Journalist Kara Swisher hosts a new CNN Original Series, “Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever,” which premiered this spring. The series is “grounded in science and facts about the best and most affordable ways to stay healthy, happy and smart,” she told CNN. Photo courtesy of CNN

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Journalist Kara Swisher begins 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 just 34. Swisher was only 5, and his sudden death had a deep effect on her career and view of life.

“My father’s death has created an awareness of death that is very profound,” she said 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 premiered April 11.

“I come to it pretty neutral and willing to listen to some stuff and willing to blow up other stuff,” said 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 said.)

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 exposé 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 healthcare system kicks in only after an often-bankrupting illness begins.

“We live in a sick care society, not a healthcare society,” she told 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.

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 healthcare 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.

Swisher, who daily takes fish oil and the vitamins K and D as 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,” Jobs told graduates. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

—AP