313 | Eric Topol on the Changing Face of Medicine and Aging

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A couple years ago, 2023, I did a holiday message entitled Reflections on Immortality. This was in response or at least inspired by a workshop we had at Santa Fe Institute on immortality, what it would mean, how you might get there. And I mentioned there that a lot of the people at the workshop basically said they don't want immortality. Like, that's too much. Either personally, they couldn't imagine what to do for all that time or socially, they think that society would stagnate if people just live forever rather than being replaced. That's fine. You can argue whether or not you'd want to live forever or not. Most people, though, would wanna live a little longer at least than they probably will live. We're very interested in longevity and aging, and not only living, but living in healthier ways. I just now, for this intro, looked up the graph of life expectancy in The United States for the last hundred, hundred and fifty years or so, and it's been going up. That's the good news. It's it went down once in this particular graph, shows five year bins. Right? So only once in the twentieth century did the life expectancy decrease from one five year bin to another between 1915 and 1920. I'm not exactly sure why that was, the flu, the Spanish flu maybe, until, 2015 to 2020. It also decreased. It also only decreased a little amount. Okay? In 1920, it was 53 years old, the life expectancy from birth in The US. In 2020, it was 78.8. So it's gone up quite a bit. That's impressive. But in 2015, it was 78.9. It was a little bit bigger, and we can talk about why that's true, the health care system, nutrition, whatever. That is the kind of thing we're gonna talk about on today's podcast. Eric Topol is a leading medical researcher. Cardiovascular system is his specialty, but he's a broad thinker, who's done a lot of work and has been thinking for a while now about medicine in a very broad way and been writing books about it. We will actually take a little bit more than a little bit of a detour to talk about his previous book, which was called Deep Medicine, how artificial intelligence can make health care human again. He has this fascinating point of view that not only can AI be super duper useful in recognizing, diagnosing some medical conditions that human beings are not very good at, but in fact, it can be better than human beings in some very, very important ways. And, you know, we think about how to make an ideal system where there'd be both humans and AI there, but one of the steps there is making the humans understand that the AI can actually be pretty good at some things. It's not about AGI or superintelligence. It's about pattern recognition, which …