It feels like a lot of the folks who occupy the same biotechnologist genre as Venter (George Church, Eric Lander, etc.) can come off this way. I agree fully about the grifty nature of aging and longevity research (mostly because of the target audience), but I also think that you need an element of this willingness to entertain ideas that are borderline crazy to get to their status in the first place. Proposing to sequence (or, perhaps more timely—edit) the human genome would have seemed like a wild idea in the 80s, and yet they were thinking about it.

The end of this short interview with Stuart Schreiber has a similar vibe:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-026-00803-0

Note how interested he is in consciousness and AGI. This is something that he's been talking about for a long time, just formulated differently. You need to be able to temper true scientific rigor with a little bit of wackiness to even think about tackling these big questions.