- Oh hey.
Welcome to It’s Personal,
a show about what makes you, you.
Today we’re talking about technology
and how or if it effects your life.
- Mm, juice!
- Brandon, no!
(yelling)
(playful music)
- Whoa!
- Whoa.
Cool, where are we?
- I think the sugar from the OJ must’ve
wormhole us into the mainframe of Shane’s computer!
- Oh no, really?
- Yeah, I mean probably. I don’t know.
Hey Shane? - Yeah?
(groans) What?
- What’re you doing?
- I’m trying to triangulate our position
so I can a way to hack us the heck out of here!
- Oh.
Well you know, looking down at your phone like that
can be a real pain in the neck.
- Good one, Brandon.
- Thanks.
But in all honesty, a lot of people have been looking down
at their phones and media devices recently,
and did you know that every inch that you lean forward
you’re actually adding what feels like 10 pounds
of pressure to the back of your neck?
- I did not know that.
- Well don’t believe me?
Check this out.
- Hi, my name’s Dr. Julie Foster,
and I am a chiropractor.
So text neck is really a syndrome,
which just means that it’s a group of symptoms
that we’ve developed specifically
from the way that we hold our media devices.
Our cell phones, specifically.
Well the symptoms can vary from person to person,
but it’s really common to find patients
who complain of neck pain, for sure,
shoulder pain, headaches, tension,
and definitely difficulty in the way that they’re
able to turn their heads.
When you keep leaning your head forward
we pull it out of that natural position.
Normally everybody’s head weighs, I don’t know,
10 or 12 pounds depending on how smart you are,
but the further you go away from your body
the more force that your head applies to your neck.
So as I pitch more and more forward
my head becomes, literally, heavier.
Up to weights like two and three, maybe six, times
its normal weight, so this is really significant strain
over long periods of time.
- I’m Candace.
- I’m Jared.
- My name is Henry.
I’m an awesome texter.
- I probably spend like six hours of the day
like, just at the computer like this.
- I’m really worried that I’m gonna develop
an old people hump, which is a very scientific term.
I’ve noticed in pictures that my shoulders are forward,
and they’re not nice and pulled back
even if it, like, feels like they are.
- I definitely have back problems,
and like, posture problems.
I’m not activating my core enough,
even though I think about it.
It’s like you’re talking to a smoker
and it’s just like, “Oh, do you think the reason why
“you’re short of breath is cause you smoke all the time?”
Yeah, probably, I’m not a doctor.
I don’t have an x-ray of my lungs in front of me
or the medical expertise to make that call,
but if I had to guess, yes.
The answer is: I do have text neck.
- One of the first things I always look at is
to see where people’s shoulders line up in relation
to their body, and you can see that her shoulders
are pitching forward, or pulling forward.
So what we’d really like to see is for those
to be set back here.
Look how that kind of immediately opens up her chest.
Candace, when I pull your shoulders back
is a little less tension on your neck?
- Yeah!
- It’s a miracle.
- I feel more ladylike!
- Yes, you look more ladylike, right?
Nice and easy.
He looks comfortable, doesn’t he?
He looks really, really comfortable right now.
Are you comfortable?
- [Jared] No. - [Julie] Not at all.
He’s not at all.
Looks pretty darn good to me.
I might pull him back just a bit.
There you go.
You notice that little bit of adjustment,
it brings his ears a little closer in line.
I think over time he’d have to pay attention
to that, but he could certainly make that adjustment
and give himself a little less pressure here.
But it’s easy when you’re standing here
and a doctor is poking at you.
Computers, cell phones, these things
aren’t going anywhere.
So to kind of blindly put it aside and say
that you shouldn’t use your cell phone as much,
or you shouldn’t use your computer as much
really doesn’t deal with the issue.
It’s up to each person individually
to become more mindful about their bodies.
One of the things that happens with technology is that
it allows us to disconnect from other things.
Whether that’s people, or places, or even ourselves.
But your health is based on your connection to you.
So absolutely use your cell phone, stay connected
to BuzzFeed, but for all intents and purposes
please lift your phone up.
Lift your eyes up, listen to your body,
pull your shoulders back,
breathe deeply.
All of these things help you keep your posture in mind.
- So we should hold our phones like this?
- Mm-hmm, yeah, it’s the best for your neck.
- Uh, alright, but we look like idiots now.
- I mean, yeah it is pretty dumb,
but that’s just the way that phones are designed now.
But if you think about it, maybe someday in the future
we’re gonna have, like, polygrams or crazy eye implants.
Or maybe we’ll be able to just send information
directly to each other’s minds!
- Ooh! - [Brandon] Yeah.
Hey guys, I got a signal!
Alright, here we...
Oh, my phone just died.
- I wonder what happens when I die.
- Kate, we’re not gonna die in here.
- No, I mean, we spend all this time
updating our Facebooks, our Twitters,
our Instagrams...
What happens to all those digital memories when we’re gone?
(ominous music) - I don’t know.
- Watch this!
- Everyone wants to talk about death, right?
I mean, bad news is you probably can’t decide
how you’re gonna die in real life,
but the good news is
you can decide how you’re gonna die
or whether you’re gonna die at all online.
(playful music)
Can I ask you a question?
- [Woman] Hey Jamie.
- Could you share with us the last
Facebook post that you had?
- [Woman] My brother wrote “Take 10 minutes to watch
“my sister talk about pubes.”
- I went to a cheese club meeting
where we dressed up in cheese hats
and everybody brought all of their favorite cheeses.
- I recently posted this photo of Lenny Kravitz
blowing out the crotch of his pants
and his dong is hanging out.
- So if you were to die tomorrow
do you feel happy about these posts?
- I guess if I died tomorrow
this would be my legacy:
this cheese club.
- I don’t know, I mean...
Is this my legacy?
My legacy would be dick pics.
Eugh.
- [Voiceover] So how do you avoid a legacy of dick pics?
Well, you need to do some planning.
But luckily, there are options.
Option 1 takes trust and reliable pals,
so if you got both of those go out today
and share the passwords for your Twitter,
Instagram, Gmail, HotMail, et cetera et cetera
with the person you love the most.
For Facebook you don’t need to share the password.
Just go into your settings
and designate someone to take over.
A buddy, a lover, a jilted lover, heck it’s up to you!
Option 2: this takes more work,
but less trust.
Use online services to store your passwords
to unlock after your passing.
Or use an account like Dead Social
where you store messages and photos
that will be posted after death in intervals.
Surprising and haunting your loved ones
for years into the future.
So once the appropriate preparations have been made
it’s time to make some real decisions.
First, decide if you want your Facebook to shut down
or become memorialized page.
You could do absolutely nothing,
but every year your friends will get the reminder
it’s your birthday, and they might not like that.
Lastly, think about what your final messages
and photos will be.
What’s the lasting impression you want to leave
on the digital landscape?
Store this online or give it to the person
in charge of your account.
What do you want your last message to be?
- You know, that is crazy.
You can’t choose your final words in real life,
but you can choose your final words online.
What would your final words be?
- I don’t want to die.
- Well that’s not original.
- No, I mean I don’t want to die in here, guys.
- Brandon, everyone has to die.
That’s the circle of life.
- Well,
maybe we don’t have to die.
- Yes, you definitely do.
- Wait, hold on Kate.
What are you saying, Shane?
- Have you guys ever heard of the Transhumanist movement?
- I have not.
- It’s a group of people dedicated to the advancement
of medical technology with the hopes of prolonging life,
possibly indefinitely.
Observe.
(playful music)
Death.
It’s all around us.
Technology: also all around us.
Can we use the latter to cure the former?
One man believes we can,
and he is here with us today.
Please welcome Mr. Zoltan Istvan.
We want to talk today a little bit about Transhumanism.
- Transhumanism is an international movement,
a few million people around the world,
that want to use science and technology
to radically change the human being
and also radically change the human experience.
- A lot of it seems kind of far fetched,
but I feel like there’s a lot of technologies out there
today that probably fall under the umbrella
of transhumanism.
- Transhumanism is sort of whatever you want to think about.
Is it the first time we picked up a rock and made an axe,
or is it really a jet airplane flying at 30,000 feet?
But I like to think of driverless cars as transhumance,
I like to think of the artificial limbs that we put
on war veterans. - What other technologies
do you think are kind of down the line
or in the near future?
- One of the most futurist type of
technologies that a lot of people love
to think about is mind uploading, and in fact
as a journalist I write about that a lot.
Eventually we’re gonna have our own avatars in machines.
That opens up so many different avenues
of thought, and artificial intelligence in 10 or 15 years
could be 10,000 times smarter than us,
so our uploaded mind is going to tap into that
artificial intelligence and be 10,000 times smarter than us.
- That sounds kind of intimidating,
to talk to yourself, but infinitely smarter?
- It would be very scary.
I mean, cause you want to have some randomness,
you want to make some mistakes,
but this smarter self may not make any mistakes.
It might be like, “Zoltan, that doesn’t sound very good
“to me, do this,” and I’ll be like, “Hey!
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
- If we get to the point where physically we don’t
have to think about death quite as much,
it becomes a choice, what do you think that
does for us?
- Well not dying as a species is gonna dramatically
effect everything.
I mean just think of it, for example,
if you were gonna live 1,000 years
you would do other things, career things,
or you would go traveling, or you would just become
a guitarist and sing at a bar in the Bahamas or something.
I mean, there are a million things we would do.
- I feel like I’d stick around for a while.
- Oh, totally, totally.
- Learn every instrument.
- Of course, you’d be an expert!
I’d wanna be an astronaut, I’d wanna be
a professional surfer. - So let’s talk about
the Transhumanist party.
- We’re a small political party founded about a year ago.
Broadly the community is interested in
using politics as a means to further
the Transhumanist agenda.
Which is just to say, let’s promote science and technology
more instead of, for example, spending trillions of dollars
on far-off wars; why not have the American government
spend all that money on a war on cancer?
I mean, this is really what my presidential campaign is
about is just trying to make waves, trying to enter
the national conversation and say,
“Hey, don’t you think we can do better?
“Don’t you think we can spend money
on our health, on our longevity?”
Slowly we can overcome any kind of disaster,
any kind of problem that we have as a species,
by putting in these bionics, or robotics,
or 3D printed organs that will help us
become a much stronger species.
This is really important, for example,
imagine if the dinosaurs had the bionic lung?
They might have survived.
- That would have been bad for us, though.
- Yes, very bad for us.
- We’d have a rough go of it.
- Who’s that at the door? (growling)
- So the future’s looking bright is the point here?
- 100%.
We just need to put resources instead of putting money into
bombs and far-off wars, let’s put the resources
into technology and science
and let ourselves live 20, 30,
100 years longer.
- Spectacular.
Zoltan thank you so much for joining us today,
and may you live forever.
- May you live forever, too.
- I can’t wait.
(upbeat music)
- Man...
Do you really think we can live forever?
- Not right now, but if you think about it
in 1900 the average life expectancy was only about 47.
With today’s advancements in medical sciences
it’s not uncommon for people to live
to 60, 70, or even older.
So someday soon it might not be uncommon
for people to be living up into the triple digits!
- Yeah,
but you’re suppose to die.
- Hold on, but I don’t want to die.
I’m gonna vote for Zoltan.
- Me too.
- We are gonna die in there though, so...
I guess that doesn’t matter.
- Yeah.
For sure.
(rumbling)
- Whoa, what’s happening?
- Hey look, it’s Colin!
- Hey, it’s Colin!
- Hey.
- Oh hey guys.
What’re you doing in there?
- No time to explain, just pour some milk
on the keyboard.
- Okay.
(zapping)
- Whoa.
- Whoa!
- Holy cow.
- How’d you know that was gonna work?
- I don’t know.
- Well, neat.
- Yeah.
Oh, bye. - Bye!
- [Brandon] Milk, huh?
- Yeah.
Just basic science stuff.
What were you looking for on the computer?
- Porn.
- Okay.
(laughing)
Perfect!