LS5 - Max More, President and CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation

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Welcome to the Longevity Show, Informing listeners on the important aspects of health, wealth, and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest. With fascinating interviews with top authors and gurus in the field, along with the latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer, happier life. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Max Moore to the show. He is president and CEO of Alcor Life Extension foundation, located near me in Scottsdale, Arizona. And this is a fascinating topic, of course. You know, we've seen it in the science fiction movies. We know that someday this technology to wake a person up at the other end will be available, most likely. And it's just a really fascinating thing to talk about. Max, welcome. How are you?

Hello, Jason. I'm very good, thank you.

Well, it's good to have you on the show, I guess. You just came back from the cryonics conference in Laughlin, Nevada, is that correct?

That's right, yes. Actually, Don Laughlin, who the town is named after, is one of our members, one of our public members and a great supporter. He's funded our research and we just had a really good conference there.

So when you call him a member, does that mean he will be a client? He will be frozen?

That is right. When I say member, I really mean someone who has made the full financial or contractual arrangements to be cryopreserved upon clinical death.

Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, so, you know, we'll talk about all the aspects of this, but, you know, the big question I have is, you know, we know it's possible today to freeze a body or freeze a brain and preserve it indefinitely, pretty much. However, what is blocking us from. From waking that body up or bringing it back? Is it. Is it just the way water works when something is frozen? The molecular structure changes when you. When it becomes ice? Is that what happens here? I mean, it's not possible to. To do anything for the end yet. Right. We're all of these members, as you say, are just banking on the idea that it will be possible in the future, right?

Yes. It's not possible currently to bring anybody back who's being cryopreserved, although it's not because of the ice. So I'll explain that.

Okay.

It's worth pointing out, first of all, that there are actually quite a few people walking around this planet now who actually were Cryopreserved in the past, and those are people who started off as frozen embryos. We have egg and sperm and embryos, and those have been cryopreserved at liquid nitrogen temperature, implanted, they grow up. So we know we can do that. We know we have cryopreserved corneas and actually several dozen other tissue types that have been cryopreserved and reused. However, when you go up to the level of a more complex organ, and even more so a whole organism, we concurrently warm that up and restart function. That's not though, because of ice formation, because that's a problem we have addressed over the decades and especially now. We have a method called vitrification that essentially, at least in good cases, eliminates ice formation. Part of our procedure is to remove as much of the blood and other body fluids as possible so they don't freeze and replace them with a cryoprotectant, which you can think of as a kind of medical grade antifreeze, if you like. And as we lower temperature, as you get down below about minus 120 degrees C, that just gets thicker and thicker and forms a sort of glass like substance with no internal structure, no ice crystals. And so it's really not ice crystal formation that's the problem. By the way, even if you do have ice, it doesn't do what a lot of critics assume happens, which is that the cells explode. That doesn't actually happen. Instead, water leaves the cell and it causes damage to the membranes. It's a different issue. But the reason we can't bring them back then is not ice damage. It's really because a whole complex slew of processes happen when the body functions become deranged and leading to what we call clinical death, which is a somewhat arbitrary point. Something else we might discuss a bit more. So, yeah, right now we can't really do much with organs, although we have successfully. Well, not us, but 21st century medicine in California has successfully cryopreserved a kidney and then rewarmed that re implanted in a rabbit and had it function successfully for months. So we're beginning to get to the level of doing whole organs, but we cannot yet bring back a whole organism, a person, and wouldn't even try at this point.

Right, right. So what has to happen in the technology in the future to bring someone back? What big barrier does science have to overcome?

Well, there's a number of things we have to overcome because one misconception people have is that, well, we'll bring back someone. Say someone is cryo preserved at the age of 85, they come back as an 85 year old. That really isn't the point. We don't want to do that. We don't want to bring.

Well, 85 may be the new 25 when that happens. Right, right.

Well, that's the idea is we wouldn't bring people back until one of the problems that's being solved, a big one, is aging. Aging itself has to be a problem that we fixed. There's really no point bringing someone back who's already pretty old. Not all of our members are old because you can die early of various things. But the idea is we bring back someone when we have the kind of technology, whether it's nanomedicine, more advanced regenerative medicine, whatever it takes to not only reverse whatever killed the person, heart disease or cancer, but the aging process itself. So the person would come back in a young, healthy body with their brain fully repaired and rejuvenated. So you really have a whole range of problems to solve. Whatever killed the person, the aging process itself. And we don't want to age again when you come back. So it's going to require major advances in regenerative medicine, which we're beginning to see really taking off at this point, regrowing tissues and organs. We'd need some pretty advanced repair methods, perhaps nanomedicine, nanorobots going into the brain, repairing 80 to 100 billion neurons. That's no small task.

So that's going to take decades at least. We don't know how long it's going to take. It could be a century. But fortunately, our patients are not going anywhere. Liquid nitrogen, temperature. They could wait for a million years and they'd be pretty much in the same state as when they began.

Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating stuff. Okay, well, talk about how the process works. I mean, people cannot decide to be frozen if they're healthy and just decide, hey, you know, I want to check out and I want to just go into the future. That would be equivalent of Jack Kevorkian by today's standards. Right?

That's right. Which is actually unfortunate because we do have some people in a really horrible situation where they have, say, Alzheimer's disease or have brain cancer. And just imagine if you have brain cancer, you're gradually being destroyed bit by bit. It's pretty appalling. But the law does not allow you to ask your doctor to give you a lethal injection so you could be cryo preserved while you're still somewhat intact. So that's unfortunate, and I think that will eventually change. But for now, yes, it's true. We have to wait until legal death has been declared. Legal death or clinical death are really not the same as biological death or any kind of final death. Just think back. If you think about, say, 50, 60 years or so, you're walking around outside, somebody in front of you keels over and falls on the floor. You rush over and they've got no heartbeat, no respiration. He would say, oh, that person's dead. And that was it. They take them off and bury them. Today, we don't do that. We pounce on them and do CPR, defibrillation, give them calcium channel blocker drugs, all kinds of things. And in many, many cases, even after minutes of apparent clinical death, we can bring people back to life. In fact, there have been some people who've been clinically dead for hours and been brought back to life if they remain cool in the meantime. So this idea that death is some kind of clear line to draw is clearly not true. It's changed historically. So our view is that when today's doctors of medicine say you're dead clinically, what they really mean is, given my skills and methods and technologies of today, there's nothing more I can do for you. Not even that quite true, because there are many cases where they could be revived temporarily, but they're just going to be in misery and die again a few minutes later. So it doesn't even mean that. So we're saying, well, just give us a chance. We're going to use our methods of cooling to very low temperatures to stop things getting worse, prevent any biological decay, because we know that technology will continue to advance, and whatever killed that person today probably won't kill them in the future, and that could be undone. So that's where we launch into action. In an ideal situation, we have warning. We have a watch list for our members. We know if they have serious conditions, and in many cases, we have a warning. We have our standby team waiting there right at the bedside or very nearby. And as soon as the doctor says, I was clinically dead within seconds, we're moving the patient from the bed into an ice bath. We're restoring circulation using a device which essentially is like doing cpr, but mechanically restoring breathing, restoring all the functions of the body, while administering a whole series of medications that reduce the damage. That starts to happen right away. So all that's happening very fast. Then we're moving the patient. If it was a local case here in Scottsdale, Arizona, say in a hospice, we would then put them in our emergency vehicle and Bring them straight here to Alcor. If it's a remote case, we'll get them on a flight and bring them here while they're cooling. And then we go to the next stage of the procedure in the operating room where we'll do the cryoprotection. A surgeon will come in, access the major blood vessels, remove as much of the body fluids as possible. Blood and body fluids, because we want to reduce that ice formation to a minimum or to eliminate it. Replace that with what we call cryoprotectant, medical grade antifreeze essentially. And then once that's done, we can then drop the temperature further, way below the freezing point after that, eventually ending up at minus 196 degrees C, minus 320 Fahrenheit liquid nitrogen temperature. At that temperature you've essentially become a solid. There's no biochemical activity. You could wait for 1,000 years and you can look pretty much exactly the way you were the day you went in. So then we hope then that the money we put into the patient care trust fund will be available to pay for repair should that become possible in the future.

So I mean is there any, nobody knows. Of course this is a total prediction, but is there any thought as to, to when it will be possible to bring someone out of the cryogenic state?

Oh, there's a lot of thought, a.

Lot of thought, yeah, well of course, but what do you think?

Nobody really knows. I actually have quite a background as forecasting methods and futurist methods, but I'm very skeptical about the ability to make any kind of forecast except in very narrow areas like computer.

I mean are we talking 100 years, 1,000 years? It's just, it's just, I mean it is mind boggling to think and I know there have been movies about this of course in the sci fi world and if you can recommend any, please do because I think that might be kind of interesting for our listeners. But you know, just to see different, you know, directors and producers depiction of this world. But you know, what would the world be like in 3200?

But I actually don't think it is highly unlikely it will take 1,000 years. I think if it's going to take that long, it's not going to happen. I would just, I'm taking really much of a guess but looking at trends in regenerative medicine, biotechnology, nanotechnology, I think that most of our patients should be back within a century. Optimists would say in 30 or 40 years. I think that's, to me that seems A little unlikely, but I think possible. Because if change does accelerate, as people like Ray Kurtz will like to argue, there'll be more change in the next 20 years, much more than the last 20. But I'd be very surprised if it took much more than about a century.

Have you, of course. Is your organization doing anything with, say, NASA or anything like this, working on the space travel, the long, long distance space travel problem, or thinking about that?

We're not currently doing that, but it seems that there's some recent restirring of interest in interstellar travel. I've heard of, I think, at least three separate organizations that have restarted now. That used to be very popular in the 70s to think about this. And then space kind of stopped happening, but now it's picking up again. And I think NASA and other organizations are actually starting to think about that. My wife is also a member of the foundation, has given a talk at a panel at a space conference. Exactly on that topic. And yeah, look at 2001 Space Odyssey, Alien. Many movies have used suspended animation or cryonic to get people into the star systems because it will take very, very long time, many years. You don't be bored. So that's a possible application.

Yeah. Fascinating. What else should we know about it?

Well, I think one important thing is people think, my goodness, isn't this only for really rich people to do this? And they ask, what do we charge to do this? And currently the minimum rates for whole body cryopreservation is $200,000 and for neuropreservation, $80,000. That's just the preservation of the brain. The idea being that any technology sufficiently advanced to repair damage done to you and fix the aging process is probably going to better clone or regenerate a body relatively easily. So people say, well, 80,000, even 200,000. That's a lot of money. What they often don't realize is that the vast majority of our members pay that with life insurance. And especially for a young person, the life insurance policy of that amount is really not very much at all. It's like having a cup of Starbucks coffee every couple of days. So I actually did started this when I was 22 years old in England, a poor student, not from a wealthy family. And I could afford that. So, yeah, we do have some wealthy members, but we have lots of people who are certainly not. It's really much less expensive than people realize.

Very interesting. Okay, well, what else do we want to know? You know, here's a question I have. How does someone know that they can trust Your organization to maintain them. I mean, you know, it's not just about, you know, whisking them out of the hospital when they are clinically declared dead and cooling the body and doing all of that important stuff. But I mean, you've got to maintain this facility. And by the way, where, where is the facility? Is it in Scottsdale, where the, where the bodies are?

It's in Scottsdale over any of the Scottsdale airport.

Uh huh. Okay. And so you've got to maintain this facility for decades, maybe centuries. You know, nothing lasts forever, not even Lehman Brothers, which was 158 year old company by the way.

Right. It's also a profit making company. We're not. It's an excellent question. I should say first of all that the Alcohol Life Extension foundation has been around for now for 41 years. So we have a pretty good track record. But yeah, how do you survive for decades is a question we spend a lot of time thinking about. First of all, we are a tax exempt nonprofit organization. And if you look around the world history, you know what the longest surviving organizations tend to be? Universities, the Catholic Church, nonprofit organizations. So that's the structure we use. We also have very importantly, when people pay us that say that 200,000 for a whole body procedure, 115,000 of that after we've paid the surgeons and done the procedures and done all the other things, all those expenses, 115,000 of that 200 goes into the patient care Trust fund. Now that's a separately managed fund, has its own board of directors that we don't control. And that money is used, the earnings on the money is used to pay for the perpetual upkeep of the patients, to pay for liquid nitrogen deliveries, the direct costs of maintaining patients in care. And the idea is that if we don't draw more than a couple of percent a year on that, that should not only last forever, but actually increase over time. So that 75, 80 years from now, however long, if it does become possible to have a go at bringing someone back to life, reviving them, then we'll have the funds available for that. So yeah, so we plan very long term, we think about these risks. We don't have risky investments because we know that if you try and put it all into stocks, you'll do really well in the long run, but you'd be run out in the meantime.

Oh, listen, you're talking to someone who thinks Wall Street's a total scam. So you're not going to get my agreement there. But we're very cautious we think about.

The long term in terms of securing our location. The physical security, financial security, the governance. You say, how can we be trusted? Well, people can come visit. We do tours twice a week, public tours. You can come see the facility, you can see the people here. You can see it's a real thing and has a long history. Our website has a huge amount of information that's been building up for the years, so pretty much all questions could be answered. You can see pictures and videos of what goes on here too.

Yeah, fascinating stuff, fascinating stuff. How many do you call them? Customers or patients or. I guess they got to be very patient, right?

They're pretty patient. We don't hear a lot of complaints in there. We have 117 patients, as we call them, because we've got still potential living people. 117. We have just short of a thousand members, that is people who've made full arrangements to be cryopreserved.

And there's 117 there. And tell us about the storage. I mean, what does it look like? What are the accommodations, if you will?

Well, if you go to the patient care bay, you'll see these very tall, 10ft tall steel cylinders called Dewars D, E, W, A, R, S and essentially very large thermos bottles, if you like, insulated layers so you can touch the outside and they don't feel cool. It's just like a thermos for your hot tea or soup. But inside we have 450 gallons of liquid nitrogen and four whole body patients will fit in one of these very large containers. And we simply top that up once a week with liquid nitrogen. We could actually go for probably six months with no deliveries and we'd still manage, which is highly unlikely because it's pretty hard to cut off liquid nitrogen supply. It's used quite commonly, so it's a passive process. One of those misconceptions is people say, what if the power goes out? And I always laugh at that because, like, oh, well, thank you so much. I never thought of that. After over 41 minutes, we don't actually use electricity. It's just a passive process of boiling off at minus 196 degrees C. So we only use electricity for alarm systems and other things that we can do without.

Have you had any, you know, vandalism or threats of it or. I, I would assume there would be a contingent of people out there that might just be, you know, kind of crazy. Then there might be another contingent of people who, you know, believe you're playing God or, you know, there, there have got to be people that are critics of this.

Oh, yeah, we have some pretty harsh critics. We got a couple of. Had a couple of waves of them in the past when we've been accused of pretty awful things that we didn't do. And we've had a couple of legal cases that we've won. You know, people will believe some bad things sometimes, and we've had some very nasty threats, but we haven't actually really experienced that kind of trouble. We do take it very seriously, obviously, and plan for that constantly upgrading our security. But surprisingly, you know, most people just dismiss it, don't understand it, don't really know how it works, and kind of make fun of it until they actually know more about it. But we don't really get, except for these unusual episodes, not a lot of real hostility. But if we're going to be around for 100 years, we have to anticipate that that could happen. So we have plans for that. Sure.

Sure. Makes a lot of sense. Well, anything else? Give out your website and just any closing remarks. Anything else people might want to know that I didn't ask?

Okay. Yeah. Our website for the Alcor foundation is just alcor.org, a l c o r.org and if viewers are interested in this, they can write to us and we'll be happy to get them on the subscription list to our magazine. We have a very informative monthly magazine which will be free, and there's just a tremendous amount of information. Our FAC essentially answers every question anybody's ever thought about for several decades. Really, this process, I'd like to emphasize we're not reversing death here because our view, these people are not really dead any more than someone in a deep coma who's potentially recoverable. This is really an extension of emergency medicine, and I really believe that in a couple of decades, it's going to be gradual. This will eventually become mainstream. If you go to hospitals that do organ donation, for instance, a lot of what they do is very similar to our initial processes, where they start calling patients, giving them various kind of medications, extending the life of their organs. It's really quite similar. So I think this will gradually become mainstream and is, in fact, becoming more and more accepted. When we deal with medical professionals, they understand this a lot better now. So I think this is the future. Not too long from now, people will look back on our time and say, were those people crazy? They were burying and burning their loved ones when they could have cryopreserved them and given them a chance. That's a chance, but it's a shot at least. We don't know for sure it will work.

Yeah. Right, right, right. Well, there's the old saying, Max. No prophet is ever revered in his own time. Right. No.

Hopefully we can be coming in the future time as well. Maybe we can get past that.

We'll be back. Absolutely. Well, this is very fascinating. Keep doing what do. It's quite fascinating, and I think that's a really interesting way to look at it as just another part of emergency medicine. All you're doing is stabilizing the patient, if you will, until something can be found to help them in the future. Right. That's a good way to look at it. That's Max Moore, Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The website is alcor.org and Max, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Jason. I appreciate the opportunity.

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