Cryonics with Dr Max More #10

Do we need a new criteria for death, that covers the technicalities around neuro preservation, issues of legal identity upon reanimation and an approach to rehabilitation? What are the misunderstandings or misinformation that surround transhumanism and endeavour to make the distinction between transhumanism and technocracy? Should we be worried about the wrong headedness of The Population Bomb, climate catastrophism and the fashionability of long termism? 

Today, I speak with Max More. 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', examined several issues that concern transhumanists, including the nature of death. He is the Co-editor of Rhe 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. 

This episode of The Future of You covers:

• A definition of cryonics
• Changing definitions of death
• The process of cryogenic freezing 
• Memory loss and personality
• Consent and cryonic preservation
• What happens to identity after death and cryopreservation?
• Rights on reanimation
• Should world leaders be preserved for the good of their citizens?
• Attitudes to cryopreservation around the world
• Should we be thinking about the end of life at birth?
• Why isn’t cryonics favourably received by the media?
• Transhumanism
• The future of states and capitalism
• The problem of shrinking populations
• Long termism and utilitarianism
• Environmentalism
• Is a misunderstanding of transhumanism really just mischief?

www.alcor.org

The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology?: www.amazon.co.uk/Future-You-Identity-21st-Century-Technology-ebook/dp/B08XBN4GBB

Links and references at: www.traceyfollows.com

Transcript

Tracey Follows: 0:20

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Max More. 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', examined several issues that concern transhumanists, including the nature of death. He is the Co-editor of the transhumanist reader, and he's written many articles on transhumanism and extropianism, including the 1990

essay, 'Transhumanism: 1:10

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 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, covers the technicalities around neuro preservation issues of legal identity upon reanimation and Alcor's approach to rehabilitation. We discuss misunderstandings or misinformation that surround transhumanism and endeavour 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 wrong headedness 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 experts on transhumanism. Dr. Max More. 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 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 process?

Max More: 3:12

Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the show. Tracy. 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. Because to me, it is a way of surviving into the future. As I argued quite recently, at a conference, you know, 30 years ago is pretty optimistic that life extension science would advance far enough that by this time, we'll be making real gains in lifespan, but unfortunately, that hasn't happened. So at this point, I think it's highly likely that my age of 58, I am not going to make it to the time when we've conquered ageing. So I think the cryonics is really a kind of a bridge to that point as the only chance of getting there. So the basic idea of cryonics, which is 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 ageing process, and that people will carry on living. So that's the core idea. And the way I think of it is 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 is dead, and we will 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 in 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. 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 is not at all that clear, which should be obvious as well, from the fact that we donate organs, the person is considered dead, but their organs are still vital and contribute to another life. So our thought really is when we say someone is legally dead today, or are 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 want us 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 that we couldn't do in 1955. So why not put that person in unchanging state, take them decades into the future, where there's a good chance that we could fix the problem and the ageing 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 been called medical time travel, in a sense, because it's not time travel in the science fiction says, but one day at a time, you 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 of living again in the future.

Tracey Follows: 6:37

Well, I remember when I was doing philosophy, like end of 1980s, beginning in the 1990s, we were talking about whether brain stem was the point at which you agree that somebody is dead or alive, and that has 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?

Max More: 7:08

Yeah, we keep changing the criteria for death. As I said before, until the 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 new cortical 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, in some sense, although 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. It's just 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 that which any future technology could bring it back. And I'd have to make the second point that 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'lll 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 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, we should have one day be able to repair like cell membranes and other things. So if you've been vaporised or turned into ash there is no way we're going to bring you back. But short of that it's not too clear how much damage you should you could sustain. You know, we know that we can actually culture living neurons after a couple of days of actual death, what we consider death, so that the brain doesn't just dissolve right away. And this idea that after three to five 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 a 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 is being done. So I think people eventually cotton on to the idea that what is really, really dead is 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 is not alive surely? That's correct. They're not alive. They're not functioning, not metabolising. So they said, Well, they're not alive, they must be dead? Well, no, it doesn't mean there's only two categories here. We have daytime, we have nighttime, it doesn't mean there isn't twilight, there are things shade into one another. So really, what we're doing is we're putting a life on pause, it's hitting the pause button, we stopped life processes, we stopped 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.

Tracey Follows: 10:31

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?

Max More: 10:54

Well, the member makes that decision. So someone has to make these arrangements preferably 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 majr 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 we can get there reasonably quickly. That's okay. But we'd rather be at the bedside, so that we can begin within seconds within a minute of legal death being declared. So there's very, very little delay. Now as to whether we proceed depending on you know, has the person been lying there for an hour or a day or two 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 six 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 a little bit headachy. We have to know that the highly likely the person is going to go in the next few days. But we have what's called a standby team. 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 we've done long as three weeks, which is obviously quite gruelling, but the idea is will be the 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 biologically alive, we can anaethsthetise that the cat or dog, we can begin the process in a way that we couldn't with humans because it'll 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 of course the goal is actually the opposite. So legally, we have to wait for legal death be declared before we begin 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 called which they often are in hospitals in the morgue, 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, or 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 a fusion cryoprotection for fusion, 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 cryo preserve human organs for transplant. This is what the research purposes and we actually licenced 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 is ice, is this brain tissue, is it a tumour? 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 and 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. This there's a big misconception that I see all the time. It's very frustrating. People who know better, even cryobiologists who I know who know better, will say, Well, you know, ice just is kind of like a freezer burn And that the it's like having a strawberry in this freezer too long. It gets 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 cry or visit all kinds of tissues. They're not mush. I mean, if that was true, there wouldn't be a million people walking around today, who were cryo preserved 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, they would be mush. So that can't be true. And in fact, it isn't. The common story is ice forms inside the cells and expands and 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 will 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 some kind of nanotechnology or something like that.

Tracey Follows: 15:16

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

Max More: 15:27

There's very little difference. So yeah, just 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 kills you in the first place in today's sense, to reverse the ageing process and 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 were already starting to grow 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 Now the process is pretty much the same, usually we'll start with the whole patient, it depends a little bit on the matter of figuring out the right genetic triggers. Because humans situation. But let's say it's a patient that's in the USA not too far from us, we'll generally bring them back in our vehicle are terrible at regenerating stuff, you know, some animals or on a plane to the operating room. So there's whole body or neuro will start pretty much the same. But then at some point, can grow half their body back or whole limbs. We're really lousy, 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 you know, as an embryo, you can actually grow back quite a bit, body because it's the head we want to keep. So at that point, we will do instead of going through the chest, as it would but then we lose that ability. And all we can really regrow as for a whole body patient to replace the blood, 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 adults is maybe a bit of our liver, and maybe the tip of our same process, we're going to over a period of about four hours or so we're going to gradually remove the blood and finger, we're just very bad at it. But that doesn't mean that increase the concentration of this cryoprotectant solution. You can't just throw it in the full concentration when you're still fairly warm, because it'd be quite toxic. So you have to we can't change those genetic triggers, and at some point do that under computer control gradually ramp it up over several hours. And at the end of that point, you're basically actually regrow the body. Some people might think, Oh, you're going from just above freezing to just below freezing, having protected the solids against ice formation, and then you can going to clone a body and put the brain into that body? Well, plunge the temperature very rapidly, we're going to about minus 90 degrees C, minus 100 degrees C very quickly. And then that's maybe a possibility. But I think it's not so plausible, I 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 that you think you'd actually support the brain in a special medium, and want to avoid obviously. So it takes us actually a couple more days to reach minus 320 Fahrenheit or minus 196 degrees then grow the body and tell the cells to differentiate, to grow Celsius. 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 out to differentiate to the right kind of cells, just like word for glass, essentially, the cryoprotectant solution, as it cools, becomes more and more viscous and just holds we got here in the first place. So when you think about the the everything in place. So there's no no internal structure of ice crystals. So that point, there's zero metabolism movies like Vanilla Sky, where you have a lucid dreaming option. Sorry, magic of being trillions of cells grown from a single not possible. There's no mental activity whatsoever. There's no brain activities, that's clearly impossible, or other kind of fertilised cell, that's pretty incredible. It sounds like fantasies we see in science fiction. So to you, assuming this works, you'll wake up one day and you'll say, when is it impossible, that's how we get here. So if nature can do it, we and you know, they'll say oh it's 2097 or whatever. And to you, no time will have passed. Last thing you knew is you're in can do it, it's a matter of learning those tricks. So that's 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 the basic idea of the, of the neuro option. feel great, and you don't notice the passage of time.

Tracey Follows: 19:27

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?

Max More: 19:41

It really depends on on the circumstances. That's why I always try to emphasise that, you know, I can describe an ideal situation. We're at the bedside, even better actually is where we can use the Death with Dignity laws, and we can actually summon the sudden twice now, someone can 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 on because some cases, there's a delay, we don't know about the case until sometime 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 protect the brain. They may have an aneurysm in which case there's going to be 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 any day now, I think by Dr. Gregory Fey, on one cryonics patient, we did it kind of a special case, where we took brain samples and did various kinds of testing on an 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 what you'd lose in that case, are short term memories, just as you would under General anaesthesia. Short term memories, or electro electrochemical activity in the brain, they're not preserved in, 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 very happy memories of the last half an hour or so. But apart from that, long term memories are 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're going to have some losses, presumably. Now it maybe you could infer a lot of what was damaged from what remains, and possibly 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, they're probably not particularly local, 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 backup as much information about themselves as they can in terms of photographs and videos and personal information. Because you can imagine that deep learning AI in the future might be able to interpolate all that information to reconstruct some some of those missing memories or traits. So not a sure thing, it really depends on the circumstances. And one of the most important things for us is to minimise those delays and get you cryopreserved as well as possible. We are not an organisation 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 that's a responsible position because there's going to be damage and we have to minimise 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.

Tracey Follows: 22:47

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, 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 sorts of people that potentially you'd want to preserve, so that once they can be reanimated in the future, there might be this sort of medical solutions to some of the problems they've got, in terms of the way in which their brains 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?

Max More: 23:28

Well, that's why they should say that well beforehand, right, before we get into dementia. I mean, if someone contacts us and they're already suffering with dementia, then we will 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 say 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 actually want to be cryopreserved? So we need to have that kind of thing. I did have a case where someone who's very uh, let me say overbearing personality insisted that we cryopreserve a mother and, and show me that she wanted to do this. Well I actually met with with the family, her and a brother and a mother, when I was travelling to another state, and I asked her you, 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 that 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. 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 better 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'll lose 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 today they recognise me, the day before they didn't. It goes in and out. It's not the memories have gone, it's you having trouble accessing them. I don't know if that's going to be true of other forms of dementia. But there's actually some other direct evidence for that, too, for Alzheimer's. So certainly, 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.

Tracey Follows: 25:29

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, 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 few years back, I was under the impression, and I don't know if the laws changed now, that once somebody has is taken into this process, they're considered human remains legally. I mean, I know that's not the way you've, 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.

Max More: 26:31

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 organisations, essentially, you know, we own you, we own your ass, we can say, legally, let's consider your 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 you know, 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 realise that we have to have a different status for them, not to 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 recognise this separate category. And it's kind of third state, not life, not death, but potential. And those people will will be accorded rights and the choices they made before they went into that condition will be taken seriously. 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 my spouse or my parents or they can set some terms, and we'll do our best to one of those things. But I think at some point, they will have to be given some kind of legal status. Now that there's actually, there's 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 have been lost at sea or disappear for over 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 interest for them until hopefully they come back, and then they can claim that money. So one of the questions that our attorney 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 the legal identity back. But he said, Well, it's actually some good practical reasons why you should have a new legal identity even if you have philosophically the same individual. I mean consider for instance an insurance payout- they paid out life insurance because you're dead. What if, now, suddenly, you're not dead. Do you have to pay that back? I don't think that'll be a reasonable interpretation based on the other years of payments on but it might it might be argued that there's actually a case for giving you a new legal identity. As long as we can separate by different philosophical identity. I don't think that's really a big issue.

Tracey Follows: 29:20

Yeah, cause 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? You know and all the, the kind of, you know, what we're now faced with on drop down menus, when we have to do a piece of online paperwork, it probably won't exist, it will be completely different. It's very difficult to 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 More or you'll be Max More 2.0 Or you'll be somebody else, not quite Max more. I don't know.

Max More: 29:56

How many genders will I have to choose from then? It's already getting complex enough there. So that's another that's another issue of the identity, right? It used to be just male or female. Now there's other legal identities being given, as you say, nationality may be completely irrelevant. By the time I come back, maybe the way things are going probably won't be United States of America. And hopefully I won't be here. I'd rather be off in some new place in space, starting fresh, but, you know, it's, it's also important to recognise that for Alcor, a core part of this mission statement, you can see us on the website at alcor.org. It's part of our mission to help to bring you back and 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, they there is a good example, you don't just wake them up and prescribe the hospital, right, you've got to retrain them, catch them 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, we 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 the 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.

Tracey Follows: 31:14

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 a in 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 fashion or even becomes obsolete by the time we want to use some of the content again, it's in it's very difficult to know how to store it.

Max More: 31:55

Yeah, quite a few of our members do store a lot of digital information. And so[unintellligible] 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, you know, 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 there were early versions of Word. It's a real issue when 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 disks or Millennium disks, 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 are highly likely to last for like 1000 years. So they're pretty good. There's also an online service called I think it's called Forever, Forever.com perhaps? It's, 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 if the organisation keeps going, those will be available in the future. So that can certainly be a valuable backup and help to reassure you won't lose a lot of stuff.

Tracey Follows: 33:19

So you've brought me round 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, alright, 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 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. And whether 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?

Max More: 34:30

You saying governments might cause some trouble? What? They never do that! No, that's actually my biggest source of concern, too. I mean, you're one of the worries is, is the organisation 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 organisations and how long they last and noting that Yeah, most most poor profits don't tend to last that long. But except in Japan, there's a lot of interesting counter examples, one going for 1400 years or so. But generally it's religious organisations, educational organisations, I went to Oxford, which is the second oldest university in the world has been around for like half a millennium. And yeah, Allcor has been around for 50 years now.

Tracey Follows: 35:08

They sort of romanticise it don't they? And it is model on a nonprofits 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 disruptive and not very respectful of people's autonomy. But yeah, there's no way you can foresee, of course, what things we'd like 50 or 100 years from tnow we really have no idea. Anybody who makes forecasts is bound to be wrong, that's my only forecast is forecaste will be wrong. So I can't guarantee anything, but my, my general perspective is that I'm fairly optimistic because first of all, if the world is really lousy, when I can be brought back, they won't bring me back, either we'll be too poor, having ruined our economy, or the environment or whatever, I'm gonna be brought back so I wouldn't have to deal with that. And basically any society which I can report back in probably decent and worth living in and, 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 wellbeing and freedom and health and longevity, it gets better over the years. I like to ask people say I would want to live in the future. Well, is there any time in the past you'd prefer to live and really think about it? Do you want to go back to a time when women didn't have the vote or basically a 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 realise a horrific history was if you read the stuff, I mean, it's always sanitised in films

Max More: 36:35

Yeah, you don't see like, you know, Louis XIV, in France, one of the wealthiest kings in 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 realise that people, you know, I mean, I get 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 can 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'd be brought back as a slave. But really, is it really economically sensible, that you're going to go to Intensive Repair process to bring back a slave who is 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, if society is able to it's got high technology and as the willingness to do so it's probably going to do someplace. But yeah, there are all kinds of unknowns. And like you I worry about what governments will do, because they're incredibly stupid and 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.

Tracey Follows: 38:05

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,

Max More: 38:18

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.

Tracey Follows: 38:24

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 there isn't like a personal right, there's like a citizens right? I wonder if we should have, you'll probably baulk at this it's a terrible idea. But I wonder if each one of us citizens 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 some, you know, take retribution? I don't know, what do you think about your 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?

Max More: 39:26

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 kinda 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, 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? 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 that holds a Masters accountable in the future?

Tracey Follows: 40:03

I don't want them to be able to escape. I think that's all it is really talk 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 more sophisticated and normalised acceptance and usage of cryonics? Or where do you think we are? And how does it differ culturally, and maybe politically and maybe even religiously across the world?

Max More: 40:36

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 fewer than 3000 people in the entire world signed up to be cryopreserved, which is pathetically small after decades of doing this, it's as a whole big question is why on the 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 the 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, and they will say, Get out of my hospital, that would be the standard approach. So 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 will 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, I know 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, it's somebody 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 or 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're going 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. I look at the history of, of anaesthesia and antisepsis. And you see kind of interesting patterns. Those two cases are very different. In the case of anaesthesia, it took off pretty rapidly once someone invented a way of stopping pain in surgery and so on. And childbearing. Actually, I think Queen Victoria made a huge difference she was the first was it Queen Victoria the first to use anaesthesia? And once the Queen did it, it became very acceptable. There are actually serious arguments at the time that it was against God's will. We mentioned suffering child bearing for the sins of Eve that was, 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 antisepsis, it's very different than anaesthesia. Anaesthesia, has obvious benefits, right? Because you're not feeling the horrible pain while they're sawing off your leg, the doctor isn't have to hold you down while you're screaming at them. So there's very clear and immediate benefits. With antisepsis, these guys, it all these invisible particles and the other cause disease. And they all thought he was crazy. So 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. 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 them off more quickly, of course, with the internet, and so on. And I think it's really some of the philosophical and social issues, the uncertainties, the oddness of the idea that's hard to overcome. But I'm hoping that sometime in the not too distant future, this will become normal. And suddenly, we'll look back on today and the person what was wrong with people back then they just threw away the 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 be seen 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.

Tracey Follows: 44:27

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 but misplaced or could be turned on its head. So for example, like when I was a kid, obviously he would be born and that week when he 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, ie, 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.

Max More: 45:21

It's kind of funny you should say IVF because it's kind of a nice symmetry to it right? That's how you started as a Christian, the Grand Wizard, 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 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 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. 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 overcome some of those social objections that it's just a few strange, weird people that Stanley's doing, it somehow becomes more friendly.

Tracey Follows: 46:02

Yeah, exactly. It feels a but perverse to me at the minute the culture because I'm seeing all the time adverts for cremation. I mean, they can't, you know, they can't render you as ashes quick enough, these days. I mean, the the percentage of burials is going down, cremations are going up. I watched 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 in 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 euthanize 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 to 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 didn't think.

Max More: 47:26

Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, I think some of it is based on sort of people's fear of population, which the whole issue we can get into I think it's very mistaken idea. I mean, there's the voluntary human extinction.

Tracey Follows: 47:36

Well, he was wrong, right? Paul Ehrlich was wrong, wasn't he?

Max More: 47:39

Yeah, he's totally wrong. We can get into that. So actually, I've been writing a series of articles for Cryonics Magazine called Getting Better where I actually I looked spend a whole time whole article looking Ehrlich and then another one looking at limits to growth and how badly wrong they are. And some people still hold on to that that nonsense. But yeah, it's kind of curious that people are, 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 or losing your body or 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. We've never had Yeah, it's kind of concerning when people are pushing people, encouraging them to die to make room for in hospital beds. And kind of be coerced into doing that. That's, that's kind of a worrying, 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 kind of bizarre, as you said,

Tracey Follows: 48:33

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

Max More: 49:04

Well, I'm not sure if all your listeners will know what Transhumanism is a very brief, brief definition of transhumanism essentially, it's an extension of enlightenment humanism, which was all about using reason, and science and goodwill to improve the human condition. Transhumanism goes a little bit further in realising 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 that structure. So for instance, ageing and death is part of our human nature. But unlike humans, we don't think we should just accept that we think we should challenge that. Why, just because that's in nature, just like you could argue slavery was natural we had it for so long. That doesn't make it okay. Obviously, viruses are natural and they kill us. That doesn't mean we just accept them. So why should we accept ageing and death? Why should we accept mental disorders and lots of other issues? So transhumanism really is about the idea of employing, 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 freedom, the idea that we should have the rights to decide who we become 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 you 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, and you know, backed by government, and coercive law could force people to change their personality in certain ways or become more obedient, or those kinds of things are very disturbing possibilities. And that's not part of transhumanism to me, it's all about extending human choice and the kind of person you want to be.

Tracey Follows: 50:45

I think part of it might be the challenge, we have, 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, a 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 kind of social media feed is that the expectation of the future? And surely, there is a an alternative vision of the future that can enable transhumanism where these kind of big tech, extractive businesses aren't part of the of the process? I don't know, how do we escape big tech in a transhumanist future?

Max More: 51:34

I don't think we really want to escape it, because big tech does an awful lot of really good things too. I mean, it's easy to indight them for some of their stupidities, but, 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 regulating what they can say they're regulating , so outsiders can't come in and change things more easily. I mean, usually, technology is a highly disruptive, introduced set of industries, and newcomers can open it up. But if you've got governments increasingly regulating what you can see what you can say, how you can invest. All the new ESG initiatives, how you can you know, that you have to hire certain kinds of employees and 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 futures, where maybe we actually 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 Microsoft Human or whatever, I would want to have some kind of open source system where no particular organisation is in control, it's kind of more distributed control and nobody can, obviously a non hackable system will be 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 that might seem like a very science fiction idea today, but it's not so far off, and we're already starting to, obviously get a lot of our memories and, and abilities are in our cell phones and devices will have virtual reality will have augmented reality. So more and more of our world will essentialy be digitised. And of course, we do have to be very concerned about who has control over that and can access it, which are obviously very live issues today, and I think will become more so. But I don't think it's your big corporations actually are in general a good thing. It's just they become pretty bad when they when they get controlled through through contact with government and regulation and can force out other people and prevent change, and obviously, with big huge government contracts that could be a real issue.

Tracey Follows: 53:33

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

Max More: 53:55

I think people 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 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, from the economy, you just have basic laws in place for fraud and theft, exactly 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 most people would be in favour 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 of government that people don't even question it they the changes, they want to make a very, very tiny and margina, if there's any improvement at all, we just got used to this system, which I think is far from an ideal system. I think it's kind of odd as society gets more complicated the economy because more complicated, people are favouring more and more central control, not understanding that you cannot control things centrally when they're complex. On a small scale, it can work. 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 is a frickin disaster. you starve people the death of Stalin did and the Khmer Rouge and various other groups, it doesn't work. The more complex it is, the more you need a distributive market based system. And people seem to have the opposite idea. And it's quite distressing. That's one reason actually, I wanted to live a long time as 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 has got under control of these territories.

Tracey Follows: 55:33

Well, that's why I'm a bit worried about the model of the future ending up being you know, communism on Earth and imperialism in space. But I think it's that 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 that there isn't anywhere to go now. All the frontiers have been populated, you know, even America, which was the land of the free is now not feeling that that is where 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? Do you see the transhumanist community perhaps ending up like that? Or what? 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?

Max More: 56:30

Well, transhumanism has 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 physically based, of course, people will come and take away your hardware, and then you 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 initiative to create new free countries, in places where you can 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 them some real, some real benefits to them. Hong Kong is kind of a depressing example, where it's a relatively free economy. And of course, China was given back control. And it's now other than that it's been repressed. So I think in the long run, it seems like 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 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. That's what I look forward to.

Tracey Follows: 57:53

I did a workshop once with a very, very famous entrepreneur. And I told him that actually, particularly in Europe, we're in population decline, and that, you know, the fertility rate has fallen dramatically in most, most regions of the planet, and all this is and he said, Well, that's not that's not right. I'm, I keep being told that the population is expanding, kind of, not exponentially, but he meant dramatically. And I said, No, no, that that is not the case where we're not even at the replacement level in most, 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, Please, please correct us on that.

Max More: 58:33

Yeah. It's bizarre. It's like people living in the 1960s, when fertility was at a peak, it peaked around 1968, and has been declining ever since. And people just don't seem to get this. As you said, throughout Europe, populations is either stopped growing or is already shrinking, and 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 poor 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 used to be you'd lose most of them in childbirth. And so you have far more of them to try and compensate for that. So as fewer children died, 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 it's not an accident that fertility rates are dropping, and people are putting off having children. So even globally, it looks like even though Africa is still relatively high growth, it's still slowed down since the 60s. Even globally, the UN which tends to over over project population, thinks that on 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'll start falling. And what's scary about falling population because there's no no bottom to it and go to zero literally, which is another reason why we want life extension to slow down that drop. Because if you're having children, you want people to continue living. A growing population is easy to handle as long as not too rapid. Falling population means you have smaller markets, fewer discoveries, fewer people printing 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 when the Julian Simon famously made that popular sources just don't get. So big population is not necessarily a bad thing. And we're getting better at using resources more wisely. I've just finished a piece for Cryonics 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 pretty much true of England. I forgot 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, 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 kilogrammes, someone calculated. And now we'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 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 isn't shouldn't be the problem, at least growing population shouldn't be considered the problem for people. If anything, we should be worrying about shrinking populations, and how do we support increasing the old populations? Another reason why we need life extension where we can live longer and healthier lives, otherwise, we're going to have a broad demographic problem as they are in Germany and Japan and increasingly other countries.

Tracey Follows: 1:01:48

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.

Max More: 1:02:09

Yeah, actually, from what I was looking at recently, it's not even clear 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. It's a very, very rapidly ageing population because of their policy. So it's going to be hit them a lot worse than other countries. And it's not just of course the population is 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 pulling in Japan is taking over Japan is taking over and look where they are now. Didn't happen.

Tracey Follows: 1:02:44

I know, lost decade. Yeah. Let's finish off with some of your thoughts on long term ism. Max, because that's in the news of late. What are your opinions on it?

Max More: 1:02:54

Yeah, it's, it's getting a lot of publicity recently, and I've been looking at it a little bit, and I probably need to read something on this. People I've been finding confused this long term ism 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, 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 term ism 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, then they 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 think. 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 maximises the outcome. Now consequencialism of different different forms of utilitarianism is by far the most common form that basically says that the thing we want to maximise is happiness or pleasure, depending on the particular version you get into different arguments about 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 maximise 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 is now my I become a robot who has to maximise this particular value. And why do I want to do that? Why should I care? To me, a critical question in ethics or meta ethics is why the moral? And to me, I don't think that utilitarian has a good answer well, because it will maximise this well so whatever, I don't care about maximising that. What am I care about? You know, being a good friend or a good husband or

Tracey Follows: 1:04:45

because isn't that an intrinsic virtue in itself to be moral?

Max More: 1:04:49

Yeah, I think we've more than a virtue theory. So which takes into account consequences and also principles as a kind of a conscient 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 sorry, rational that rationalistic mind, because it gives you at least the illusion that you can calculate the right answer to every moral problem. So it's very appealing to people who like a lot of math. But it's to me, it's really a kind of absurd theory that's completely unappealing to me. And if you take out utilitarianism, then long term ism falls apart. You know, some of the things of course, are still worth paying attention to 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 a paying attention to the wrong things. I think climate change is not an existential risk. I think being hit by an asteroid is, pandemics are as we've seen recently, on a very mild form, that's something we should take pretty seriously and have better responses to. So those aspects of long term ism are worth paying attention to, but the idea that we should denigrate the present for 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 long termist and vice versa.

Tracey Follows: 1:06:10

And not that related. It's interesting what you just said about climate change not being a n 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 in ways that may be foreseen or maybe not foreseen. But actually, that could be just as dangerous as the things that the climate change advocates or activists are worried about.

Max More: 1:06:50

I think it's much more dangerous.

Tracey Follows: 1:06:52

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

Max More: 1:07:00

I think we should be worried about climate catastrophism more. We're already seeing a very clear effects of that, that belief in the energy shortages, people are going to be recalled this winter. I understand that 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 oil and coal and gas in favour 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,

Tracey Follows: 1:07:37

and selling what's in storage to China.

Max More: 1:07:39

It's just It's just crazy. So yeah, of course, we want a nice environment. But to me, there was no evidence that of climate catastrophe. And even the, you know, the IPCC don't really see that people will tend to selectively quote things they quote, visible for the executive summary, which exaggerate stuff compared to the actual studies in those reports,

Tracey Follows: 1:07:57

which was the worst case scenario.

Max More: 1:07:59

Yeah, the worst case scenarios, which are highly implausible and we know now a highly implausible the, the scenarios that showed the greatest increases are now known to be completely off. And those projections just aren't working out all. So we are seeing warming, but it's pretty smart, pretty small, doesn't seem to be deeply unprecedented, it's well, within our capacity to adapt. And one point a lot of people miss is that three or four times as many people die from cold as they do from heat. And so you know, in some areas, 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 have to worry about it more, but I don't. In I suppose, if you believe the planet is overpopulated, it most countries, though, the will actually will live longer and better. 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 track 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 millimetres 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 bits of rock like in Sweden. Stockholm is not really a place. It's a whole bunch of little tiny islands. And people manage fine. There's a lot of very selective evidence people give. They talk about certain islands thinking 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 you have pictures on Time magazine of the Statue of Liberty being submerged. And he had pictures you know, 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 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 resistence to the evidence, it has a lot of a lot of the signs of religion. It has its prophets, 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 going to view its apocalyptic view, that's pretty much like a religion. It's pretty much like, 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. We're not destroying it. So it's 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, even if it may actually stop longevity advances. But it may actually shortened lifespan. So to me that's very disturbing, is the advocacy, out of out of touch with reality? I mean, why are they not ever getting nuclear power for instance? If you're really worried about carbon dioxide, and yet very few of these environmentalist there are some exceptions for nuclear power. So I find that a very disturbing trend. might be quite convenient, though, right? No, I'm with you on all of that. So I'm gonna 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? Most surprised to see? Oh, I'm not sure how to answer that one, really? Because I'd be surprised to see anybody who hadn't been preserved. That would be kind of a miracle,

Tracey Follows: 1:11:33

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,

Max More: 1:11:45

Well, you never know people can change their mind. I kind of already said that someone like Stephen Hawking should get cryopreserved. Seems like, why did that not happen? His body wasn't much used to him, you think you'd be natural neuro patient? 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. I'm pretty sad about it. Robert Heinlein, one of my favourite science fiction writers influenced me. It was very sad when he died and didn't get cryopreserved. Even though hehad a book the door into summer, which was about cryonics, basically. So I mean, I wouldn't be surprised obviously, most people not getting grabbed reserved because most people don't get it at all. I'm not sure I'd be most surprised by I guess those are the most hostile to it. But even then they can sometimes change.

Tracey Follows: 1:12:28

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

Max More: 1:12:34

Yeah my first my first dog Oscar, Oscar Wilde, because his sense of humour. 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 I didn't like dogs before that because of my childhood experiences, which were my stepfather's dog was completely undisciplined, would steal food from me and I didn't like it at all. And then other other experiences put me off. But once I had Oscar, I realised that dogs would be pretty fantastic, great companions. And so he lived to, even though he was a big dog, he lived on 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 that we have today will also follow because they are also great dogs. So yeah, it'd be me, Natasha, and our dogs will be come back in the future. And I hope to see those when I wake up,

Tracey Follows: 1:13:28

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 than technocracy?

Max More: 1:13:51

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

Tracey Follows: 1:13:56

Is that just mischief? For you know, is it clickbait? Is it mischief? Or is Do you think that is a genuine misunderstanding or laziness to get into the issues?

Max More: 1:14:07

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's you know, there's quite a while ago, and he gets it completely wrong. He seems to think we're goning to hate our physical bodies. And it's just where are you getting this from? I mean, the whole point of this is we want to improve ourselves, and 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 it's more of the good stuff that our bodies give us. So to me, 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 think it's about a few few computer geeks or something. Well, it's not you know, I'm not a computer guy. 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 this kind of body haters, it's just a lazy way of attacking. People always do a straw man argument, right? They don't do the steel man but you strengthen the argument to attack it. They do the straw man where they make it as weak as possible. That's not at all an accurate view of transhumanism.

Tracey Follows: 1:15:15

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 print that in the in in the press? I don't know. So maybe they should do a little bit of reading.

Max More: 1:15:29

Thanks for mentioning that. Yes. Go to Amazon and get the Transhumanist Reader.

Tracey Follows: 1:15:32

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

Max More: 1:15:45

Yeah, I'm actually, I realised recently that I've got all these almost written books that didn't get published. The first one actually was going to be for Wired when they had a book publishing division, 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, 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 of, I'm not sure that would be the final title. But that should be a pretty good source. But yeah, the Transhumanist Reader is some 35 authors, I think, from the 80s up to the present, some older pieces of 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 websit. We have under the Resources a big library there. And I'm actually writing a series of essays for the called the Independent Cryonics Educator Programme. 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.

Tracey Follows: 1:17:05

Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me today. Max.

Max More: 1:17:08

Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure.