Cryonics with Dr Max More #10

Mm-hmm.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Max Moore. As some of you may already know, Max is considered to be the founder of modern transhumanism. A philosopher and futurist who writes extensively on technology and humanity. He's also currently Ambassador and President Emeritus at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, having served almost 10 years as President and CEO there, and having been its 67th member. His 1995 University of Southern California doctoral dissertation, The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, and Transformation, examines several issues that concern transhumanists, including the nature of death. He's the co-editor of The Transhumanist Reader, and he's written many articles on transhumanism and extropianism, including the 1990 essay, "Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy," in which he introduced the term transhumanism in its modern sense. In this conversation, we start on the topic of cryonics, and Max gives a great summary of both the technology and the philosophy that's involved. And I challenge you to listen to that and remain convinced that life and death are truly binary concepts.

It's more the case, perhaps, that we need a new criteria for death.

It covers the technicalities around neuro-preservation, issues of legal identity upon reanimation, and Alcor's approach to rehabilitation. We discuss misunderstandings and misinformation that surround transhumanism, and endeavor to make the distinction between transhumanism and technocracy, with Max making it very clear that the two are in complete opposition. Transhumanism being a philosophy more concerned with preserving our humanity, our autonomy, and with individual potential. The wrongheadedness of the population bomb, climate catastrophism, and the fashionability of long-termism also get a look in. So, buckle up and tune in to the world's foremost expert on transhumanism, Dr. Max Moore.

So, welcome, Max. Thank you for joining me on The Future of You. I wondered if we might talk a little bit about transhumanism, but also specifically about, um, cryonics in this time we've got together. I think people are really fascinated by it. And somehow I think like the kind of media, the mainstream media have sort of caught up with it now. And I'm not sure whether they're on board or not with it. I wonder if you could just outline for people what it is and maybe clear up some of the definitions around cryonics and what's the right language to use and just tell us a little bit. About the, the process.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the show, Tracey. Really appreciate it. I think the kind of area of topics you talk about is extremely interesting to me, so that's really good. So yeah, cryonics is kind of obviously a main interest of mine, has been for several decades, uh, because to me it is a way of surviving into the future. Um, as I argued quite recently at our conference, uh, you know, 30 years ago I was pretty optimistic that life extension science would advance far enough that by this time we would be making, you know, real gains in lifespan. But unfortunately, that hasn't happened. So at this point, I think it's highly likely that at my age of 58, I am not going to make it to a time when we have conquered aging. So I think that cryonics is really a kind of a bridge to that point. It's the only chance of getting there. So the basic idea of cryonics, which, yeah, probably the very basic idea that it's the preservation of human beings at extremely cold temperatures with the hope and expectation that more advanced technology in the future can repair the damage, reverse the aging process, and let people carry on living. So that's the core idea. And the way I think of it is it's essentially an extension of emergency medicine. If you think about, say, going back to before 1960, if you were walking around with a bunch of other people and someone stopped breathing, they just keeled over and you check, there's no heartbeat, no respiration. Back then we would have said, oh, this person's dead, and we would just give up on them. Today we don't do that. We say, oh, this person needs rescue, needs resuscitation. We're going to do CPR, defibrillation, And many times we can bring them back from what was considered dead in the past. So our view in cryonics is that when someone is declared dead today, what that really means is the doctor doesn't know what else to do to help the person. They've kind of reached the limits. And even that's not necessarily true. People are declared legally dead even if they could actually be revived. But they may have a do not resuscitate order because they know what's the point? You're going to be miserable and then you're going to die again, you know, a few minutes or hours later. So it's not this clear line that people think of life and death. It's not at all that clear. Which should be obvious as well from the fact that we donate organs. You know, the person is considered dead, but the organs are still vital and can keep someone else alive. So our, our thought really is when we say someone is legally dead today, or declared clinically dead, well, clinical death is just respiration and heartbeat stopping. We can reverse that. Legal death is basically the doctor saying, okay, I don't know what else to do for this person. I can maybe revive them for a while, but let's just draw the line here and give up on them. So what it's really saying is, given the level of technology and skill that we have today, there's nothing more they can do for the person. And our point is, well, okay, but the future can do a lot more than, than you can today, just as we can do things we couldn't in 1955. So why not put that person in an unchanging state, uh, take them decades into the future where there's a good chance that we could fix their problem and the aging process itself? So why would you not do that? It seems kind of insane to me that we would just dispose of the person, throw them into the ground to be eaten by worms and bacteria, or incinerate them when we could actually give them a chance of coming back. And so that's basically our view. It's, it's being called medical time travel in a sense, because it's not time travel in the science fiction sense, but one day at a time you're stopping the person getting worse. And so from the outside, or from their point of view, no time is passing biologically. There's no biochemical activity, and you can wait for as long as it takes, even a century or more, and there'll be no degeneration. So if you can get someone cryopreserved well enough that they retain the essential structures in the brain, which I think there's good evidence that we can, —not that we always do, but that we can—then it just makes sense to give that person a chance at living again in the future.

Well, I remember when I was doing philosophy, like, end of 1980s, beginning of the 1990s, we were talking about whether brainstem was the point at which you, you know, agree that somebody is dead or alive. And that had shifted on, as you say, from what we'd understood for decades. So Do you think this will become the standard almost for whether somebody is dead or alive or in a liminal state of some description that can, you know, they can go on to be preserved?

Yeah, we keep changing the criteria for death. You know, as I said before, until the '60s or so, just cessation of breathing and heartbeat was considered dead. Now we have different criteria. We can use We can use that criteria with the idea that we can't reverse it today, or we can use brain death criteria, or we can use neocortical death criteria for all kinds of different possibilities. From a cryonics point of view, we're a little bit cautious about some of these because if you require that someone be considered brain dead before they're released, that's a really bad thing for us because we don't want them to be brain dead. We want to preserve the brain, and having someone on a ventilator for a long period of time when there's no blood flow is just a disaster because it's going to destroy your brain. So, uh, in some sense, although the, the standard criteria is sort of primitive in a way, it's actually good for cryonics because the person can be released while the brain is still intact. So some interesting considerations there. So yeah, I think eventually the view of death that we have in cryonics will become more widespread, and that view is sometimes called the information theoretic view. This is kind of a fancy term for what I think is a fairly, fairly simple idea. The basic idea is that You're not truly dead, you know, if by dead we mean truly irreversibly gone, not just non-functioning, because often we can bring back function. But if it's irreversibly gone, you're not really totally gone unless the brain structure that embodies your memories and personality has been destroyed or beyond the point at which any future technology could bring it back. And I have to make the second point that, you know, is any future technology is very important because just because we can't bring it back today doesn't mean we can't tomorrow. Obviously we'll have better capabilities. So you just need enough left that you can repair it and bring it back. So there could actually be a lot of damage that, you know, there's no way we could fix today. There could be damage to the cell membranes, a lot of things wrong, but so long as we can envision technology that doesn't break physical laws, uh, we should have one day be able to repair cell membranes and other things. So if you've been vaporized or turned into ash, there's no way we could ever bring you back. But short of that, it's not too clear how much damage you should— you could sustain. Um, now we know that we can actually culture living neurons after a couple days of actual death. What we consider death. So the brain doesn't just dissolve right away, and this idea that after 3 to 5 minutes without oxygen your brain is just dead is actually highly misleading. That really depends on not supporting the brain with the right methods, you know, not cooling it down properly, restarting the brain with warm blood flow which causes a cascade of damage from reperfusion injury. So those kind of things we can tackle, and even in mainstream medicine that's being done. So I think people eventually caught on to the idea that what is really, really dead It's really when you've destroyed the structure, not the function. The function can stop. You can put someone into basically a coma with no metabolism. That's really what you're doing with cryonics. And if there's potential to someday restart that, you can't be considered dead. Now, it's confusing to people because they say, well, the person's not alive, surely. That's correct. They're not alive. They're not functioning, not metabolizing. So they say, well, they're not alive. They must be dead. Well, no, it doesn't mean that there's only two categories here. If we have daytime, we have nighttime, it doesn't mean there isn't twilight. There are, you know, Things shade into one another. So really what we're doing is we're putting life on pause. It's like hitting the pause button. We stop life processes, we stop the degeneration, and at some point maybe you can restart that. So clearly the person isn't alive and living today, but that doesn't mean that they're dead. They're kind of in this awkward in-between state that people have a hard time wrapping their minds around.

Yeah, definitely. So who is it that kind of facilitates this? How do you train people and how do they turn up to kind of look after someone who might be in this state and make some of these, I guess, quite important decisions. Are they the decision makers, in fact? Who, who makes the decision about whether someone's in a state that can be taken to Alcor for the rest of this process?

Well, the, the member makes that decision. So, you know, someone has to make these arrangements perfectly well in advance. We don't like taking cases last minute. We rarely can do that for all kinds of reasons. So people usually sign up for years or decades for this. And we try to track members we know who have major health problems. And ideally, we want to be there at the bedside when legal death is declared. And we can't always do that, of course, because there are unexpected situations. And if we can get there reasonably quickly, that's okay. But we'd rather be at the bedside so that we can begin, you know, within seconds or within a minute of legal death being declared. So there's very, very little delay. Now, as to, you know, whether we proceed, depending on, you know, has the person been lying there for an hour or a day or 2 days at room temperature, that's pretty bad. We don't decide whether to help the person or not. That's up to the member. They specify that in their agreement with us. They can say, if you don't find me within 6 hours at room temperature, don't bother, or do whatever you can no matter what, which is what most people choose because we don't know exactly where to draw the line. We don't know how far is too far. So we don't decide that, the member decides that. Of course, we have to decide when to send a team out at the bedside because it's expensive, obviously, sending a whole team across the country with a surgeon and a bunch of other people. So we can't just do that whenever someone's feeling, you know, a little bit headachy. We have to know that it's highly likely the person is going to go in the next few days. But we have what is called the standby team, where we send the team to the patient's location and literally stand by and wait. And that can be hours, it can be days. We've done as long as 3 weeks, which is obviously quite grueling. But the idea is we'll be there at the best time, we'll be there and ready to begin the procedure as soon as we're allowed to, which legally means we have to wait for legal death to be declared. Which is not ideal. Ironically, we can do a better job for animals, for pets. We can actually begin the process while they're still, you know, biologically alive. We can anesthetize the, you know, the cat or dog. We can begin the process in a way that we couldn't with humans because it would be considered illegal, which is kind of ironic because at some point you'd be stopping the heart, which would be considered homicide, even though the goal is actually the opposite. So legally, we have to wait for legal death to be declared before we begin. And again, the faster we can begin the procedure, the better, but If it takes a few hours to get there, especially if they've been cooled, which they often are in hospitals in the morning, that's probably fine. And we can kind of measure the outcome by doing CT scans, which is something I introduced about 10 or 11 years ago at Alcor. We discovered that we can actually do CT scans of our neuro patients, our brain-only patients, in liquid nitrogen, and we can actually see how well we've protected the brain against freezing injury. This is what we call perfusion, cryoprotectant perfusion, where we've replaced as much blood and other fluids in the body, especially the brain, as we can with this solution, the cryoprotectant solution, which you can think of as a sort of a medical-grade antifreeze, something designed for human beings, actually designed to reversibly cryopreserve human organs for transplant. This is what the research purpose is, and we actually licensed the best solution for that. And so once you do that, you can actually do a CT scan and you can tell from the electron densities, is this frozen blood, is this ice, is this brain tissue, is it tumor, what's going on? So we can actually tell that in some cases it looks really good, that we've essentially eliminated any ice formation, which is great. In other cases, not so good. Now, even if ice has formed, it doesn't mean that there's no hope of bringing the person back. There's a big misconception that I see all the time. It's very frustrating. People who know better, even cryobiologists who I know know better, will say, well, you know, ice just— it's kind of like a freezer burn. It's like having a strawberry in a freezer too long. It's all squishy and you've destroyed everything. That's completely untrue, and they know that. They're basically being dishonest because they know that we can cryopreserve all kinds of tissues that are not mush. I mean, if that was true, there wouldn't be, you know, a million people walking around today who were cryopreserved as embryos. You know, we cryopreserve embryos and we implant them and grow them up. There wouldn't be cryopreserved corneas and heart valves and skin and other tissues. There wouldn't be much. So that can't be true, and in fact it isn't. The common story is ice forms inside the cells and expands and then kind of blows them up. That's completely a false picture. Even if we don't provide cryoprotection for an ice formation, what happens is the cells will dehydrate and the ice will form between the cells, not inside them. And yes, it'll do some damage, although most of it's not from the ice directly, it's actually from the concentration of the chemicals in the cells as it gets more concentrated. So it doesn't, it doesn't blow up the cells or destroy them. So they're still there and still potentially repairable in the future by, you know, some kind of perhaps nanotechnology or something like that.

And is it completely the same process if somebody wants to be preserved just in terms of their brain, or their brain and their body? What is the difference, or maybe there isn't a difference in the process?

There's very little difference. So, um, yeah, just so for some context for that, about half of Alcor's members have chosen just to preserve the brain, although in practice it's the brain within the skull because it's actually very difficult to remove the brain without damaging it from the skull. So we leave it in there, it's a natural protective box. But the idea is that the kind of technology we will need to reverse whatever killed you in the first place, in today's sense, to reverse the aging process and to reverse any damage done by this, by the cryonics process, will be so advanced that regrowing a body by comparison will be pretty trivial. I mean, we're already starting to grow, you know, parts of bodies now. We can grow proto-organs out of stem cells, and it's no longer considered science fiction to think about regenerating limbs. It's a matter of figuring out the right genetic triggers, because humans are terrible at regenerating stuff. You know, some animals can grow half their body back or whole limbs. We're really lousy. You know, as an embryo, you can actually grow back quite a bit, but then we lose that ability, and all we can really regrow as adults is maybe a bit of our liver and maybe the tip of our finger. We're just very bad at it. But that doesn't mean that we can't change those genetic triggers and at some point actually regrow the body. Some people might think, oh, you've got to clone a body and put the brain into that body. Well, that's maybe a possibility, but I think it's not so plausible. I think you'd actually support the brain in a special medium and then grow the body, you know, tell the cells to dedifferentiate, to grow out, to differentiate into the right kind of cells, just like we got here in the first place. I mean, you think about the magic of being trillions of cells grown from a single fertilized cell. Pretty incredible. It sounds like impossible, but that's how we get here. So if nature can do it, we can do it. It's a matter of learning those tricks. So that's the basic idea of the neuro option. The process is pretty much the same. Usually we'll start with the whole patient. It depends a little bit on the situation. But let's say it's a patient that's in the USA, not too far from us, we will generally bring them back in our vehicle or on a plane to the operating room. So whether it's whole body or neuro, we'll start pretty much the same. But then at some point we'll do a separation of the, of the skull from the rest of the body. Some people say, well, you're removing the head. Well, that's the wrong way around, actually. We're removing the body because it's the head we want to keep. So at that point, we will do— instead of going through the chest as we would for a whole body patient to replace the blood, you know, with our pumps and perfusion equipment, we'll instead use the carotid blood vessels in the neck. But other than that, it's really the same process. We're going to, over a period of about 4 hours or so, we're going to gradually remove the blood and increase the concentration of this cryoprotectant solution. You can't just throw it in there at full concentration when you're still fairly warm because it'd be quite toxic. So you have to do that under computer control, gradually ramp it up over several hours. And at the end of that point, you're basically going from just above freezing to just below freezing, having protected the cells against ice formation. And then you can plunge the temperature very rapidly. We've gone to about -90°C, -100°C very quickly. And then we slow down a little bit because basically you become a big lump of solid at that point, and if you go down too quickly, you might cause some thermal stresses and fracturing, which you want to avoid obviously. So it takes us actually a couple more days to reach -320°F or -196°C, and at that temperature you're not changing at all. Basically everything is fixed in place. You've been vitrified, as we say, not frozen, vitrified from the Latin word for glass. Essentially cryoprotection solution, as it cools, becomes more and more viscous and just holds everything in place. So there's no, no internal structure of ice crystals. So at that point, there's zero metabolism. You know, movies like Vanilla Sky, where you have a lucid dreaming option— sorry, not possible. There's no mental activity whatsoever. There's no brain activity. So that's clearly impossible. Or other kind of fantasies we see in science fiction. So to you, it Assuming this works, you'll wake up one day and you'll say, when is it? And, you know, they'll tell you it's 2097 or whatever. And to you, no time will have passed. The last thing you knew is you're in miserable condition in a hospital bed, dying and looking pretty awful. And now you look really good. You look in the mirror, you've been de-aged, you're looking fantastic, you feel great, and you don't notice the passage of time.

Do you anticipate that all of our memories will be preserved, or some of them, or most of them? Or our cognitive abilities? I mean, do you think this is like foolproof, full preservation, or will some things have degraded? It really depends on the circumstances.

That's why I always try to emphasize that, you know, I can describe an ideal situation. You know, we're at the bedside. Even better actually is where we can use the death with dignity laws. And we can actually— someone— this happened twice now— someone could call us up and say, I want to go on this specific date. And we can book a date with them, we can be there at the bedside with no, you know, no worry about airline schedules and that kind of thing. We begin with no delay if the patient has a good vascular system, there's no blockage, we can get the cryoprotectant in. It really depends though, because in some cases there's a delay, we don't know about the case until some time later, we have to get there as quick as we can. The patient may have really bad blood vessels, in which case we may not be able to fully cryoprotect the brain. They may have an aneurysm, in which case there's going to be, you know, some problems with blood flow. There's all kinds of things that you have to take into consideration. So in ideal cases, or something close to ideal, I think you will actually retain pretty much all your memories as far as we can tell. And there's a study that will be coming out actually any day now, I think, by Dr. Gregory Fay on one cryonics patient we did, kind of a special case where we took brain samples and did various kinds of testing on them, electron microscope studies and various other testing. And his results show that actually we've preserved the neural structures extremely well. It really looks like all the structures necessary for memory are preserved in that case. So I think all you'd lose in that case are short-term memories, just as you would under general anesthesia. You know, short-term memories are electrochemical activity in the brain. They're not preserved in structural changes, and so you will lose those just as you would in that kind of surgery. But that's kind of pretty trivial stuff and probably memories you don't really want because they're not going to be very happy memories the last half an hour or so. But apart from that, long-term memories are all encoded in actual changes in the physical structure of the brain. And under good conditions, it looks like we are preserving those. But yes, there will be cases where conditions were not ideal, and you can have some losses, presumably. Now, it may be that you can infer a lot of what was, you know, damaged from what remains, and possibly it could be fully intact, but it may be that you'll lose some stuff. Now, to me, that's not— it depends on what stuff I'm losing, right? I mean, I don't actually care about a lot of my memories because I have pretty lousy memory anyway, and I forget a lot of stuff. And that's not really me. I think what's me is my values and personality and those basic characteristics, which as far as I can tell, probably not particularly local. I think they're probably fairly distributed in the brain, and so hopefully those will survive. But yeah, you could lose some memories, that's possible. Some people like to back up as much information about themselves as they can in terms of photographs and videos and personal information, because you can imagine that, you know, deep learning AI in the future might be able to interpolate all that information to reconstruct some of those missing memories or traits. So it's not a sure thing. It really depends on the circumstances. And one of the most important things for us is to minimize those delays and get you cryopreserved as well as possible. We are not an organization whose philosophy is that it doesn't really matter. We'll just, you know, just check you in there quickly and our friends in the future will fix everything. No, that's not a responsible position because there's going to be damage and we have to minimize that on our end. And, you know, that's why it does cost a certain amount of money. There are a lot of procedures we have to put in place. To get you cryopreserved as effectively as possible.

When people sign up for this, are there any disqualifications? I was thinking about, you know, a dementia patient, for example. Maybe you say to me, well, the vascular damage or the neurological damage is just— is too profound to take on somebody like that as a patient. But what I was thinking was, actually, perversely, they're the sort of people that potentially you would want to preserve so that once they can be reanimated in the future, there might be the sort of medical solutions to some of the problems they've got in terms of the way in which their brain's working, or they've lost memory. Where do you stand on, you know, somebody with dementia? Maybe they can't even be said to make the decision to sign up themselves. Perhaps that's an issue.

Well, that's why they should sign up well beforehand, right, before they get into dementia. I mean, if someone contacts us and they're already suffering from dementia, then we would not go through with that because they can't make informed consent. And we have this issue because we do have family members calling and saying, you know, I need to get Uncle Bob frozen or whatever. And we say, well, okay, we need to know a few things. We need to know, for instance, that they would want to do this. Do you have any evidence that they'd actually want to be cryopreserved? So we need to have that kind of thing. I did have a case where someone who's a very, let me say, overbearing personality insisted that we cryopreserve her mother and showed me that she wanted to do this. Well, I actually met with the family, her and her brother and her mother. When I was traveling to another state, and I asked her, do you want this? And she said, no, I don't want to be cryopreserved. And yet the daughter tried to tell me that she didn't really mean that, and then, or she changed her mind since I talked to her. And I said, okay, great, send me a video of her telling me that. And of course she didn't. Well, we're not going to do something against someone's wishes, even if we think that they're mistaken and they're losing their chance. We're not going to force anybody to do this. So in dementia cases, it's not really a problem if you've already made the arrangements ahead of time. You say, you know, I want to do this. When someone has dementia, you don't— if they change their mind about something, you don't really take that seriously because they've lost the ability to reason. So that's not so much of a problem. The issue really is, are you going to be able to repair that person in the future? And I think, you know, we should be very careful about saying something is hopeless when we don't fully understand it. For instance, with Alzheimer's, which is just one form of dementia but a pretty common one, it seems that there is some evidence that you're not really losing memories you're— the brain's losing the capacity to access those memories, which kind of explains why a lot of people say, I went to see my relative and, you know, today they recognized me, just the day before they didn't. It goes in and out. It's not the memories have gone, it's that you're having trouble accessing them. Now, I don't know if that's going to be true of other forms of dementia, but there's actually, you know, some other direct evidence for that too, for Alzheimer's. So, um, certainly, you know, I wouldn't want to give up on somebody. I wouldn't say in my own paperwork, don't bother cryopreserving me if I get Alzheimer's. Certainly not. I think there's a decent chance I could be brought back.

Yeah, I think there's massive potential for that. If we can't, you know, make the medical advancements in this lifetime, you know, maybe we can make them in the next, in a way. But I wanted to ask you as well about this idea of identity, and you talked about legal death. I wanted to ask you about legal identity, because when I was first researching this a few years back, I was under the impression— and I don't know if the law's changed now— that once somebody is taken into this process, they're considered human remains legally. I mean, I know that's not the way you've just— you've talked about it, and I understand that. But if that is the case, then what happened? They get a death certificate, presumably, or don't they, if they go to somewhere like Alcor? Because one of the things, you know, I was discussing with somebody and thinking about was, what is your identity when you're reanimated? Are you the same person with the same name? Or do you take on a new identity? How does it work, almost very boringly but administratively?

Yeah, no, it's actually an interesting question. There's a lot of interesting ramifications. So legally, exactly as you said, legally you're considered to be dead and you get death certificate issued, and the status of you is considered in the eyes of the law, basically you're donating yourself as a medical experiment. So, you know, in the case of the cryonics organizations, essentially we own you, we own your ass, we can say legally, let's consider you've donated yourself as an experiment. Of course, that's not the way we view the patients, and we call them patients because that's what they are. We consider them as potential people who can be brought back in the future. It's very much like maintaining someone in a long-term coma. So in our eyes, they are the potential people, but in the eyes of the law, they're not. Now, that may change in the future if people start to understand what we're doing better, and that finally gets through to the lawmakers, which is going to take a long time. They may realize that we have to have a different status for them. Not too different again from people in long-term comas. You can't just go in there and hack off their arm or rifle their pockets for something. I mean, they still have rights. Obviously, they can't enter into contracts and that kind of thing, but they still have basic rights. And I think at some point we will recognize this separate category of this kind of third state, not life, not death, but potential. And those people will be accorded rights and the choices they made before they went into that condition will be taken seriously. So our members do make their wishes known in their paperwork. They can say, they can express their preferences, which obviously we can't enforce legally because they don't have legal status, but hopefully in the future they will. They can say, you know, don't bring me back until you bring back my spouse or my parents, or they can set some terms and we'll do our best to honor those things. But I think at some point they will have to be given some kind of legal status. Now, there is actually, there is some precedent for this because there are people, of course, not just in soap operas who die and then come back, but in real life, people are declared legally dead because they haven't, you know, lost at sea or disappeared for a decade. And then they turn up again. And what happens? They've been declared dead. Now they have to get back their Social Security number and their identity. And there is a way of doing that, that there is actually a process already in place for that. But it's interesting, we have an attorney who works on trusts. These are asset preservation trusts where members can actually put funds into a trust and it's held in trust for them until hopefully they come back and then they can claim that money. So one of the questions that he, our attorney, Tony considered was, should we assume they will be legally the same person, or should they have a new legal identity if they return? And I always just assumed, well, that they'll just get their legal identity back. But he said, well, there's actually some good practical reasons why you should have a new legal identity, even if you're philosophically the same individual. I mean, consider, for instance, an insurance payout. They paid out life insurance because you're dead. Well, if now suddenly you're not dead, do you have to pay that back? Well, I don't think that will be a reasonable interpretation based on the years of payment and so on. But it might be, he argues, that there's actually a case for giving you a new legal identity. Now, as long as we can separate that idea from philosophical identity, I don't think that's really a big issue.

Yeah, because I was thinking, you know, a legal identity these days has a sort of nationality attached. But let's say by the time we come back, there is no nationality, or we're an interplanetary species or something. And then all the kind of, you know, what we're now faced with on dropdown menus when we have to do a piece of online paperwork, it probably won't exist. It'll be completely different. It's very difficult to project project out and imagine what those might be. Yeah, that's one of the interesting conundrums, I think, about legal identity, whether you will come back as Max Moore or you'll be Max Moore 2.0, or you'll be somebody else not quite Max Moore.

I don't know. And how many genders will I have to choose from then? I mean, it's already getting complex enough now. So there's another issue of legal identity, right? It used to be just male or female. Now there's other legal identities being given. As you say, nationality might be completely irrelevant by the time I come back. Maybe the way things are going, there probably won't be United States of America, and hopefully I won't be here. I'd rather be off in some new in space that is starting fresh. But, you know, it's also important to recognize that for Alcor, a core part of its mission statement, you can see it on the website at alcor.org, it's part of our mission to help to bring you back, not just to push you out the door when we revive you and say good luck. It's actually our job to rehabilitate you. Again, the long-term coma idea is a good example. You don't just wake them up and push them out the hospital, right? You've got to retrain them, catch them up on how to use these fancy new smartphones and all this kind of stuff. You may have electric cars and you have these little devices that do all this stuff. You'd have to train people, obviously, to catch up with the future. And I think there'll probably be new tools for doing so. There'll be probably very immersive virtual reality where you can learn a lot of stuff without having to go into the physical world until you're ready. You know, we already have Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri. You can imagine the future versions of those where you come out and you're puzzled about how things work in the future. You just ask and you get a very detailed explanation and guidance. So I think we have a lot of ways of catching you up, but that is part of the job, is to bring you back and rehabilitate you as well.

I wonder if there's some merit in creating a digital twin of yourself that can be updated over time, because this is one of the— so that when you are reanimated, you've got a kind of an updated version of yourself in an immersive or a virtual reality. So, you know, it's kind of— it's you of the future. But digitally, because this is one of the problems we always face, isn't it? It's always the formats. It's never really the content. It's the format that we record information on that goes out of date and out of fashion or even becomes obsolete by the time we want to use some of the content again. And it's very difficult to know how to store it.

Yeah, quite a few of our members do store a lot of digital information. And actually some of our members like Martine Rothbard actually offers a service for that where you can create kind of a digital twin in a sense. I don't think that's you. I don't think there's enough there to be, in a sense, you, but it could be very valuable information to repair any damage and to remind yourself. The format issue is a real problem. I was just in working on the collection of works I was trying to work on recently that I want to get published. I was trying to go back to the 1980s and look at some stuff I wrote back then, and Word was refusing to open the files, even if they were early versions of Word. It's a real issue. I mean, you can do it, but it takes some work. You have to find someone who's really good at that. And the physical format can be an issue when you're talking about possibly a century or something like that. We've recommended using M-Discs or Millennium Discs, which are kind of a special form of CD-ROM or DVD that have been tested, put in ovens and frozen, and they're built to very high standards where they can actually— highly likely to last for like 1,000 years. So they're pretty good. There's also an online service called— I think it's called Forever, forever.com perhaps. It's basically like a cloud storage for all your information where you pay one fee that's intended to last indefinitely, very much like our Patient Care Trust Fund. So you can store all your photos and digital memories in there, and, you know, if the organization keeps going, those will be available in the future. So that can certainly be a valuable backup and help to reassure you you won't lose a lot of stuff.

So you've brought me around to thinking about reanimation and what our rights will be. I mean, potentially we could end up coming back into a world which is you know, all right, this is a lazy trope, but run by robots or where robots are in charge or— I think, because I'm quite pro this, but I mean, I'll tell you what my worry is personally. It's a trust-based issue. I'm not worried about the company that I have a contract with or whatever. I'm worried about the government. I'm worried actually that the government will come along and just kind of eradicate this possibility or potentially bring in some regulations that we wouldn't have anticipated, or I don't know what it is, it's difficult to imagine, but I can imagine the government doing something that basically eradicates my personal autonomy. And my nightmare scenario, honestly, is coming back or being reanimated into a world where I have literally zero personal autonomy. Is there anything— I know there are no guarantees in this life or whatever life, But do people worry about that, or is it just me, or are there any mitigating circumstances around this?

You're saying governments might cause some trouble? What? They never do that. No, that's actually my biggest source of concern too. Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the big concerns, of course, is the organization going to survive long enough to bring you back? And that's something we spend a lot of time thinking about. And I've actually wrote a two-part article on this for Cryonics Magazine, looking at the history of organizations and how long they last, and noting that, you know, most for-profits don't tend to last that long, but except in Japan, there's a lot of interesting Counterexample is one going for 1,400 years or so. But generally, it's religious organizations, educational organizations. I went to Oxford, which is the second oldest university in the world. It's been around for like half a millennium. And, you know, Alcor has been around for 50 years now, and it is modeled on a nonprofit basis, which is good for long-term thinking and long-term planning, at least for patient storage. But that's one of the big issues. But yeah, I worry about government too, because I think governments are highly destructive and not very respectful of people's autonomy. But there's no way you can foresee, of course, what things will be like 50 or 100 years from now. We really have no idea. Anybody who makes forecasts is bound to be wrong. That's my only forecast is, forecasts will be wrong. So I can't guarantee anything. But my general perspective is that I'm fairly optimistic because, first of all, if the world is really lousy when I could be brought back, they won't bring me back. Either we'll be too poor, having ruined our economy or the environment or whatever, that I won't be brought back, so I wouldn't have to deal with that. Any, basically any society which I can be brought back in will probably be decent and worth living in. And why would I think that? Well, because of the long trajectory of human history, things tend to get better over time. And there's obviously, it goes backwards for periods of time like under Stalin and Hitler and things like that. But in general, if you look at the main measures of human well-being and freedom and health and longevity, it gets better over the years. I like to ask people, say, I wouldn't want to live in the future, Well, is there any time in the past you prefer to live? And really think about it. Do you want to go back to a time when women didn't have the vote? They were basically property of their husbands. Do you want to go back to when we had slavery? When we couldn't have any kind of painkillers or antiseptics? I mean, people don't realize how horrific history was. If you read the stuff, I mean, it's always sanitized in films.

They romanticize it, don't they?

Yeah. You don't see like, you know, Louis XIV in France, one of the wealthiest kings with his grand Versailles Palace. People don't tell you that people, they went to the bathroom inside the palace on the floor. There were no toilets. People don't realize that. People, you know, I mean, I get into a lot of disgusting details. The past was not a nice place. So over time, yes, humans cause problems, but we also solve more than we create. So life has gotten better over time. So this is always possible. We could completely disastrously screw that up. But in general, I think a world in the future where I'm brought back, we have that technology and willingness. I think it's unlikely it will be a bad place. First of all, some people say, oh, you'll be brought back as a slave. Well, really? Is that really economically sensible that you're going to go to intensive repair process to bring back a slave who's out of date? That doesn't make any sense because machines will be doing stuff, right? They're already getting better than humans at most things. So that doesn't make any sense. So I think if I'm brought back, the society is able to, it's got high technology and has the willingness to do so, it's probably going to be a decent place. But yeah, there are all kinds of unknowns. And like you, I worry about what governments will do because they're incredibly stupid and, you know, run by corrupt interests. So some people run around saying, oh, we need to get cryonics regulated. And I'm kind of scratching my head. Are you really sure you want to be regulated by bureaucrats who don't know what the hell they're doing? You know, that's very disturbing. If by regulation you mean simply protection of the law, then fine. But if you mean putting bureaucrats in charge of how we do things and No, no, thank you. That's not really a great idea.

I always find that regulation only serves those who already have the wealth or the assets or the vested interests. It tends to cut off innovation and stop any interesting experimentation. And it's protectionist, I think. Enforces the status quo.

Yeah. The idea of regulation is supposed to protect people, but it does the opposite. It just entrenches the existing interests.

Yeah. Which is what's happening now. Anyway. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. When I was thinking about questions I wanted to ask you about rights, I was thinking, I wonder if there's a right that isn't like a personal right, there's like a citizen's right. I wonder if we should have, you'll probably balk at this, it's a terrible idea, but I wonder if we should have a citizen's right that world leaders should be preserved. Because at the moment, we might see some declassified material in 30 years' time or 50 years' time, we might find out who shot JFK or whatever. We have to wait for the paperwork. It feels odd to me Now we're in this sort of mode of thinking, I'm wondering, I wonder if we should keep world leaders so that they can be reanimated and either tell us what exactly happened, or I don't know if they're guilty of war crimes or something, we could, you know, take retribution. I don't know, what do you think about the idea of like a national security rights, right? Or like a citizen's right to preserve some of our world leaders or people of interest.

Yeah, I can kind of see the appeal in principle. I think in practice it's probably going to be very problematic as to who makes those decisions. But in principle, I kind of like the idea of preserving world leaders so we can hold them accountable in the future, so they don't get to escape by dying from all the horrible things they did. That's kind of appealing to me. But I think, you know, I think in practice that might be quite difficult. Who's actually going to decide who we preserve and how and who pays for it? And I know there's a lot of tricky things there and preserving them against their will, you know, that itself to me is kind of morally problematic too. But I kind of like the idea in principle. Let's hold the bastards accountable in the future.

I don't want them to be able to escape. I think that's all it is, really. Tell me a little bit about what's happening around the world with cryonics and where do you think we might be? I know it's difficult to say, but where do you think we might be on the roadmap? Are we sort of one minute past one, or are we kind of halfway towards a a more sophisticated and normalized acceptance and usage of Quionics? Or where do you think we are, and how does it differ culturally and maybe politically and maybe even religiously across the world? Okay, that's a big question.

As to where we are in terms of progress, I think there's a couple of ways of looking at this. In one sense, we've made very little progress. There are still very, very few people. There's only maybe, you know, fewer than 3,000 people in the entire world signed up to be cryopreserved, which is pathetically small after decades of doing this. It's a— and the whole big question is, why aren't there far more people? After all, you can find clearly crazy ideas that attract far more people. So why is it when we have good scientific rationales for this, we get so few? And that's a whole topic I get into. So in that sense, we've made very little progress. But in another sense, we've made a fair bit of progress in the last few decades. In that although of course it's still not mainstream medicine, we see a lot better treatment when we go to hospitals. People have probably seen a science documentary on us, Discovery Channel or something, and they go, oh yeah, I've seen you guys and that's pretty interesting, can we watch? Which is very different than say 30 years ago where they would say, get out of my hospital. That would be the standard approach. So it, and also, you know, looking at how far we've come in terms of people to where we could be, could be misleading because I think it might be one of these things that could take off suddenly at a certain point.. There'll be an inflection point where it just suddenly grows a lot faster. Part of that would be a kind of a social resistance being overcome. Right now you probably don't know anybody, unless you're an unusual person, you don't know anybody else who's got arrangements to be cryopreserved. But once someone knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, it starts to be less strange, especially if some very well-known people do it. Then it starts to become more normal, something you can talk to your friends about without being considered too weird. So it's got to overcome some of those issues, as well as of course pushing buttons about life and death and having to think uncomfortable things. And the uncertainty is another big reason I think people don't do this, is that we're not offering certainty. It's not like a religion where we say, "Believe the right things, you'll go to heaven for your reward." No, we're saying, you know, "Go to this effort and trouble and some expense, and maybe it'll work." We're not guaranteeing anything, and people hate to hear that. They want certainty. So there may come a point where this does become a normal thing, and fairly quickly, and I can only hope that's the case. You know, look at the history of of anesthesia and antiseptic, and you see kind of interesting patterns. Those two cases are very different. In the case of anesthesia, it took off pretty rapidly once someone invented a way of stopping pain in surgery and so on, and in childbearing. Actually, I think Queen Victoria made a huge difference. She was the first— was it Queen Victoria? The first to use anesthesia, and once the Queen did it, it became very acceptable. There were actually serious arguments at the time that it was against God's will, women should suffer in child— bearing for the sins of Levi. That was a serious viewpoint. But when Queen Victoria did it, that kind of shut up. So it can change pretty quickly. But if you look at the history of antiseptic, it's very different than anesthesia. Anesthesia has obvious benefits, right? Because you're not feeling the horrible pain while they're sawing off your leg. The doctor doesn't have to hold you down while you're screaming at them. So there's very clear and immediate benefits. With antiseptic, you know, first of all, this guy said, oh, these invisible particles in the air that cause disease. And they all thought, thought he was crazy. So yeah, it took a while to establish the theory of that, and even when it was established, people didn't change their practice really for decades. Even today, they don't necessarily wash their hands properly. You know, people literally go to the bathroom and then eat with the same hands without washing them. They had no clue that was a bad thing. They thought it was, it was a miasma in the air. So that actually took a long time, decades and decades, before it became standard practice. Now, we'd hope that today things should spread more quickly, of course, with the internet and so on, And I think it's really, you know, some of the philosophical and social issues, the uncertainties, the oddness of the idea that's hard to overcome. But I'm hoping that, you know, sometime in the not too distant future this will become normal, and suddenly we'll look back on today and the past and think, what was wrong with people back then? They just threw away their loved ones, they disposed of them or destroyed them when they could have given them a chance. So I think from a future perspective, it'll seem kind of insane what we do today and what we're doing what we're trying to get people to do will seem like the normal, obvious thing that you do.

I was wondering whether it's the point at which people start to think about it, if they even do, that's not wrong, but misplaced or could be turned on its head. So for example, like when I was a kid, obviously you would be born and that week one of your parents would go out and not only sort of sign your birth certificate, they'd go and set up like a building society account and do a few little things like that. And I'm wondering if it's actually at the period of birth, where you should think about, here's an opt-in or an opt-out, thinking about cryonics for later in life, i.e., a sort of, not cradle to grave, but cradle beyond grave, and try to change people's perspectives. Especially if you're an IVF baby, for example, it kind of makes, philosophically and practically, it sort of makes more sense to me, and I wonder if people could envisage thinking about it at the beginning of life rather than the end of life.

Yeah, it's kind of funny you say IVF because it's kind of a nice symmetry to it, right? That's how you started as something cryopreserved, and that's how you're going to end up, at least in this kind of cycle. Yeah, we are actually— we do encourage families to sign up. So, you know, families who want to do this can sign up their minor children, and of course when they turn 18 they can decide for themselves whether or not they want to continue with this. But I think it's a great idea to get people thinking about it early on and to make the arrangements because things can happen. And making it more of a family thing I think also helps socially. That, you know, if it's just kind of a few weird individuals doing it, that's one thing. But if families are signing up, I think it kind of overcomes some of those social objections that it's just a few strange, weird people. If it's families doing it, it somehow becomes more friendly. Yeah, exactly.

It feels a bit perverse to me at the minute, the culture, because I'm seeing all the time adverts for cremation. I mean, they can't render you as ashes quick enough these days. I mean, the percentage of burials is going down. Cremations are going up. I watch these bizarre— ads with this kind of laughter and having a conversation about cremation over the breakfast table and lots of giggles and even the dog sort of barking in approval. It's so weird to me. And then also we've got this surge of, I would say, interest, or maybe it's even propaganda, around assisted dying. I've seen a lot of mainstream media talking about it, in the press in Canada. I was even, I think it was the Netherlands last week, that were talking about assisted dying even for babies. And now it seems to have widened to if you're in poverty or you're very, very depressed, then you can, you can choose to euthanise yourself. And that seems such a paradox to me that we're not able to, or the mainstream media aren't able to sort of embrace something like this more favourably, but they're very, very quick to sort of promote euthanasia, assisted dying, you know, to, um, I don't know if it's to do with people believing they need to reduce, reduce the population or what, but there's definitely a narrative at the moment. And for some reason this isn't treated in the same way, I don't think.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, I think some of it is based in sort of people's fear of population, which, you know, whole issue we can get into. I think it's a very mistaken idea. Um, I mean, there's the voluntary human extinction. Well, he was wrong, right?

Paul Elric was wrong, wasn't he? Yeah, he's totally wrong.

Yeah, we get into that. So actually, I've been writing a series of articles for Cryonics Magazine called Getting Better, where I actually, I spent a whole time whole article looking at Ehrlich and then another one looking at Limits to Growth and how badly wrong they are. And some people still holding on to that nonsense. But yeah, it's kind of curious that people are— you know, it's obviously, it's much easier to destroy people than to preserve them. I don't know, I mean, I agree that people should have the choice to do these things. I think it's horrible to be stuck with a painful degenerative disease where you're losing your mind and losing your body, you're in extreme pain and you're not allowed to terminate that. I think that's a terrible thing. And you should have the rights to do that. On the other hand, yeah, it's kind of concerning when people are pushing people, encouraging them to, uh, to die to make room for the— in the hospital beds, um, and you kind of be coerced into doing that. That's, that's kind of a worrying side of this, and we need to guard against that. But why would you be so keen on that but not on giving people the option to carry on living? It's, it's kind of bizarre, as you said.

It's so perverse, I think. Um, on that point, actually, let's widen that conversation to talk a little bit where, um, I mean, you are the obviously the founder of modern transhumanism. How would you characterize the state of transhumanism today? And again, the sort of approval or disapproval or prevailing narratives that now are around with transhumanism seems to have been coupled up with technocracy at the moment, and I think maybe unfairly so.

Well, I'm not sure if all your listeners will know what transhumanism is, so I'll try and kind of very brief brief definition of transhumanism. Essentially, it's an extension of Enlightenment humanism, which is all about using reason and science and goodwill to improve the human condition. Transhumanism goes a little bit further in realizing that the human condition is largely based in our genetic structure and our bodies and our physical structure, and to make some fundamental improvements, we're going to have to make changes in, in that structure. So for instance, aging and death is part of our human nature, but unlike humanists, we don't think we should just accept that. We think, you know, we should challenge that. Why just because that's been in nature, just like, you know, you could argue slavery was natural, we had it for so long, but that doesn't mean it was okay. You know, obviously viruses are natural and they kill us, that doesn't mean we just accept them. So why should we accept aging and death? Why should we accept, you know, mental disorders and lots of other issues? So transhumanism really is about the idea of implying, extending the Enlightenment ideals to say, how can we improve ourselves? But a very important part of that to me, and I've embodied this in the principle of morphological the idea that we should have the rights to decide who we become, you know, biologically, psychologically. Because you mentioned technocracy, that to me is very contrary to my understanding of transhumanism, because technocracy is really about certain small groups of people controlling everybody else, and that's actually the opposite of what we want in transhumanism. We want to extend individual choice, and that's why I had that principle of morphological freedom. So yeah, it does disturb me, the idea that, you know, just a few people, you know, backed by government and coercive law, could force people to change their personality in certain ways or become more obedient, or those kind of things are very disturbing possibilities. And that's not part of transhumanism to me. It's all about extending human choice and, uh, you know, the kind of person you want to be.

I think part of it might be the challenge we have, uh, as regards who's in control of the technology that's going to be the enabler to some of these augmentations. At the moment, we're living in a world where Big Tech has you know, ridiculous amount of control. And once these technologies are sort of intrinsic, not just extrinsic to the human mind or body, it becomes a bit more difficult, doesn't it? And one has to think, you know, am I having to sign up to terms and conditions in the way that I do for a kind of social media feed? Is that the expectation of the future? Surely there is an alternative vision of the future that can enable transhumanism where these kind of big tech extractive businesses aren't part of the, um, of the process? I don't know, how do we escape Big Tech in a transhumanist future?

Well, I don't think I say I want to escape it because Big Tech does an awful lot of really good things too. I mean, it's easy to attack them for, you know, some of the stupidities, but, uh, you know, without Big Tech we wouldn't have a lot of stuff that we obviously like to use an awful lot. I think the problem is a much bigger one when government gets on board with Big Tech and they become this kind of unholy alliance and they start, you know, regulating what they can say, they're regulating so outsiders can't come in and change things more easily. I mean, usually, you know, technology is a highly disruptive industry or set of industries, and newcomers can open it up. But if you've got, you know, governments increasingly regulating what you can see, what you can say, how you can invest, you know, all the new ESG initiatives, how you can, you know, that you have to hire certain kinds of employees in certain ratios, and, you know, interfering with the actual technologies themselves, that to me is more disturbing. So if you think about more advanced possible features where maybe we actually would upload our consciousness into a different platform, then of course you do have issues. Well, who controls the platform? I wouldn't want to be uploaded onto, you know, Microsoft Human or whatever. I would want to have some kind of open source system where, you know, no particular organization is in control. It's kind of more distributed control and nobody can— obviously a non-hackable system will be a very important thing. I talked about that with Ben Goertzel, who's an AI expert, and he says there are ways actually of guaranteeing you can't be hacked. They're not widely used still today for various reasons, but they are possible. So that might seem like a very science-fictional idea today, but it's not so far off when we're already starting to— obviously, you know, a lot of our memories and abilities are in our cell phones and our devices. We'll have virtual reality, we'll have augmented reality, so more and more of our world will essentially be digitized. And of course, we do have to be very concerned about who has control over that and who can access it, which are obviously very live issues today, and I think will become more so. But I don't think it's— I think corporations actually in general are a good thing. It's just they become pretty bad when they get control through contact with government and regulation and can force out other people and prevent change. And obviously with huge government contracts, that could be a real issue.

No, I think I agree with that. I suppose what I meant was sort of corporate fascism or state authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it. As you say, the coupling of the state and tech against the consumer, the user, the citizen, just the normal person, which I suppose we always have to guard against no matter where we are in history or the future. I agree.

I think people use the term capitalism so loosely and it's not clear what they're talking about because capitalism can mean, and people seem to use it to mean, you know, big corporations in alliance with government. And that's not what I mean by capitalism. I mean, I mean free market capitalism where you basically separate the government from the economy. You just have basic laws in place for fraud and theft and stuff like that, but then you don't control anything else. You let people do as they choose. That's a very different kind of capitalism, and that's the one that I personally would be in favor of. And we're very, very far from that. And that's kind of something I find a very worrying trend that we're so used to this, the size of government and the increases in government, that people don't even question it. The changes they want to make are very, very tiny and marginal. If there are any improvement at all. And we've just got used to this system, which I think is far from an ideal system. I think it's kind of odd that as society gets more complicated and the economy becomes more complicated, people are favoring more and more central control, not understanding that you cannot control things centrally when they're complex. On a small scale, it can work. You know, a kibbutz is basically communism, and it works pretty decently, but it's just a few people. When you try and do that to millions or hundreds of millions of people, it's a freaking disaster. You starve people to death as Stalin did, and you know, the Khmer Rouge and various other groups. It doesn't work. The more complex it is, the more you need a distributed market-based system. People seem to have the opposite idea, and it's quite distressing. That's one reason actually I want to live a long time, is I'm hoping I can get off this planet, away from all these existing societies that have become very kind of rigid, and start again with like-minded people where we can have new social experiments. Just like people left Europe to come to America in the past, we can start again and try some fresh ideas, because I don't think it's easy to do it on the Earth anymore. It's— everything is kind of under control in all these territories.

Well, that's what I'm a bit worried about, the model of the future ending up being communism on Earth and imperialism in space. But I think it's that dilemma that you've just articulated is something I think that Balaji Srinivasan is sort of talking about when he talks about the network state, isn't he? That there isn't anywhere to go now. All the frontiers have been populated. Even America, which was the land of the free, is now not feeling that that is what it is. So do we create these communities these digital communities which are networked and sort of nodal, and eventually they end up being physical communities, but maybe they're in space, or maybe they're, you know, via seasteading, or maybe they're in non-sovereign waters, if you like, wherever that might be. Do you see the transhumanist community perhaps ending up like that, or what's your sort of prognosis for transhumanism as a community, or maybe even as a political force, or How do you see it evolving?

Well, transhumans have been interested in this idea of alternative communities since the very beginning. Back in the 1980s in Extropy magazine, we had pieces on private law systems and new communities, seasteading, all these possibilities. And of course, the hope for cryptographic systems that could basically operate outside governmental systems. And back then we talked about digital currencies before anybody else was even beginning to think about those and those became real. So we're still a long way from being able to do that. But I think there is still hope for that, we can have freer digital communities, but there's still limitations on that. So long as you're physically based, of course, people can come and take away your hardware and then you're kind of screwed. So there are some limitations on that. I think I'm very interested in— I haven't really followed closely enough, but I'm very interested in the initiatives to create new free countries in places where you can, you know, do a deal with the government, they leave you alone. It's kind of tricky because they can always change their mind and come back, and you have to show there's some real some real benefits to them. Hong Kong is kind of a depressing example where it was a relatively free economy, and then of course China was given back control, and it's no longer— now it's being repressed. So I think in the long run, it seems like, yeah, we can try and build freer cultures within cyberspace, but ultimately I think we have to get off the planet because there isn't any free land. There's plenty of space out there. There's huge resources in the asteroids and the other planets, huge amounts of space. There's no issue of population. Not that there is here in my view, but I think that is, that's the future and that's what I look forward to.

I did a workshop once with a very, very famous entrepreneur and I told him that actually, particularly in Europe, we were in population decline and that, you know, the fertility rate has fallen dramatically in most regions of the planet and all this. And he said, well, that's not right. I keep being told that the population is expanding kind of not exponentially, but he meant dramatically. And I said, no, no, that is not the case. We're not even at the replacement level in most places. So it's very interesting that these narratives, they become concretized and then it's just the lens through which everybody sees. So please, please correct us on that. Yeah, people, it's bizarre.

It's like people living in the 1960s when fertility was at a peak. It peaked around 1968 and it's been declining ever since. People just don't seem to get this. As you said, throughout Europe, population has either stopped growing or is already shrinking. Germany is losing people, Japan's losing a million a year, all of Eastern Europe is shrinking, and other countries are following the same track. It seems to depend on your level of economic development. At a certain point— well, first of all, in the poorer countries, as women get more rights and more education, they tend not to be baby-producing machines. They want to have their own life. So, and along with losing fewer children in childbirth, you know, it used to be you lose most of them in childbirth, and so you have far more of them to try and compensate for that. So as fewer children die, people have fewer children, and of course they get more expensive because they're no longer working for you in the factories and on the farms. You have to pay for them to go to college and go to Disneyland and get an iPhone or whatever. So children are damn expensive these days. So it's not, uh, it's not an accident that fertility rates are dropping and people are putting off having children. So even globally, it looks like, um, you know, even though Africa is still relatively high growth, it's still slowed down since the '60s. Even globally The UN, which tends to over-project population, thinks that, you know, in the middle scenario, towards the end of the century, global population will stop and will start shrinking. Other people have looked at it, I think, more carefully and argue that probably by 2060, 2070, global population will peak and it will start falling. And what's scary about falling population is there's no bottom to it. It can go to zero, literally, which is another reason why we want life extension to slow down that drop, because if people are having children, you want people to continue living. Growing population is easy to handle as long as it's not too rapid. Falling population means, you know, smaller markets, fewer discoveries, fewer people creating ideas and solutions. That's one thing people never get, right? They will say, "Another mouth to feed." No, it's another person to create and produce stuff. That's what the point that Julian Simon famously made that these apocalypticists don't get. So, you know, bigger population is not necessarily a bad thing, and we're getting better at using resources more wisely. I just finished a piece for The Economist magazine making some similar points to what you find in books like More with Less, where you can see that the most advanced societies these days are actually using fewer resources to produce the same or more economic output. It's very much true of England. I forget the guy's name. There's an English fellow who's done a lot of research on that, basically using less electricity, even as population doesn't shrink, less metals, less of these raw materials as we substitute and do other things and move towards information goods. I mean, just the fact you think about your smartphone, you compare what that's replaced, it replaces this whole bunch of other equipment that would weigh like, I think it's like 40 kilograms, someone calculated. And now you've got this little device that does all these things for you. So having more people doesn't mean necessarily we use more stuff. Not that there's any shortage of stuff because that's been proven wrong over and over again, even without looking at the asteroids. So yeah, population shouldn't be the problem. Growing population shouldn't be considered the problem for people. If anything, we should be worrying about shrinking populations and how do we support increasingly old populations populations. Another reason why we need life extension, where we can live longer and healthier lives, otherwise we're going to have a real demographic problem, as they are in Germany and Japan and increasingly other countries.

Yeah, I mean, the latest projections I was looking at, which suggests that China will become the largest economy by like 2050, but not so by the end of the century because of the one-child policy and the way it works out through the generations. So even though we think, you know, there's the rise of China, there's still other things that will be happening demographically in China, which will kind of pull down the economy.

Yeah, actually, from what I was looking at recently, it's not even clear that they will even be the economic biggest economy in 2050. They may have already passed the point where that's not going to happen. It looks like either this year or possibly last year, because you can't really believe the numbers, population may have actually started shrinking already in China. And it's a very, very rapidly aging population because of their policy. So it's going to be hit them a lot worse than other countries. And It's not just because the population, it's the working age population you have to look at in terms of the economy. But yeah, it kind of reminds me of Japan in the 1980s. People were panicking, Japan is taking over, Japan is taking over. And look where they are now. Didn't happen. I know, lost decade.

Yeah. Let's finish off with some of your thoughts on long-termism, Max, because that's in the news of late. What are your opinions on it?

Yeah, it's getting a lot of publicity recently and I've been looking at it a little bit and I probably need to write something on this. People, I've been finding, confuse this long-termism idea with transhumanism, and I can see some reason for that because some of the people behind it, like Nick Bostrom, are transhumanists, or at least they were. I'm not sure if he still is, but it's a different set of— it's a specific set of beliefs which transhumanists don't necessarily share. I certainly don't. So long-termism puts extreme emphasis on the far future and on the benefits of the people in the future and seeing current people as being less important by contrast. This is all based on a certain moral philosophy, that of utilitarianism. And if you don't— if you buy into utilitarianism, I think their arguments might be quite persuasive. I mean, it depends on the assumptions you want to make, which are always a little questionable. But if you don't accept utilitarianism, that whole thing falls apart. And I don't. I think utilitarianism is a terrible theory of ethics. Essentially, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, which says that the right action is the one that maximizes the outcome. Now, consequentialism can take different, different forms. Utilitarianism is by far the most common form. It basically says that the thing we want to maximize is happiness or pleasure, depending on the particular version. You get into different arguments about, you know, John Stuart Mill's more refined pleasures versus Bentham's simple pleasures. But basically it's about calculating, of the actions you can take, which one will maximize happiness or well-being. But to me, first of all, why would I accept such a moral theory? It turns me into a moral slave. It's now my— I become a robot who has to maximize this particular value. And why do I want to do that? Why should I care? To me, a critical question in ethics or metaethics is, why be moral? And to me, I don't think utilitarianism has a good answer. Well, because it will maximize this. Well, so what? What if I don't care about maximizing that? What if I care about, you know, being a good friend or a good husband or, you know, Yeah, because isn't that an intrinsic virtue in itself, to be moral? Yeah, yeah, I do believe more in a virtue theory, so, which takes into account consequences and also principles as a kind of Kantian ethic, but it's, I think, a more human and realistic view. So utilitarianism to me is a really strange view that I can see that it appeals to a certain kind of calculating, rationalistic— not necessarily rational, but rationalistic— mind, because it gives you at least the illusion that you can calculate the right answer to every moral problem. And so it's very appealing to people who like a lot of math, but to me it's really a kind of absurd theory that's completely unappealing to me. And if you take out utilitarianism, then long-termism falls apart. You know, some of the themes of course are still worth paying attention to, you know, extinction risks or existential risks, something we should pay some attention to. I think not too much, probably too much today, too little in the past, and people mostly are paying attention to the wrong things, I think. Climate change is not an existential risk. I think hit by an asteroid is. Pandemics are, as we've seen recently, you know, in a very mild form. That's something we should take pretty seriously and have better responses to. So, you know, those aspects of long-termism are worth paying attention to. But the idea that we should denigrate the present for, you know, the vast number of people in the far future who don't exist yet, to me, is a very strange view and not one that I think should be taken as representing transhumanism at all. You don't have to be a transhumanist to be a long-termist and vice versa.

They're not that related. It's interesting what you just said about climate change not being an existential risk, because I agree with you on that. In fact, one of the questions I was going to sort of ask you was, which is more important, you know, preserving the planet or preserving humanity in the way that we might be able to do with cryonics? Because my worry about some of the philosophies and catastrophism around climate at the moment is actually it's It's denigrating humanity and it's punishing humans in ways that may be foreseen or maybe not be foreseen, but actually that could be just as dangerous as the things that the climate change advocates or activists are worried about.

I think it's much more dangerous.

Yeah, they end up bringing about the ends that they are trying to avoid. So, yeah. So which should we worry about more? Maybe you've just answered it.

I think we should be worried about, you know, climate catastrophism more. We're already seeing very clear effects of that belief in the energy shortages. People are going to be very cold this winter. I understand England is raising electricity prices by 80%. That's incredible. And that's just the beginning. And of course, Germany is in a very bad situation, all because of application of climate change fears and cutting off, you know, oil and coal and gas in favor of theoretical energy sources that aren't necessarily terribly reliable or ready for primetime yet. You know, President Biden is doing his best to destroy our capacity for producing energy, but going to Venezuela, horrible dictatorship, and begging them to produce more, I just— it's baffling.

It's just mind-boggling. And selling what's in storage to China. It's just, it's just crazy.

So yeah, of course we want a nice environment, but to me there is no evidence of climate catastrophe. And even the IPCC don't really see that. People tend to selectively quote things. They quote They quote first of all from the executive summary, which exaggerates stuff compared to the actual studies in those reports.

Which was the worst-case scenario.

Yeah, the worst-case scenarios, which are highly implausible and we know now are highly implausible. The scenarios that showed the greatest increases are now known to be completely off. And those projections just aren't working out at all. So we are seeing warming, but it's pretty small. It's pretty small. Doesn't seem to be particularly unprecedented. It's well within our capacity to adapt. And one point a lot of people miss is that 3 or 4 times as many people die from cold as they do from heat. And so, you know, in some areas— well, I live in Arizona, so we'd be hit by it the most if there's an increase, which is probably actually more due to the urban heat island effect as our population grows here. So if anything, I would have incentive to worry about it more, but I don't. In most countries though, people actually will live longer and better, and we're also seeing better crop growth as there's more carbon dioxide. You know, carbon dioxide levels are not particularly high compared with other times in human history when there's a lot of plants flourishing. There's a reason people have greenhouses. They trap the greenhouse— they have the greenhouse effect. They trap carbon dioxide, raise its levels, and plants grow better there. People seem to forget about that. So carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it's not a poison. Yeah, and that there are— Earth on average is slowly warming. The ocean is rising at a terrifying rate of a couple of millimeters a year, like, which is totally, totally normal. You talk to people in some parts of Europe where they basically built their whole country on bits of rock. It was in Sweden, I guess. Stockholm is not really a place, it's a whole bunch of little tiny islands, and people managed fine. There's a lot of very selective evidence people give. They talk about certain islands sinking. What's actually happening is subsidence, it's not the ocean rising. You can look at— who's the guy in New York, one of the famous people who were predicting doom and gloom, and then you have pictures on Time magazine of the Statue of Liberty being submerged? And he had pictures, you had projections of New York being submerged. You can actually look at where his office was in New York and look at the water level and you see in like the 30 or 35 years since then, there's no visible difference whatsoever. So this idea that it's a big catastrophe has become kind of a religious concept to me. It's resistance to the evidence. It has a lot of the signs of religion. It has its prophets, you have Paul Ehrlich and I guess Al Gore and people like that. It's treated as kind of a revelation. It's an end of times kind of view. It's an apocalyptic view that's very much like a religion. It's very much like certain religions and seeing humans as inherently bad, that, you know, the planet is good and we're bad and we're destroying the planet. Well, we're not destroying it. So it is very much a religious idea and a very disturbing religious view to me, which is very anti-human and explicitly so in many of the writings you dig into. It's very explicitly anti-human. So to me, that is a major threat. It could destroy our energy sources, reduce our progress, which is going to kill lots of people. You know, even if it may actually stop longevity advances, but it may actually shorten lifespan. So to me, that's very disturbing, is the advocacy, you know, out of, out of touch with reality. I mean, why are they not advocating nuclear power, for instance, if you're really worried about carbon dioxide? And yet very few of these environmentalists— there are some exceptions— are pro-nuclear power. So I find that a very disturbing trend.

I suppose if you believe the planet is overpopulated, it might be quite convenient though, right? No, I'm with you on all of that. So I'm going to ask you one final question. When you are reanimated, whenever that might be, whichever, whichever decade or century that might be, who would you be most surprised to see? Who would I be most surprised to see?

Oh goodness, I don't— I'm not sure how to answer that one really, because I'd be surprised to see anybody who hadn't been cryopreserved. That would be a kind of a miracle.

Who do you think would never be cryopreserved or really should be cryopreserved and you'd be very surprised to see them when you are reanimated? In the future, whatever that future may look like or feel like.

Well, you never know, people can change their mind. I'm kind of really sad that someone like Stephen Hawking didn't get cryopreserved. It seems like, why did that not happen? His body wasn't of much use to him. You'd think he'd be a natural neuropatient. Um, he seemed to have a very long-term vision of things that you'd like to see, so why on earth did that not happen? So anytime somebody who's been an influence on me, or someone I think is a really fascinating character, dies without being cryopreserved, like pretty sad about it. Uh, like Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite science fiction writers who influenced me, I was very sad when he died and didn't get cryopreserved. You know, he had a book, The Door Into Summer, which was about cryonics basically. Um, so I mean, I wouldn't be surprised obviously at most people not getting cryopreserved because most people don't get it at all. I'm not sure I'd be most surprised by, I guess, those who are most hostile to it, but even then they can sometimes change.

You're going to see your dog though, aren't you? Because your dog is also on this timeline, right?

That made my first dog, Oscar, named after Oscar Wilde because of his sense of humor. I didn't really want a dog, and my wife Natasha really wanted one. I didn't buy one for Christmas, and she was very upset with me. So I got one for her birthday and chose a golden doodle because it seemed to be a good combination of intelligence and playfulness. And I didn't like dogs before that because of my childhood experiences, which were, you know, my stepfather's dog was completely undisciplined, would steal food from your hand. I didn't like it at all. And then Other experiences put me off. But once I had Oscar, I realized that dogs would be pretty fantastic, great companions. And so he lived to— even though he was a big dog, he lived to almost about 15, which is pretty old. And we had him cryopreserved. So he's sitting there at Alcor. And I'm sure the two golden doodles we have today will also follow because they're also great dogs. So yeah, it'll be me, Natasha, and our dogs will be coming back in the future.

And I hope to see those when I wake up. Reunited. Lovely. Well, thank you. It's been a real privilege to talk to you. Thank you so much for sparing the time. And thank you for also setting some wrongs right, you know, in terms of ensuring the distance between, you know, explaining, you know, technocracy and humanity and making clear that transhumanism is much more adjacent to humanity than technocracy.

Well, thanks for giving me a chance to talk on those issues because it's disturbing when people get this stuff wrong.

Is that just mischief for, you know, um, is it clickbait? Is it mischief? Or is— do you think that is a genuine misunderstanding or a laziness to get into the issues?

It's probably some of all of those. I think there's definitely some bad faith because I know there are some pretty smart people who've written on this topic. There's a book called Technosis by Eric Davis who, you know, wrote this quite a while ago, and he gets it completely wrong. He seems to think we've got these Platonists who hate our physical bodies. It's just, where are you getting this from? I mean, the whole point of this is we want to improve ourselves and, you know, we want to enhance our bodies. And if you want to eventually be non-biological, it's not because we hate biology, it's because it gives us more opportunities for senses, a wide range of senses and emotions. It's more of the good stuff that our bodies give us. So to me, you know, people really look into it, it can't be innocent that they get this wrong. For other people, if they just kind of hear about uploading and you know, and think it's about a few computer geeks or something. Well, it's not, you know, I'm not a computer geek, I'm a philosopher, I work out, I take care of my body. It doesn't, it seems very alien to me to say that, you know, we're kind of body haters. That's just a lazy way of attacking it. And, you know, people always do a strawman argument, right? They don't do the steelman where you strengthen the argument to attack it. They do the strawman where they make it as weak as possible. That's not at all an accurate view of transhumanism.

Maybe they should read the Transhumanist Reader, right? Yes, definitely. I mean, I don't know how you could read that and then come out with the opposite opinion, really, and, and print that in the, in, in the press. I don't know. So maybe they should do a little bit of reading.

Thanks for mentioning that. Yes, go to Amazon, get the Transhumanist Reader.

Yes, actually, for people, where would you, um, point people to, uh, who are interested in knowing more either about transhumanism or cryonics or any other work that you're doing? You've got a lot of— you've written a lot, you have a lot of articles, don't you?

Yeah, I'm actually, I realized recently that I've got all these almost written books that didn't get published. And the first one actually was going to be for Wired when they had a book publishing division, and they went bankrupt and I never got the thing published. So I'm actually planning on putting together in the next few months a collection of a lot of stuff on transhumanist ideas. It'll probably take several volumes to do this, but I'm thinking of the title "Maxisms," which might sound a bit self-absorbed, but it's kind of a play on maxims and Marxism, which is a set of philosophical ideas. I'm not sure if that'll be the final title, but that should be a pretty good source. But yeah, The Transhumanist Reader is about some 35 authors, I think, from the '80s up to the present. Some older pieces, some revised pieces give a very good idea of transhumanism. My opening chapter is designed specifically to sort of educate people as well as possible in a concise way on these ideas. Natasha Vita-More has a couple of shorter books that are much more readable. You can also find on Amazon. For cryonics, I think the best thing is really to go to the Alcor org website, A-L-C-O-R. We have under the resources a big library there, and I'm actually writing a series of essays for the, uh, called the Independent Cryonics Educator Program, and I'm about halfway through publishing those. And those are designed to sort of really explain these ideas to people in detail. So I mean, there's a lot of— so much stuff out there, it's very hard to sort of pick a few of them, but those are places to begin anyway.

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Max.

Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you for listening to The Future of You podcast hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Also visit thefutureofyou.com. For more on the future of identity in a digital world and visit futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast is edited by Big Tent Media and produced by Emily Crosby Media.