After a recent London newspaper story we speak with Dennis Kowalski – who heads Cryonics Inc. in Michigan – It freezes people in liquid nitrogen after their death in the hope they can one day be “revived...” Some people have been there for 50 years... It's always controversial – we talk through the process and the issues...
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| Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
| Hoping that everything is good, whichever part of the world, or maybe the United Kingdom or United States, you happen to reside in, wherever in the world you are, you are welcome to this show, and I hope that your life is okay. | |
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| You can be, I think at one point I went out with a t-shirt and a scarf on, and nature believes that it's springtime, so the flowers are coming up. | |
| You know, it's all very bizarre, but for those of us who are trying to save money on heating bills, it's good news, I guess. | |
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| Very quickly, just to talk about the TV show, and this is probably the last time I'm going to say those words for the moment. | |
| You know, some of you keep asking me, and I understand why, about the TV show, and they ask me as if I had the power to do it. | |
| Please bring it back. | |
| Please know that I don't have that power. | |
| I have to say that I love it as a radio show because I'm a radio guy, but I enjoyed learning the techniques of being on television. | |
| And I think if it was ever what I would call a proper TV show with resources behind it, I think it would do very well. | |
| You know, that's just my feeling. | |
| And of course, I would say that, wouldn't I? | |
| So that's my thought about it, but it's not a TV show at the moment. | |
| And I very much appreciate those of you who like it on the radio. | |
| And that is the way that it is at the moment. | |
| Beyond that, the situation or the situations that mean that I'm now doing a radio show and not a television show, I'm not at liberty to talk about, though I promise you, one of these days, I absolutely will. | |
| And I think I have to put it to bed now because we have to move forward. | |
| It's the only direction that we can move in. | |
| And sometimes in my life, you know, through sad things that have happened to me, yes, I've been inclined to look back at some of the bad things that happened in my career. | |
| Why didn't I get further and all of those things? | |
| But usually I shake myself out of it and I accept what it is and I enjoy what is and I move forward. | |
| And that, if it makes any sense whatsoever, is all there is for all of us. | |
| We've only got now. | |
| And since we can't go back, we can only step forward one pace at a time. | |
| We can't rocket into the past and check out our relatives. | |
| And we can't get in the DeLorean and shoot forward. | |
| Now is more or less, as far as we know, although we may be proved otherwise, now is all there is. | |
| So that's all I have to say about the TV show. | |
| It was quite a lot in the end, wasn't it? | |
| Probably too much, I'm sorry if it was. | |
| So thank you to you for being part of this. | |
| Remember, when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show. | |
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| Now, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, it's an extended version of a short conversation that you will have heard on the radio show. | |
| I think you'll have heard about seven or eight minutes on the radio show. | |
| This is about 37 minutes talking about what is a deeply controversial but fascinating topic. | |
| You might think that it is the kind of thing you would hear or see in a James Bond movie. | |
| And I think it even featured in one of them, didn't it? | |
| You can tell me, was it Dr. No? | |
| The fact that I'm going to be talking about cryonics, that is preserving yourself pending the day that a cure for whatever led you to leave this earthly plane is found, the fact that we're talking about this is partly to do with a piece I saw in the Metro newspaper in London a few days ago, and I'm going to read it to you. | |
| Suspended in a deep freeze, the growing number of patients at the world's biggest cryopreservation facilities are taking a dice roll at another life. | |
| Some have been there for nearly 50 years, despite the current odds being vanishingly small. | |
| They represent an increasing number of people opting for an indefinite existence at minus 196 degrees Celsius after their legal death. | |
| The sleek white vats that stand in rows at the Cryonics Institute storage facilities in Michigan represent an increasing number of bodies, body parts and pets from around the world, all opting for that indefinite existence after legal death. | |
| Frozen in the liquid nitrogen, they await possible future technological advances that will revive them or may. | |
| Among those living in this Arctic limbo are chefs, students, secretaries and professors. | |
| And it turns out that British people are the most keen takers outside the US, according to the Metro newspaper. | |
| So after reading that in the Metro, I decided to check in with the president of Cryonics Institute, Dennis Kowalski. | |
| Now, we've talked about cryonics on the show before, but I thought it would be interesting to get an update on how this works. | |
| I know it's deeply controversial, and I know that there are views one way or the other about this. | |
| But I wanted to stand in the middle and just hear what they have to say. | |
| So this is the extended version that wasn't heard on the radio of the boss of the Cryonics Institute, Dennis Kowalski. | |
| Now, Dennis, I don't know what you made of the piece that I saw in the Metro newspaper in London this week. | |
| It was fascinating and periodically, not that often these days, cryonics gets covered. | |
| The way that the newspapers always report this is that it is a gateway to immortality. | |
| Is that how you see it? | |
| No, I think that's a little over-sensitive. | |
| Sensationalizing over-sensilizing it, yeah. | |
| Really, What we're trying to do is we're trying to extend life. | |
| Just as in emergency medicine, you know, let me use an analogy. | |
| 100 years ago, if I were to tell you I'm going to bring back the dead, you know, that's certainly a very over-the-top statement. | |
| But today, routinely, we use CPR and cardiac defibrillation to, you know, for lack of a better word, you could say bring back the dead. | |
| But what we're doing is we're taking people that are really sick and cardiac arrest and we're restarting their hearts. | |
| But 100 years ago, that was dead. | |
| So the definition of what dead is changed. | |
| And so in the same light, the technology that we have now is only so advanced and it's going to continue to advance. | |
| I mean, I don't think we're at the zenith of all human knowledge right now. | |
| We don't know everything. | |
| And so as time, you know, and technology advances, things that were impossible today will be possible in the future. | |
| Not everything, but some things. | |
| And in the case of keratics, we're hoping that a future hospital will be able to take and bring back the people who were stored in liquid nitrogen in this time, in this era, and be able to potentially revive them and bring them back. | |
| So in the same sense, will they be reviving the dead? | |
| Well, in today's terminology and definition, yes, but in the future, it's just going to be taking people in a form of suspension and giving them another chance. | |
| Now, does that mean you're going to live forever and some sort of immortality? | |
| No, something statistically will always get you. | |
| So we're not talking about immortality. | |
| We're talking about life extension. | |
| Has the technology for this changed? | |
| Because I can remember reading about this. | |
| I can remember watching programs about this on television when I was a kid. | |
| And it was something that was cutting-edge technology. | |
| It was seen to be very much the thing of the future. | |
| But there were some wealthy individuals who even 20, 30, 40 years ago had decided that this was a good avenue to go down. | |
| Yeah, so yeah, in my teen years, I remember hearing about it. | |
| And I'm in my mid-50s now. | |
| So yeah, the technology has changed. | |
| It went from basic straight freeze, which is just taking someone down to those very cold temperatures, liquid nitrogen, to a form of vitrification, which is, you know, some of the things we've learned through cryobiology. | |
| You know, with, you know, people, or science routinely freezes embryos and sperm, eggs, skin cells, and stem cells for laboratory, you know, experimentation and so forth. | |
| And they use a form of biological antifreeze that keeps the cells from imploding and getting crushed by ice crystals. | |
| And we incorporate that into our formulas as well to minimize the damage from the ice. | |
| Does that mean that people who were frozen, I'm sorry for putting it that way, but who were put into this form of almost suspended animation, I guess, 30 years ago may not actually be able to be revived, brought back? | |
| Well, certainly that could be the case, but I don't think it's that cut and dry that you could say that. | |
| I'd like to say, you know, there's a thing in chronics that we call information theoretic death. | |
| And that means, is the information destroyed? | |
| Because the information is what really you are. | |
| And the components are changed throughout time. | |
| You know, it's kind of a deep philosophical thing I just hit on there. | |
| But for instance, you are both your DNA, which is the software blueprint for your whole body, and also your ConnectHome, which is the software blueprint for all the connections in your brain that make up your mind. | |
| Those are two separate and distinct things that we're trying to save in cryonics. | |
| And so, you know, when you're a young child and you're eating, you eat food and you bring in nutrients, and those nutrients bring in new molecules that form your bones, your skin, and your brain. | |
| And over time, different material is brought in to, you know, form your brain and body. | |
| And then over time, some sloughs off, you know, through waste production and so forth. | |
| So different material in, different material out over a period of time. | |
| But the information that is you is also changing. | |
| But that pattern, part of it is your DNA, which is pretty hardy. | |
| Your DNA can last even sometimes without liquid nitrogen. | |
| So we know that at least one cell out of the trillions is going to make it through the process. | |
| The more important question, and that's enough information to, through stem cells, basically clone you and rebuild and repair and replace every cell in your body. | |
| But that's only part of you. | |
| That's just the components that make up your body. | |
| The other part is your mind, and that's the information that is encoded in all those nerves and synapses in your brain. | |
| And are we saving that piece of information with enough fidelity? | |
| Again, the answer is only time will tell for the future. | |
| But I like to use the analogy of if your brain and body were a computer and it was thrown off a Empire State building or a large building and shattered in a thousand pieces. | |
| In theory, we could still take and piece together the hard drive and download a copy of all the information that was on that hard drive. | |
| And we could melt down the pieces and reform them back into metal pieces for this and that. | |
| A very, very, very complex process. | |
| But that's kind of what your body does anytime you eat a hammer or have a salad and it formulates those Carbon molecules into muscle tissue or bone tissue, for instance. | |
| These processes all exist in nature, very complex processes. | |
| We haven't figured out how to reverse engineer nature yet, but that's the proof in principle that it works. | |
| It's like Da Vinci having a discussion about heavier-than-air flight, and it wasn't going to be possible for another couple hundred years, but a bird flies overhead, showing that it's not, we're not talking time travel or anti-gravity. | |
| We're talking something that happens in nature that we haven't figured out yet how to reverse engineer it. | |
| And once we can reverse engineer, and we're starting to do that with stem cells and so forth, and once we take all that knowledge that we have and we learn maybe through artificial intelligence, we can recognize patterns and we can deconstruct nature, | |
| then maybe we can retrieve that information, repair all the cracks and damaging that was done through aging, that was done through the disease or trauma that caused your death, and through the freezing process. | |
| But if you have no information, if we take that same computer that was shattered by being pushed off the building and we melt it in a vat of molten metal or something like that, the information is gone. | |
| There's nothing to retrieve. | |
| And our argument is when you get buried or cremated, that's kind of like dissolving the information. | |
| The DNA is gone. | |
| The mind is gone. | |
| There's nothing left to retrieve. | |
| But when you hold someone in a static state in liquid nitrogen, you know, it might be a broken state, but that state can be repaired in theory. | |
| Just like if you took a piece of paper and put it through a shredder, you could piece together that paper to read the document. | |
| So anybody, Dennis, anybody who had the impression, and people I think were given the impression a long, long, long time ago about this, that I have some illness that is eventually going to kill me, so let's get myself frozen and maybe they'll be able to cure it when they bring me back to life. | |
| Anybody who had the impression that you're going to be warmed up and will step out of that tank as if you'd been in some kind of stasis for 40, 50 years, whatever, that's not the way that this is going to work these days, no? | |
| Oh, absolutely not. | |
| I mean, even most of the sci-fi we see, you know, where someone just steps into a device that cools you down so you can travel across the stars at light speed or whatever, even that, you know, there'd have to be some kind of repair mechanism or at least something that keeps you from getting damaged through the ice, the cool down process. | |
| I mean, even though we do minimize the damage, there is some damage that happens even in the crowd preservation process. | |
| But the question is, are we destroying the information and are we destroying you? | |
| I think we're doing more good than harm, just like traditional medicine. | |
| You know, when you go in for a surgery, they're going to break some eggs to make the omelet. | |
| They're going to do some cuts and some fixing here and some fixing there. | |
| The question is, are we destroying the information? | |
| We don't think so. | |
| We think the fidelity of your DNA and your mind are still intact. | |
| There's damage done for sure. | |
| But we believe future technology, we don't believe it's impossible to reverse that damage. | |
| And let's be clear, there's three major damages, aging. | |
| Nobody wants to be brought back 90. | |
| And there is whatever trauma or disease killed you by today's definition. | |
| And also, there's going to be some freezing damage. | |
| But ironically, already there is a hint of the repair mechanisms that will be in place. | |
| And if you think, if you look at stem cells, if you can take you or I, one of our older skin cells, and you can trick them into becoming a undifferentiated stem cell already with today's technology. | |
| So we can take that already determined skin cell and turn it back into undifferentiated stem cell. | |
| And that stem cell can divide and basically grow a clone of us. | |
| That clone of us is all the components that make up you and I. So that's a lot of spare parts that can be swapped in, replaced out, or repaired at the molecular level if we know how to do that. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I'm sorry for jumping in again, but this is so fascinating. | |
| Say this has been done and you've got people on ice now. | |
| You're going to tell me how many, but you've got people who are on ice. | |
| Say this is done and the essence of one of those people or eventually all of those people is somehow implanted into a clone. | |
| How do you know and what confidence do you have that what will return or what will appear would actually be that person, would actually have the essence of that individual, the soul of that individual? | |
| Well, I don't think I would, I'm not a person who believes in taking just your memory pattern and putting it into another whole body to produce you, because I think that would be a copy of you and not you. | |
| However, nature already kind of swaps out the components throughout your lifetime, at least some of them, not all of them, in the process of eating and waste production and so forth. | |
| So in a way, nature is already chipping away at the hardware, replacing the hardware over a lifetime. | |
| And nature is already doing the repairs that it's supposed to do when there's damage. | |
| But nature, the death process, an aging process overwhelms the repair process. | |
| And that's why we have what we have today. | |
| So I would argue that I'm for repairing what is there, the individual that is there, maybe like an internal cloning, if you will. | |
| But again, to your deeper question of how do you know that's you? | |
| Well, how do you know when I bring back someone from cardiac arrest through CPR? | |
| How do we know that's the same person? | |
| Well, I mean, all indications are that's the same person, the same mind, soul, if you will, body. | |
| People are just happy to be alive. | |
| And if a person has a stroke, we don't always know if they're going to have 100% of their capacities or their brain is going to be intact. | |
| Yet, you know, there's all degrees of, well, did you bring back 90% of a person or 10% of a person? | |
| If it's 10%, you know, that's not a good thing. | |
| If it's 90%, most people are happy to be alive post-stroke. | |
| Maybe if they lost a little vision or the ability to walk, and then they can relearn that with different parts of their brain. | |
| I would argue that if you could bring people back with chronics at a future date, which is what we're hoping for, you will not be just bringing back sick people who are aged in a stroke format, but you'll bring them back maybe with some memory loss, maybe with some ability loss, but they'll be young, healthy, and vibrant and very much able to recuperate those abilities. | |
| There are so many questions to be asked here, and here I am again jumping in. | |
| And I know there's a slight digital delay between myself here in London and you in Michigan, but let's ask this. | |
| When somebody approaches you, and presumably you don't go out looking for them, they find you. | |
| But again, I'd be very keen for you to tell me how that works. | |
| When they approach you, let's assume they do. | |
| What has to happen? | |
| Do they have to tell you, look, I have whatever condition it is, it's going to result eventually in my death. | |
| I don't like the idea of not being here in the future. | |
| I would rather like to continue, and you might be able to facilitate my continuance. | |
| What do you do for them? | |
| Do they have to be with their families in a hospital and clinically die? | |
| Then do you pull up with an ambulance outside the hospital and trolley them away? | |
| Okay, that's a lot of questions all packed into one. | |
| Sorry. | |
| So yeah, it has to do about how do you become a member of our organization and also how does the beginning process work? | |
| So if someone is interested in cryotics, they usually seek us out. | |
| We're not out there proselytizing or selling like we're selling windows or doors or anything like that. | |
| We are on the internet. | |
| We are a nonprofit organization. | |
| Not only are we nonprofit, all of our records are open for public scrutiny. | |
| A lot of people, we're the least expensive, but also the largest corpor company that does this. | |
| And people fund it through life insurance. | |
| So it's not very expensive. | |
| It's about $28,000 US dollars. | |
| And with that cost, most of the money is put in an endowment into like an S ⁇ P 500 index fund, which pays perpetual interest to pay for the perpetual overhead and storage of the patients. | |
| So that's how the process works. | |
| We're democratically, the membership democratically elects the leadership through a board of directors. | |
| That's how I got to be the president. | |
| So I am signed up. | |
| I have a vested interest. | |
| Me and my family are signed up. | |
| And we have strict bylaws and rules that we follow to make sure that we exist. | |
| And we've been doing that for over 50 years. | |
| So with no hiccups. | |
| That's basically the signup process. | |
| Life insurance pays for it. | |
| So it's pretty cheap, relatively speaking. | |
| And when it comes to the process, okay, the process is very much like a conventional emergency situation. | |
| So if I were to keel over right now and my family recognized that I keel over, they would call 911 emergency services. | |
| The ambulance would come. | |
| They would try to revive me. | |
| If they were unsuccessful, after maybe a half hour, hour of attempts, they would, through a medical director on the radio or phone, declare me legally dead. | |
| At that point, since I have things in place ahead of time, I've already orchestrated a local standby in my area where I've got a cooperative funeral director, cooperative, a couple of paramedics and a bunch of equipment nearby who would get me, continue the cardiac arrest code, just like a regular 911. | |
| But they would add me to a vat of ice, you know, a container with ice water, circulating ice water. | |
| They'd give me a couple other medications like heparin and sodium citrate to thin out my blood so there's no coagulation. | |
| And they continue a little CPR to circulate that. | |
| And then they'd move, get me on my way as fast as possible to the cryonics facility where they'd be standing by to hook me up to a heart-lung machine that would pump in the cryoprotectants, the biological antifreezes that have been developed by cryobiologists to protect my tissues and brain from freezing damage. | |
| But legally, they would have had to have tried everything to resuscitate you. | |
| This would only happen after I'm legally declared dead. | |
| Right. | |
| Because we're not going to do this on anyone who is live or viable because it's an unproven technique yet. | |
| It may take 100 years to prove out the technique. | |
| That's the point. | |
| When people say this is impossible, or they try to bring in point counterpoint or how come you haven't done this with a hamster or a gerbil or something in a lab. | |
| Well, indeed, that's what, you know, I've been looking online about this, trying to get up to date with it. | |
| I've done the subject before. | |
| And the same arguments are put up every time, and they're equally as valid now as they were 20 years ago when I first talked about this on the radio. | |
| You haven't done it. | |
| You know, people are waiting for you to bring something, not necessarily a human being, but perhaps some kind of laboratory animal or whatever, you know, some kind of cell or whatever it might be. | |
| People are waiting for that to happen. | |
| And of course, they say it never has happened. | |
| Right, right. | |
| So, I mean, it's really kind of the wrong question, though, because it's like asking, well, if you brought back the lab animal, then there'd be a stronger proof in principle that we can do this with humans. | |
| But, you know, we'd have to bring back that lab animal, we'd have to have such advanced technology that we'd be in the future, and you wouldn't need Chronics to get you there. | |
| Cranix is an ambulance ride to a future hospital that may or may not exist in the future. | |
| And the ambulance absolutely exists in proof and principle. | |
| But the hospital does not exist. | |
| So one of the criticisms is the hospital doesn't exist. | |
| Well, if we had the hospital, we wouldn't need this particular ambulance to get you there. | |
| So it's like arguing, you know, why should I give you money and get involved in cancer research? | |
| Because you haven't proven to me that you've cured cancer yet. | |
| Well, that's the point is we're working on it. | |
| This is an ongoing experiment. | |
| You won't know the results for another 50, 100 or more years. | |
| And everyone who's buried or cremated is in the control group. | |
| We know for sure what happens to them. | |
| It's a complete loss. | |
| But we don't know what happens to people who are stored in this liquid nitrogen situation. | |
| We do know, we have anecdotal evidence that embryos can survive, other cells can survive, smaller organisms like bacteria and viruses can survive, and the structures mostly survive. | |
| So are we at the zenith of our technology or are we going to keep learning and advancing? | |
| That's the big question. | |
| Are you registered for this? | |
| Have any of your family had this or do they plan to have it? | |
| I am. | |
| I'm signed up. | |
| My whole family's signed up. | |
| That is actually a condition of my being a director on the board of directors. | |
| We want people with a vested interest running the organization who care because their family and loved ones are involved. | |
| You know, so my heart is definitely in this for myself and my family and my friends. | |
| Is there any guarantee that this will work? | |
| Absolutely not. | |
| But there's no guarantee when you call emergency services that the doctors are going to save you at any given day. | |
| We're fighting the good fight against disease, impairment, death. | |
| And the only way to find out what is possible is to reach into the gray area of what's possible, what's not possible, and to do the research. | |
| And do you have teams of scientists who are constantly probing the boundaries of feasibility for this? | |
| Well, our organization does what it does as a primary mission, but we do fund other organizations and other universities who are working on similar fields of cryobiology. | |
| For instance, we very easily can freeze and vitrify small biological tissues. | |
| The kind of the current holy grail of cryobiology is to be able to scale that up to larger organs like hearts and livers and kidneys so you could do organ transplant instead of having to do it immediately. | |
| You could cryobank these organs for like a week or two or three, and that would save already millions of lives and be great for the human condition. | |
| Well, we're helping to fund that because as the vitrification formulas become better, less toxic and more efficient at the process of preserving tissues, it's a win for everyone currently, but it's also a win for us in the future because we can enhance our formulas to make our process more efficient and better so that the future has less repairs to do, not more. | |
| So like my initial analogy was, you know, like if you run something through a shredder, you know, and maybe you shred it, you know, one piece of paper into 100, you know, maybe 10, you rip it up 10 times, you can paste that together and read the document. | |
| That level of damage is less, I would argue, than if you ripped it up into 10,000 pieces. | |
| So the more damage, the harder it is to repair, the more chance there is for a loss of information, the information theoretic loss. | |
| So we're trying to minimize the damage now and here, here and now, so that there's less to do in the future. | |
| How many people do you have currently on ice, if you want to put it that way? | |
| And what sorts of spread of people do you have? | |
| You know, are they mainly billionaires, company executives, people of some kind of faith that might embrace this? | |
| Is it a particular kind of person? | |
| And as I said at the beginning of that question, how many people have you got stored? | |
| Okay, so we have approximately 250 people stored, equal amount of pets, animals, also many tissue samples, DNA, stem cells, and so forth. | |
| We have around 2,000 people signed up approximately. | |
| The type of people who do this kind of spans all across the board from very extremely wealthy, like you said, to your average everyday Joe who uses life insurance as a vehicle to pay for this. | |
| You know, anywhere from politically left to politically right, fundamentally religious to atheist, agnostic. | |
| Kind of like you might say, you know, who would be the type of people who would get the first heart transplant before it was a proven thing? | |
| You know, that seems kind of off, but off-putting because, you know, at one point you'd say, oh, I'm going to stitch and sew a heart out of from a corpse into a living human being. | |
| That sounds like Frankenstein. | |
| But yet now, again, that's accepted medical procedure kind of taken for granted every day today. | |
| So some people might look at what we do as kind of, you know, out there a little bit, but we're hoping that as people really look into it and look at the logic of it all, they'll realize that what we're trying to do is just rational faith in science, if you will. | |
| Some of those critics call this pseudoscience because they say it's something that's never really going to work, and we know so little about this that we shouldn't be doing it. | |
| What do you say? | |
| Well, I mean, if you take the conservative approach to science of never looking and never trying to find out, you're never going to really... | |
| There is, if we just stuck with conventional science and conventional wisdom, we wouldn't move forward. | |
| And that's how we progress. | |
| There's a lot of sayings that the only way for science to progress is after the scientists, the old scientists die and a new breed comes in and some new ideas come in. | |
| But I believe that you have to keep an open mind with this stuff. | |
| Not such an open mind that your brains leak out your ears, but open mind enough to look at the logic of what we're doing. | |
| I mean, nothing we're doing hasn't already been done some form or shape or another by nature. | |
| Like you say, well, you can't reverse aging. | |
| Well, you know, nature already does that when some of our cells are reverted back to embryonic cells when we procreate, for instance. | |
| Some cells do go from 20, 30 years of age right back to square one, zero. | |
| Nature can do that. | |
| So if nature can do it, it can be done. | |
| We have to figure it out, reverse engineer what nature does. | |
| If nature can fly a bird heavier than air flight, you know, airplanes don't look like birds, but they incorporate some of what a bird uses as far as lift and takeoff and everything like that in aerodynamics. | |
| So the proof is it can be done. | |
| It's very hard to do. | |
| And if you just say, well, you know, we don't know for sure, let's not even try. | |
| You're not going to get anywhere. | |
| You're never going to find out what is or isn't possible. | |
| Let's say chronics absolutely doesn't work. | |
| The only way to find out what's possible is to run the experiment. | |
| Do you have anybody famous on your books? | |
| We do, but we also keep our records private for certain people. | |
| Just like regular medical procedures, we have HIPAA laws that protect the privacy of others. | |
| If people want to be public, that's fine. | |
| If people want to be private about it, that's fine. | |
| There's a lot of people out there who have said they want to do this. | |
| They've spoken about it, but they really haven't pulled the trigger, so to speak. | |
| I mean, I think Simon Cowell, I could go on and on, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, all these people who have talked about it at one point or shape in there, like Walt Disney, who haven't actually done it. | |
| We call it, you know, people put, they think about death, they think about these things, but a lot of people sweep that under the rug. | |
| Even you might ask yourself, how many people have, you know, their wills filled out properly and documented? | |
| You know, there is a, people just don't want to address death, no matter how logical it is. | |
| It's inevitable, but it's the thing that we don't want to think about. | |
| And I don't think I'm unique in being in that particular camp that you described. | |
| Have you got anybody frozen at the moment? | |
| I don't expect you to name their names unless you want to, who if you uttered their name, I would know who they are. | |
| I'd have to think about that. | |
| Yeah, probably, probably a few people. | |
| But again, I'm going to do my best to keep for patient privacy intact. | |
| And when you talk to people who are going to do this before they actually do it, what sorts of things do they tell you about why they want to do it? | |
| Well, it's all across the board. | |
| I mean, some people, I think almost all cryingists, you're looking for some common threads. | |
| And I told you a lot of crying assists are just like anyone else. | |
| But also, there is a couple threads that separate us. | |
| We tend to be optimistic about the future. | |
| We tend to be, well, you know, sci-fi science thinkers, people who enjoy science fiction, positive science fiction, not the dystopian type. | |
| It's easy to write dystopian stories because anything that's scary catches people's eye. | |
| It catches your eye, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. | |
| if you look at the current news cycle, so much of it is negative, negative, negative. | |
| And even though I... | |
| So I just wanted to ask this. | |
| Of the things that people say to you, do they say to you, well, look, I want to be able to come back because I want to know who's going to win the 2200 World Series, or I want to see I want to see my I want to see future generations of the family grow up. | |
| I want to see what I heard that one. | |
| You've heard that, you know, nothing about sports teams or anything like that. | |
| That was a frivolous example, but people who have an eye to the future, they want to know maybe how their business will shape up, how the family will develop. | |
| Or how the humankind progresses. | |
| I mean, there is a strong optimism. | |
| There's a very intelligent, a lot of highly educated People sign up and they're optimistic. | |
| So they're thinking that maybe we're going to have a lot of robots around. | |
| We're going to have the flying cars, the space colonization, and a lot of positive things like that, a lot of problems that we wring our hands about today will be solved in the future. | |
| Of course, it's not going to be a utopian future, but I do believe things will be better. | |
| Just by going by the current trends, 500 years ago and going back to as long as you can imagine, people had it really, really hard. | |
| 99% of humanity just struggled to survive, you know, almost an animal-like existence. | |
| And we're pretty spoiled. | |
| You know, we think we have it bad, but look at your great-grandparent. | |
| I mean, fighting World War II and the disease and the poverty and the starvation. | |
| I mean, we have obesity because we have too much food. | |
| I mean, you could take things, people just are spoiled by what they have. | |
| And I think things are going to continue to get better. | |
| It'll never be utopian. | |
| But do you think that this process is part of the getting better of things? | |
| Last question. | |
| We've only got two minutes to ask it, but I think that's probably long enough. | |
| Sure. | |
| If we read the newspapers, if we take a look at the media, we will see that there are various people working on our brains and electronic interfaces with them. | |
| Do you think that this is being overtaken, what you do, is being overtaken by the fact that one of these days, I might be able to, for whatever my sum total of knowledge is worth, I might be able to plug that into a data bank and live indefinitely through some kind of computer? | |
| Maybe, possibly. | |
| I really don't know. | |
| That's kind of above my pay grade. | |
| But if that is the case, and if that's the way someone wants to exist in the future, it's certainly important to save the original hard drive so you have that information to download. | |
| And that hard drive is the wetware that is your brain. | |
| So I'm thinking more of a biological thing, but I don't know if I believe you can be completely emulated in a hardware robotic situation. | |
| But if that's the case, either way, saving what you have is the important thing to do. | |
| And that the conservative thing to do is to try to fight the good fight, to do the best you can to alleviate pain, suffering, and death. | |
| And certainly for your family and friends. | |
| And that's what we're trying to do. | |
| Last question. | |
| If somebody who maybe had a lot of money but found themselves on death row came to you and said, I would like to be preserved, and that person just happened to be some kind of horrible killer, would you offer them the service? | |
| Well, that's quite a hypothetical. | |
| I don't think there's anyone on death row that's got a lot of money, much less the amount of money that it would take. | |
| Well, just say some despot or dictator who done something terrible, something bad. | |
| Well, I mean, you know, I mean, I wouldn't look forward to, you know, saving Hitler or something like that. | |
| But, you know, in my current job as a paramedic firefighter over the years, many, many times I had to, you know, help save people involved in criminal activities. | |
| So the answer is that you would say yes. | |
| Well, yeah, you know, it's not for me to judge. | |
| You know, that's up for society to judge. | |
| But I look at it from a medical perspective. | |
| Your doctor doesn't ask if you've been good or bad before you get the heart transplant. | |
| Your doctor just does the heart transplant. | |
| And then it's, you know, if it's up to society to decide on whether your punishment is maybe the death penalty or something like that, that's not medicine. | |
| Dennis, thank you very much for giving me your time. | |
| I find it, we both know that it's controversial. | |
| I find it fascinating. | |
| And I think it was a conversation that was worth having. | |
| Thank you for giving me the time today. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| Well, I know that I've used that word a lot in the past, but fascinating. | |
| And yes, of course, controversial. | |
| And I'm sure you'll tell me in your emails how controversial. | |
| But the man you've been listening to is Dennis Kowalski from the Cryonics Institute. | |
| He's the president of it. | |
| And that is how things stand with cryonics in 2024. | |
| An era when preservation techniques may include electronics one of these days. | |
| You may be able to plug your brain in one of these days. | |
| I don't doubt that's coming. | |
| And preserve the essence of you and all your memories and all your experience in an electronic way. | |
| The cryonics way is the biological way. | |
| It's fascinating, literally perhaps chilling in some ways, and deeply controversial, but a conversation that I thought was worth having. | |
| Your thoughts welcome. | |
| Thank you for being part of this. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained Online. | |
| Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |