicists work. ‘Cause look, sometimes you get stuck, sometimes you get stuck for months. Einstein got stuck for years sometimes, but he had the determination to stick with it for all those years. So you roll with the punches, basically, you get stuck, you roll with the punches.
Max: I mean, that doesn't necessarily just feel like rolling with the punches to me. That feels like really sincere optimism.
Michio: Well, the bottom line is you have to be optimistic. As General Eisenhower once said, pessimists never win a war, even if optimists exaggerate their victory, at least they have a plan for victory. And pessimists, how many pessimists have made history? How many pessimists do you read about in the history books? No, they’re all optimists because optimists make history. And the same thing with physics. Is it genius that creates a great Einstein? Well, yeah, part of it. But part of it is luck. And part of it is hard work, the nitty gritty of sitting down and doing the hard work.
Max: I wonder how that fits, though, with the causes that you have championed over the course of your life. Like you, you've been talking about and fighting against climate change for decades. You have led protests against nuclear warfare. You have taken really political positions that are connected to your work--maybe they don't feel political to you--and some of those things, certainly the environment, are only getting worse, getting more dangerous, getting more serious. How do you stay optimistic in the face of that?
Michio: Well, realizing that social change, social change does not come about this because people bitch about it all the time [Max laughs]. No, social change comes because people have studied the question and have come up with reasonable answers to these kinds of questions. And then we can debate these reasonable solutions. But if all we do is bellyache, all we do is complain, then we're not going to get anywhere. We physicists, believe it or not, have seriously looked at the future, uh, not just one hundred years, but thousands of years into the future about these kinds of questions. We divide these civilizations of the future into three types: Type I, Type II, Type III. A Type I civilization has planetary energy. They control the weather, like, for example, Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. Type II is stellar. They control the energy output of an entire star. That's like Star Trek. Star Trek would be a typical Type II civilization. Then there is Type III, galactic. They roam the galactic space lanes. They play with black holes. That's Type III, like Star Wars. Now, on this cosmic scale, what are we? Do we play with the weather as Type I? Do we play with the sun as Type II? Do we play with a galaxy, like Star Wars, in Type III? No, we're Type Zero. We get our energy from dead plants, but we can dream about the time when we become Type I around the year 2100. So what could get in the way? What could prevent us from becoming Type I is, as you mentioned, three things: global warming, nuclear warfare and killer germs. These are the three things that threaten the entire human race. So it's a race. It's a race against time to see whether or not humans can mature fast enough to overcome these three problems or whether we descend back into barbarism and we--we become primitive once again. So that's where we are today. We're at the beginning of a Type I civilization. But are we mature enough to negotiate a Type I civilization? That is not clear.
Max: One thing that is clear or-or is clearer to me now, having done this show for a little bit, is that younger generations feel quite frustrated with older generations and the world that's getting left behind, whether it's climate change or systemic racism or nuclear warfare, there's real antagonism, I think,uh, on the part of younger people for older generations. I wonder how you understand the relationship between generations and-and whether you think those young people who are so pissed off are getting something wrong.
Michio: Well, I think for one thing, it's good to be pissed off because you want a better world, you're not satisfied with the world as it is, you want to create a better world. And I think that's a good thing. I think it's good that young people feel that way, however, it's bad if they turn inward. It's bad if they start to get frustrated and depressed and they begin to realize things are hopeless because you need hope to create a new world. See, we're talking about creating a new world. That means first you have to recognize the problems of the old world and then lay out an agenda for the next world.
Max: This sense of optimism that you keep returning to, is it--is it work for you or does it come naturally to you?
Michio: Well, it's second nature, but of course, you have to have the alternative. When people say well, well and good your opinion but hey you know what’s the alternative or what’s your solution in other words, positive program. Unless you have a positive program, all you can do is bellyache. And I think that there's a lack of positive programs. For every negative, there has to be someone with a positive program. I mean, what's your solution? What's your policy? What's the answer? That’s what people want to hear.
Max: Is there any piece of it that's connected to faith? When you grew up your parents were practicing Buddhists. You went to like a Presbyterian Sunday school. You've had this whole career in theoretical physics, which in a way, at least to me, feels connected to some real spiritual ideas.
Michio: Well, the nice thing about Buddhism is it introduces the concept of nirvana. Nirvana is timelessness, the state of high consciousness and I think that people who believe in Nirvana want inner peace, and they believe in this higher consciousness beyond the worldly constraints of the world today, and that is how physics is leaning toward, that the world we see today is only a fraction of the actual world, and we're forced into it because of the quantum theory. In order for the quantum theory to make sense, we almost have to have other universes, other worlds, other higher states of consciousness.
Max: Do you, um, do you feel an inner peace?
Michio: Well, inner peace, knowing that you feel one with the universe, that you're not divorced from it, so many people who are depressed think that they are outside the universe in some sense. You know, we have a right to be here just like the trees. Does a tree ask itself, do I have the right to be here? No, the tree, of course, has a right to be here. Well, we do, too. We have a right to be here in the same reason that the trees have a right to be here. So I don't question that.
Max: And that's present for you.
Michio: Yeah.
Max: So, how's aging going for you?
Michio: Uhh, well, so far, so good. I mean, the main thing is to have good energy because people who are optimistic have less stress hormones, uh, less wear and tear on their body. They don't drink and get drunk and then worry about things that are not important. And as a consequence, there's less damage to their body and molecular damage, genetic and molecular damage is aging. And there are things you can do to slow it down and that perhaps one day even reverse it.
Max: Why do you want to slow it down? What do you still want to do?
Michio: Well, of course we all want to live forever. Uh, that, of course, is hardwired into our being that you want to live forever. You want to see, quote, beyond your years, unquote. I would love to see beyond my years because it's beyond my years is a transition to Type I. We are headed toward a planetary civilization. I'd like to see that. Unfortunately, I probably won’t but I would love to see the day where we become planetary, around the year 2100.
Max: And have you made your peace with the fact that you can see that and yet you might not be able to see it for yourself?
Michio: Yeah, that's a little frustrating. You see, when I was a child, I had a role model. That was Albert Einstein, but on weekends they had reruns of Flash Gordon. So I used to watch Flash Gordon every Saturday. And they had starships, they had ray guns. They had cities in the sky, cities under water. And I said to myself, wow, hey, that's pretty neat. [Max laughs] So I would love to see beyond my time because that, of course, is what science fiction does. It teases you, thinking that their stories can give you a glimpse into the future, which doesn't yet exist or may never exist. Later in life I began to realize these two strains, one Einstein and the other was Flash Gordon, were the same. That if you really want to understand the future, you have to understand physics. The physics of aging, biochemistry, all that stuff comes right out of physics. And if you understand physics you have a leg up on understanding the future.
Max: That 8 year old kid he still looms like pretty large for you, huh?
Michio: Yeah, you know, um, I do interviews sometimes on radio and I've interviewed Nobel laureates and I asked them, when was it that steered you in the direction of physics? And they always saw the same thing. They always say, when I was 10 years old, it all started. It was a telescope. I visited the planetarium. That's when it all started. And then I began to realize that we're all born scientists, all of us are born scientists, especially around the age of 10. That's when we go beyond mommy and daddy and think about the world. How big is the world beyond them? Then, then they hit the biggest killer of scientists known to science, and that is junior high school [Max laughs]. We lose millions of young kids in junior high school, millions of them. Great scientists say, I don't want to become a scientist. It's boring. It's just memorizing the parts of a flower. It's just regurgitating boring stuff that I'll never use again. We lose them because we make science so boring. It's all memorization. That who wants to become a scientist? Science is about principles, concepts like evolution or the aerodynamics of flying. It has nothing to do with, well, something to do with names. You have to give names to some of these things. But that's not what science is, but that's where people think science is. So when I write a book, I try to put principles, concepts. Concepts that will stay with you for the rest of your life rather than simply giving names to the stars or names of the planets. That's not science.
Max: It's also about creativity.
Michio: Creativity and the mysterious of the unknown. Einstein said that what’s more important than knowledge is the unknown, the mystery of the universe. That's what inspires people, not the names of the planets, but the possibilities of unknown planets. That's what stimulates scientific investigation.
Max: All right, I want to ask you about one more thing that I'll let you go, OK?
Michio: OK.
Max: And this might just be betraying myself as as, uh, a total pessimist, even after this conversation, but are you scared of dying?
Michio: Well, I think it's genetic that we have no choice but to be afraid of dying, because that's what evolution says. You have to survive, have children, have progeny, help the next generation survive so their genes can propagate. But, you know, like I said, I think digitally we'll live forever. It’s not, of course, the biological you, but something of you will live forever. And your memories, your thoughts, desires, your consciousness will live forever when you’re digitized. [Right]. And you’ll be able to interact with other digitized souls as well. So, you see, there’s hope.
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Michio: But, uh, you try not to think about it [Max laughs] because, of course, it is the end of everything.
CREDITS
Max: 70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios, and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixers are Raj Makhija and Elliott Adler. And Jenna Weiss-Berman and I are the executive producers.
Our theme song is Like a Dream by Francis and the Lights and the music you’re listening to right now is by Arthur Russell, who would have been 70 this year. Original music by Terence Bernardo. Additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maira Kalman, who’s 72. And our episode art is by Lynn Staley, who’s 73 and also is my mom.
Thank you Travis Mayes, and thank you Michio Kaku.
I’m Max Linsky. Thanks for listening.
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