This Past Weekend - E404 Dr. Max More

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Dr. Max More is a philosopher, writer, speaker and expert in Cryonics - the process of cryopreserving a body at the time of legal death in the hopes of reviving them in the future. Dr. More is the Ambassador for Alcor Life Extension, a non-profit in Scottsdale, Arizona practicing cryonics. Max received a Doctorate in Philosophy in 1995 from the University of Southern California after completing a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University. Theo talks with Dr. More about what actually happens when someone decides to have their body frozen when they die. They also discuss the future of the world, the debate over “legal” death, and we ask Theo if he would preserve his brain for science.  Learn more about Dr. Max More: https://www.maxmore.com/ Learn more about Alcor: https://www.alcor.org/ ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com Podcastville mugs and prints available now at https://theovon.pixels.com ------------------------------------------------- Support our Sponsors: Click-Up: Get 15% off with code THEO at https://www.clickup.com  Better Help: Our listeners get 10% off their first month at https://www.BetterHelp.com/THEO Mint Mobile: To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to https://www.MintMobile.com/THEO Blue Chew: Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code THEO at https://bluechew.com  ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [e-mail] Hit the Hotline: [phone] Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reinerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And if you're wondering what cryonics is, well, it's basically that he freezes your body when you die in hopes that they will be able to bring you back to life in the future. It's a fascinating world to learn about. I think you're going to love it. I did. We had a great conversation about life and death

and the afterlife. Today's guest is Dr. Max Moore. Dr. Max Moore, do I call you doctor? Is that? Oh, I insist. No, no, no. I'm Max. Okay.

Okay. So yeah, you were saying you didn't sleep that good last night. Yeah. I don't know what happened. It was, I get problems with congestion and I got, so I didn't know the damage. So sometimes my foot is numb. I had both of those last night and I took a sleepy pill

but it shouldn't last more than four hours and that didn't work after an hour and a half. I took another one and that was probably a mistake. Oh yeah. That's always when you get that double up, you know. Yeah, but it shouldn't have kept me asleep that time. So I was going to get up at 7.30, get some work done and then I get the call.

It's 10 o'clock and I go, oh my God. So I wish I could have around about 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes. Well, we're glad you made it in, man. It's interesting that you didn't get much sleep, but that you're kind of like the eternal sleep guy, you know? Like, I just want to preface for our audience. So people always like, you always hear about like living forever.

People are always like, I'm going to live, you know, I'd love to, how do we, you know? And people are always like, well, you can get frozen, you know? You know, you can get frozen. Like, you know, they always say different people that are frozen and like Kirby Puck, it's frozen or, you know, Walt Disney's, you know, there's that company. Walt Disney always comes up, you know?

Right. You can hear, you can always hear that, right? People always hear that just like in like just human interaction, societal chatter. But that's actually what you do. That's your world. That's what I do. I will have to come back to a couple of things you mentioned

by Walt Disney, about freezing. Okay. Some of those stuff. But yeah, that's what we do. It's cryonics, right? It's cryonics. Not to be confused with cryogenics. Okay.

So let's start there. Let's start there. So what is cryonics? So we can get it. Cryonics is essentially the preservation of people at the point of legal death, not the same as biological death. And to very simplify the process that we can go into, it's the preservation of people at the point of legal death

at extremely cold temperatures minus 320 Fahrenheit. In the hopes that in the future, and we're talking about decades to a century or so in the future, we may have the technology to fix whatever killed you in today's sense, revive you and bring you back so you can carry on living at the most simple. Wow. Wow.

Both. So yeah, you're the guy that like, yeah, I want to have an IOU from, I feel like, you know? And so what is cryogenics then? What's the other side of that? And there's some water too, if you knew. Yeah, there's a bunch of cryo terms. So cryogenics is simply the engineering of low temperatures.

So lots of people use cryogenics. You know, chip companies use liquid nitrogen to cool their labs. That's cryogenics. You know, freezes that go below pretty cold temperatures, colder than once we have at home. That's cryogenics. The editor of the cryogenics magazine wrote an editorial

a couple of years ago complaining that people keep calling cryogenics cryogenics because they're different things. Ah, I see. This is a cryobiology, which is simply the study of the effects of very low temperatures on living things. And then there's cryopreservation. So there's a lot of these cryo words. Okay, a lot of cryo, yeah.

So cryopreservation though, this is an important one. Cryopreservation is the application of very cold temperatures to living things. Now this is important because if you think about it, there are millions of people walking around today who are cryopreserved. They were just embryos at the time in vitro fertilization. You take an embryo, you cryopreserve it, right?

You keep it at liquid nitrogen temperature. Wow. So there's a lot of those freezer burn babies just running around on the planet. There's a lot of. There's no freezer burn, but yeah, that they were cryopreserved. Some people have corneas or heart valves or skin

that was cryopreserved. So that's something we can cryopreserve and we can bring that back today, unlike human beings as a whole, which is a more complicated issue. Wow. So, but the world that you facilitate basically or have facilitated is in cryonics. Right.

And you guys are the company that when someone, I guess registers with your company, they want to be, they want to take that long shot. They're playing the long game. They want to be frozen. Yeah, the basic idea is that someone in almost all cases, someone makes these arrangements way in advance, years or decades in advance.

We very readily take people who call us up at the last minute because we don't want to be seen as taking advantage of people for one thing when you're not thinking straight at the end of your life. Plus it's actually legally risky because maybe the relatives are against the idea. So people generally set up well in advance and fill out all the contracts and make sure we understand

what they're doing. They have to make the right financial arrangements because obviously this is something that costs money. And if we go through this whole thing and don't get paid, it's going to threaten the organization. Right. So all of that has to be put in place. And then at the point when your body gives out,

I don't want to call die because that's not really what's happening. We'll get into that as to are you actually dead or not because I don't think you are. But your body gives out, your heart fails, whatever something critical goes. In an ideal situation, we're right there at the bedside and we can begin within seconds of legal death being pronounced.

And do you have to wait for someone to be there like does a coroner have to show up or like at least a kind of smart policeman or something to say, hey, yeah, you guys are good to get in there. They're dead. Generally, no, we hate those cases when you have coroners or medical examiners. Now, in most cases, you just wait for a doctor

to declare legal death. I think in some cases it can be a special kind of nurse, but legal death has to be declared. And it's very important to understand how that's different from other things. But coroner's or medical examiners, that's a disaster when they get involved because you have to wait for them to arrive, which could be an hour or more.

And they're slow. So, I mean, they're dawdling. They take their time. Yeah. And they have, they're like gods. They have complete power. It doesn't matter if you have a religious objection. They can do it anyway and they often will.

And that can be a disaster. That can be as bad as taking the brain out of your head, slicing into pieces and then shoving it back into your stomach, which is as nasty as it sounds. It doesn't have to be that bad. We've had a lot of success in... I mean, basically, they will autopsy you if you're driving a car, you have an accident.

They're going to autopsy you. Okay, I'm going to slow it down a little bit for me so I can be, yeah, I am, yeah. I'm, so you're, okay. So you have, so the corners and those kind of guys can be a hindrance. It can be a hold up. So you want to be already involved with the presumed patient

that you're going to freeze. You want to be already involved with them. And hopefully there's like a medical, they're, you know, at the end of their life with a doctor or they're in hospice or something. They should be in hospital or hospice. Someone can... Someone could pronounce.

Pronounce them legally dead and then you guys can be there. Right. And right then you guys start, what do you do? Like, right? Like, do you give them a couple minutes to kind of like be like with the Lord or whatever? Do you just get right in there? We get right in there.

Wow. Ideally, I mean, we're not always able to get there before Neil death is pronounced. We want to get there as quick as we can. It's not essential, but it's certainly better. So ideally we're at the bedside. The doctor says I declare you legally dead. Okay.

And let's just go into that for a second before we go into the procedure because it's really important. When they say I declare you legally dead, what does that mean exactly? Does it mean your whole body's dead? All your cells are dead? No. It can't mean that because people donate their organs

all the time, right? So all these things are still alive. Just something critical has failed. And in fact, many times when you're declared legally dead, they could actually resuscitate you. That's why people have DNR do not resuscitate orders because they're saying, please don't resuscitate me because I'm just going to be miserable and horrible

for a couple of hours and then fail again, right? Wow. So it's very important to understand that legal death is not the same as everything suddenly dying. That doesn't happen. I see. So it just has to be legally dead and then there's still a lot of life going on inside of people.

Yeah. So that's when you guys get in. That's when we get in there. And what we do, I'll try and keep it relatively simple because it's a complex procedure. Basically, we'll take the patient and move them from the hospital bed or the hospice bed into an ice bath. We'll cover them with ice, add some water.

We have a device that circulates that icy slurry around them to accelerate the cooling process. And what temperature is that that you put them in? Well, it's just ice water. So we don't want to go below freezing at this point because that would damage the cells. We haven't protected them yet. So we're going to put icy water that starts circulating.

We'll put on a mechanical CPR device to start pumping on their chest and a respirator to take over breathing. So we're actually restarting circulation and respiration. You might say, well, why are you doing that? This person's dead. Well, as we've said, they're not really dead in any interesting sense.

And we have to preserve the viability of the tissues just like someone donating an organ or a kidney. We want to keep it viable. There you have to keep it viable for several hours while you send it across country. Yeah, when I was young, my sister got a liver transplant when I was younger, when we were kids. And she, yeah, I guess they had to move the organ pretty quick

and then get it in her. Yeah, they don't last that long. Anyway, yeah. Sorry, I don't know why I went on that tangent. But okay, so you have the body now. When you're, when you... Well, we're just a bit more to go. But when you apply that, do they ever come back to life

in that moment? No, no, and that's what the next thing I'm going to get. Okay, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Don't be gone yet, no. No, that's a very important point though because that could happen. You're quite right to think about it.

That is possible theoretically. Again, because just because they called you legally dead doesn't mean everything has stopped, right? So once we do this, once you do the cooling, we're also applying various medications. We have a series of 10 or 12 medications. The first of which is Propofol. Now, I used to have to explain what Propofol is,

but since Michael Jackson and most people have heard. Yeah, that's that party. Yeah, he didn't do too much of it. Yeah, he did a lot, I guess. There's two reasons for that. First of all, let's move this mic over a little bit on you. Sorry. How's that?

Just see if I like this way a little. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Okay. There's two reasons. Yeah, Michael Jackson did a lot. He definitely, yeah, if he was still alive, he would be selling the drug.

That's right. The reason for that, the Propofol is twofold. First of all, it slows down brain metabolism. And that's very important because the first of you, metabolism is running, the first of things are going to fall apart. So we want to slow that down. The other thing is it will prevent any return to consciousness,

which is possible, as we've said, is unlikely, but it wouldn't necessarily be a full return to consciousness. Like, hey, what's going on guys? It could just be some kind of sense of, oh, I feel really cold and unpleasant. So we want to prevent that completely. So that's why we give that as the first medication. Wow.

So that's the one that's going to cut off any chance of a real, somebody popping back to life. But at that point, they've been declared legally dead. So they're, so societally, you're cleared. And then they've already chosen that they want to be frozen. So they've dialed in. So then at that point, once you get the Propofol, and it slows the brain metabolism,

is that the same as like a metabolism you have in your stomach and stuff? Yeah, it's just biological metabolism in the brain. So we're actually slowing everything down, but the most important part for us is the brain, because that's the most important thing. And we should talk more about that because some people just want to preserve the brains and we can understand the logic of that.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that, man. Look, these are the rumors. These are the things people are saying. That's why I'm glad I'm sitting here with the savant of afterlife, man. Okay, cool. So we got the body, you got the Propofol in there. We've still got a bunch of more things to put in there. We're going to put in, again, I won't go into all the details of it,

but various other drugs to stop the blood from clotting, for instance, to maintain blood pressure, all that kind of stuff. Like an antifreeze or something? Not yet. Okay, that's antifreeze, right? So anicoagulant? Anticoagulant. Right, exactly.

Yeah, the antifreeze stuff will come later. Oh, dang. So there's a bunch of things we put in based on the research we do to, again, at this stage, people in the hospital go, oh, and I get what you're doing. This looks very much like donating organs. You're trying to keep them as alive as possible while you transport them somewhere else.

So this part of it makes perfect sense to people in hospitals. Okay, and at this point, are you, you had a video you pulled up, Zach, is that? Yeah, we actually, we found a video on the Alcor website kind of talking, you know, going through this process, if you... Does this help us at all, Max? Yeah, it's probably one of my... Max, if you want to maybe walk us through this.

Sure. I think this is one of the videos I did about 10 years or so ago. This is some generic pictures of people in hospitals. So, yeah, that's the thing. Now you can see, you know, you got a respirator, you got artificial... Oh, okay, they're moving the patient into a nice bath here. Okay, this is what you just told us about? Yeah, okay.

So they added the bed into the ice bath. This is a little different than what we do now, but it's basically the process, kind of cover the patient in ice. In the ice bath we use today, we actually circulate the icy water, which is more efficient than just packing the patient in ice like that. Yeah, got it, yeah. But the idea is, you know, we really want to start the cooling

because there's actually an equation that tells you that if you drop 10 degrees C in temperature, your metabolism will slow down by 50%. So if you can get down three, lots of 10 degrees, you slow down to a half, a quarter, an eighth of the speed, which means you've got eight times as much time to transport the patients. Wow, so they... That's why they cool organs when they're transporting them too.

So you want to get them cold quick? Yeah. So here they've arrived at the alcohol facility, the surgeon has been called in, and I'm assuming there's a whole body patient, they're going to open up the chest in what's called a median sternotomy. Basically just cut open the chest. Okay.

They're going to access the major blood vessels of the heart. Mm-hmm. They're still working on the surgery part. So this is all taking place above freezing. It's important to understand. We haven't gone below freezing at this point. So here they're connecting up, these tubes are basically connecting up the patients of astral system, the blood vessels to our pump and chiller system.

And what we're going to do over the next several hours under computer control is to pump out as much of the blood and intracellular fluid as we can. And then you can see basically the perfusion machine that's doing the pumping. It's going to take as much blood and other fluids as possible and replace it with a kind of a medical grade antifreeze. Okay. And do you save the blood and stuff that you pull out? No, we don't need to save that.

That's something that's easily replaceable. We do that all the time, even today. So we're replacing with the medical, that's me talking about it. So the medical grade antifreeze or cryoprotectant as we call it. We actually use the same cryoprotectant that's being used in research right now for human organ cryopreservation. Now we talked about how people would try to donate the organs and you have to get them from here to whatever state the person's in.

Hopefully in time and it's a lot of them don't make it in time. And so we lose tens of thousands of people every year because they can't get the organs in time. So the goal is, and this is very relevant to what we're doing and there's a lab right here actually in California that does this, not too far away. The goal is to take organs and cryopreserve them just like we do. Hold them down at extremely cold temperatures. You can keep them for, you know, for months or years if necessary.

Keep them in a hospital bank and then rewarm them. And then as the patient needs them, they're right there. You don't have to worry about transporting them. You could save many tens of thousands of lives a year. And we're on the cusp of doing that right now that the company's actually achieved successful freezing on... Actually not freezing, we'll get into that. Basically freezing of rabbit kidneys,

re-implanting them and having them function well. And re-implanting them in the same rabbit or different rabbit? Yeah, the same one. Okay. But do they have the... Can you go to a different body yet? Like with that sort of thing? Because what I'm hearing you say is that at hospitals...

Well, it could go on a different one, yeah. But then you've got issues of, you know, possible rejection the more different the creature is. Although that's something I think we'll figure out pretty soon. We're getting some good progress there. But what you're saying, or what I'm hearing is that you can take the organs out of someone or someone and save them, preserve them at a hospital.

Hypothetically, that's what we're getting close to. And then if someone was in the hospital and needed an organ, they would be able to take one and put it in them. Exactly, yeah. And so just to emphasize, we already do this not with organs because organs are more complex. We already do this with things like corn ears, heart valves, skin, obviously eggs, sperm, embryos.

So people say, oh, this cryonics is crazy because you can't unfree something. Well, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Of course, just think about it for a minute. Of course we do. We do this all the time. It's just the difficult part is actually the rewarming and the more complex the tissue we're talking about.

Once we go from a tissue to an organ, it gets difficult. That's why it's the cutting edge today. And going from an organ to a whole body, that's something we can't do today. Right. But are you really going to say, if we can't do it today is impossible? Yeah, we went from cigarette to vaping.

We went from biplanes to landing on the moon. Yeah, we went from the unicycle to... I don't know what, nothing. I mean, the unicycle was kind of a piece of shit, but... I mean, we've done some... Yeah, we continue to do some amazing things, you know? So I agree. So sorry, I have so many ways to go in here.

So should we finish kind of going through the process? Yeah, this is better. The less I talk, the better. Go on. I'm serious. No, so I mean, yeah, something you have to kind of really know the details of. So at that point, after several hours of replacing the blood,

we finished what's called perfusing the body. We replaced the blood with these fluids. Oh, and I did have one question. Yeah. Sorry. So the organs, you took them out of that body? No, no. You didn't?

The organs are still in? We don't need to do that. No, not for what we do. Okay. That's the other kind of research, but... Okay, you've just gone into the main arteries and stuff and started to take the blood out. And put in the antifreeze.

Exactly. Okay. That takes a few hours because if you just throw it in there at high concentration when the patient's still relatively warm, it's pretty toxic to the cells. So we have to start off with a low concentration and gradually wrap that up over time over a few hours. So it's all very well researched to optimize this.

At the end of that process, we can then drop from just above freezings, about plus three degrees C, down to about minus three. And then we put this kind of wrap across the patient, start pumping in liquid nitrogen vapor. That starts the wrapper cooling. And then we're going to move them eventually to another room where we'll put them another container and then plunge the temperature very rapidly to about minus 90 degrees C.

Dang boy! Which, you know, in your freezer box, almost minus 20. So it's minus 90. That's just to start with. And then we slow down a bit to let the temperature kind of equal out throughout the body. And eventually we're going to go down a little more slowly all the way down to minus 196 Celsius or minus 320 Fahrenheit.

That's the devil's produce door. At that point, man, you're really, dude, you're deep in. You're very deep. You're so cold that basically you could wait for a thousand years and you'd be just as fresh as when you started. Once you go below a certain temperature, basically nothing is happening. There's no metabolism whatsoever.

Really? So at that point, you're not going to, no. So at that point, you're not going to decay at all? Not at all. At all? No. Wow. Not on the least.

So you are really stuck. I mean, you are, you're, is, is any part of you still living at that point? No, you're not living, but this is actually a really important discussion. We can get really philosophical about this. You're not living because life implies metabolism and activity and obviously we've stopped all of that happening, but you're

not dead either because dead implies that you've gone beyond repair, right? You've gone forever. And that's, that's not the case either. Just as we've seen with the case with skin cells and corneas and other things that we can, they're not alive because they're not functioning, but we can bring them back. Yeah.

Just like Tom Brady almost, you know? So yeah, so death is not a clear concept actually. At least most people don't have a clear idea of what death really is. So we've talked about clinical death. That's just what a doctor says. I declare you dead. Well, sorry.

Not that's legal death. Legal death is where a doctor says, I'm going to call you dead. Maybe I can bring you back, you know, but I'm going to call you dead and giving up at this point because there's nothing more I can do. Clinical death is different, right? Clinical death is just when you stop breathing and your heart stops beating.

That's it. Those are the two requirements. Yeah. But in the old days, that was death for people like before about 1960, you know, if we were talking and you were so excited about always saying that you just went, oh, oh, oh, and you had a heart attack and you stopped breathing. We check your pulse.

It's just like in the old South Texas series. He's dead, Jim. That was it. We gave up. Yeah. We don't do that today. Someone would jump on you, do start doing CPR and defibrillation. We'd be shocking you and probably bring you back.

So what we said was dead before about 1960. We don't consider dead today. We consider in need of help. So, so dead keeps evolving. Yeah. What we call that keeps evolving. What we call dead keeps evolving and keeps changing. Yeah.

Wow. That's interesting. And today we had the idea of brain death to take it further. So in our view, when someone declares you legally dead, you're also clinically dead at that point. You're not really dead in some fun. If by death we mean irreversible, you've gone forever, you're not dead because almost everything in your body

is still alive. Now you will be dead if we don't intervene and stop things decaying. You know, if you do what most people do, which to me is completely crazy, throw you in the ground to beat my worms and bacteria or shove you into a gigantic oven to be incinerated, which is just crazy stuff to me. Yeah, at that point, yeah, you can't really do that.

You're not going to be re-eated. That's right. Now, what about this? So with clinical death and legal death, is that where they're then able to take organs and donate them? Yes. So that's interesting. So after clinical and legal death, you still have organs

that go and can live in someone else. Exactly. Man, that's a pretty good insight of what could be possible one day. And that's an interesting point about that. There's also something called donation after cardiac death, which means that actually your brain, in principle, your brain could still be functional when they take

your organs out. Wow. You got to be really, really generous to do that. That's something they could, in principle, do. So this idea of dead is actually a lot more complex than people will realize. They often talk about crying and say, well, look, dead is dead.

So it's impossible. Well, what kind of death are we talking about here? There's different kinds. If you're crazy, if you're like at a street corner, some guy tip by a bus and people are like, he's dead and you're like, is he? No, that's why we call the emergency medical services. Because just because they're not breathing doesn't mean

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That's BetterHELP.com slash Theo. Yeah, it's interesting to start to think about, yeah, what is the idea of death and when is it? But we already have three. Two, we have legal death, clinical death, and then we have the point where you've incinerated or gotten damaged, whatever's left so badly that it's irreversible and to you, that's real.

And we have a special term for that, which will sound very, very highfalutin probably because some of us are philosophers like myself. So we call this information theoretic death. Now, it's not as complicated as it sounds. Basically, the idea is, well, obviously, let's say you're in a plane crash and you were totally incinerated on the crash.

Are you dead? Well, yes, you're dead because there's no conceivable technology that could ever fix you. So even if you gathered your ashes and frozen, nobody could ever fix that. But if, just take an example, let's say that, let's say, Theo, that you're doing some kind of nefarious thing. You're thinking about robbing a bank

or doing something like that and you're kind of sitting in your chair here, kind of writing it down on a piece of paper. Okay, first of all, I got to buy the guns here and then I got to find out how to get through the locks and then I got to, yeah, all your plans, detail of a piece of paper, right? Yeah, planning masks, maybe.

You've done this before. Yeah, okay. Quiet shoes. Yeah, exactly. So you've got your plan on this piece of paper and you think, oh, God, that was so stupid. Why did I write that down? Someone's going to find this.

You know, the FBI has been maybe sniffing around. And so you take the paper, you shred it in one direction, you shred it in the other, you throw it in the trash, you think, okay, I'm safe now. No, you're not. Because if the NSA has been watching you, because they know what kind of guy you are, come on, they probably are.

Oh yeah, they definitely, I've gotten a couple of, no, I haven't gotten actual mail, but I've gotten emails that say I got to tone it down. So they got their eye on you. So they're going to go into your trash, they're going to fish that out, they're going to lay it out, they're going to scan it, run it through a very computer,

a very clever computer algorithm, and they're going to reconstruct what you thought you'd destroyed. And if you think about the brain, it's like a three dimensional version of that piece of paper. You could do a lot of damage actually to the brain. You can damage the cell membranes, poke holes in them, change some of the chemistry. It doesn't mean that you couldn't ever repair it.

So long as there's enough information left in the brain that some advanced technology, like an advanced molecular nanotechnology, maybe generate, run by artificial intelligence, whatever, if it can put those pieces back where they were, then you could actually bring back the function of the human being. So that's why we call it information theoretic death. If you've lost too much information,

there's too much damage, it's really obliterated, then you're dead. But beyond that point, you're not because more advanced technology could in principle repair you. Now, we don't know for sure that's going to happen, but it seems like a pretty good bet. We're going to get better and better at repairing people.

That's a pretty reasonable assumption, I think. Yeah, I agree. I mean, well, technology just keeps advancing, you know? Even if you wanted it not to, at this point, we could, it's impossible for us to even stop. There was an article the other day, there was something the other day about some pigs I saw on, I think it was even on TMZ.

Here it is right here, dead pigs come back to life. Did you see this? Yeah, yeah, this is very interesting research. It was like... Heartbeat returns during experiment. I'm just going to... A group of pigs was pronounced dead for hours as part of a study, and then incredibly...

I can't go back. And then incredibly, scientists got it beating again. Staggering a few researchers from Yale, again pumping synthetic fluids through the bodies of dead pigs, getting their hearts to faintly beat. This is after about five hours of what would be considered death. Wow. So was this like...

Do you know this has been going on for a long time, or was this news to you? Well, this was news in a sense, but it wasn't a surprise. The same researchers actually did something in 2019 that was fairly similar. They kind of extrapolated a little bit further. And back in the 80s, we don't do any animal research anymore

because it makes you a big target for various people. But back in the 80s, we, or an associated lab, did some work with dogs where they would basically take out all the blood from the dogs, replace it with a saline-based solution, and then chill them down to just that four degrees C above freezing, hold them there for several hours, like four hours, replace the blood, rewarm them,

and they came back and they were perfectly fine. They were neurologically intact, they recognized people, everything was fine. So it's kind of a little bit similar to what they're doing with the pigs. So they took the blood out of the dogs, put it back, and replaced it with a saline solution for a few hours. And supported the circulation externally because the heart wasn't beating on its own.

Okay, right. So then kept it alive with machines, and then brought it back to life. And the dog knew what was going on, knew where it's on, and what it was. So much like they're doing with the pigs. So that's actually very advanced research because we had, there's a guy called Dr. Peter Rhee, who actually used to be Clinton's personal physician, and he's a real expert in this area.

And he realized that using low-temperature surgery is pretty good stuff because there are some people you can't operate on. Like if you have a gunshot wound, you can tend to bleed out really fast and try to get you to a hospital and operate on you in time, usually hopeless. So he thought, well, what if we could cool people down

a lot more than we do today? Because we do sometimes cool people for like brain surgery. We'll take them down a few degrees. He said, what if we could take people down all the way to 10 degrees C above freezing? Which is pretty chilly. And the idea is that, again, as you drop in temperature, your metabolism slows down.

And that would buy you about four times as much time. So if you had only 10 minutes to operate, you've got 40 minutes and so on. And I see, so at a certain, so the colder you have, the more preserved you are and stopping your body from metabolizing and slowing that, then that equates to multiplying the amount of time that you have to operate on the body as it is.

So now I don't know if he's actually started the study yet. It was supposed to be in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, maybe because they had a lot of gunshot wound victims there or something, but I think they've moved it. And I don't know if they've started doing it yet, but they've done it in animals and it does work. And he actually came to visit us in Arizona at Alcor and he said, well, what you're doing is more radical

than what I'm doing, but it's basically the same principle. And then, you know, it made sense. And so now you guys have the body. You have, so that's your clientele. You freeze them down. You get the fluids into them. Do you keep the organs in them? I guess it depends on if it's a full body.

Yeah. Well, we, no, we keep everything in there, but yeah, there's, there's a basic choice about how far members choose to preserve the entire body. And the other half, including myself, just reserved the brain. Now as a practical matter, we leave the brain inside the skull because it's actually kind of hard to remove it without damaging it. And it's just a useful protective box anyway.

So no point in removing it. But the thing you want is the brain because everything else you can possibly regenerate. And you might think, well, why do you want to do that? Isn't it like Futurama where you'll be zipping around on a flying saucer to keep your head going or something? One, though, the idea is that given the kind of technology we'll need to repair, you know, 70, 85 billion damaged neurons

plus all the trillions of cells in the body, that kind of technology should be able to regenerate a body pretty easily. That's actually relatively easy. Well, I'll say easy. It's a near return problem than being able to repair a brain. We can already start to grow at least proto-organs in the lab, basic organs we can grow today.

Right. And the liver regrows. The liver regrows part of itself, right? The liver is the only thing that humans are really bad at this. We're just terrible compared to animals. You can chop their arms off. Some of them, I mean, they regrow their arm or the worms grow half their bodies. Parsoms, yeah.

Humans are lousy at this. When we're embryos, we can actually regenerate parts. But basically, we can generate part of our liver, unless we drink too much, maybe, but we can do a little bit of liver, we can maybe get the tip of our finger back. And that's it. We're just terrible. But that's because we have the wrong genetic sequence, right?

We can get in there, we can alter that. We should better program the body to regrow parts. And we're starting to grow things in the lab today. So to me, regrowing a body is actually going to be a lot sooner than repairing a brain. I think we'll do that in the next, you know, 20 years or so. Whereas the brain is going to take longer. So my logic is why should I take my whole body, which hopefully

if I, you know, I won't die early, it's going to be a really lousy condition by the time that happens. It's just going to be easy to grow a new one, probably. Right. And you'd want a new one too. Nobody's, if somebody, look, man, if you bring me back, honestly, Dr. Max, if you bring me back and I'm in my same old body and I can't, you know, go on dates or, you know, do hoops or anything like that, bro, I'm not going to want to be there.

Exactly. No, yeah. The idea is, and it's a good thing you bring that up because it always kind of amazes me that people think that's what you do. Of course, you're not going to bring back someone as a 95 year old. What's the point? The idea is you're going to rejuvenate the body with that

kind of technology. You're going to rejuvenate the body, reverse the aging process and fix it so you don't age further. And yeah, you'll be in your best body that you ever had. And I would, I would assume that there will be options either before they bring you back fully or right afterwards. They're going to say, well, okay, we'll bring you back in your best body you ever had, but shall we also fix your short-sighted

list? You want to fix that back problem you've had for your entire life? L5S1. Yeah, yeah. But do they, but so, but now does this, does the size of a brain grow over time? So could you, would you have to bring the body back? Say, say you, okay.

So it's a lot of ways to go. There's a lot of ways to go here. So, okay. So first of all, what are the options that you guys offer for freezing? Just so I know for the cryonics process. At Alcor, that's your company. Alcor.

And what, what, what are the, the options? Like what's the packages? I should say by when you say my company, it's actually a nonprofit organization. We're a 501c Texas nonprofit organization. Okay. And that's important to us because as a profit making company, I've got nothing against that, but it tends to not

survive very long. If you look at them historically, where's nonprofits, educational organizations, religious organizations, they can survive for centuries. That's why we're set up that way. So we, nobody actually makes profits from this. We, you know, we have salary stuff, but nobody makes profits. It's fat.

Well, I love that man. It's fascinating. Cause yeah, I mean, you guys are basically like, um, like death, like Magellans. I mean, you guys are out there just like, you know, that's, that's a good analogy. I think that's a good analogy because when people say, well, what kind of people do this?

Um, well, there are a number of factors, but one of them that's really critical is you have to be an explorer. I mean, if you think about, uh, I've talked to so many people about this and, uh, those who say, well, yeah, I can, I can see how this could work. This is not implausible. And then they go, but oh my God, this might work. That's, that's scary because they think about coming back

into a future baby a hundred years from now. Everything's radically different. Their skills are outdated. They don't know anybody and it horrifies them. Yeah. Which I think is one big reason why there aren't more people doing this. Uh, it tends to appeal to people who have, you know,

um, gel and type personality and explorer personality who look on that and say, well, yeah, it's going to take some getting used to, although the organization part of its mission is to help you get rehabilitated. Yeah. You got to be brave cause you're going to go see your buddy and he's going to be like 70 years older or you're going to go, or he's going to be gone.

All your, like a lot of your friends might be gone or say if you died at like 21 and you got frozen and you come back 40 years later, you're going to go over to your friend's house. He's going to be 60, you know, it's like everything's going to be actually probably not that because the, again, the technology we're talking about to re, to reverse all the damage that's been done by that point that you legally die

plus the extra damage done in the process, we will fix the aging problem before we bring people back. So at least your friend, yeah, they may be 80 years older, but they won't look 80 years older. But yeah, there's still be that huge gap in experience, obviously. Now it's better if you can persuade your friends and family to come with you.

Yeah. You know, I know quite a few people. I know a number of people who already cry are preserved and I have my wife is signed up for this and all of my friends are. So I don't have that problem so much. I'll know some people, but not everybody will, but you know, I'd still rather come back not knowing anybody.

I mean, I came from England to Los Angeles back in the 80s and I didn't really know anybody and it was a weird place here. You had this kind of bright object shining from the sky instead of water falling on me, which is what's up with that people driving on the wrong side, people driving on the wrong side of the road and stuff. But we came over here.

Yeah. In the 1700s and we didn't know anybody. Yeah, you know, exactly. It's like a journey through time instead of a journey through space. Dude, that's so there's so many things going on here, man. So, but also you're going to bring your wife, bro. That's a risky move, huh?

Where is that risk? I mean, I think it's great. I think it's very honorable and it's very, it's very sweet and kind, but what if like, dude, you know, it just see you got to really be dialed in for, you know, because you only said what for light? What is the vow? It's like, oh, we didn't do that one though.

Oh, it's till death to his part. You should have said till legal death to his part. Yeah, we didn't do that one because we have a problem with the idea of death. So no, it does bring up some interesting questions because yeah, I mean, okay, you've got 50 years together, 70 years together, okay, but what about a thousand years together? So, but you know, we're worried about that one.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good call. So yeah, you have to think of these people. Yeah, because you, I think in the simplistic mind, which I happen to possess, thankfully for the both of us, it's you just think like the animal, the Neanderthal thoughts are like, I'm going to live forever. I'm going to come back, but you don't think about after that, like do you, like what do you guys do?

Do you guys just give them like a bus ticket? Like out of prison or whatever? Do you guys like, like what, where do you put them at? Is there like a reentry program? Yes or no, I mean, no, in the sense that this is still so far off that we can't really, we can't really figure out, we don't even know who will make the decision to bring you back.

I mean, will it be our organization? Will it be some kind of, you know, ethics panel of universities or a government thing? We don't, we don't even know that, right? So we can't really plan in too much detail, but yes, we do think about it and we, it's part of our mission statement, you go to the website, look at our mission statement.

Part of that is not just to wake you up and kind of shove you out the door and say, good luck, man. No, we're going to actually rehabilitate you. Yeah, here's a hand warmer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, when today, think about it today, there are people who've been in comas for years, even decades. If you've seen the movie Awakenings with Robert DeNiro.

I just watched that movie a couple of months ago. Can we bring some of that up? That's fascinating. Yeah, based on the book by Oliver Sacks. So these are people who were basically in a special kind of coma, basically the dopamine levels in the brain were really low. They're like frozen statues, not really aware of the

passage of time. Some of them like that for more than a decade or two. And when they were woken up, of course, for some of them, it was pretty horrifying because they'd suddenly aged overnight. Yeah. So in our case, it would be the opposite of that. Of course, you're looking in the mirror and go, damn,

I look good. Yeah, right. Because people would be excited because you would be bringing them back in. So what you're saying is you're going to be bringing people back into their best self. Exactly. Because of technology.

That'll help because you're coming back not feeling crappy like when you when you cease to function, you'll come back feeling the best self. Plus we are there to help you out. We're going to rehabilitate whatever that will mean at the time. It might mean, you know, we're going to put you in some virtual reality environment to sort of train how the

world works before you step out in front of that flying car or whatever. You know, we don't really know what things would be like a hundred years from now. Nobody does. Anybody who says they do is lying because you just can't forecast that far ahead. Yeah, that's future people.

If somebody says they're from the future, brother, probably lying. Wow, man. So yeah, you really your work kind of like, like, you know what you do, but it's also what you do is constantly like going to be evolving. So it's kind of interesting. It's like your job is like kind of your job is kind of trying.

It's like it's malleable really because we don't know what the future holds. It's difficult because we don't know what the future is going to be exactly. And we get a better idea over time. I mean, there's also changes because of the conditions under which we can do our job. So for instance, it's only in the last few years in this

country that we could use the death with dignity laws which are actually very useful for us. So yeah, before that, basically, we had to wait till our doctor declared illegally dead. That could have happened, you know, out of the blue. No warning. But today we've done this twice so far. A member can call us up and say, look, you know,

my doctor said I've got no more than six months to go. I'm in a state that allows the death with dignity laws. I want to go two weeks from Wednesday. No. So we can say, okay, great. We're going to have a team there. So we don't have to worry about getting someone there, you know, get an emergency call.

We've got to get someone there. The person's already stopped breathing. No, we can have a team right there. They can take their medication. They have to self administer our law. We wait. Soon as they declare legally dead, we begin with no delay whatsoever.

That's pretty much ideal. That's fresh. And that's not every state right now. That's only certain in California. Can do that in a few other states. Can Arizona do that? Not yet. No, they should be soon.

Arizona Arizona's they're pretty wild west out there in a lot of ways. Yeah, we're kind of we're kind of advancing some ways and all backwards and others. Yeah, it's good cause you live in Tucson over there and a lot of people don't have shirt sleeves on a lot of times. And we have, you know, we have marijuana is legal there. It's not in some of the places, but we're a little conservative

on some of the social stuff like death with dignity. But I think it's mixed there. So I think it will get there. But we do have teams here in California. So that's not really a big problem. So, so you have the, okay. So people get brought, people sign up in advance. Yep.

Almost always. And do you meet with them usually? At least probably have Zooms with them or people are just like, I want the program. This is it. Quite often they'll come for a visit and we do encourage that because I mean, you don't have to because there's so many videos who can go online and see what we do.

But we do encourage people to come and visit. You know, we give tours of the place. We're very open. So we want people to see what the reality of it is. Oh, yeah. But they don't have to come visit if they've, you know, read a lot about it. I went to that Coors Brewing over there in golden Colorado.

You ever been to that? No, but they have some similar containers to ours. They have the very big containers like that. The Dew is basically the vacuum containers. I think the brewing. Yeah. That's what I was thinking of. If they're full body, you saw them up and down or can you do a

lay down option? No, we don't do a lay down. That'd be kind of inefficient for space. That's an interesting question because a crown, the first crowning organization in China started a few years ago and we were talking to them and that's what they wanted to do because it's kind of a cultural thing. They want to lay that you can't stack them though because

that applies superiority if you're on top, I guess. So they want to do that, but it just, it just doesn't work very well. It doesn't work very well in the vessels. It's expensive. Nothing from China works very well. I don't think. No, I agree.

So no, they're actually, we actually store patients upside down the whole body patients. Wow. I don't think we really need to do that. Basically the idea was that the liquid nitrogen will boil off over time. It will gradually get lower and lower over a period of weeks to months.

And if you have a little bit at the bottom, obviously that's where you want the brain to be at the bottom. The last thing to get warmed up, although, you know, that shouldn't have. So they're upside down. Yeah. But it is not really necessary there because we now store patients inside these steel, steel containers, you can see

there's an aluminum pod that contains the patient and that conducts temperature really well. So even if you just got a little bit liquid nitrogen at the bottom, it's still going to be super cold at the top, but it's just kind of an extra, you know. Extra layer. What do they call it? Shoot, shoot.

Laces and what is the phrase basically? Shooting fish in a barrel? No, no. The backup option with the laces and the stride. I forget what, you know what I mean? We just do that as an extra protection. An extra layer. Yeah.

And who's this chick? She's cute. Sorry. I meant suspenders and belts. Belt and suspenders. Oh yeah. If you go belt and suspenders, that's insane. That is, that's a star book from metal star galactica.

Is it really? And many other shows. Dang. I got to quit going to coffee being then. We had a really good time talking. That was a good, that was a good tour. I bet bud. It's enthusiastic about it.

She seems to, and she seemed like a nice lady, but I'll say this. So dude, this is, first of all, this is crazy, man. First of all, thank you so much for coming in, man. This is really fascinating because I don't want to die to be honest with you. You know? That death is boring. I mean, who wants to die? It's just boring.

Yeah. Well, part of it starts to feel good because you want to get some rest, I think, but there's a big other part of it that it's like, but, you know, I don't want that much rest. Yeah. So what I'm thinking is like, I would love to be able to come back one day, you know, or have the option. And so what kind of, that's the thing though.

It's an option, right? You don't, you don't have to live forever. We're not, and that's, that's something I think you mentioned that early on. We're not offering eternity. We're not offering immortality because we can't do that. You can still get hit by a bus or get shot by somebody or an asteroid can land on your head. This is not about immortality. We're not offering that.

We're offering the chance to come back and live for who knows how long hundreds, thousands of years, but, you know, after 500 years, you go, you know, I think I've done everything I want to do. You can always check out. So it's an option. That's the, that's not really the point of it. Do you, would you ever worry that you would bring people back and wherever they've gone when they've left here or like hypothetically left here was so awesome.

They're going to be like, oh, fuck. Dude, you brought me back here, back here to hearties or whatever. And I'm not really worried about that. I have to distinguish my own personal opinion from that of the organization, right? The organization doesn't take any, any view on whether there's a soul or not. I personally don't believe in a soul. I don't, I think that we're just a physical being. And if you destroy that, you're gone.

And so long as we can restore it, you can come back. But if there is a soul and you know, I've taught philosophy, religion, I taught events and Mary's not too far from where I stay. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's awesome, man. So I've taught philosophy, religion. I know I understand that probably better than many of the religious people do.

I found. I do know that you're a philosopher and a doctor. I do know those things. So I don't want you to think I don't know anything. So I don't think it's a problem. And for several reasons, let's look at, we mentioned vitro fertilization, what used to be called test tube babies. Right.

They're frozen. My ex-girlfriend's eggs are frozen. Yeah. Frozen embryos who could be there for years, sometimes more than a decade. Well, if you believe that the soul enters at the point of conception, they have souls. And yet, do you ever ask, you know, of the millions of people walking around today who used to be in that state, do they ever say, yeah, it was really boring, you know, floating around, getting really bored?

No, they never report that. So it doesn't seem to be a problem for that. Yeah. We also have people who've been legally dead for up to an hour or so. And if you believe the soul leaves when the body stops functioning, again, they don't really report, you know, being in some kind of boring condition. So I don't think it's a problem also because if there is a soul, it's obviously not a physical thing because otherwise we could detect it with science.

So it must be outside space and time. So I think whether it's a day or a minute or a day or a hundred years shouldn't make any difference. Right. That's true. If it's gone for an hour, it's gone for it. If it's a data attached to the actual physical being, then it should be able to come back. So really, you guys, if people are able to be thought out hypothetically back into existence, we might find we would learn a lot about if there are souls or not.

Maybe, yeah. I mean, my view is it's completely compatible with just about any religion. There might be one or two exceptions that is that the Jehovah's Witnesses or one of the groups that doesn't do blood transfusions, that could be a problem for us removing the blood. But apart from that, I mean, if you're a Christian, it would seem to me that you'd want to do this because first of all, why are you in such a rush to get your eternal reward? Don't you want to do some more good works or save some souls, that kind of thing?

Yeah. It's a bit selfish to take off at the earliest opportunity, right? Yeah, buzz out. Yeah, you have one stroke and then you leave. That's kind of soft. And Judaism, too, I think is actually very pro-living and life is basically good. You stick around and do good works. Oh, yeah.

My Jewish buddies, they'll mill around forever, dude, if there's some opportunity, you know? Jews love to do stuff and create, you know, be part of things for sure. So you're not going to lose them. No, I mean, the way I think of it is Chronics is really an extension of emergency medicine. It's not some kind of strange thing about dead people because they're not really dead. It's just an extension of emergency medicine. It's a doctor saying, I just can't do anything more for this person right now. And we're saying, well, let's not just destroy them by putting them in an oven or the ground.

Given to us, let us treat them, stop them getting worse and give the future a chance at giving them more life. That seems like the reason, the more conservative thing to do. Yeah, it seems like, yeah, I mean, I consider myself a Christian and I believe that I'm down for it, you know? Yeah, do you feel like it's like, do you feel like it's like divinely intend? Like there's divine intention behind this? Or do you think that it would be like divinely frowned upon, I guess? And you may have already just answered that. Well, I don't think either.

If there is a God out there, I don't see God objecting to us creating the internet, for instance, or electric vehicles or even old fashioned vehicles. So I think if there is a God, then for the most part, that God lets us use our own intelligence. God given intelligence, if you like. And what we do, it is up to us and what we do, hopefully we'll do good things with it. But I don't think there is a list of things that we, we mustn't do. It's more a matter of, you know, let's do the right thing, let's do good things. And this is a good thing.

This is about saving lives, about giving people more life and able to do more good things. Yeah, and maybe God would be impressed too. God would be like, dang, you guys figured this out? Yeah. I think that'd be pretty cool too. You got off the planet in 1969, then it's the one on the moon. Now you're bringing people back to, that's pretty cool. You guys are doing good stuff, guys.

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Just pay $5 shipping. That's bluetooth.com promo code Theo to receive your first month for free. And are you Austrian? No. Austrian, no. No, I am not Austrian. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm from England, actually. I'll pull this back in. Okay. I'm from England. I've been in the States since 1987. Oh, I couldn't tell if you were from England if you had a cold. Well, yeah.

Kind of a little both. So I came over, actually, because of Cryonics in a way. I actually first came over in 1986 to California because I joined Alcois, 22 years all the time. Wow. And I came over here because I'd sent a little donation like out of my puny student salary. And I got a donation because Alcois was a tiny little organization at the time.

And how'd you hear about it? I heard about it. Oh, well, there's a long and a short version of that. I heard about it initially as a fictional thing in a kids TV show, which kind of still amazes me because this was like a young kids TV show with some pretty interesting advanced ideas. In the very first one, it's called time slip. You can actually get it on DVD now, which I did about 10 years ago.

In the first episode, they go through this kind of hole in space and time some years into the future to this Arctic research station. And the episode that the captain of the station had been seriously injured. And so he was cryo-preserved. Wow. And they looked at his frosty face. I'm like, whoa. It also had artificial intelligence, had brain augmentation.

This was a kid show. It was like amazing. So that was a fictional thing. And then later on, I read a book by Robert Anton Wilson. I don't know if you know this guy from the 70s, used to be editor for Penthouse. He wrote the Illuminatus trilogy. It was a big counterculture book back then. In his nonfiction book, Cosmic Trigger, he wrote about his daughter Luna, who'd been

murdered at the age of 14 in San Francisco. And he had a terrible idea. He had a brain cryo-preserved. And I went, oh, so this is a real thing. So that's when you learned out that the thing you had seen in a fictional aspect as a child was now real. That was the first time I saw it as real. And so you sent him in some money.

You're like, I'm like, this is my church. Before that, I didn't know anybody actually doing it though. So the next thing happened, I was kind of a strange person in the sense because I was interested in all these weird futuristic ideas and nobody else around me was. And then I saw an ad for a group meeting at Imperial College in London to talk about space colonization and life extension and all the kind of cool things I was into. So I went down there and at that time they had the magazine we still produce today, Cryonix magazine.

And they shoved that. I mean, what do you think of this? I said, yeah, that makes sense to me. So that's how I first heard of it. And then I got involved with the organization I joined up. So I came over to the States in 86 for six weeks. I signed up. My training actually went to UCLA with Jerry Leaf, who was a surgery researcher there.

Alcor at the time was actually in Fullerton just before they moved to Riverside, which is a not a good place to be. Yeah. A lot of bangers out there, dog. A lot of at least MS9 out there. We had legal problems. We could talk about that. Yeah.

All these guys do too. Trust me. No, that's not quite the same kind maybe, but with the bureaucrats. Oh, you did? Yeah. So you guys are trying to establish or you're joining something that's already established out there. You're on a six week.

Is it like a camp or something? Yeah. I decided to come over. Well, basically what happened was the president at the time said, okay, you send us some money. That's great. I'm going to challenge you. Why don't you actually sign up, become the first member in England? I said, okay, I'll do that.

They said, if you've got the balls for that, why don't you actually start something in England? So we ended up actually creating the first cryonics organization in England at the time and did a lot of media appearances. I did this very scary thing. I'd never been on TV. I was on the Terry Wogan show, which is like Johnny Carson used to be. Everybody watched it.

It was live. Terry Wogan. Let's see what we're looking at here. I just want to see this very famous presenter in England, this lad, the biggest show live. So I had to go on a stage live in front of millions of people, like no experience. Terrifying. There he is. Zoom in on a pick up and let me get a look at his guy.

Terry Wogan. Yeah. He looks like that. Been around forever. He looks exactly like you'd expect him to look Irish. Irish fella. Oh, is he Irish? Irish.

Very cheerful. It's unfortunate. He was a good host. But that was actually a good appearance because I was on the very, I had the other guest one. I sat next in the makeup room to Shirley Bassey. You remember the Bond singer? She did all the James Bond themes in the Sean Connery days. I remember.

Diamonds are forever. Yeah. The song, yeah, I remember. Wow, that was her? So she was in the chair. Because I was there for like a minute. She was there for probably two hours. Was she cute?

Yeah. I don't think I could really see her because she was kind of to my side. But then on the actual show, they had. That's crazy. So they just have you. So that had to feel kind of strange or at this point, were you feeling kind of like empowered then? Like, what have I stepped into?

I was kind of terrified at that point. I mean, I got used to it fairly quickly, but it was kind of scary for the very, it's actually my second appearance. The first one was two days early on what they call breakfast TV at the time because it was a new thing. But actually for the Wogan show, I guess they had a budget in those days. I was in Bristol and they sent a guy on the train all the way to Bristol to talk to me to make sure I wasn't a crazy person, I guess.

But on the show itself, they had, what is his name? Oh, James Burke. He was like a science boffin who did all these very popular shows, had a show called Connections, which is amazing. All these developments in technology came out of totally unexpected directions and it was a really good show. And he stayed on next to me. He was that guy before me and I was like, oh, shit, what's he going to say?

Is he going to say this is stupid? And he said two things, both of which were supportive. So I went, oh, phew, that's great. Wow. You feel almost accepted at that point. Like a moment of like, oh, here's some acceptance by kind of just society. So then I came over to the States spent six weeks here basically doing the training, went back and then the next year I moved over here to go to USC to do my doctoral work.

So I helped out with our core doing cases back those in those early days. And then eventually went on to run the organization much later. And at that point, are you guys like going to bars when people are like, are you, how are you? How are you advertising? Going to bars. Yeah. How are you reaching people, you know?

Or people that buy motorcycles because I'll say this, that's an interesting thought. People that buy motorcyclists are the number one organ donors. A lot of people don't know that. But yeah, I've heard that. Plus, they're probably adventurous in spirit, right? Yeah. And they, I mean, yeah, they're the number one organ donors. But anyway, so how are you guys advertising and getting the word out to people that there's

this company? I'm still thinking about you saying bars. I think about going into bars like, hey, can I buy you a pint and talk to you about getting your brain frozen? I'm not sure that would work that well. I don't know, dude. There's some chicks I think it would work on. Any gay dude would take that as a good, you could say anything to a gay dude and if he's

interested, he'll be interested. So I think he could buy them anything, you know? But the biker thing is interesting because actually, yeah, it's interesting because how do you find people, I mean, our members tend to be pretty well educated because you need to sort of understand a bit about the process and understand how it could work and the future stuff. But I think very important, again, is this adventurous personality and how do you find that combination?

Maybe mountain climbers, maybe people who like to travel the world, but yeah, maybe bikers. I don't know. Yeah. No, it's interesting. Well, you said earlier, these are adventurers, you know, it's people that are explorers, you know? Yeah. I mean.

Explorers of tomorrow. Yeah. Well, people, what's that from? Me. Oh. I just do the voice like from, I don't know, it's like a separate phone voice or something. Yeah. No, it makes you feel like that.

It's like, well, I'd never thought before until you and I are sitting here talking. First of all, could I come back? That's all like, that's as far as my brain is going with it. Wow. If they could do this, sure, I'd be willing to be a part, you know, I'd be willing. This sounds like I'd be up my alley, but then would I want to, you know? Would you want to just walk out into like, you know, back out into life, not knowing who would be there, what it would be like?

What if we were under like rule of another, you know, you just don't know what it would be like? Well, okay. So I've said before that, you know, nobody can forecast the future, not in detail. Right. We had no idea. But I think we can reasonably safely make some general predictions, general trend predictions. So you say, well, you have no idea.

I think we have some idea of what it'd be like. And I'm going to say things here, which a lot of people listening are going to go, bullshit, man, because everybody today is thinking that the future is really screwed up. Can I say F words here? Yeah, you can say it. Everybody's saying that the future is fucked. Right.

We're going to be fucked by the AIs. We're going to be fucked by pandemics is going to be Mad Max worlds is just going to be all kinds of awful stuff. Because that's what science fiction shows because that's the easy way to write drama. Right. Yeah. I think that's the wrong way to look at things. If you think about human history over the very long term, have things got better or worse?

Well, obviously they've gotten better because we just go back a little way. We didn't have the vote, black people were enslaved. We didn't have painkillers. We didn't have antibiotics. We didn't have anything. A lot of people couldn't keep their teeth for a long time. Teeth. Right.

Exactly. In fact, in England, we didn't have bad teeth just a few decades ago. You guys are still practicing. Yeah, that's crazy. Still working on that one. So I often ask people that, let me take it back 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, 1,000 years. Would you want to live then?

Hell no. When you actually think about what it's like. It's horrible. It was also very violent. I mean, people think it's violent today. They have no idea. Things have gotten. It's been the least violent time in human history.

Even the Bible. At one point, Cain killed Abel, there were four people in the Bible and one of them killed the other one. Yeah. Well, God says in the Old Testament quite a few times, wipe out this village, wipe out all of them. Or else, sometimes he says, keep the women from yourselves, but sometimes you just wipe out everybody.

So it was pretty brutal back then. Yeah, it sounds like it. So my view is that the reasonable way to think about the future is to extrapolate what we've always been doing. Right. Almost like the standard, like the S&P 500. Yeah. So over time, there are a few, and again, a lot of people don't believe this, but go

look, there's a great website called Our World In Data, if you don't believe me. Our World In Data? World In Data. In Data. Or HumanProgress.org. Both of them will show you in immense detail in all these charts, how many people are starving to death is going down, actually in total, not just proportionally. So that gives you this actual data.

So instead of when somebody's like, man, everything sucks, man, you know. These actually have lots and lots of information showing how things are generally getting better. Obviously, there are local problems, things get worse locally in various ways. But overall, there are a few people starving, not just proportionally, but in total. A lot of people think pollution is getting worse. Even smart people. I was debating this professor at UCLA on actually an Oxford Union debate. And I was telling her, you know, the air in Los Angeles has gotten better over a decade.

She went, no, it hasn't. No, it hasn't. Really? How can you not know that? Just look at pictures from the 60s. You couldn't see. It was like London fog. Yeah.

Right? That's where they got the most. Volta, the kind of compounds. You got dope smoke in the air, too. More probably. Yeah, I bet that as well. But no, you're saying so that's a great place to get information. Like, yeah, even Joe Rogan says that sometimes I've romanticized things and I'm like, man,

I missed this and I missed that. And he goes, you would have hated that. He's like, you're right now is really the best, you know, the best time to be alive. You have the best chance of living. You have option to as much information as you want. Yeah. I mean, you go back a couple of hundred years. You probably never went more than 20 miles from where you were born.

That was where you lived. You did the damn job. Your dad and grandfather did. I mean, you had no choices. If you were gay, you're in big trouble. Yeah, yeah, you're hiding. Yeah. Gay people had to hide all the time.

If you had the wrong religious ideas, you're in big trouble. You couldn't even get away. Witches. Remember they had witches? Oh, yeah. Like 130 years ago, they had witches somewhere, dude, and they got them. Yeah, that stuff's crazy, man. So yeah, so I think it's reasonably safe.

I mean, it's always possible we'll completely screw things up and just destroy ourselves, but I love your attitude. The most likely thing is there will be pretty decent place to come back in. It'll probably be better than it is today. So I'm willing to come back, even if I have nothing, and I do have plans to actually have something, but if I have nothing, I still want to do it. I want to come back and enjoy my life. Yeah, because if you come back and it sucks, you can always leave again.

Exactly. But there are ways, excuse me, there are ways of actually coming back with something, we hope. First of all, as an organization, because we're a nonprofit, we have a work called a Patient Care Trust Fund, where when you pay for this procedure, a big chunk of that money is put into a separate fund and is managed by its own board of trustees. It can't be used to pay for anything else, just for keeping you care preserved and eventually revived.

So we can't divide that up because it's a nonprofit, but you can personally set up a special trust fund, an asset preservation fund, where it'll be managed by trustees after you're legally dead, and when you come back, if this works out, then you should get that money back. It's kind of like a university in downward, I guess, or something like that, where you can tie it up for a long period of time. So hopefully when you come back, you'll have money, because we don't even know if you need money.

Yeah. Maybe the robots will be doing all the main things. You only have to pay for really expensive stuff, like going into space or something. We don't really know, but it's nice to have that option. And so the cost, when people want to sign up for this type of service, what is that cost and how does that look, how do you, what is that like? Yeah, it's less than people think. I mean, I signed up as a pretty poor student when I was 22 years old in England.

But yeah, our costs have gone up a bit since then, because it was all volunteer, and now we have a professional organization. But basically there are two expenses. There is the membership dues, which you pay while you're still legally alive, it keeps the organization functioning. And that actually depends on age now, but let's say it's around about 600 a year. So yeah, if you're someone who goes to Starbucks every day and gets a cup of coffee, don't tell me you can't afford that.

Right. Yeah, if you can afford to get a little buzz in the morning, you can get afford to get a little buzz forever. Yeah. So it's really not that much. And then the one that will seem expensive is the fee itself will call the cryopreservation fee, which pays for the entire process that I've described, everything from us sending a team to stand by your bedroom, even for days to weeks, doing that whole procedure, taking

you to Alco and Arizona, doing the surgery, the perfusion, the cooldown and the indefinite storage, all of that for a whole body is a minimum of 200,000 and for neuro, just the brain is 80,000. Oh, wow. Now that might seem like a fair bit to people, but I'll make the point that almost all our members, probably 95% of our members, pay for that with life insurance. So you don't have to have 80,000 or 200,000 bucks in your pocket. You have a life insurance policy, which most people can have.

And if you're reasonably young and healthy, that's not a big expense. So people get our organization, the beneficiary of make sure organization, the beneficiary of the life insurance policy. Wow. That's really interesting. And can people even say they have enough money in their life insurance policy? They could split that up and make their family and you guys, wow. Dang.

So, dude, I think I want to get in, bro. I can't even believe I didn't think I was going to buy in, but I think- Go visit us. Go visit us in Arizona. Yeah, it's like all time share. It's like the ultimate time share, you know? And a lot of time shares are shit. My brother got in one, but this is like the time share, like this is like the real time

share. Like if I'm buying a time share, I feel like you guys are like selling the best one, you know? So you wouldn't have to share your body with anybody? Yeah. Did you share one of the little things with somebody? Well, actually, yeah, the doers, the containers, yeah, actually, that is what you do right now because-

Good. The ones we've been using for a long time contain four patient, four whole body patients, but now we have what we call the super doers, which will take about 11 whole body patients. Hell yeah, dude. You might say, well, who am I going to be spending my time next to? Well, you won't be aware of anything, of course. There's no consciousness. Do you ever see the movie Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruise?

Yeah, I did see it. Yeah. So that was very unrealistic cryonics, right? They had cryonics in that, but they offered a lucid dreaming option where you could have dreams while your cryopressor. That does not work. You cannot do that because there's no brain activity. There's no metabolism.

So you guys don't have that? That doesn't work. But what about the one movie with Mel Gibson that I loved? Remember when he came back? He was frozen? Oh, is that one where he ages rapidly when he comes back? Yeah. See, that's kind of a negative one.

There's no reason why that would happen. That's kind of- Yeah, sorry. Don't reference that one, but I loved that movie just because he got to come back, you know, he got to come back and have some moments that he missed out on. Cause he was from the 1940s or something. Yeah. And he got to come back.

There it was right there. Forever Young. Forever Young, right. There's demolition. There's been so many movies. Demolition Man, of course. That's one of the reasons I was so interested in speaking with you because it is fascinating. It's fascinating because I still just think of my life on these limited terms and to be

able to adjust my perspective to think of my life as like, well, what if this is just a start of something that's going to happen? Like- It is just a start. I mean, if you've been 50 years, it's still just the start. That's the great thing is it changes your perspective on things. Yeah. And if you think, what kind of people would we be?

I mean, right? Just think about how we are right now. Human condition is pretty awful in a way because you're pretty stupid when you're 20 years old, even 30 years old. You kind of haven't learned very much, right? Even 41. Yeah. Even 58.

Yeah. I look great, man. Well, thanks. Well, I don't want to get cryo-preserved any sooner than I need to. So yeah, it takes us a while to learn things and just as we're starting to figure a few things out in life, we start going wrinkly and weak, getting heart disease and our brain slows down. It's true.

Isn't this awful that as age goes up, vitality goes down at the same time? What if you could live indefinitely, get older in years, but stay vigorous and youthful? In fact, maybe even get smarter because we could probably do alterations to make you even more intelligent and emotionally, emotionally more stable. What kind of person would you be after a few hundred years of increasing experience and wisdom? I mean, for one thing, I don't think we'd have many wars because who fights the wars? It's a 19 and 20 year olds.

It's not the people who are 70 years old. They don't want to risk all that life they've had. So I think people would think long term. They think about the environment. They think about not having wars, better kinds of ways of negotiating. So I think it really changes a lot of stuff and I think for the better. Yeah, it's so true, it's so often, I always talk with guys about how crazy it is, how hard it is to pass information on from one generation to the next, even though they're

right there. It doesn't feel successfully residual when you teach your kids. They learn the same thing you learned and then you're dead. It seems like we get caught in this bad repetition. It doesn't hurt when the schools are so bad too and that's how to get to learn anything from, as I know from teaching. But yeah, to have an extension where you're like, wow, I'm going to be able to really keep this information.

Are there certain ethnicities or gender, who's your clientele right now kind of or who has it been and what has that looked like changing over time or not changing? Well, of course, we will take anybody, just like a hospital, we're not going to turn someone away because we don't like the look of you or your religion or whatever. But yeah, we do tend to skew male right now and there's some discussion about why is that and you can have speculations, well, maybe it's an evolutionary thing that traditionally males have been the ones doing the hunter-gatherers to go out there and get the food while the women kind of protect things that though or whatever, maybe, I don't know, that's kind

of a possible explanation. Yeah, or there are a lot of archetypes. What is archetypes? Yeah, a lot of our, I think it's archetypes have been like males that are like the, you know, and so maybe they've been a lot of the explorers over history and even though now it's changing some like she-hulk is coming out, I think. But it's like, but so now I think maybe that process might be getting more involved in women's heads, you know, it's changing, but it's still, I think there is still that aspect

there. Right. So, okay, so it's men. That might be part of it. And so we're like 70-something percent male right now, but we're also seeing more family signing up as a whole, which is great because the idea of coming back with your family is obviously even more appealing than being solo. So that's one aspect.

We tend to find that our members tend to be more highly educated than the average. And I think that's the natural because to think about these ideas in depth and to go through the details and figure it out, it's more likely to be someone who's more educated. Yeah, I never thought, I mean, I hadn't thought much about it. It's not necessary. But again, I guess in terms of people's industry, we definitely have a lot of people from the computer industry. I think there's a reason why we have a lot of people from computers, which is if you

think about it, people who deal with computers deal with really complex problems, millions of lines of code, these things, most people look at go, how the heck are we going to deal with this? It's impossible. But they're used to hacking the system, hacking the problem, right? They break it down into smaller components. And if you think about the body and the aging body and repairing the brain, that's a massively complex problem.

Most people are going to say, oh, that's impossible. But someone who deals with computers is going to say, no, it's not. We just got to break it down into smaller components. We're going to hack the problem until we've solved it. So I think it's pretty natural that we get people from that area in particular. And it's so interesting. I'm glad those people are going, we're going to need those people. And what if they're ethnicities, is it more, is it like a, I guess wealthier people can

maybe afford it, but especially when you say that life insurance can be part of it, that's a huge, I mean, That makes a big difference. Yeah, because do you want to leave, especially if you got like kind of a shitty kid, do you want to leave your money to your shitty kid, dude, who's not doing much, who's doing a lot of, you know, you know, who's still playing like a lot of like pickup sports or whatever. And he's like 45.

He's living at the house and whatever, but, or do you want to get a job and I'm going to get, I'm going to come back and make sure you have a job. It's interesting, man. Yeah. But no, as you said earlier, we do encourage people to provide for their family as well. Because if you don't, if you put everything into the preservation fund, there's an incentive for, I mean, it's amazing how bad families are. Once you, once you're legally dead, they turn into vultures in many cases.

It's pretty sad. And you'd say, Oh no, my family would never do that. Well, man, we've seen it too often. They'll actually try and take the funds you've dedicated for, you know, your own possible survival. We've had to go to any court cases or whatever to, yes, we have a number of times and we will do that. We were very, we're absolute about protecting our members' rights.

So we've had relatives try to take people out of our preservation, try to block it. We have, we've come to court a number of times to protect the rights. So try to provide for them separately unless you really hate the kid and don't want to do it. But, but yeah, provide for them separately, preferably with a separate policy to make it even less complicated. I love Matt. This is cool, man.

So why, why, how do we know that you guys will be able to stay around? Like, I guess we don't. Great question. I actually, you know, I take that question very seriously. People are really interesting. Go to our website, alco.org, go to the Cryonix magazine and look for a two-part article I wrote on this very topic. How, what was the title?

How does this stain an organization for more than a century? And we'll put a link in that in the, in the episode. We'll put it in the website information, guys. But yeah, it's just because, yeah, I guess that would be some people's question. Because even like, I remember when we went to pizza when I was young, pizza, I don't know if they have it in your country, but they have a place here. It's called Pizza Hut. And when I was young, it was like a nice sit-down restaurant.

We'd go in there. People were nice. And now it's like barely even, you know, it's not as good anymore. And there's just like a bunch of brothers fighting outside all the time. So it's not the same. Your country, like England is mine, all of England is mine. I'm actually more American than English at this point. So I've been here since 87.

So that way, I think we've had three British people and we've had you, Michael Bisping, and Robbie Williams, I think, are three Brits. Pretty cool, pretty cool client, pretty cool group. So anyway, sorry to go back to you. Sorry. No, I almost lost the machine. I thought too. So no, so I've written on this because it's a really important topic and it's a reasonable

concern if you look at most companies, they don't tend to last that long. So a little tricky if you look at the numbers because they often merge. They don't necessarily die. They kind of merge into other companies, but still most for-profit companies, you can think of exceptions, but most of them don't last more than a few decades and small businesses don't last more than a few years at all in general. So yeah, we, I did some research on that. What you find is the most of the really long lived organizations in history tend to be

either religious organizations, governmental institutions or educational institutions. Now there are exceptions in Japan, they have, they actually have a number of thousand year plus companies and they're almost all very tightly held family run businesses. I think that the longest lived one was like 1,407 years old and it, I think it built temples or something. And then during some massive war, there were no temples to build, it built coffins for a while instead. So it was a little bit flexible, but generally, you know, obviously I went, for instance,

I went to Oxford University, which is the second oldest university in the world. Yeah. I walked over there one time, walked by it. Do you see the gardens? Yeah. It's beautiful, dude. Blew my mind. It's kind of like half a millennium, so that's a long time, right?

I think the oldest one is even if he's a civil in Spain. So they can survive a long time. Obviously, you know, the Vatican's been around for a long time, other religious organizations. So nonprofits kind of, the thing about, you know, for-profit companies, which I'm perfectly fine with, but they have to, especially public ones, they have to answer to shareholders and they think about short-term profits and so on. If you're really long-term, you really want to be a nonprofit because you don't have to worry about short.

You have to make money. There's more than you spend, obviously, just because you're a nonprofit doesn't mean you can lose money. Right. You go out of existence. Right. But you don't have to have, like, you don't have to meet certain huge goals. Right.

You don't have to appease shareholders. You can just be, you know, do your best and stay alive. Yeah. You can optimize for the long term rather than the short term. And you guys are almost like a school and a bit of a religion in a way that- I wouldn't want to say that, but only in the sense that- Or a bit of a belief that people want to explore. Yeah.

That's what I mean. In the sense that we're thinking about some pretty profound stuff in that sense. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. But we do, there's all kinds of things we do to survive at the long term. And some of this is unique to us. So I mentioned earlier the Patient Care Trust Fund, when you pay the fee for this, a big

chunk of it goes into a separate fund that can't be touched for any operations, only for maintaining patients. And that is maintained by a separate board of trustees. There's a strict rule you can never draw more than 2% a year. So even if the market is crappy for a long period of time, we can ride that out. We have an endowment fund, just like universities, which is fairly modest right now. It's just a few million, but hopefully that will build up and that will pay a steady income to the operations.

We have board of directors that they're not paid. It's kind of self-perpetuating. So they can't be voted out by people who are hostiles, which can happen in small organizations. Oh yeah, totally. Get voted out by outsiders. We do a lot of different things to really protect ourselves for the long term. And we're in our 51st year right now. So we've been around for over half a century as it is at this point.

That's incredible. Yeah. It's just, man, the whole thing is really interesting to me. So how would we bring people back? I think that's got to be the big question now. Yeah. I mean, what's going to happen there, Maxie? What are we doing?

Okay. The time has come. You guys get the email from whoever it is, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever emails you and tells you, Hey Maxie, we got everybody. Let's bring them out. You know, let's do a big thaw or whatever. Let's cook. Yeah.

Let's cook. Thank you. You know. Well, the opposite of a perfect one. Yeah. Let's do it. Slow roast. Slow roast.

Okay. What happens? How do we do it, Max? I don't know. I don't know is the is the first answer, right? Because again, we can't forecast specific technologies in the future. I'll do a little bit better than the second, but just to make the point that if you kind of like asking me, let's say we're in 1890 and you said, okay, Max, how are we going to

put someone on the moon and when it's like, how the hell do I know that I've got to invent rockets that we haven't designed yet, life support systems, computer systems. Now we know it's possible in principle, it doesn't violate any physical law and that's the point that we're making. There's nothing impossible about this, but how do I know exactly how? I don't. But given that, okay, we can point to a number of lines of evidence. First of all, I already mentioned we're growing organs in the lab so we can actually get

control of human biology more and more and we should be able to regenerate organs and tissues. And that'll be a big thing in the coming years, people regrowing organs. Of course. I mean, that's, if they can do that, if they can regrow tissue, that's a huge part of you guys' deal. Yeah. That's a huge part of it.

They're bringing big pigs back. Right. But the most critical thing, of course, is repairing the brain. That's the most important part. That's where we live. So for that, we may need, well, first of all, there may be a point where we get so good at preserving people that we do very little damage. Now that means we can bring people back with much less advanced technology.

But for our existing patients, where there is considerable damage, there's often some ice formation that we haven't entirely prevented. Oh yeah. There's all kinds of damage. That's going to take some advanced technology, probably nanotechnology. I don't know if you're familiar with nanotechnology. It's something that, you know, people hear the word a lot, but don't understand very well.

I just saw normally the other day about how they were using DNA to go inside of a body to detect something. They made a nanotechnology out of DNA, and we're using it inside of a body. That's kind of a biological form of, nanotechnology comes in different forms, but nanotechnology can be the biological form like you're talking about, or it could be more of a mechanical form. Basically, the definition of it is, it's from the nanoprefects, meaning a billionth, billionth of a meter.

Okay. So you've got meter-length objects, you've got things that are one micrometer, and currently tiny, tiny machines, people who build actually a functioning automobile that you have to have a microscope to see. It's so small. And we're talking about a thousand times smaller than that. So devices that, you know, we've evolved these devices naturally, obviously, they're inside our cells, but we're talking about actually designing devices that could go inside

your cells. Can we go right here? Yeah. None of us are throwing for your body. There you go. So they could be artificial blood cells. So you could actually, Robert Freitas, who's an expert in this area, design what he called respirocytes, where you could pump in all this extra oxygen, you could hold your

breath for like an hour or something. Wow, because the nanobots will be able to carry out oxygen with them, maybe. Yeah, that's a very simple example, but you can actually, devices that go in there could find, you know, deposits of fat in the arteries and slice that off, go inside cells, cut out all the cancer, very specifically, take out the plaques that might be causing Alzheimer's disease, repair, age-related damage. So basically, this is like a very advanced technology, which is on the drawing board, and Freitas has actually a book on this right now, that we know is possible because it doesn't

violate physical laws. It's not like time travel, it's just a matter of developing it. Right. It's the same thing that goes back to when you said, well, how would we get to the moon from somebody in the 1890s or whatever, and they're like, well, somebody who could look ahead at that point and say, it's possible because it doesn't, getting there wouldn't really defy any physical laws. But not everybody got that point.

I mean. Right. No, of course not. No, I'm sure if you had told me, I'd have been like, you're out of here. Like the New York Times, this is hilarious. The New York Times in the, I think it was the late 40s or the 50s, maybe, they kind of dismissed the idea of space travel because there was, you can't move in space because there's nothing to push against.

It's like, do you not understand Newton's laws of action and reaction? So that was pretty stupid. The British astronomer royal, a guy you know, is a physics, 1959, 10 years before we land on the moon says that this is ideas ludicrous, we'll never, we'll never fly in space whenever it's on them. This is the astronomer royal. So when people say that something's impossible, always ask them, you know, why do you think it's impossible?

Because people, if they can't imagine something, they think it's impossible, which is pretty poor argument, right? Just because they're lack of imagination doesn't mean it's not possible. And that usually is, it's usually lack of imagination, argument from lack of imagination. They need to better show that it actually violates physical laws. Like right now, as far as we can tell, given basic physics, we're never going to have backwards time travel. You can have forward time travel by going very fast towards the speed of light and, you

know, your zone of reference changes. And so if you came back, but you can't go back in time. As far as we can tell, that probably isn't possible. So but we're not talking about violating physical laws. We're talking about what we're already seeing, which is the development of science and technology, the way it inevitably keeps developing on a finer and finer level, just a projection of that. How long it'll take?

We can't really say I'm guessing 50 to 150 years, very vaguely, but it seems like a good bet. Right. It's, look. There's nothing to lose, basically. Yeah. The most, I'd work, I'd do my bookie sometimes, but for me, this legitimately seems like a good bet.

It's like. It just costs a little bit. But what, you know, it's not that crazy, though, what you're going to do with the money anyway. And it's, that's not that, yes, it's a lot of money, but when people are buying a lot of the shit that they're buying these days, it's not that, it's not that unrealistic. And then also, if you got to come back and if you didn't like some people and they didn't do it, then they wouldn't be there, which would be cool. Right.

But what about this? Outlive your enemies. Yeah. Outlive your enemies, right? Yeah. But what about the brain? Because, or what, what's happening now with the, with the thawing out that, or the freezing and what's happening with the cells that's not there yet a hundred percent?

Well, like I said, with a lot of tissues, we can, we can actually cryopreserve them, bring them back perfectly well. The problem is, as I kind of mentioned earlier, the biggest problem right now is in reversing the processes, the larger the tissue, the larger the mass of tissue, the harder it is to bring them back because the problem is actually the rate of rewarming. You can cool very slowly, but you have to rewarm very rapidly and I won't get too much into the technical details, but it might sound weird. Kind of flash for I am.

It's kind of, yeah. In a way, well, the problem is the ice can actually form as you warm up, which might sound weird. How can ice form as you warm up? But it actually can. It's called recrystallization. And to avoid that, you have to rewarm very rapidly. It could be like several degrees per second.

And for, you know, like skin, which is thin, you can do that, right? Even heart valves and corneas. But when you talk about like a kidney or a brain or a whole organism, that's pretty tricky. And so there's a research into this right now, there's all kinds of different ways of doing that, but right now we can't do it fast enough. That's why we can't bring people back today. So people will say, well, what you're saying is stupid because have you ever brought anybody back?

Well, no, of course we haven't. That's not the point. Right. And we don't have to today. Right. Because when you cry, I preserve you can wait for as long as it takes. You're not getting any worse. Yeah.

Dude, so you almost need something that's going to be able to reheat the center and the outside at the exact same kind of rate kind of, yeah, there's all kinds of actually just to the conference we had recently had a top researcher who talked about some of the main methodologies of radio frequency warming and nano warming. There's all kinds of methods that are being investigated today. Do you believe, so you must obviously believe in that whether we have so much more to learn that we're going to advance. We're just getting started.

I mean, people, people often in history, it's funny if you look back at some history books, you find people saying that we've learned everything there is to know. Even like 20 years ago, there was this guy, what's his name, John Horgan or something. The end of physics is his book. Seriously, guy? We haven't integrated general relativity and quantum mechanics. They won't work together. Physics is obviously not, not correct at all.

I'm sure a lot of juniors in high school were stoked though, nothing more to learn. Yeah. But people have said that for a long time. And, you know, you think about Sir Isaac Newton, who created the laws of motion. You can predict, you know, how you throw a football or how planets move. That's pretty amazing. That's the final word, right? No.

Einstein came along and said, well, that's not really correct. So yeah, I think we have a huge amount to learn. We don't even understand dark matter and what most of the universe consists of, you know, people get stuck in that little contemporary framework and think, well, what else can there be? I think we'll look back in 100,000 years and say, how primitive we were? What primitive stupid creatures we were back then, just like we would look back on cave people and kind of think, oh, poor bastards, they don't know what the hell we're doing

back then. Yeah, no, it's, I love the idea of challenging your own imagination, like just because you can't imagine it going beyond even your own imagination, the walls of your own imagination. That's fascinating to me. Here's one thing that actually excites me about the future. People often say, well, what do you want to do when you come back? And obviously, it'll depend on what there is to do, right? There'll be a lot of stuff I haven't even conceived of.

But one thing that excites me is because I personally am not a big fan of the politics of the world today. I think our societies are doing things really badly in a lot of ways. We've gone in the wrong direction. I think there's far much central control on things, too much authoritarianism, too many people afraid of things and looking to governments and authorities to solve their problems. Yeah, the worst. I want to get, I like to, just like people a few centuries ago left Europe to escape

oppression and come to America and start fresh with a freer society. I think America's gone in the wrong direction, frankly. And I look forward to getting off this fricking planet and starting new colonies, new societies with new rules where we can start fresh without these huge bureaucracies and politicians, start with a new constitution better than the one we had, which didn't last too long, unfortunately. To me, that's an exciting prospect because we can't do it here on earth. Everything is controlled by somebody on earth, but getting off the planet, that's a whole new ballgame.

Man, it's so funny because I was just talking a few weeks ago about like, I wish like America, we could go to a new America kind of like. But now, and then my thought got to, first, that's what I imagined, man, wouldn't it be cool if we could sail off to a new America, you know, but there isn't anymore. So then my imagination kind of shut down at that point. And it was like, oh, we can't do it. But then here you are saying, well, what if the new America is out into the space, you know, it's like.

There's a lot of space out there. There's no lack of space. There's huge resources, like a single asteroid can have millions of tons of carbon and nitrogen, all kinds of materials that we can use is amazing amounts of stuff out there. There's no lack of resources. People are saying, oh, we're running out of resources. They don't know what they're talking about. This is a whole nother issue because a whole nother area of this is causes.

What if there are too many people in the future? That's a whole nother, whole nother thing that I think people don't think clearly about. But once you're in space, there's just massive amounts of resources and that's where solar power actually will work because you have direct sunpower 100, 100% of the time, whereas even in Arizona, it doesn't necessarily work all the time. So yeah, I think getting into space really takes away those boundaries of possibility and we can try all kinds of new social experiments. If you want your little totalitarian or socialist society, whatever you want, fine, you can

have it. Just don't impose it on me. I want to have my much more free society over here. If you want your Mormon society there, fine, you know, everybody can have their own society if they like. Yeah, dude, we need to build like an arc and just figure it out. Why do you guys station, you guys are based out of, Alcor is based out of. Scottsdale, Arizona.

Scottsdale, Arizona. Yeah. And why? Which might seem kind of funny that we're in a really hot place. That's a good point. It's going to cost you more. One of the hardest places, it doesn't actually make any difference, but it's symbolically kind of appropriate because we're in the Phoenix area and of course the Phoenix is the symbol

of rising from the ashes and returning to life. So it's kind of symbolically appropriate. We didn't really choose it for that reason, but when we were actually based in California, we had the Phoenix as our logo. Now we can't do that because it's confusing for the city of Phoenix. But there's two main reasons why we're there and the heat actually doesn't make any difference. Once you're in our containers, which we call Dewars after Sir James Dewar, the metal, basically very large, expensive thermos flasks is what your patients are in.

It doesn't really matter what the temperature is. We can actually put them outside in the heat and wouldn't make a difference. But like you would see at a brewery, really. Exactly. Yeah. Very, very similar. So the two main reasons are, and this will come back to a point I made earlier, one of which is environmental stability.

We used to be in Riverside and Fullerton area. Well, there's a huge bloody earthquake fault right here. So storing patients long-term near a massive earthquake fault doesn't seem like the best idea in the world. Yeah. It's a real, yeah. Even I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do it.

Whereas where we are in that area, we don't really have earthquakes. We can occasionally feel aftershocks from California. Nobody's ever died in an earthquake in Arizona. We don't have typhoons or any kind of weather events. All we have to do is the regional dust storm going through. So it's pretty stable. But another major reason is we had a bad time in California and today because it's much worse in terms of the bureaucrats here.

But in the Riverside area, we had some major problems. We went through major legal battles where we were accused of murdering somebody by the Riverside coroner. The health department then jumped on us and said, what we're doing was illegal because there was no box on their stupid form to check. And we had to go through a whole lot of legal battles, which we won all of, but eventually you said the hell with this and moved out to Arizona. Yeah.

It was quite a time, like in 1980. They accused you of murdering someone. Yeah. In 1988, there's the Dora Kent case. You can read all about it on the website. This was the coroner who, this guy loved to get publicity. This was the same guy who ordered Liberace's body to be exhumed so that he could prove that he died of AIDS.

Like, dude, you really need to do that. Yeah. What a pervert. If you don't know Liberace, you're an idiot. So he liked to get in the newspapers. And I think he looked on us and saw a really small organization that he could crush and get his face in the papers and didn't realize what he was getting into. And so what happened was one of our members, his mother, who was 83 years old, I think,

and she was dying, we took her into the building, which we would never do anymore for this reason. And it took a couple of days and she, you know, her body gave her there and she was declared legally dead. And then sometime after that, everything was fine. We registered the death and everything and did the procedure and it was, I guess a couple of weeks later that they suddenly decided to look at that and said, well, let's take a look at this. I guess they had some kind of samples and they said there was barbiturates in her bloodstream

and they said, well, yeah, that's because that's what we do. First thing to stop awareness returning, right? After she's legally dead. Now we use Proberphol instead, but it's basically the same thing. It's not like we killed her with that. Plus what the hell is the motive for the son who has the money killing his mother who has no money? I mean, there's no motive.

Yeah. She's 83 years old. I mean, do you think she's healthy? It didn't make any sense. Then they, you can find this actually. Bring up Dora Kent. Come on. Help me out here.

You can find it in the LA Times. There's lots of stuff on that. They accuse us of stealing stuff from UCLA because they didn't bother to ask for our receipts. All these wild accusations. Oh, she looks like Groucho Marx a little bit or in that picture. So yeah, that's a good story that kind of tells you everything that happened there. So, you know, we almost killed us because we didn't really have any money at the time

only because of a couple of our members who paid for the legal bills that we survived this. Then the health department, this is typical bureaucracy, the health department then came along and said, well, what you're doing is illegal. Oh yeah. Why? Because there's two boxes, there's a cremation box, there's a burial box, there's no cryo box.

So we said, well, give us a box to check. And they said, no. So it's a catch 22, right? It's illegal because there's no box and there's no box because it's illegal. It doesn't make any sense. I thought America was a place where things are legal unless it's specifically a law against them. That's kind of the point of the fricking constitution.

So we had to get a constitutional attorney, spend a lot more money from our member and we won again, but this is not the kind of place we wanted to live really in the long term. Yeah. We wanted to live in a space eventually with the group. So you guys end up over in Scottsdale. What do you guys do? What's the process of keeping the bodies cool and how long does that take?

Like how is it, what else do you have to do? So you're in there, they're in what? Or they're in a... Actually, before we get to that, just to sort of finish that story, the one reason we chose Scottsdale was we had a member who lived in the area and he met with the local politicians. And it turns out, you know, we've had the mayor of Scottsdale open our conferences. We've had a lot of the top council people come do tours of our court and they actually like us there.

They boast about, you know, having advanced stuff there. So it's radically different than California. So I just had to put that in there. No, I think it's interesting. I think a lot of that has started to happen. California's gotten so, I don't know what it is. It's gotten so ridiculous that a lot of the creatives have started to want it to go to other places and do different things.

They're leaving for Arizona, leaving for Austin, for Florida. Okay. So what else did we, what else were we saying? What we do for the long-term to take care of the situation? Right. So what kind of, what am I in? If I'm in there, am I in, do I have my hands up or what am I, if I do full body? Oh, we're going to put you in some kind of funny position and make fun of you.

No, no. Now what happens is once we've finished the surgical procedure, we've washed out the blood and we've done the cool down. Actually, we have it on the operating table. We actually have a shape to the table to make you kind of cool you down like this. Because we don't want your arms sticking out, which make you hard to put into the container. So we're going to actually shape you and then we'll put you in a sleeping bag, a high quality sleeping bag.

That's not for your comfort. The reason for that is if we ever have to pull you out and transfer you to another container, the sleeping bag will be drenched with liquid nitrogen. There we go. Right there. That's, yeah. That's the ice bar. That's where, that's before we put you in the container.

And are you there doing it? Do you help doctor? Yeah. I usually, I usually help out. I'm not a technical person, but I'm usually overseeing and maybe scribing, making notes as to what's happening. So those are the containers. So before we put you in that container you see there, well, first of all, put you in

an aluminum pod. Well, first of all, the sleeping bag, as I said, so that soaks up liquid nitrogen in case we have to move you. It stops the temperature rising. Then we encase you in an aluminum pod, which is a good temperature conductor. We open up the roof hatch, which is just down where you can't quite see it there. And then we'll put you in what you can see here. These are the aluminum doers.

I mean, that's our stainless steel doers, which again, have a vacuum layer. They're just like very large, bloody expensive thermos flasks. So you can touch the outside. They just be chilly metal, but inside it's minus 320 Fahrenheit. Oh, boy, we're getting in there. This picture you can see here's a fill going on. There's liquid nitrogen fill. We have a truck pull up the back.

It fills them all. I don't know. This is pretty a good humid day because we don't usually get this much vapor, but it's great for images. You've got the liquid nitrogen vapor. Oh, yeah. Great for huffing too, boy. I didn't take a hit off of that whole room.

Actually, it would kill you if you breathe too much. Would it really? We have to have, I don't think so. I'd have a little bit. You can see one on the right, actually. You can see that tube on the right. That's a vent. So we have sensors.

So if the oxygen goes down too low because of the liquid nitrogen, it'll automatically go on and suck it out and pump in air because you will actually suffocate if you don't get enough oxygen. Oh, dang. So it's a really controlled environment. How many people do you have stored right now? Let's see. We've added a number just recently.

I think we're at 196 patients, human patients, plus something like close to 100 pets. Oh, wow. The pets are coming in. Yeah. My own dog, my own first dog is in the hospital. Full body or brain? He was a big dog. He was a big doodle.

So I don't know, just brain. It would be expensive because he has to do it. It'd be almost as expensive as a human if he did the whole body. Since I'm brain-only myself, why would I do that? So I actually didn't like dogs before we had Oscar. I didn't want to get one. My wife insisted on a dog. She wanted a poodle.

I said, I'm not walking a poodle. Yeah. I feel you. I'm not going to be seen walking a poodle. But we agreed on a doodle, which is a good combination, golden retriever and poodle. And you loved it, huh? Most popular dogs since it got down there. Yeah.

Same here. They're smart. They're playful. They're a lot of fun. So he actually lasted 15 years, which is a long time for a big dog. But then he's got valley fever and other things, and we had to put him down, but we cry and preserved him. I just learned about valley fever the other day.

Yeah. It's such a bizarre thing. It's a weird kind of bacterial thing. I don't think I've ever had it, fortunately. I'd never heard of it until two days ago when somebody mentioned it. Okay. So we have 196 patients and people can do body, head or brain or is it just whole body or is that we just say the neuro, but that means basically the brain kept inside the

skull just because it's easier. Okay. And you guys have Ted, Ted, Ted, the room is always you, Ted Williams is chronically frozen. Yeah. He was supposed to be private. When people sign up, they can choose to be private or public because some people just don't want people to know because it's considered unusual.

And we have some famous people who signed up who I can't name, but yeah, Ted Williams was mentioned. It was supposed to be private, but there was a big legal battle because one of his family said he didn't really want to do it and the other said they did. And so we had to go to court and it became public. So he's our probably our most famous known patient. We actually get people who are big baseball fans come to visit him and really to see where he is.

And can people do tours of the facility like a guided tours? Absolutely. Yeah. We offer them twice a week and we can do them by special arrangement. We like to be very open. So you can see the place. We publish case reports to explain what we do in each of the cases and what went right and what went wrong.

Because it's not standard medicine, we think it's very important to have very, very good feedback on what we do because, you know, I'm going to be in there myself at some point. I don't want to hide anything from anybody. So we're open as possible to hold ourselves to account and make sure things are doing, working properly. And what about, bring up that Ted Williams, let me see him. We also have, there's also a public member I can mention, an old friend of mine, Hal Finney, whose name you might not be familiar with, but if you're into cryptocurrencies,

you'd know his name. He was the first guy to ever receive a Bitcoin. And some people think he's the creator, although he always denied that he was. Really from crypto to cryo, huh? Yeah. There's actually a lot of people interested in both. It's interesting combination there. I could see that.

Wow. That's Ted Williams right there, huh? And do y'all just have his brain then, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Dang. He seemed pretty handsome. There's actually, there's a novel that came out a couple of years ago, I haven't read

it, but it's all about him coming back from being cryopreserved and carrying on in the future. Really? Yeah. Wow. And has there been proper, what? And so once you get the bodies in there, like where is Ted Williams brain right now? By the way, we don't call them bodies.

We call them patients. Okay. Sorry. No, it's okay. I just want to say that because in our minds, they are patients. They're just like someone in a long-term coma who we're caring for. So we don't think it was body that they're actually patients. So the patient, Ted Williams is in one of the doers.

Yeah. Wow. So with neuropatients, they only take up, you know, as you can imagine, they only take up about a tenth of the volume of a whole body patient. So it's less expensive to store them, which is one reason we can charge less because the long, if you're paying for long-term storage for the, you know, the rent and the insurance and maintenance, obviously it's one tenth of what is for a whole body patient. So you're in there with, we can convert the pod that contains one whole body patient with

shells and have 10 neuropatients in the same volume. I don't know which one he's in because that's one of our security issues is we don't identify who's in which doer just in case someone has like a really bad enemy and wants to come in and find them. Right, right. Or is it more difficult? But you guys know, though. It's not.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Interesting. Now there's a, there's a, the patient is numbered. The, the aluminum pod they're in is stenciled with the number on there and there's lots of record keeping. We keep that backed up in the cloud and other places. So it's all very secure.

Oh good. The room itself is secure as well. Of course. We take it very seriously, patient security because they can't protect themselves. So the whole room has got like metal plates on the walls and we got security systems with the resources we have available. Of course. We take that very seriously.

And what if, what do you, so what elements do you need in order to keep the facility maintaining these bodies at the low temperatures? Yeah. So that's a common misconception. It's only to say there are two things people know about cryonics that are wrong. One is that Walt Disney was, was frozen. He wasn't. Really?

No. He wasn't. Oh. I think what happened was that there was a big cryonics story at the same time that he died and they got mixed up somehow. Plus it's kind of a natural assumption, right? This is a guy built tomorrow world and future land and it seemed like something he would do, but no.

Yeah. You think he just spent the 80K. Well, he could afford it. Yeah. We'd be much less than that then too. But no, unfortunately not. The other one is people say, well, you guys are so screwed when the power goes out. Like seriously?

You think we haven't thought about that in 50 years? It's like, no, we don't actually need any power to maintain patients at that temperature. We just refill once a week and that's more often than we need to do with liquid nitrogen. A truck pulls out, we put liquid nitrogen into the containers. That weird as it sounds, that boils off at minus 320 Fahrenheit. No electricity is needed for that at all. So the only power we need is, you know, for our comfort, the air conditioning because it's in Arizona, for the computers and so on.

We do need power for the operating, obviously, for the surgical procedure and for that we have a big backup generator outside that will kick in automatically so there's no delay in the surgery. But the patients themselves will not warm up. We could actually go for several months without any liquid nitrogen delivery because it only boils off maybe 12 liters a day and so it will very slowly go down. We've done a test with an empty one, you know, empty of patients. It takes several months to get low down so we could go for months and there are many

liquid nitrogen supplies in the area. I think something like seven of them. You know, I wonder if you guys ever had like supply chain issues or something like that, that if there was a possibility for you guys to at least have a gap in whatever you would need to keep the body. It's extremely unlikely where we are again because we have so many, you know, we use such a small amount compared to like a chip company, which for their chip fab uses vast amounts of the stuff and other companies use far more.

So we're kind of like a side effect. We just use whatever's left over so it's unlikely. But if it was like World War III and we thought there's going to be a major disruption for more than a couple of months, we could actually go out and buy our own liquid nitrogen plant. It cost us, you know, probably a few hundred thousand, cost us twice as much per unit to make but we could do that. You just need power and air to make liquid nitrogen. So it's not really a problem for us.

So do you feel like a businessman or do you feel like a explorer? Is that a fair question? Yeah. I mean, I'm currently I'm not really a businessman. My position right now is ambassador. I'm the guy who comes out and explains what we do. But for almost 10 years, I was the president and CEO. So I kind of ran the organization, but not really a businessman.

I'm more, I'm, well, I'm a philosopher by training, philosopher and economist by training. I did a lot of work with nonprofits and run other nonprofits. But I don't really think I'm a businessman as such, but I, I do realize that you have to have an organization that works, of course, obviously, and you have to be able to communicate the ideas. It's not something you can sell as such because it's not like call now, limited time, you know, $50 off. Yeah.

That kind of thing is not going to work for cryonics. You know, some people say, you know, there's some people who are cynics and say, oh, this is a scam. It's a get rich quick scheme. I just, it makes me just kind of either laugh or despair when they say that because, yeah, this is the hardest thing in the world to sell. Yeah. Is the worst thing to try and choose to get rich quick.

You know, that's why after 50 years, we only have like 1500 people sign up for this. You have to explain complex ideas about life and death. People have to think about stuff they don't want to think about. They got to make all these arrangements. This is the hardest thing in the world to sell people on. So I don't think of myself as selling, but as educating. And this is great to be on your show because I get a chance to talk for like an hour or so because it takes a long time to get through the ideas for people to understand what the

hell is this strange idea is about. Yeah. And I don't, and I don't feel sold to, I feel just, that's what I feel a little bit more educated of a little bit more like, Hey, what, what if your imagination or your picture of what life is could expand or be different? And that's interesting to me. I can see that, uh, flooding over into different ways that I envision everything. I wish I had more of that in my natural life, kind of that perspective, you know, because

it's a lot more of a perspective of possibility than it is a positive perspective of limits. One thing I would say though is if you, if you seriously do think this would be an interesting idea, think about it sooner rather than later, because don't think, well, I'm not that old now. I can wait, you know, for another few years because things happen and I see this happen all the time. People put it off and then, you know, we get a call at the last minute, you know, Uncle Bob just died, can, can you still cry?

Well, no, we can't because the arrangements aren't in place and it's almost, almost impossible to do a last minute case like that. In special cases, maybe we can, but we don't want to take advantage of the family financially. We want to make sure the person really wanted to do this. There's all the contracts to sign. So it doesn't work that way. You need to do this well in advance. Right.

This is a choice you got to make to go beyond for the body to come back because the science isn't there yet. But as we see, there's clues that it could be getting there, man, I feel really explained to you. Zach, do you have any other thoughts? I think my final question would be like for Theo, honestly, both of you say it's 30-22, you come back, it starts. What's the first thing you're doing?

First thing I'll have to waking up, I'd say, when is it? And they'll tell me and I go, yes, I made it. And I want to take a look at myself. I want to know, well, I want to have newspapers, but I want to know what's going on. I want to know if my wife is back, if my dog is back, you know, or my other friends and just start to figure out what's going on. I think I'd just be ecstatic, actually, it'd probably be the best time of my life that I actually made it.

I beat what would be thought of as death and I'm back and I've got all these opportunities. That's my first reaction. And after that, I don't know, it depends on what's possible, right? What's available. Man, it's a great question, man. I'd probably, let me see, they bring me back. Show me the best movies of the last 1000 years. Yeah, you'd have a lot of stuff new to watch on Netflix.

I'd probably honestly, the first thing I would do is thank them, probably take a piss, I bet. You know how good that's going to feel? And then I would probably have a lunch or whatever they have then, a new type of lunch or if they don't even have lunch anymore, I would see if there was anybody who was really old that still knew about lunch and I would ask them if they knew where, you know, someplace that was still doing it. It was a good place on whatever planet we're on to go have lunch.

Yeah. And then I would feel yes. I would be like, I did it. Yeah. Billions, tens of billions didn't make it and I did, that would be kind of a sad but good feeling. Yeah. It would be interesting.

And it would give you, I mean, the power you would, your own DNA would feel at every molecular level to be back, to just have the lights back on. That's fascinating. You know, one thing, one thing I might want to just touch on is, because this usually comes up and I'm kind of surprised you haven't asked me, it's maybe because you don't share this view. But a lot of people say, well, won't there be too many people when you come back, aren't we overpopulated and this isn't going to be a lot worse.

And this always kind of makes me chuckle a little bit because I've studied this stuff for a long time and kept track of it. And what people don't seem to realize is that's not a problem. In fact, we have maybe the opposite problem coming up. You know, fertility globally peaked around 1968 or so. It's been falling ever since. The US is a bit of an exception. We're still growing pretty slowly, though, but, you know, all of Eastern Europe is shrinking.

Japan is shrinking, Germany is shrinking. The west of Western Europe is stopping growing and it's about to shrink as well. So people are kind of stuck in a 1960s mindset of population growth. Really? The fact is that almost 40% of those populations are now stopped growing or are starting to shrink. And that's going to get worse as over time goes on. Even Africa, you know, its fertility has dropped massively and when they reach a certain level

of wealth and women have more opportunities, they stop having children. So even the UN, which is consistently over predicted population, even the UN says by about 28 to the end of the century, global population, not just Western, which will stop a lot sooner, global population will peak and start falling. Wow. And the scary thing is there's no bottom. You can go to zero. So I don't think, you know, population is a problem in that sense.

In fact, we'll want people to live longer so we don't shrink the population so fast. And this is even regardless of going into space. Well, yeah, even growing up, I remember my neighbors growing up, they had like seven children and my neighbor, the neighbors I have now have only two children. Yeah. If any, yeah. A lot of people don't have any of these days. He's getting a lot less out there.

So that's not an issue. Nor is resources, you know, people panicking about energy and resources, those are all political problems. It's because of stupid policies that we're not, we're not trading energy. What about this? What if you say I get frozen, right? My grandkids are like, oh, fuck, we didn't even know him. Shut it down.

We don't want to do it anymore. How do I get protected? Oh, well, they don't have any choice on that. I mean, you made the arrangements. Your agreement is with the Alcor foundation and that's our contractual obligation. That's what we do. We'd certainly be in big trouble if we ever did that at someone else's wish and that's why we've had legal battles because we've said, absolutely no, we are doing what the

patient wishes and you're not going to stop it. So somebody who doesn't want you to continue being cry-preserved has no, no word and no say in the word. Legally, and this is an interesting point actually, because it will change, I think at some point in the future, right now, legally, when you're cry-preserved in the eyes of the law, you're donating yourself to a scientific experiment, basically, because we're a nonprofit organization, scientific educational organization, you're basically donating yourself biologically as an experiment.

Now, that's not the way we see it because we see you as a patient, but at some point in the future, I think we will, when it's become more familiar, you will have some kind of legal status. You'll be someone who can't be just taken out or when I'm yanked off, just like someone right now in a long-term coma in a hospital, you can't just go in there and take their foot off or take out their kidney. They have certain rights. So right now, literally, we own your ass right now, legally speaking, but at some point,

I think you will have a legal status like someone in a coma, but relatives can't just come and yank you out, no. And what do people want their pets to become back of, oh, usually people get frozen with their pets, right? No, no, usually, well, no, it's not like the Egyptians who, when the Pharaoh died, they killed all the servants and buried them with them, we don't do that with the pets. Now, generally, the pets are cribs at first, and you may even have several of them by that time.

I don't think we've really had a case of when a member has died and then what happens to their pets. I think they're usually adopted by someone else. What about the smallest pet? You got any hams in there? Any hamsters? Probably. I think the smallest, we actually have two, what do you call those things?

Little furry things, not hamsters' spores in that. Oh, gerbils? No. Ferret? Ferret. No, no, is it a ferret? Oh, guinea pigs. It's something like a ferret.

I think it's got a different name. It's a really cute, very, very soft thing. Sugar glider? It's super soft. What do they call those things? It's kind of ferret-ish, but it's cool. It's really, really soft. Got a beast on, huh?

No, that's dog. No, that's dog. I'm trying to remember what it is. I forget the name, but yeah, those are really kind of, you can't do the surgery on those very well because they've got tiny blood vessels, so they may not get the full treatment. Pull up a guinea pig, man. It could be a G-pig, baby. I'm trying to think what that thing's called.

It's extremely soft, that's why they're so popular. Let's see one. Let's click on one. We did have a crank call once a few years ago, somebody. No, it's kind of, you know. But these are beautiful. I'll remember later on when it's too late. We did get a crank call one time.

It was kind of funny. Someone called us up and said, well, I have a pet octopus. Do you charge by the tentacle or what? Yeah. That's insane somebody would do that. What about that population? Is population growth that's really going down? Yeah.

The growth has been going down and down, and absolute population levels are going to actually going down in many countries. Because you always hear all this population fear. What is all that? No, it's bizarre. It's very outdated. It's like people haven't learned. Where do we find information that population is going down?

Is it out there? Our world in data is a good place again. You can find it pretty much anyway, even Wikipedia, which is not reliable on a lot of stuff. I hope population can do whatever it wants. I think it's fascinating, man. It's fascinating to be kind of like a Christopher Columbus on the plane of time, you know? Cryonauta sometimes. Yeah.

Sort of an astronaut, a cryonaut. Yeah. Christopher Cryolumbus. I think this is really fascinating, Max. Man, I really appreciate it. I think it's intriguing to think of, it makes me think of what type of like non-profits people could even get involved in. It expands the idea of where I even think of non-profits being and what they're doing.

I thought it was going to be a lot more expensive, honestly. Yeah. Most people do. They think it's only for rich people. It's really not the case. Again, life insurance makes it affordable, especially if you're fairly young. It's quite easily affordable. Again, despite that it's growing pretty slowly, you know, there's only three or four organizations

in the States. There's one in China. There's one starting up in Australia. There's one starting in Switzerland, one in Russia, which is kind of a disaster, as you might expect. Yeah. So there's really not that many worldwide, but it is gradually growing. I like to think when I started, when I joined, I was member number 67, now we have 1,500.

I think there were three patients, now we have 196. So we're getting there slowly, but I think there'll be some point we'll look back on at some point in the future. This will be normal. This will be the thing that is normal to do and people will just scratch their heads and wonder why the hell did people destroy their loved ones, bury them or cremate them when they could have done this. How weird is that?

So this won't seem like the weird idea. What we're doing now will seem weird in the future. That's exactly what I'm thinking about. It was like when you were talking about getting to the moon, what I pictured was two guys and one of them has a ladder and the guy's one guy's like, there's no way we can do it, you know? And then I thought about like burial was like, yeah, putting someone in the ground or cremating them.

So if everything is kind of evolving, it's like, eventually, yeah, burial would be like, well, you got to get saved. Like why would, yeah, like somebody be like, oh, we have my grandmother's like a NFT, like a real life NFT, you know, we ever like saved, you know, with Alcor, you know, or saved cryonically. About being a normal thing in the future, whereas, you know, it's seen as kind of bizarre and strange now, but I think it'll be perfectly normal, it'll be the standard thing in the future. It'll be crazy to do the opposite.

Yeah. It'll be crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. I love him, but I'm going to burn him. I'm going to love him. I want to be eaten by worms and bacteria. What?

Yeah. It's like we keep everything, baby. You're the frickin do you're like the, I mean, you're the liaison of leftovers, man. You're talking about long term, baby. I mean, if you hate Uncle Fred, okay, Barry, I'm very much burning, but if you like the guy, why would you do that? Or bring him back later and we'll fuck him up down the line, you know, if you want, but whatever to have the opportunity, you know, the possibility.

I like that, man, uh, Dr. Max Moore, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having me. It's been great. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves, I must be cornerstone, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of mind I found I can feel it in my bones, but it's going to take a little bit of time.