The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Nectome Will Preserve Your Body, Brain & Memories. Wake You in the Future.- for $10,000

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Aurelia Song is the winner of the Brain Preservation Prize and has spent the last several years working to adapt the technology for human use. Her company, Nectome, works to preserve and store brains with the future goal of bringing people back to life.

The Comedy Cellar live from the table is brought to you by Sheath Underwear. If you want to support the show and get 20% off your order, head over to sheathunderwear.com slash seller. Code SELLER for 20% off your first order. That's sheathunderwear.com slash seller. Code SELLER. slash seller code seller. This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller on SiriusXM 99, raw comedy.

By the way, Sirius, they're not... I sent in that album I made with Lenny here at the Village – or rather at the Fat Black Pussycat, and they said they did not accept any of the tracks for payment, for playing. So I'm mad at Sirius. Anyway, this is Dan Natterman. Keep it up. Maybe you can just cancel this show too. Go ahead. Well, is this show on Sirius? Yes.

Yes, that's why you were saying it, yes. No, I thought that the other comedy shows are on Sirius. Anyway, we have with us, you know, the comedy episodes. I thought those go to Sirius and this just go to. Oh, well, let's see how this one turns out. Go ahead. Go ahead. Anyway, this is Dan Natterman.

They used to play me on Sirius. They no longer do. I'm with Noam Dorman, owner of the comedy cellar with perry alashan brandon coming uh joining us via the miracle of teleconferencing aurelia song who's the winner of the brain preservation prize and has spent the last several years working to adapt the technology for human use she thinks that uh we'll be very soon we'll be able to download memories uh to computer i believe is is what you will be able to preserve them. Yes.

Now, it's Aurelia, right? Not Aurelia. Aurelia. Aurelia, because it's one E, not two. But anyway, so let me just say that. Am I allowed to say about where we met? Yeah, why not? Is that what you think?

We met at a conference called Dialogue in Arizona where various people of various walks of life, a lot of finance people, but it's like – it seems like 50 percent finance people and 50 percent other interesting people. And Aurelio was one of the very first people I met when we were being segregated on the first evening by some sort of was like Greek myth characters or something. I forget how we were. And and I took a liking to her right away. And she has a fascinating company, a startup, I guess you'd call it, which is essentially going to what she's going to tell us. But, you know, like you'll never die when you when you're getting close to the end, they're going to freeze you or whatever it is. And then you'll wake up and you'll be all young and vital and your your your sex organs will work again and everything will be fine. But and then Dan is always focused on dying.

And so I met somebody in Arizona who actually has a company like that. Let's get her on the show. So welcome, Aurelia. It's nice to see you again. Great to see you again. So you want to give us an overview? Actually, Dan, this is your you're so interested. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, so so tell us about do you freeze? You freeze the individual right prior to death? Because once you're dead, I'm pretty sure, you know, that would be a lot harder to reverse that. And by the way, I'm going to do this. Okay, well, you might as well. So I won

the Brain Preservation Prize in 2016, and I've spent the intervening time figuring out how to get this to work for people. And it's a process that has to be done immediately after death, and it's something where the that has to be done immediately after death. And it's something where the death has to be controlled.

I've run a human brain bank and I've tested a lot of variants of this, both on animals and in human cases that were human donation cases. And it looks very strongly like it, first of all, can be done and can be done successfully and successfully preserve memories. But it's got to be under very tight constraints. So that's kind of the result of the last several years of research that I've done, such that now I have something I think will actually work. Let's take it step by step, because I remember. First of all, you're in the state of Oregon, correct? That's correct.

And tell us the reason why. It has to be Oregon. Tell them why. So you have to do this as part of an end-of-life procedure. So this is for people who are terminally ill, which means that a doctor thinks that you are likely to die within six months. So if you're terminally ill and you want to be preserved, then you go through the same process that everybody else who does death with dignity or medical aid in dying does. You get drugs that will end your life in a controlled manner. And then you do that as normal. And then immediately after that, we preserve you. Well, hold on. First of all, you mentioned you're from Oregon.

Is Argonne used in this process? Oregon. No, but I in this process? Oregon. No, but I'm... The state of Oregon. I'm just making a play on words. I was just wondering if Argon has any... Isn't Argon like something you might use to freeze somebody? You know, it's actually really interesting.

Some people studied xenon and whether it could adjust ice crystals, and it apparently does. It was kind of really interesting, I think, in the 80s and 90s, and I don't think anything came out of it, but there was actually some excitement using noble gases to interfere with ice crystal formation. So I was right. Noble gases, there is a possibility.

So it's probably because you've answered so many times. So the reason I understand it had to be in Oregon, because most states will not permit the doctor to put you to sleep. Oregon is one of the only states or maybe the only state where they can actually oversee the process. The doctor will kill you. And exactly as you're dying simultaneously, Netcomb is the name of the company? Nectome. N-E-C-T-O-M-E. Nectome. as you're dying simultaneously, um, net comb is the name of the company. Uh, Nectome.

Net, net, N-E-C-T-O-M-E. Nectome. As I said, net, N-E-T-C-E. Yes.

Yes. Um, net comb. Um, um, they will be there and, and transition you to, uh,

your frozen state. Now let's really get into the detail here. I come in, I'm, you know, you know, the movie Total Recall, you go in the chair, like, what does it really look like? I, I show up, what's the office look like? What's the procedure? What's the, the, the paraphernalia, the machinery? So I've talked to a lot of people and I've asked them, how do they want to die? Nobody wants to die, but if you do have to die, how do you want to die? And I have gotten the same answer basically from every single person I've ever talked to about it,

which is that they don't want a bunch of machines around them. They want to have their family around them. They want it to be in a dignified way. If you've got to die, dying in your living room with your family around you is about the best you can get. And so it's very similar to that. You have your family around you, ideally. You have your prescription medication that your doctor has prescribed you, and then you take that medication. So it's, you know, in contrast to like euthanasia, where there's an injection by a doctor that ends your life, this is what they call medical aid in dying.

So you consume medication, and then that ends your life. And you're agnostic about what medication the doctor uses? That doesn't matter to your process? That's correct. And then how is the freezing done? Okay, I'm in my living room now. How long does it take once you take the pill for you to then die? And then how quickly do they freeze you? So given that you probably would have traveled to Oregon to do this, it wouldn't be your living room.

It would be a room that's prepared but something that's appropriate to have your family around. Ramadi. a room that's prepared, but, but something that's appropriate for, uh, to have your family around. Um, so when you take this medication, uh, generally you go to sleep within a minute or two. Um, and then you're dead, uh, after a few minutes after that. And so once you're unconscious, we move you to an adjoining room and then in that place you're preserved. But how, how are you preserved? So the way this works is it is a process that is somewhat similar to embalming, where you gain access to the aortic arch by doing a type of surgery. And then you're able to pump chemicals through the blood vessels. So those chemicals go to every single cell in the body, most importantly, all the cells in the brain.

And those preservation chemicals then essentially glue the proteins inside those cells together into a gel. And once they're converted into that form, the machinery of life basically stops moving and is preserved. And then there's a secondary process after that initial gelation step where we displace a lot of the water with cryoprotectants. And again, you're delivering these cryoprotectants through the vascular system. So what it looks like is very similar to like a heart bypass surgery, where there's tubes that are going in they're pumping chemicals through and it's preserving all these cells and then uh finally this uh this entire body is stored in cold storage and it can be stored that way for a hundred years and not degrade so i i just i know you got something i'm just picturing like because obviously time is of the essence that like everybody's like it's almost like it's all phony.

Like everybody's like, oh, go to see Mr. Dormant so nice. Okay, he's dead. Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And the stopwatch is going to get him out of here. How many seconds do you have to get these chemicals into the person's body so that the natural decay of the brain, which happens pretty quickly, right? Happens immediately. So this is the thing that's taken me years to figure out what the limits really are.

And the name of the game, more or less, is speed, as you say. Once a person dies, you have about 12 minutes to start perfusing chemicals. But that's once they die. So they're moved to the room, their life ends there, and then that timer starts. We can fairly reliably do

this in about four minutes in our animal models. So you've frozen animals and then brought them back? So what I do, there's an important detail here, what I do is preservation. So the only thing that's possible to do today is preservation. And you can't bring anything back because it's way too complicated to do. And this is pretty similar to to basically everything that that's happened before. It's almost always easier to archive something than it is to do anything with it. So for example, if you're a librarian, right, and you have a book that's written in a script that you can't read, it might be the work

of multiple generations to eventually decipher that book and have it become part of human knowledge. But if you just want to preserve the book, that's a matter of understanding ink, and it's an understanding of paper chemistry. it is in some cases an understanding of how to transcribe that into a new book so that the information isn't lost so you can be a caretaker of the information and it's often a lot easier than actually reading information or changing it or doing anything with it does that have more but you go well what uh you know the technology that would need to exist to bring someone back from the dead in this way, assuming it's possible, how long do you reckon it's going to take for us to crack that puzzle?

So I've often modeled that as being the work of one or two generations of neuroscientists to do. Nowadays, it's really complex to actually predict that out. If you'd asked me this five or six years ago, I would have said, you know, somewhere between 50 and 80 years. And the one thing that could change that is AI. And because there's been a lot of rapid progress in AI, it is in general hard to predict almost any technology or any technological advancement on any tangible timeframe anymore. Because if you imagine that developing a certain technology of any kind takes so many man years of development, right? And then you have AI that's able to do that in accelerated time, or over, say, a week, you suddenly have 100 years of engineering put to a project,

then you can get some wacky things happening. So I would no longer be surprised if the technology to get people back came as early as 30 years at this point. But it's wide margins. People are working assiduously on this. Who's working on this? So I would say that the whole neuroscience community um in their quest to understand the brain is constantly developing new technologies to model neurons and to scan neurons in uh very high throughput uh so uh i think that we'll

probably have the whole mouse connectome within 10 years or less at this point. And that's kind of the first step towards being able to scan preserved people and get them back. But there's a catch. It's not just about being brought back. You want to be brought back and then have all the advancements such that you can then live another thousand years or whatever it is. I don't want us to be brought back as an old man and then die a week later. Thousand years? I want to live forever. Oh, God.

Forever and ever. Amen. Amen. So when do you think – I mean, you could have no idea, but that is the plan, right? You want to get brought back at a time when they can roll back your age, when there's all sorts of, uh, uh, Well, when they can at least cure what killed you. All kinds of perks. Yeah. But I don't want to, even if I, if I'm 80 and I have terminal cancer, what,

they're going to cure the cancer. Then I died 85 of, uh, Hilarious. Imagine you come back and then you die a week later. Yeah. So I assume we're going to be preserved again. Right. And if you were, Right, right, right. For the for two, is there is there is there like a punch card where like after nine preservations, you get a free one? So so OK, to take it to take a little bit of a step back here. I don't think it would make much sense to bring someone back if you didn't also have the capabilities to allow them to flourish, right?

Yeah. And so in the case of somebody who is 85, that would include being able to live without, you know, being very likely to die within two years. So you simply wouldn't bring someone back if for some reason you had the ability to do that, but didn't have the ability to heal them in further ways. That being said, I do think that if you can get someone back from a preserved state, that technology is probably much harder to develop than technology to allow them to live as long as they potentially want to. And so I think that it's not actually going to practically be an issue.

I'll tell you, but we still won't have an umbrella that doesn't get turned inside out in the wind. Dan, move over a little bit to your right. So, OK, not that far. Put Dan back on the screen so he can see himself. I'll put Dan in the middle. No, that's too far. Sorry. Yeah.

So here, Aurelia, now listen. You've seen the movie Pet Sematary, right? I haven't actually. How does it go? Well, you probably shouldn't because I would imagine this movie is scary for regular people. But this movie would scare the shit out of you because in that movie, they bring them back to life and they think they're OK. And then little by little, we realize they're not OK. They're slightly different.

They have problems. Will this involve testing on animals first, bringing them back? You know, monkeys. Do you have a bunch of monkeys already frozen, ready to test them first? So there's this trend in Hollywood that irritates the hell out of me um whenever they try to predict uh depict preservation right um the story is always oh there's this one maverick person and they invent some sort of uploading technology or they invent some preservation technology and they get it to be used on them successfully and it works and then nobody else ever does it and there's no further development of the technology for like hundreds of years and then nevertheless even though there's there's not

thousands of people preserved or millions of people preserved so that it would be all that useful to develop technology to bring someone back nevertheless that society brings them back and then you know it's a great story because now they're a refugee they've been displaced in their original time and they've got to to you to maybe teach the future people some useful lesson while learning some stuff themselves. But it's kind of a silly way that this would ever actually happen. In the case where you're actually bringing people back, then you would expect there to be a trend of increasing numbers of preservations that happen every year because it becomes increasingly easy to imagine that you can come back from it. There's going to be increasing demonstrations of partial revival in animals and in neuroscience that make it easier and easier to imagine. So there's a big difference between right now, where it's not exactly clear what the form of technology to get people

back would look like, even though it's clear that we can do the preservations, and say 30 years from now where you actually have brought someone back and they're talking with people, but perhaps the process that brought them back was very expensive. It cost a billion dollars, it took 10 years, like the first human genome to be scanned. And yet it's very clear that that process is going to become cheap and potentially eventually free. I think in that scenario, you'd have a very large percentage of people that want to be preserved. Those people then therefore form a political class, an interest group, just like people

suffering from any type of disease that are going to be able to demand fair treatment. So when somebody is preserved today, the next thing they're going to see is whether it worked or not. There's no experience of the intervening time. So I think it matters a lot to think about what that's going to be like. And it's tricky for someone to even consent to being revived today because they don't know exactly what that's going to look like. And nevertheless, it's tricky for someone to even consent to being revived today because they don't know exactly what that's going to look like. And nevertheless, it's something that's going to happen to them immediately. So how do you deal with that? The way I deal with that is this idea of a sort of proxy consent.

And it's the same thing that I do in my life all the time when I fly planes or, you know, if you're considering other hypothetical situations. So for example, let's say you have the opportunity to go to Mars. Do you want to get a ticket to go to Mars? Well, it's kind of cool. You might want to do that. But if somebody offered me a ticket to go to Mars, I would be scared to accept it because I don't know if it's safe. And I'm also not a rocket scientist, so I don't really have the tools to

evaluate whether it's going to be safe or not. But what I can do is I can say, well, how'd the last 10,000 people that went to NARS do? Did they make it there and were they happy? And if that is the case, then I can say, okay, I'll get that ticket too. So same thing for preservation. The people who are being preserved now are not going to be the first people to be revived. People who are going to be revived are the people who can properly give informed consent to whatever the technology of the future is, and then we'll see how it works for them. And in the case where it has worked well for people, then you take the people who trusted in this sort of proxy consent for the future and get them back.

It's a more boring story, but I think it's more accurate. You said it's a Hollywood trend. I haven't seen it. I was about to pitch it to Netflix. It seemed like an interesting... Well, like Futurama, right? They have functional cryopreservation. And there's very, very few people that ever make use of it. I think that if you

had a technology like that that actually functioned, it would be used a lot more. There's another example in Star Trek where they discover a bunch of cryonics patients from the 70s. But there's only like five of them. And it works. They actually bring them back to life. And it's very strange because they clearly have a method that would allow people to be preserved and come back in the future. And everyone, including the chronics patients and the space people in the future, are like, eh, we don't really care about it. It's like, no, this is a revolutionary technology. This changes a lot how like society makes at this point they start in cubes at one time don't don't destroy this is this is not to be confused with

suspended animation which is very commonly seen in movies but that's different that's taking a living person and basically putting them on pause and then and then waking them up at some future date. But the person's never dead. The person's alive, and their whole biological processes are put on pause. Or very much slowed down. Unless, you know, we saw that in Planet of the Apes. So, okay. And it costs, this is the amazing part. Well, two things, two things.

First of all, when we were in Arizona, you know, we all take this oath that we can't say what anybody said to us or who said it. And there's so much I want to say about the stuff I heard there, but I'll, you know. Why? What is it? Like AA for like crazy ideas? That's not crazy. It's just like, it's a place where people can go and they can say and discuss whatever they want without, you know, openly, without having to worry about somebody turning them in.

You know, you can think out loud. You can say outrageous things or, you know, it's a nice thing. Turning them in. Whatever. nice thing so but one turning them in whatever so one guy there said like let's say you say women should uh wives should make breakfast in the morning for the husband so so one guy there very important guy very smart said he's against this because he felt that if he got woken up a thousand years from now, that we would be, we, the thousand year woken up community would be discriminated against that.

We would be used as slaves and, and like, just like, like treated and as a second class citizens, it's grunts. And, you know, it's funny when somebody is that successful

like if perry l said they want to end on a high note like you're a fucking idiot this guy has such a resume i'm like oh my god like i gotta take it seriously but do you think like i feel like the arc as they say, of morality always bends to the better. I don't believe that a thousand years from now, we're going to be in some dystopian hell waking people up after. You might be. But you might find yourself dumber than everybody, perhaps in a world where we've we've mastered genetic manipulation. I think as long as they don't know I'm Jewish a thousand years from now, I'll be fine. Do you have any feeling about that?

And then I have the other question. Go ahead, Aurelia. Go ahead. You know, it sounds corny as hell, but I really think the future loves us. I think the because, like, if you're looking at all these generations spread out into the future, right, and you're wondering, like, you know, do we want to be the types of generations that reach our hands back and help each other? Or do we want to be the ones that foreclose the opportunity of these future generations to welcome us back, the only thing that's really stable is one and one that's treating the future with respect is to give that future the option. So like preserving yourself is not about forcing yourself on the future and then they resent you and discriminate against you,

right? Because the future is what has the power here and the future is what has the power here. And the future is what has the ability to welcome you back or not. So to preserve yourself is simply to safeguard the option of the future to welcome you back with love. And to not be preserved is to deny them that option. So that's really how this game works. If you're coming back, it's because they want you. This is what's interesting. And then I'll leave it to you, Dan and Periel.

So the price for this is $10,000. Now, I'd suggested to Aurelia it'd be $9,999.99. I thought it was for a mark, but she says no. $10,000 is... But all joking aside, $10,000 seems very inexpensive for such a profound thing. And by the way, when you wake up, you're no longer married. Yeah, I paid no longer married. Yeah, I paid nearly as much.

I do want to correct this because there were people who put down $10,000 as a kind of deposit towards this before we determined the price. So that was a thing that we did in the past that was supposed to be a gentrist. But the actual price that I'd be charging this would be $60,000. You told me! I don't care. I'll be dead. What do I care? I can't take the money with me anyway. You could charge me $100,000. I don't care. But I thought it was $10,000. I think you raised

the price. But yeah, I think that the and this would be payable, I assume not by credit card. Yeah, but credit, not by check. Well, I don't know. Like. Now, you can't do an installment by promissory note. So is it 60 for the whole thing, like also to get woken back up or it's just 60? You're going to owe whatever cost if we woke up, you're going to owe them when you wake up. Right. I think that would be like kind of monstrous to do. And again, you know, I think the process of getting woken up would be part of a health care system that doesn't exist in a vacuum. But I mean, it seems like a nightmare.

You wake up and the first thing you get is this big bill. That does not seem like a nightmare. If I wake up a thousand years from now in a beautiful life in utopia, I don't care about the bill. I'll work it off. Nobody said anything about utopia. Well, then you can't kill yourself. Sheath underwear is where it's at.

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Get Sheath Underwear. Support the show. Support your balls. I just you got I don't know. You know, I'm making all these jokes. I don't understand the pessimism about something so fantastic. It's the most basic human urge is to want to be alive. Here you are promising that you can wake up, see the future, be alive, be healthy, and you're worried about the fucking money. You know, it's true what they say about you people. I would like to remind you that you waltzed in here this evening and said,

I am so padded with my- Because I think my life's almost over. You think I'd feel this way if I knew that I was just getting started? Do you know the things that I would do, the different decisions I would make? Like what? Give me one thing. Everything.

I would open new businesses. You are opening a new business. I would go back to school. What would you go back to school for? It doesn't matter. The point is that when your time horizon zooms out, it's a totally different world. Why can't you go back to school? I can go back.

Let's say I want to study physics. Do you? Yeah, maybe I would. Well, why don't you study physics then? Because I only have a little bit of time left. Well, that's absurd. You have plenty of time left. You have no idea how much time you have left.

Is there an IQ test? Seems like we're straying a bit off topic. Anyway, so I think that the more you're charged, the more people will do it. It's just like a show at the comedy cellar. If the cover charge is too low, people think it's not reliable. You're talking about something people want. I think you should charge half a million dollars. It should really be expensive. And, you know, you can make side deals, but it should

be, it should be very, very expensive. You have rich people doing this, but I want to do this. And can I already sign up? I'm not kidding. So, so you have to be terminally ill. Um, yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, wait, this is not fair guess you know this is part of the problem okay wait this is not fair no this is important i hadn't thought of this i can't do this unless i get terminally ill i can't just do it i can't when i get old like like most people don't die of a terminal illness most people die of a heart attack or suddenly they expire. I want to be able to know that I can do this. I have to fake cancer or something?

So a huge fraction – so the primary way people die is heart disease. And the second primary way is cancer. And almost every type of cancer would qualify as terminally ill. And a decent fraction of heart disease is not in a vacuum. There's often enough wrong with someone that if they are trying to plan the end of their life, that that can make sense. But it is true currently that the laws of the country are such that it has to be a terminal illness. It's got to be a doctor who will take the money out of the bank. Well, there could be another country who could do it has to be a terminal illness. I've got to be a doctor. We'll take the money out of.

Well, there could be another country you could do it. And I know all the Oregon. No, you can. There's there's some other countries. The laws are subtle and complex. And, you know, I think they're from a time when there was less respect for individual autonomy and they haven't changed as much. You know, there's, there's different variants, like, like you can't end your life at all for any reason is, is still, I would say the

majority on the planet, uh, for, for where it is. And I would say that that is fundamentally in contradiction to like the basic principles of, of personal autonomy. Um, and that's a tension that we're going to have to resolve uh and and we are resolving it but we're doing it very slowly i think my i'm i'm interested in um i'm upset now go ahead in um how you plan to keep these people on ice indefinitely say it does take a thousand years i'm skeptical that it will ever happen but okay say it takes a thousand years who's in charge of this this of keeping these bodies going for a thousand years you thought he was going to get a sitcom but he's skeptical that your your your uh your company might not be around in a thousand

years you might you might change business I think a thousand years is almost impossible to do because there's so much changes in society that it is extremely hard to create any type of legal or financial instrument that can actually survive. While we do have things that have lasted thousands of years, like libraries and such, I think it's mostly an accident. I think it's selection bias. Like you point to something and say, well, this thing survived 2,000 years, so can't you do it that way? I think that that's not true because what you're not seeing is the other things that were set up in a similar way that didn't. So 1,000 years, realistically, I don't think it will work. If you want to do 100 years, I would say that is relatively straightforward because there's lots of cemeteries that have been around for more than 100 years, if they're set up correctly. A startup is not the correct organization to last 100 years with any degree of certainty.

And so we specifically designed it so that if Nectome goes bankrupt or doesn't exist for some reason, that the people who have already been preserved are going to be okay. So you feel that about 100 years is about as long as is possible for this to work, or would you go a little bit further than 100 years? It's very hard to predict anything anymore because, again, I can't see anywhere into the future more than about like like seven to ten years anymore um due to ai like kind of changing the game here a lot but um you know if it was at all reminiscent of the past yeah you can definitely set up things and go 100 i think 150 is is reasonable and then you start to have increasingly difficult ability to keep things around.

What are the odds that in 150 years you'll be able to bring people back from the dead? Well, I'm team Nyctalm. I think you can do it. Listen, there's got to be a guy, a doctor. I'm sure we could find you. Who could take some money on the side to tell you you had cancer. I just have to believe there's a way around this. Wait, so you take the bodies Well, but do you think realistically that within 100, 150

years is the time frame she's talking about that there's any chance that this could work? Yes, I do. Yes, obviously he does. I do. I do. I do believe it. it i mean i think that technology um accelerates in certain areas it accelerates and then as she says ai is uh although ai ai the more familiar i get with it it's not quite what we think it is yet it's really like a huge powerful autofill in some way but it definitely and it makes a lot of mistakes but obviously it's going to get way way better if you just imagine like the early videos of or movies of people trying to fly you know it was very quickly before we had f-16. So I'm sure technology will move along fast.

And once they crack the code, as it were, of aging and stuff like that. Dude, they can't get rid of my psoriasis. And, you know, I mean, not all technology moves like computers. Listen, first of all, you have nothing to lose here. No, you don't. And it's not a lot of money. And it's 50% down and 50% when you wake up. How does it work?

It's all of it down when you get preserved. But yeah. Is $60,000 enough to keep somebody on ice for potentially 100 years? It is. It is even without taking into account potential decreases in the cost of energy over time, which I think are realistic to project, but I don't include that. Now, you also have to preserve the body along with it. I assume. Yeah, this is a whole body preservation technique. So the whole body is preserved. It's just the brain is one of the trickiest things to preserve. And generally,

if you can preserve the brain really well, that means you can preserve the rest of the body really well too. And I, and I mentioned for the, one of the first things I asked her when I met her was, well, okay, when you wake me up,

let's say my wife and I do this together. Will we still be married? And she reminds me of Jesus, you know, where the parents, that's not for her to decide. I don't marry seven people in a row, you know. That's for the legal people to do.

No, death do us part. We are legally dead. Okay, that's an interesting point. I mean, of course we could get divorced, but what if she wants to take half – whatever. Now, the problem here is if you come back, were you ever really dead? A little bit of detail is what I'm saying. Go ahead. If you could come back, were you ever really dead? A little bit of detail is what I'm saying. Go ahead. If you can come back, were you ever really dead?

Yes. Well, you're saying, you said at the beginning of this episode that shortly after death is when you begin the process. Unless we want to redefine what dead is, of course. I'm an originalist. Well, I think we're going to have to redefine what dead is

because right now it's cardiac death. A doctor listens to your heart and it stopped. And if that condition kept on going, you know, you're going to decay, right? And you're not going to be conscious ever again. But like the reason that cardiac death is a legitimate type of death is because it's highly predictive of you ever being conscious again. And this is starting to break that. So I do think that, like, if you can get people back from this, I think it'll eventually be seen not as dying, but as a chemically induced coma. Wow. And because it doesn't make that much sense. I got a question. How old are you when you wake up? So if you die at 85, do you wake up at 85? or you go back and you're vital? Because you started talking about the dumbest question I've ever heard. That's the dumbest question you've ever heard. They're preserving you at the moment of death.

So that's if they preserve that, then you'll be that when you and hopefully when you wake up, they'll have therapies to roll you back. How is that the dumbest? First of all, because we already covered it. No. Second of all, I said I don't want to wake up at 85 and then be 85 and then just die at 85. But Aurelia didn't... I want to hear what she says. Okay, go ahead, Aurelia.

So I think if you come back, again, you've got to enable flourishing, but part of that is not being in a really unfamiliar body. So right now, I would be in favor of bringing someone back almost exactly as they were when they were preserved.

And then like having them have the ability to change their body and change their, you know, other parts about themselves at a rate that's comfortable to them. Right. And I could be convinced otherwise, you know, I think we'll have a developed clinical theory of this over the next decades, which I don't personally have to worry about that much. I just do the preservations. So if somebody shows that, like, hey, actually, you can jump straight to this form of like a younger version of yourself and it doesn't cause problems. Right. Then. Great.

OK. I suspect that if you make too many changes all at once, it might cause some type of dysphoria, though, because it's too much of a change. But I don't know. This is something that should be researched and will be researched. Are there any other companies in this business, or are you the only game in town? So preservations, depending on how broad you want to think about it, it's a very ancient type of thing, right? I mean, the purpose of what the original Egyptians were doing was to preserve you, so to kind of anchor your soul into the world. They thought that the soul had five different parts, and one of them was your physical body. And so by protecting your soul, they weren't expecting you to wake up, but by protecting your body, it kind of secured your afterlife.

You know, I would say that given that they didn't know enough about biology to make their preservation work, that that probably shouldn't count. But the idea behind it, I think, is fairly similar. Like the impulse to do this has been around. If you go to Benjamin Franklin, he literally wrote saying, I wish somebody could figure out how to like make some sort of cask of like alcohol or something that you could put someone in and just it would kind of suspend them and then they could wake up again. He was thinking, well, I would love to wake up and see how America is doing, you know, 200 years from now. And so, you know, practically, I'd say it's been with us for centuries of this idea a republic if you can keep it but what but but but it currently in doing precisely what you're doing now with the promise of if not eternal life then you know uh being being brought back from the

dead who's doing this besides your company so um i would say like starting in the 60s, there was a guy named Robert Edinger who published a thing called The Prospect of Immortality. And that kind of started the more modern movement here to try and be rigorous about it. And there's been several companies, Alcor, Chronix Institute, et cetera, that have engaged in preserving people more based on cryobiology and using variations between freezing them and trying to perfuse some cryoprotectants in. The key difference here would be the brain preservation prize. So like from my point of view, we know what it takes to preserve memories, to preserve the essence of a person. And it's a standard we can measure and a standard that we can meet. And so, you know, what I did was I looked at the current protocols that exist and saw that they don't meet that standard. That doesn't mean that they don't work, but it does mean that you can't say that neuroscience says it does work.

And I want to meet that higher standard. So I think I was going to say, anyway, we have pretty demanding listeners here. So I do have to ask you what I know everybody's going to be asking me, which is you don't have anybody frozen yet. You don't have any animals frozen yet. Is there any – is this anything but an idea as of now? Is the technology established? Like what is this – how has this uh uh an idea at this point so so

we've done a lot of testing on donated human brains so these are people that when they die they want to donate their brain to science um but they're not clients it's not that they're being preserved for the long term um we've done very extensive testing on animals so we can preserve an animal um using the protocols we defined. And then we can look at its brain after it's preserved and show that the brain is preserved well enough that the memories are still there according to the current neuroscience theory of memory. Oh, I remember. So one of the people also at our conference was bothered by your company because they've they had a religious uh objection to it that somehow this was um you know in conflict with the notion of a soul and blah blah blah you know have you had

people just uh bring that up to you and like you can't do this and believe in the soul i think you can actually um i guess you can believe anything you know i like it to me you know as a scientist that's not what i want to hear from you because yeah i'm trusting my future to you so i want to hear you don't believe in the soul but go ahead okay so like people sometimes talk about this with regards to like teleporters right um you know if you walk into a teleporter that like disintegrates you and it beams the information somewhere over, and then it rebuilds you in that other new location, then what happens to your soul, right? And I do think it'd be, you know, taking as given that souls exist,

I think it'd be awfully silly if you could walk through a teleporter and have that like disconnect you from your soul in some way like trick god into not recognizing you as the same person somehow uh that seems absurd to me uh that that doesn't make much sense like you go through a teleporter and you pop out a new place are you like are you a new person like you, you know, um, that, that seems weird. Right. Uh, I don't see how that would really make that much sense from, from most current, like religious understandings of how the soul is supposed to work. Uh, the only thing that makes sense to me is that it would obviously be the same person and, and, and attach even through that type of disruption because the causality is still there.

Meaning what the person before they walk through the transporter, you know, as an author of their story, making decisions about the future, right? Those decisions are still going to be carried forward after they go through a transporter. And so I think that similar considerations apply here. There's no soul. What is a soul? Of course there's a soul. So is a soul? Of course there's a soul. So is a soul me as a horny 17-year-old? Is it me as a low-T 80-year-old? Is it me after the stroke, before the stroke, with the brain damage?

What does it mean? There's no soul. You're so, I mean, really. Think about it. How could there possibly be a soul? How could there not be? Well, what happens to your soul, say, when you're under anesthesia? It's still there. But why am I not conscious of anything?

Well, I mean, having a soul doesn't mean that you have to be conscious. The soul plays along, Dan. Don't be snide. I don't think there's a soul. Don't be snide. I don't think there's a soul. I do believe in souls. You're forcing me to think there's a soul. I do actually believe in them.

It's just... Well, maybe Netcom's not the right company for you. Nectome. Maybe there's another preservation company that you could go with. But maybe I have an idiosyncratic version of it. I think that we don't know... If you're going to learn something about how a soul company that you could you could go with but if i have an idiosyncratic version of it like i think that we don't know like like if you're going to learn something about how a soul works that's the

job of science to discover it's not the job of you to pretend like you know how it works right like to the extent like we need a word for how do people move around how do they how are they conscious like how do they dream right like how do these things work and if you want to say that there's obviously some sort of animating principle behind how people are able to function and call that a soul that obviously exists there's obviously something that when you're unconscious is different than when you are conscious or when you're dead is different than when you're alive animals have souls as well then it's perfectly reasonable to give that a name but having given it a name doesn't mean you know how its properties work right and it seems that one thing that's very clear is as you're damaged

i think is as me and noam understand the term is something that after you die lives on and allows you to experience things beyond death uh that's sort of how I interpret the word soul. I want to look up a word. Go ahead. So in that regard, I would say that is something that you should be able to do science about it. And it sure does seem that... So I think the basic impulse to have this concept of a soul makes a lot of sense. Right.

But I think if you want to learn what the properties of it are, that you'd be more effective figuring those properties out by empirically observing what happens with people rather than like asserting that you think that it's eternal and unmovable. Right. Um, because in the case, especially of neurodegenerative diseases, right, you have people lose parts of themselves over time. So, you know, in what ways this interfacing with the soul, you know, it seems to me that maybe souls aren't indestructible, right?

They seem to be very intimately tied with the brain. And as the brain is destroyed, then those parts of it are lost. But you're defining soul in such a way that it doesn't seem to be the more common way that people think about a soul. Well, I have a very different way of thinking about it, I guess.

But it's founded on what I can observe. It's founded on what I can see, right? We're going to wrap it up, Aurelio. I just want to tell you, I guess. But it's founded on what I can observe. It's founded on what I can see. We're going to wrap it up, Aurelio. I just want to tell you, I'm down. I mean, I just need to know that it's real. Well, you have to be suffering from a terminal illness. I will figure that out.

I will get somebody to sign on the dotted line. Well, let me ask you this question. Suppose I said to you that you could do this. You could do this tomorrow. They'll preserve you and you can roll the dice. Or if you don't do it,

you'll live out the rest of your life, but you can never do it. Say it again. I'll say it again. You can do this. Now? It's got to be done now. How about it's got to be to be done at 75 at 75 we'll do this procedure for you at 75 but if you don't take it at 75 you'll never get it but you might live till 100 who the hell knows i will decide at 75 well you can't do that you got to decide now i know this offer won't last no i can't i can't

do it now because i i don't actually know if it's real. But if at 75, I'm convinced that this is... What about at 85? I'll do it at 110. But at 75, what level of assurance would you need

that this might work? Obviously, you won't know at 75 that this works. I mean, unless won't know at 75 that this works. I mean, unless by then the technology has been figured out, but I highly doubt that. I don't know, but I do know this. Would you roll a 1 in 100 chance? You're 75. You're still in good health.

It's a 1 in 100 chance that this will work. It's like tomorrow. No, these are good questions. Why don't you ask Aurelia? If she would do it? It's her technology. It's even better. Well, she probably thinks that the chances are much better than 100.

At what age would you be ready to risk it all on your technology, given that, you know, you understand the question. You're a scientist. Yeah, so it's weird because if I get older, there's going to be a lot more evidence, right? But you're saying you have to decide right now what age you would have it done and then ignore all evidence between then and now? Is the idea here? I think so. You can answer it a different way. I mean, you can frame it how you want.

Man, that is… I just want to know how confident you are in this tech. You know, sometimes it's like, why not just go for it, you know? But, I mean, because, okay, like, if you really thought it'd be cool, then it's more a question of, like, do you want to see the future now or later, right? And if you think that it definitely isn't going to work, then, you know, there's no point in doing it it you might as well just continue to live your life and then like it's kind of complex because you're sort of weighing the rest of your life and you're weighing like whether it'll work

or not um really this is why this is why i want to do it for for only terminally ill people because uh at that point right it you're you're going to die either way. The question is just when you do die, do you want to be preserved? So I would feel pretty bad right now, giving up like a large portion of my life, um, to, to be preserved. Cause it's also sort of taking the choice away from me. yeah i think i i'd be really annoyed at anybody saying like i have to do it at 75 or i have to do it 65 or whenever right like just just on the principle of the thing right because that's taking i mean 75 is no look at biden he's spry as ever but uh all right i i mean at night we're all dying right we're all terminally

ill in a certain sense so but uh at, whatever, I just want to live forever. And the awesome part is that as soon as you do it, if it works instantaneously, you're awake in the future. But as far as living forever is concerned, you realize, Noam, that once you've lived a billionth to the billionth power years, you're still a billionth to the a billionth power years, you know, you're still, and you're still not even close to the, I mean, like, you'd go mad.

Would you? You know that? You lived one with a thousand zeros after it years, and then you raise that to the Google power, and you're just getting started. Why would you go mad? I don't know. I just think, I mean. Do you know how, I mean.

I just think. I get to see my kids get married. If they chose. You'd see a lot more than that. I mean, obviously, no. Realistically, the universe isn't going to be around forever. The comedy seller will. You know, and at some point, the universe is. They don't even know if matter is eternal.

There's some question as to whether matter itself in some ridiculously far off future will start to decay. And what does it become? Some preposterously, it just becomes energy. So I don't think you necessarily live forever, even if you are preserved and come back. No, no, we're not saying your company is offering immortality, but Noam is saying he wants it. Well, there's all kinds of ways to die. In the future. I think we'll invent new ways that aren't the package deal,

because death has a bunch of stuff that comes together right now, and it doesn't all have to be that way. So like dying is both you don't have any agency over the future anymore, and it's all of your memories are destroyed and erased, And it is a cleaving of the social network, right? And these things can be done independent of each other. So I think that in the future, we'll have different ways to die that may very well be appealing, or maybe would be appealing, you know, like, so for example, if you permanently merge with another person, right, and then that entity goes forward and the two that formed it don't, is that dying? Well, like in a sense, because the person, like the legal person that was you isn't around there anymore. But on the other hand, your memories are still there. Your agency is not quite the same, though, because this new entity behaves very differently um some people may choose to like donate all their memories to a common library uh where you know they want to leave the future to you know younger people but they also want their wisdom to have been remembered

um there's there's lots of there's lots of things and i think we'll eventually kind of pick apart dying into its constituent parts and some of them are appealing and some of them aren't um some of them are ennobling to the spirit and some of them aren't um i think for most people the way that that death works doesn't work for them um and and and i hope we'll have more choices in the future about this all right but just but just to review you won't be married anymore right well that's not for her that That's going to be up to the future to figure that out. All right, we got to go. We got to go.

You have another question, Dan? We got to go. Well, she also is doing work on preserving memories, Black Mirror style, right, on computers and things of that nature. I'm doing the preservation now. And what it looks like to access those memories in the future. You know, I have opinions on what that might be, but it's immaterial to whether the preservation works today. I'm the same as the people who preserved DNA in the 70s. Like, they knew that

you could preserve DNA and they started a thing called the San Diego Frozen Zoo. And they didn't know how that DNA would be read or what that technology Diego Frozen Zoo. And they didn't know how that DNA would be read or what that technology would look like, but they didn't need to know that. They knew enough to know how to preserve it. And they knew that probably the people of the future would want it. And they were correct in that regard. So same thing, but for brains is what I'm doing. If I were a single dude again, and I was in in your profession can you imagine how much you know what you would get like you might meet a girl in a bar what do you do and then you can tell them this is what you do it's like well it's interesting there's nothing more they wouldn't even it's

unbelievable i don't know that there's necessarily a uh a chick magnet to be in this business, in that business. Anything interesting. If it works, then you know, then you'd have, you know, that would be impressive. Keep talking about not being married when you wake up and you might be a single dude again soon. Believe me, my wife,

I mean, we can always renew our vows. There's no rule against that. Is that you backpedaling? I'm just saying. Dancing, one billion zeros of marriage. You can get up and have another wedding. I mean the same sexual position. It's just like – I get it. It's like,

you know what? Maybe I don't want to live forever. Anyway. Um, anyway, Aurelia, it's really nice to see you again. Are you going to go to another, um, dialogue convention? Is that, is that a regular thing of yours? I think I probably will. I had, I had a good time too. I didn't think I was going to, but I actually really had a good time and my wife did too. So I think maybe we'll go, but it's always in the same place. I think they do it in different places.

I think they have it in Europe sometimes too, right? I want to go to the Europe one. Anyway, I had to get invited, even though I'll be invited back. Anyway, all right. Well, Aurelio, it's really nice to see you again. I don't know if you ever get to New York, but of course, if you do, you have my number. Just call me. Anyway, all right. Well, Aurelia, it's really nice to see you again. I don't know if you ever get to New York.

But of course, if you do, you have my number. Just call me. We can hang out. I would be delighted. All right. All right. Any last thing? That's it?

No, I would just, you know, I think we started the discussion with how we'd like to die. I would like to be a ground zero of atomic blast oh my god dan because then i feel like you're not really dead you're just gone you know you're vaporized anyway that's a thought that i had um about your soul though your soul's forever that's right my dad once said he wanted to be in in his truck that he called old red and have it have rocket boosters on it and like rocket across a canyon and explode at the apex. Oh, that's cool. That's pretty cool.

It's like Thelma and Louise-ish. But now he wants to be preserved. This is before... Is he just saying that because he's like he wants to support your business? Maybe. Your parents have got to use their startup thing. Your parents have to use their startup thing thing they have to they have to you know like they have to my parents bought my book so um can i buy gift certificates

oh it doesn't matter this like the second this is actually like considered legit people are gonna go crazy for this like people are going to go crazy for this. Like, people are going to go crazy for this. This is whatever. This is, what's the, who's the famous explorer of the Fountain of Youth? Ponce de Leon. Ponce de Leon.

Yeah, that's what the company should have been called, Ponce de Leon. All right. Bye, Aurelio. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. A huge thanks to Sheath Underwear for sponsoring the show. And don't forget to head to sheath underwear for sponsoring the show and don't forget to head

to sheath underwear.com slash seller and use code seller today to get 20 off your first order support the show and support your balls with sheath