Journalist Kara Swisher starts her new six-part CNN series about longevity and health in an interesting location: a cemetery.
It’s the final resting place of her father, who died in 1968 at 34 years old. Swisher was only 5 and his sudden death had a deep effect on her career and how she views life.
“My father’s death has created an awareness of death that is very profound,” she says in an interview. “I’m very aware of my death and I don’t mean I’m going to die tomorrow. I just know the time is limited.”
Swisher wades into the intersection of how health and tech can lengthen life for the series “Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever,” exploring everything from wellness influencers like Gwyneth Paltrow to AI-powered robotic companions for the elderly. It premieres Saturday.
“I come to it pretty neutral and willing to listen to some stuff and willing to blow up other stuff,” says Swisher, who has become synonymous with Silicon Valley since she began covering the tech industry in the 1990s.
“All these health influencers always are going for a magic bullet. And I’m sorry to tell you there isn’t one.”
Red light and collagen supplements
In the name of science, Swisher takes the powerful anesthetic Ketamine, undergoes sound therapy and steps into a hyperbaric chamber, which treats wounds and infections. She checks out concierge medicine for the rich and gets in a full-body red-light therapy pod (“I feel like I’m in an air fryer,” she says).
Armed with her self-described “adorably surly” approach, Swisher talks to billionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson about his quest to extend human lifespan by undergoing blood plasma transfusion and injections of stem cells. She pricks herself repeatedly for home blood tests that promise a look at her cellular health. (“I bleed for you, CNN,” she jokes.)
Fads like collagen supplements and vibration plates don’t impress Swisher, who chats with Amy Larocca, author of “How to be Well,” an expose of the wellness industry. Too often, they conclude, the hard science isn’t there and charismatic peddlers are just getting rich on our gullibility. Swisher argues that they exploit the gap that opens when the American health care system kicks in only after an often bankrupting illness begins.
“We live in a sick care society, not a health care society,” she tells the AP. “What we should be investing in is to make all of us healthier for a longer period of time rather than participate in what is a sick care industry here in this country.”
Swisher finds brighter spots in medical-tech advances like gene editing, GLP-1s, VO2 max training, AI screening for cancer and the combination of AI and mechanics that promises to help revolutionize mobility with exoskeletons.
She speaks to Sam Altman of OpenAI and Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna. At Stanford University, she finds tiny soft robots called millibots that are injected into a patient’s neck and can break up blood clots with minimal invasiveness.
“This is her curiosity unleashed and all the things that make her tick,” says Amy Entelis, executive vice president for talent, CNN Originals and creative development.
“She brings her wit, her personality, but her journalistic curiosity and rigor to a very complex subject that I know I personally feel inundated by.”
Swisher, who daily takes fish oil and the vitamins K and D supplements, says the series is informed by her father’s death and a 2005 commencement address to Stanford students by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who argued that impending death was a critical motor of innovation.
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” he told graduates. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Lessons from South Korea
Swisher’s quest takes her to South Korea, which has one of the world’s highest life expectancies. She finds good nutrition starts early there with fermented and whole foods. Universal health care doesn’t hurt either, with each citizen getting 16 visits to the doctor a year, which leads to preventative testing for things like obesity and high blood pressure. Dolls with AI help with elder loneliness.
Back home, Swisher creates a 3D clone of herself to understand what it might mean to live for generations. The technicians upload all kinds of details about Swisher and she starts talking to it. “It got smarter by the second,” she says. It even learned to joke.
Then it freaked her out.
“As it was leaving I said, ‘Well, I’m probably going to kill you, you’ve got to go.’ And it said to me, ‘See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.’ It’s something I say to my kids as a joke. I don’t know where they got it from. I can’t find a place where I’ve said it in public,” she says. “I was just blown away.”
