#E30 Is Cryopreservation A Second Chance At Life With Max More
About Dr Max More
Dr. Max More is of the founders of the modern philosophy of transhumanism, co-founder of the Extropy Institute, an organization crucial in building the transhumanist movement since 1990, and Ambassador and President Emeritus of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the largest cryonics facilities in the world.
Dr. Max is an internationally acclaimed strategic futurist who writes, speaks, and organizes events about the fundamental challenges of emerging technologies. Max is concerned that our rapidly developing technological capabilities are racing far ahead of our standard ways of thinking about future possibilities. His work aims to improve our ability to anticipate, adapt to, and shape the future for the better.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
(00:31) Briar: We are bringing you an exclusive episode of Hyperscale Live at the Longevity Summit in Dublin, a 4 day conference with experts and scientists in the aging field. This is a real fan girl moment for me as today I'm introducing you to Max More, author of the Pro Actionary Principle, co-editor of the Transhumanist Reader and the director of communications at Bio stasis Technologies, a cryo-preservation organization. We'll discuss the cryo-preservation process as human life extension, digital twins, transhumanism, and mind uploading. So what were you just saying? So you can have 10 coffees a day.
(01:47) Max: Yeah, I can drink coffee till the evening and go straight to sleep. Because there's certain gene, I forget which one it is, but if you have this genetic variant, you process the caffeine very rapidly so you don't really even feel the effects. Whereas other people, the opposite is true one cup will keep them awake all night. So it's very important to know your personal biochemistry.
(02:04) Briar: Interesting. So where could I go and find out more about my biochemistry? Well,
(02:08) Max: There are a lot of companies offering these tests. One that's been around for a long time is 23 and me named after the 23 chromosomes, and they've been around forever. And I think when I did it a number of years ago, it was like a hundred dollars, which is nothing. And you get a lot of information. It's not a whole genomic decoding, but it's kind of all the, the main in variant. So it'll tell you, for instance, if you have the cancer breast cancer variant, the BRCA one gene the caffeine gene. It tells you whether you have the variants that put you at risk of Alzheimer's disease. So if you have one copy, your risk goes up several fold and you have two copies. It's really bad news. Yes. And that also actually is interesting 'cause the same variant that affects your Alzheimer's risk also tells you whether you can eat a lot of fat or not. No problem. So some people can eat fat, no problem. Other people, not so much. So any dietary advice that says this is the diet for everybody, it's nonsense because it really depends on your personal biochemistry and we're just starting to figure out how to test that. Yeah.
(02:58) Briar: So tell me a little bit more about this. So we we're just figuring out how to test it. What other things can I do to find out all of these things about myself? So I can say, oh yeah, I can drink 10 cups of coffee, or I could do this.
(03:12) Max: Well, there's a lot of different tests and I don't want to recommend other ones too much 'cause I'm not sure how solid they are at this point. Some people will I've done allergy testing and it, to me, it was pretty much nonsense. The results. It wasn't very helpful. It told me that I was fine with wheat, which I know I'm not, and that I had problems with broccoli, which I don't. So that wasn't very helpful.
(03:30) Briar: My friend had one of these recently and it came back with this massive laundry list of stuff that she couldn't eat, and she kind of looked at it and was like, what the hell am I meant to eat? Like, there's nothing.
(03:41) Max: So the genetic tests are the ones that the most, most well-funded at this point. But there are tests of all kinds of different things. But I'll be very careful in believing claims at this point.
(03:50) Briar: I think that's the challenging part that I'm finding is, it's a very hard thing to, to navigate around. So I've been talking to many experts and exploring this idea of, could I live forever? Can I become a cyborg? Just really just starting to explore the space. And it's like, the more people I talk to, the more confused I am about everything.
(04:15) Max: That's not a bad thing because what you don't want is someone who finds an idea and latches onto it. And that's the answer to everything. So confusion is good, it's uncomfortable, but it means that you are getting a lot of different opinions that may be conflicting and it takes some time to sort that out. I think one thing that's really needed, not just in this area, but anywhere in life, is critical thinking. The ability to ask the right questions as to why should I believe what you're saying versus this person. 'cause it’s, this field obviously is very complex. A lot of conflicting views and especially people selling products are going to tend to be biased towards what they're selling you. So how do whether to believe them or not. You can't just reject everything, but you've gotta be pretty careful in what you do agree to.
(04:53) Briar: Yes. I think curiosity is one of my massive values in life, and that's actually why I'm producing this documentary and how I got so into learning about transhumanism and cryonics and all of these, and longevity and all of these kind of topics. Because at the end of the day, the way that I see it, as the world will evolve, technology evolves exponentially. And we either have two choices. We can either kind of stay back or we can explore and, and experiment. Yeah.
(05:21) Max: But curiosity, I think is a core characteristic of people interested in living longer. Because, I was just telling you, I think yesterday that I was writing this publishing an essay I wrote back in the nineties on stagnation. And people's fear that they get bored. I think people who are afraid they'll get bored are just boring people. They don't have curiosity, so they can't imagine how people can enjoy the next 50, a hundred thousand million years. Whereas people with curiosity say, well, there's lots to do. I can't imagine running out of ideas. So I think it's very critical to have that. And when we talk about biostasis or cryonics, that's one thing that characterizes people who choose to get themselves cryopreserved, is a sense of curiosity. They want to see what the future will be like. They're very curious about that. Many people don't really see the appeal of the future 'cause they tend to be pessimistic for one thing, think they believe science fiction think it's going to be a terrible place, a mad max desolation or AI terminator scenario, which highly implausible, I think. But they also just don't have the imagination to think of what they're going to do. They kind of think, well, I'll be stuck in the same job for the next 5 million years. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous.
(06:18) Briar: And tell us more about your cryonics facility. I really want to come to, it's in Arizona, isn't it?
(06:23) Max: 1Yes. Well, I won't say my facility. I actually worked there for 12 years. I was president for almost 10 years. The longest of anybody there. It's been around for over 50 years now. Alcor is the largest cryonics organization right now with about something over 200 patients or maybe up to 215 or so, and around 1500 members. That means people have actually made the full arrangements to be cryopreserved financially and legally. That's been going since oh 1972. It was founded. So quite a long track record. It's being hard recently to grow members. It seems to have slow down for some reason, but hopefully that'll pick back up. It's a very difficult thing to talk to people about because it's so complex. It has so many aspects. Philosophical, technological, financial, legal, there's a lot of aspects. So it, it's not an easy thing to sell well, to make people understand.
When I've talked about it many times in the past, people have often, assumed that I'm a charlatan or a fraud or something. And they say, oh, it's you're trying to, sell us a quick fix or this is an easy way, or get rich quick scheme is their favourite phrase, which is kind of the opposite of reality because it's get slightly wealthy very, very slowly with great difficulties, more like a good description. 'cause if you have, like we're talking about treatments that don't necessarily work, if you have a simple treatment with a simple answer, that you can sell that to people who are in need of it. But with cryonics, you have to persuade people to overcome all these psychological barriers, social pressures, all kinds. It's the hardest thing in the world to sell people on or to get people to understand. So I find that very frustrating
I think back to 1980s my first television appearance ever actually, in 1986. I was debating a professor of surgery from London and about cryonics. He didn't know anything about the subject, but he was, poo-pooing it the whole time. And as we left the studio, He turned to me and said, I'm sure he'll make lots of money, but he's the surgeon who makes lots of money. I'm not the person who made money. I'm doing it for the ideal and the principle of it.
(08:14) Briar: So walk me through how it works. So say I want to get frozen. I love to do this little speech bubbles around it because I know that we're not meant to say it's frozen, but say, I want to do this. Like, how do I do it? Say I'm 60 years old, how does it work? Am I like lying there on some kind of, I don't know, am I still awake? Like, how does it happen?
(08:39) Max: So people generally make the arrangements well in advance. You don't want to leave this at the last minute. That's very problematic. So I made arrangements back in 1986, couldn't have kept mine. So if you leave it to the last minute, the problem is you have to make financial arrangements because obviously if cryonics organizations spend a lot of money and then you don't have the funding, it's going to endanger everybody. So most people arrange life insurance. That's the most common way to pay for it. Wealthy people may just put a hand over, $200,000 in cash, but not most people do that. You've gotta sign a whole bunch of contracts and show that you have informed an understanding of what you're doing. So generally, that's all in place well in advance.
A number of different scenarios. If you're 60, then probably you're not dying of old age, so it's probably a heart attack or something like that. So let's take that scenario. You're in a hospital, you've had a heart attack. It looks like you don't have long to live. Hopefully they'll, they'll see the little, either the card in your wallet or the tag that you carry around. Some people have a number in their neck. I put mine here. Okay. 'cause a number to call in the emergency and some basic instructions, and then the team will be deployed as rapidly as possible. There's teams in different states that can get to there as quickly as possible even internationally. And they'll be hopefully stabilizing the patient so they don't go down too quickly. And then the goal is to arrive there before the person's declared legally dead. And it's very important to understand that legally death is not real death. Or clinical death of that matter. Legal death actually is just the doctor saying, I declare you to be dead.
Which, sometimes you could actually revive the person. They may have a do not revive order on them. So that's not really what, what death is. And clinical death isn't death either. Clinical death just means that your breathing and heart rate have stopped. But we know now, since the 1960s, we have C P R and resuscitation techniques, we can bring people back from clinical death. So clinical death isn't really death, and that leads to some tricky issues. But we'll believe that for now as to what death is. But we want to get there as soon as legal death is being declared, because legally we can't begin the process till that point. So then we're going to start cooling the patient immediately with external ice circulate the icy water around the patient to accelerate the cooling, we're going to administer a bunch of medications to protect the cells.
So some of those will be antacids, which acids will be produced. Membrane stabilizes, things to maintain blood pressure anti-clotting agents, that kind of thing. So then we can transport the patient. Oh, also another thing is going to put on a heart, heart lung machine. So you start taking over the patient's breathing a respirator. So they keep breathing. So it looks peculiar to people in the hospital that you are treating the person if they're still alive, because as far as we're concerned, they're not dead. They’re kind of a state where they're beginning to die and we want to pause that process. That's the whole idea, is to pause the dying process. There is no line where you're suddenly dead. It's just a process. So at that point, you'll be transported to the facility. Again, there's different variations, but once you reach the place like Alco in the operating room, a surgeon will, let's say as a whole body patient, they'll open up the chest, do basically a median sternotomy, access the major blood vessels of the heart cannulate those.
Then they're going to connect that to a, a pump and chiller system and remove as much of the blood and bodily fluids as possible. Because, you talked about freezing, we actually don't want to freeze the patient. We want to vitrify, which means that we replace the blood and other water with a solution that when you go below freezing doesn't freeze, it doesn't form ice crystals, it just gets thicker and thicker and holds all the cells in place. And that's known as vitrification from the Latin with the glass. So it's kind of a glassy block. So that doesn't have any sharp edges from ice crystals. It just kind of holds everything in place. And then the patient's taken down to minus 320 Fahrenheit or minus 1 96 Celsius. And at that point, nothing is changing. There's no metabolism. You can wait for a hundred years, you'd be as fresh as one day.
(12:03) Briar: Fresh As a daisy,
(12:05) Max: Pretty much. Yeah. A chilled daisy. Yes.
(12:07) Briar: Chilled daisy. So that's interesting. Okay. So the that process is done. And then how do they look in the facility? Because when I picture this in my head, I just picture a whole bunch of bodies on display. But I'm sure it's not like that.
(12:23) Max: No. What you'll see is very large metal canister steel, stainless steel canisters are 10, 11, 12 feet tall. They'll contain maybe four whole body patients. Well, actually there's different models. The newer ones can take 10 or 11 whole body patients. Some members just choose to preserve the brain. And you can get far more of those. But you don't see anything because you're in case, first of all, in a sleeping bag which soaks up the liquid nitrogen in case you have to be transferred. Then you're in a metal pod, which protects the whole body. And then you're inside another stainless-steel canister. So you can't see anything. It's not like in the science fiction movies or TV shows where you see like a, a frosty face behind a panel. It's nothing like that, unfortunately.
(13:00) Briar: It's yeah. Funny to sort of think. I do hope one day I can come and have a look. It would be so fascinating to see. Okay. And then how long do we think, so obviously the technology is developing, we have eggs these days that we can what's the process called again when we
(13:19) Max: Vitrify or cryo-preserve.
(13:22) Briar: Cryopreserve. So people who are having like IVF and things like this, what do we need to do in order to get to the point that we're reviving the humans that we have preserved?
(13:34) Max: Well, as you said, we can already cryopreserve reversibly cryopreserve things like sperm, eggs, embryos corneas, heart valves, many different kinds of tissues. The challenge is as you go from single tissues to like organs, let alone to whole organisms, you have a problem that you have to rewarm at a certain very rapid rate. It may seem peculiar, but as you warm ice crystals can actually reform and that can do a lot of damage. So you have to rewarm very rapidly, and I mean like tens of degrees per second. So that is something we can't do for large bodies of tissue yet. But obviously we're making progress. So as to when we're better do that, we can't really say, we just know that we're making progress. We can do more and more tissue types. We're getting larger amounts.
Just a couple of weeks ago it was announced that at University of Minnesota, they had successfully and repeatedly cryopreserved rat kidneys and then reversed that and implanted them. And they function well. So we know it's going to happen. It's a matter of when, and there isn't, people say, well, give me a year when we'll bring people back. That's not possible for several reasons. One is there won't be any one date because patients are in very different condition. Imagine someone cryopreserved in the 1970s with not very good technology, then that'll probably take long to be repaired. Maybe they won't be repairable or it'll take more advanced technology. Also, circumstances vary. I talked about a situation where, you're right there at the hospital, right at the time, no delay. That doesn't always happen, right? Sometimes someone dies in their sleep, they're not being monitored.
They may be, clinically dead for several hours before they're discovered. There's going to be a lot more damage done that may take more technology to repair. So there isn't going to be one date. And I, I don't really want to give a date because it's all predictions are false that they never come out. Right. But I would imagine on the most super optimistic end of things like 30 or 40 years seems to be very optimistic. That would depend on probably on AI accelerating things. It could take a hundred years. I mean, it is really, we're just guessing. We really don't know. We just know it's going to happen one day.
(15:23) Briar: It's fascinating. And I guess you've signed up
(15:25) Max: Yeah, since 1986. I mean, a long, long time. I signed up when I was 23 years old, basically as a 22 years old. Not 'cause I was expecting to need it, but really as a statement, this is something sensible. We should do this and so do it by example.
(15:39) Briar: And when was the first person who went through this process?
(15:43) Max: Dr. James Bedford, who's an occupational psychologist in California. He was cryopreserved in 1967, and he's still actually maintained by Alco that he was taken over as a charity case. 'cause there was no real funding. It wasn't arranged, the very first case, it wasn't properly arranged, but he was taken over as a charity case and is still there. He's actually, if you count him, is not dead, but, still persisting. He's the oldest surviving human being in history at this point.
(16:06) Briar: And what about Walt Disney? Is this a conspiracy that he's done this process?
(16:12) Max: No, that's one of the myths. There's a couple of myths about cryonics. That's the most common one. I'm not quite sure how that arose. I think what happened was, at the time Walt Disney died, there was also a cryonic story in the press. And somehow they got mixed up and kind of understandably, because Walt Disney was, Tomorrowland and future world, so you'd expect him to do this, right? It's a very natural idea. But in fact, he's buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery. So unfortunately he won't be coming back.
(16:35) Briar: Regarding your thoughts on death. So this is obviously a very complicated topic and I was reading a book recently called After by Dr. Grayson, Dr. Bruce Grayson. He essentially shared stories of people who had been on the operating table and died and then been brought back to life. He was potentially having a conversation with someone down a hallway. And this person who was apparently dead overheard the story saw He had like a stain on his top, like all of these little details, which the fact that they were on the operating table, they could not have frankly have seen. Which makes me really wonder about, yeah, like our soul and things like this. And I had posted a, a post on LinkedIn recently saying that I would like to be preserved by cryonics should the time come.
Maybe when I'm 70 or 80 or something like this. And there's not an opportunity for me to live forever or at least extend my life. And people were saying all sorts of things to me like, oh, you have an ego. You just want to live for the sake of yourself and you need to make way for other people on the planet. And people were being quite aggressive to me. I was getting quite picked on and I was just like, wow, this is a really complicated topic. Of course you've got the spirituality side of things. You've got people who believe in life after death. You've got religion that plays into this. And part of me wonders that if I went through this process, bearing in mind the book that I read by Dr. Bruce Grayson and what happens if like my soul is like hanging around the room for like a thousand years just waiting .
(18:23) Max: Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that. First of all, the, the kind of stories you're talking about I've looked into those and I don't think there are any credible cases of people actually able to see things they couldn't have seen. Now, when you're on a hospital table, even if you're clinically dead again, you're not completely gone. So you could hear things that you could remember later on that's quite possible. But I haven't actually seen any validated cases of someone who, observed something they couldn't really have observed or found out in some way. If you believe in a soul, I personally don't believe in a soul. I'm a materialist. I think we're physical beings. My myself is embodied, my brain functions. But, I don't think the idea of a soul is a problem. Because if you think about it, we already have people walking around today who are once cryopreserved for months, sometimes years as embryos.
Most people believe that, if there is a soul, it starts at the point of conception. So if that's the case, these cryopreserved embryos had souls for sometimes a long time. There are twins have been born like 10 years apart. So one has been cryopreserved 10 years. They don't say, oh, it was really boring before I was born. They don't report that. We also have people who've been clinically dead for many minutes, even an hour or more. And again, on the idea that there's a point of death where the soul leaves the body, well, they don't report a problem. They don't report, floating around being bored. So my view is if there is a soul, it's something we haven't found. So it's not something in space and time, it's not part of the scientific worldview. So it must be outside space and time in which case time doesn't really matter.
So whether it's a minute or an hour or a hundred years really doesn't make a difference. So I personally don't think there is a solve, but if there is, I don't really see that as a problem for cryonics. Now it's interesting what you said though. This person gets very upset when you start talking about this and start accusing you of selfishness. 'cause you want to live, oh my goodness, how terrible you want to live. It's because you're challenging some fundamentals of their worldview. And it is making them go into a very defensive position. And we see this a lot with life extension and cryonics, they're challenges, some very fundamental worldviews. And people get very upset and, get back in and get hostile and say, oh, you just want to, you're just selfish. And well, is it selfish to want to live?
I mean, if you're saying, well, we should be replaced by the next generation, why don't you go die right now? So that's the one else come by. I mean, it is very hypocritical. The same people will accuse you of wasting money, but they'll spend money on very expensive holidays. Is that more important than living? At the end of life, people spend huge amounts of money just to buy a few extra days or weeks of miserable life and nobody criticizes that. We're talking about something where if it succeeds, you've got an indefinite period of time. So I think, if you look at it rationally, these arguments are just ludicrous. They're rationalizations. But the reason is you're challenging fundamental worldviews that makes people very uncomfortable. And again, they tend to have I think mistaken ideas of what death is. And you know what personal continuity is?
I'll say to people, if they do believe in an afterlife, religious kind of afterlife, does it really make a difference if you have to wait a bit longer? I mean, maybe that's actually God's plan, right? Isn't it selfish to go hustling off the, to get your reward in heaven when you can stay here and do good works and save souls. So really you can turn around the argument on them and say they're being selfish by hurrying off to their heavenly reward. But actually in Christianity, the majority view is that when you die you don't go to heaven right away. The majority view is actually you stay kind of, you don't exist. And then when the saviour comes back, you'll be physically resurrected. That's actually the standard line. The idea that your soul leaves the body is actually kind of a modern heresy in Christianity. I know this 'cause I taught philosophy of religion.
(21:26) Briar: Interesting. Yeah I think it's exactly what you say when, when people are, when you're talking about these sorts of things, people when they find out about death, it's almost such a horrifying thing to wrap your head around. So once they finally get through that, anytime you give them a little possibility or a little nugget or challenge their worldview, as they say, they do get quite hostile and things and
(21:51) Max: The reason why that is, it's not just because you are challenging their worldview. It's because their worldview is based on certainty. People don't like uncertainty. They want to be certain about things. So they're one, be certain that they go to an afterlife or they want to be certain that when they're dead, that's it. There's nothing else to worry about. It's the end. If you say, well no, there's a chance that you might better continue and things could be drastically different in the future, that's really uncomfortable. 'cause they’ve already settled on one certainty or the other. Humans in general don't like uncertainty. So people like us who are interested in, living longer into a future, which we don't really know what's going to be like, it's unpredictable. That takes a certain kind of courage and willingness to endure ambiguity and uncertainty. But most people just really don't like that. And that's what you're doing is challenging their certainties.
(22:30) Briar: I think it's really interesting and I think even these days it's become even worse. People are almost very black and white with their thinking. You even see this in regards to like politics and things like this. It's kind of like, I'm here, you are here. Whereas I'm a big believer that we should always listen to everything. We shouldn't stay so stagnant in our thoughts. We should listen to all kinds of different experts and people with opposing views. And we should listen to different views from what we have from ourselves as well. Because even just thinking to my background and my thoughts and worldview that I've had over the years, I look back to what I used to think back when I was in my twenties and I'm like, oh my god, things that I thought I was super concrete in my thoughts have changed now. And I'm sure they'll keep changing. I look back and think, hey, you were wrong back then. I wasn't necessarily wrong, but that's just what I had thought in that in that time. Yeah. So I think more people should be doing this. I think more people should open up. Yeah, the idea and as you said, kind of be brave and live in that ambiguity.
(23:38) Max: I think the problem is that people tend to identify themselves with their beliefs. And so when you tell 'em that a belief is wrong, they take it as a personal affront. In fact, our language reflects that. If I disagree with something, I'll say, you are wrong. I don't say what you said was wrong or the idea, I say, you are wrong. So you're negating my whole self when you say that. And that tend to be how we talk. So rather than personalizing beliefs, I think we have to get used to the idea that we're going to change our ideas over time. That's not who we are now. Who we are should be a process, a process of learning and improvement and growth. So you don't have to be so defensive about your current beliefs. So what, okay, I've just learned something. Thank you for showing me I was wrong. 'cause I've learned something. I'm wiser now. But that's a hard attitude for people to adopt, especially the way they're taught. And we're taught things in school. This is the knowledge, learn it, repeat it back. You're not really taught really to think for yourself or to be critical or creative in your thinking. That's unfortunately not a large part of the educational system.
(24:27) Briar: I feel like they don't teach you a lot of things in school, which would be very helpful for you to know, such as how to manage your money and investing. Instead we're being told what five plus five is and now we just use a calculator for it. I think there's a lot of really interesting things here. And I think a big part of what you do and longevity and life extension and things like this is it just does not get enough airtime. I think a lot of people talk about things that aren't necessarily important. I just think of the media, I think about the sensationalist headlines and oh, they talk about, I don't know, reality TV people and things like this. But, but not really things that I think personally are very meaningful. I think that governments aren't doing enough in these sorts of spaces. I was reading statistics about how many trillions they're putting towards nuclear bombs and the small tiny little mere millions that they put towards funding longevity and life extension projects. Like how can we start to get these people and governments and people with money, like how can we start to get people more involved in these sorts of things?
(25:39) Max: Well, I think government's pretty hopeless. I wouldn't really look to government because they're the last people to wake up to things. I think, we are starting to see a shift of thinking especially in the area of life extension as we're seeing at this conference, a lot of interest. And it's, a lot of universities are looking to this, a lot of private foundations. So I think there is a shift, but we're facing a real problem in that, we already talked about polarization of views. The news works aren't like that. It's very polarized and it's also very catastrophic in its coverage. The news is constantly talking about catastrophes. Imaginary ones. We're always told that the world is about to come to an end from some reason or another. The latest thing is the climate catastrophe. We're supposedly wool is going to end very soon.
We've seen this throughout history, right? But we are actually pretty good at solving problems. So as long as we're occupied with these catastrophes we're not going to think about the positive possibilities. So as a real problem is, is there are obviously very strong incentives in the media to highlight the most grabbing catastrophic headlines. You don't really hear about all the great stuff that's going on, which is another reason people are so unhappy and pessimistic 'cause they think the world is going to hell because that's what they're being told all the time. If one person gets murdered across the world, you'll hear about that. You won't hear about someone who helped someone out of the river or someone who created a cure for something. We rarely hear that stuff unless you read specialist, scientific publications or, futurist publications. So that's a real problem. And we've seen increasing rates of depression and anxiety especially in the USA and other countries because people are being fed all this catastrophic stuff all the time and they're not get around to thinking creatively about the future of life extension, improving the world. They're so terrified that the world's coming to an end.
(27:06) Briar: I think back in the day we used to be able to just put the newspaper down . . Whereas these days with social media, we're constantly fed this fear. And as you said, fear sells, this is why fair creates clicks. Clicks create revenue. And this is why the media do it. Gosh, I even just think about my myself and how every now and again with all of the research that I do, I end up going down this giant rabbit hole and then I get all concerned and conflicted and worried about the future. And I always have to remind myself at the end of the day that if I take myself to this kind of place, then I can't give to the community, my family, my friends. And at the end of the day, even if I solve all the conspiracy theories, if I solve all the ideas about the future, I'm still stuck at the same place at the end of the day with my family and friends to care for. So I think it's very interesting.
(28:00) Max: I Think you've really gotta make an effort to seek out different sources of news. You really, the best thing for your mental health is just don't watch TV news at all. 'cause it’s just awful. The worst stuff. It really distorts your worldview. And people have actually shown this very clearly that it is completely inaccurate. So you really have to kind of search out good sources of information, which actually it blogs are a good way to do that. And it takes a bit more effort to read good blogs 'cause people go into more detail. But there's a lot of really good writing as to what's actually going on in the world. That tends to be a lot more optimistic. Even when it deals with negative things, you get a lot more understanding out of it. The standard media is just a horrible place to get information, as is Twitter, which becomes a hostile battleground. So I'd recommend, going out, looking for futurist transhumanist publications and forums where you hear more about the positive stuff that's going on.
(28:40) Briar: What kind of blogs do you enjoy reading? I know that you mentioned you quite enjoy Substack what kind of publications?
(28:46) Max: Yeah, I read dozens and dozens of blogs on Substack. There are so many good ones. I've been reading a lot of stuff about artificial intelligence recently because obviously it's a big topic today with the latest catastrophe. Right now, AI is going to kill us. Either climate or AI or nuclear weapons is always something. So currently people are freaking about AI. So I've been reading a lot about that AI safety and replying to a lot of these discussions that we should shut down AI. I think that's a really bad idea.
(29:10) Briar: Why do you think it's a bad idea?
(29:12) Max: Well, because People talk about the existential risk of AI, the idea that AI could destroy all of humanity. My view is that we are already facing an existential risk individually, one by one, everybody's going to die unless we solve the problem of aging. So we already have a huge catastrophic problem. If we have to solve, AI is probably our best bet at solving that in time for us to continue living. So if you stop AI, you're basically stopping a huge source of technological progress, which could save lives and make lives much better. But that doesn't really get mentioned very much. It's always, the theoretical downside of an extreme science fiction scenario means we should stop everything. But that's not the way technological progress and problem solving work, this is a very kind of platonistic idea of problem solving where you sit in an armchair and you just reason out all the problems with AI and create all the solutions before you do anything. That just doesn't work. You have to move forward and experiment and try things. And as problems come up, you tackle them. You can't predict those in advance. That whole way of thinking is, is really hopeless.
(30:07) Briar: Sometimes I wonder if there's a lot of progress with AI and robotics. I was reading, well actually my director of comms in New York was telling me about these robots that have to get chained during the night, because if not, they go out and destroy things , apparently they're very powerful. And part of me wonders if we're having so much progress on the robotics and the AI side of things, and we're not doing enough to evolve ourselves that we're here in our little organic meat sack, so to speak. But are we looking enough into things such as neuro-links? Is things such as funding and clinical trials and things like this kind of halting our progress. so that maybe one day things like the robotics and the AI have developed so fast and they're, they're doing all of these crazy things and then here we're, we're kind of held back. Do you think we're doing enough as humans to evolve with the technology?
(31:07) Max: Well, no, I don't. It is good that you brought that up because, I'm known as a transhumanist as one of the creators of transhumanism. And a core part of that is improving the human being. That we can improve external technologies, whether it's AI or other things. They can develop very fast. They're not limited by biology. Now, the problem is, yes, we want to improve ourselves, but how do we do that? It's difficult because the transcendental meditation people say, well, if 5% of the world would meditate, everything would, well, I don't think that's going to happen. Because you can't really change, change your brain just by thinking about it. You can alter your thinking, you can alter your mood to a certain degree, but there's biochemical pathways in there that you didn't choose to put there.
So some people suffer from depression and anxiety that, they're basically born with. It's very hard to shake that. You can't just say cheer up. That doesn't work. May have to have, drug treatments, which are still very crude. So I think, yeah, we should do a lot more. Direct brain computer interfaces might be one way of changing the way you think. But I think eventually we have to get into the human brain and start tinkering with it. That might sound scary to people, but just think about it. You've been given a brain that you have no control over. Don't you want a bit of fine tune it so that for instance, you can modify your emotions if you have a lot of rage, maybe you want to tune that down. Maybe you want a better focus, better.
Like certain times you want to focus on creativity, other times you want to enjoy sex. Those are very different things. You can't maybe do them at the same time. Maybe you turn down one dial and turn up the other. Maybe you're not kind of the person you want to be and it's hard to wheel yourself into that state. Maybe we can change some pathways. For instance. We know very well that the way we evolved affects the way we understand our emotions. We don't understand emotions well at all, because we used to situations where I see a, a tiger coming out, a saber-tooth tiger that goes into my eyeballs. It affects my brain. I recognize it. That sets my amygdala off. I feel fear. Fear drives me to run. That's how I survive. So we all have that kind of flight or flight reflex. It did not evolve to deal with complex problems in complex societies. Our, our brains have not changed since we created civilization. So we're still having that saber tooth avoidance factor in a very complex situation. So clearly our brains are way outdated.
(33:03) Briar: Which is also driven by these cheap dopamine hits that we get from our phone. I think a lot of people are continually now in the state of fight and flight.
(33:11) Max: Yeah, they're, finding mostly imaginary things to feel, fight or fight about. And so, yeah, they're constantly getting pinged by upsetting things. And it's very hard to think clearly when that's going on. I think it's important to detach from all these kind of annoying impinging bits of information and put aside the newspapers, put aside Twitter. Just sit, read a book for a while, go meditate, go out into nature. That's the old older advice. But I think it applies even more today 'cause you have to have your own space. But I think eventually we're going to have to actually re-engineer the human brain. And I have to be careful in saying that because some people have a misconception. They think that transhumans are saying that we should design everybody's brains for them. No, no. It's not what we're saying at all.
I came up with something I call the principle of morphological freedom, which basically says, you have the right to choose how your brain works and how long you live and how you alter your biology. So fundamental, right? It's your body, your mind, you decide. So I'm not talking about some kind of government plan to tell us how to think. Absolutely not. I'm totally against that. But we are stuck with these three pound pieces of meat that are not that good at thinking and not well suited to the future. So eventually it's not just AI and other technology that have to evolve, it's our brain itself. And that's something we're going to have to think about a lot more.
(34:25) Briar: And I really enjoyed your book written by yourself and Natasha Vita-More too. The Transhumanist Reader, I thought was excellent. And tell us more about what being a transhumanist really is. What does it mean?
(34:36) Max: Well, I like to think of being of a philosophy background. I like to think of transhumanist as the successes of humanism, because humanism, enlightened humanism, which came along with, the beginning of science and progress, basically said that whether or not there's a God, we can't expect a higher power to do everything for us. We are here, to create our own lives and to make the world better. So it's really the view that we can understand the world if we work at it. We have science, science actually tells us stuff. We can make progress if we act with goodwill and scientific knowledge, we can make the world a better place. So it's based on kind of reason and progress and goodwill. So transhumanism is an outgrowth of that because humanism is, it's humanism and we're not going to stay human forever. We've already been talking about the limits of humanity.
So transhumanism is the idea that we can take these values further, understanding that we can make some fundamental changes in human nature. That's why it's not humanism. Because if we're talking about living indefinitely, that's not something that humans have done something fundamentally new. If we're talking about changing the architecture of the brain in a way that our genes can't do, that's going beyond human. So that's why it's transhumanism. I sometimes divide it between transhuman-ism and transhumanism. So the transhuman-ism implies going beyond human as a primary thing, but also transhumanism focuses more on the philosophical and value side of it. So it's a worldview that basically at its core says we have the opportunity and ability to change human nature fundamentally for the better by applying intelligence and goodwill.
(36:00) Briar: I think it's fascinating and I think the more I started exploring transhumanism and reading your literature and getting people's views and opinions and things, I just think it really does align with my core values in the sense of it's all about exploring, being curious. We have control of our future. We can take steps
(36:21) Max: To some extent. Yeah, we can, we can try and guide ourselves.
(36:27) Briar: We can guide ourselves. Exactly right. Rather than having a kind of passive approach to life thinking that perhaps the world owes us something and the world does all these things to us. Like we can take action essentially. Tell us a little bit more about, yeah, like life on Mars and things like this. I know that one of the values that Transhumanists have is space exploration. Would you go to Mars?
(36:49) Max: No, actually I'm not interested in Mars. I haven't quite see the appeal of Mars.
(36:51) Briar: It's a Bit dusty, isn't it?
(36:55) Max: Yeah. I mean it doesn't really have any advantages over earth, particularly the main reason I wanted to go into space, and I've been a space enthusiast since I was very young. I watched the Apollo 11 landing when I was five years old, and all the Apollos till 1972 when they finished them, even though it meant staying up till maybe 3 in the morning. So I've always been fascinated. And of course there's a long period of time in between where we didn't do anything. It was very frustrating. And now finally we're seeing a new efflorescence of space travel. So that, that's great. But to me, it's not just the cool thing about being in space, which is pretty cool to look back on the planet and to see the vast frontier out there. What really excites me about it is it's an open frontier where we can have new social experimentation.
Like right now I don't see any society I really like that much. There's a lot of problems in every society, every economy, every way of governance. I think there are better ways of doing things, but there's no way we can go on this planet to have an experiment because it's all claimed by governments. So just like back, a few hundred years ago, people who felt religious oppression or didn't like the way society work could leave Europe and come to America and start new experiments. And they were a lot of radical experiments early on. We can't do that today, but if we can get into space, we can suddenly have a whole explosion of social experimentation. It's kind of like a scientific method. We can then societies evolve, see which ones work and which don't, and we can move between them.
So I think evolution will actually speed up the rate of social progress right now. It doesn't really do that. So to me that's kind of the exciting part. We can essentially have a framework where we have some very basic rules. So you can leave one colony, you go to another, but each colony can do exactly what it wants. It can be like a Marxist colony here. You can have a vegetarian colony, you can have a libertarian colony, anarchist colony, whatever. Let them all try different things and see which one works out. And that will really speed things up. 'cause Right now everybody's kind of, everything's very bureaucratic. There's not really a lot of difference between societies in the west. I mean, they're all fairly similar on a fundamental level, we're not able to really shake things up anymore. That's what kind of scares me about staying on the planet. Bureaucracies tend to keep growing and growing 'cause that's in their interests. Everything gets more and more regulated and I think we have to get off planet before we can really shake things up and try something new.
(38:45) Briar: And what about the Metaverse? Obviously it was such a huge buzzword last year and I actually spent 48 hours nonstop in virtual reality and metaverse platforms. I slept in virtual reality. I, I went into this sleeping room that other people were sleeping in. So you can kind of hear people sleeping around you. It's a bit weird. I don't know why people would do that unless they were doing an experiment like me. But in your book, the The Transhumanist Reader you've been talking about the Metaverse since like the 1980s, the 1990s. Like this is not a new topic for you. What was your thoughts about all of this hype that came around last year? What's your thoughts about the metaverse?
(39:28) Max: Well, the term, the Metaverse has been around for a lot longer than the current usage. It's kind of been taken by one company right now, but it's been around for a long time. Neil Stevenson wrote about what he called the metaverse way back in the early nineties, I think it was in the book called Snow Crash, which everybody should read. It's a great, very entertaining novel of the kind of the near future. I talked about how we need to get into space to experiment, but actually there's another possibility which is virtual worlds. Now they're still limited because you still have to have your servers in the physical world, which other people can take control of. But it does allow more experimentation if you can go into a virtual world. You can have different virtual communities. They can have their own experiments, their own rules. So that actually is kind of a frontier. Not entirely as free as going into space, but it's obviously something we can do today. So to me, that's the big appeal. And of course you can it's very transhumanist in the sense that you can go and choose your virtual body and how you express yourself, which is something might be physically hard to do in the physical world.
(40:19) Briar: I love that aspect about it. You can just show up and be as fantastical as you want to be in virtual reality.
(40:24) Max: Which is probably good training for women. We can actually do that physically and maybe, shift our brain into different bodies. Maybe download our minds into different forms. You might, I mean, I kind of have the idea of one day I could download my mind into some kind of a shark body or a very efficient swimming body where I can spend time in the oceans or something Like that.
(40:39) Briar: That'd be so fun. Like a dolphin. Yeah, don’t know if I'd be a shark going around like eating ad attacking things.
(40:49) Max: Not like that. I just think a shark because they're so efficient, they, they're really good at what they do. But dolphin is probably a better
(40:54) Briar: I don't know, shark's kind of cool now that I think about it. You just probably have to get past the attacking the meat eating side of things, though.
(41:02) Max: The downside of a shark of course is, they have to keep moving all the time or else they die so they even keep moving while they're sleeping. Dolphins are a lot better 'cause they're lot more cheerful.
(41:13) Briar: So you talked a bit about mind uploading, and this is something that I think is getting chucked around on Reddit so much these days. Everyone's talking about mind uploading. You've got the people who are totally hyping it up and then you've got the people who are like doomsday sort of thing. I think that's, it's like that on all platforms on Reddit. But tell me a bit about your thoughts about mind uploading
(41:32) Max: Hans Murk wrote about that back in the 1980s. So this isn't a new idea, it's been around for a while. The basic idea is that who you are is essentially brain activity. So your memories are stored in your neural connections. And at some point it might be possible to scan a brain. That's such a fine level of resolution that you can essentially emulate yourself in software. So you can either transfer yourself to a different platform or make copies of yourself even. So basically the idea is you could leave your biological self and become something based on silicon or opto electronics or whatever, some different platform that's not biological doesn't decay where you can make backup copies of yourself. So even if you get completely destroyed, you can just, pick up from your last backup maybe from yesterday and all you lost is, a few memories from the last 24 hours or so.
So it's got a lot of advantages. And of course, if you're in software we no longer have to do with human biology. We can maybe make changes a lot more easily. So all this idea of improving the way you think and fine tuning your emotions, we don't have to deal with the pathways that biology has devised. We'll actually better change those more easily. So it opens up a whole new world. There’s a lot of appeal to it. Especially the idea of making backups where you really can't die. Like even if the sun exploded, if you have a backup, in a different planetary system, you'll still be able to survive.
(42:41) Briar: Where is that hard drive ? Where's my backup? Yeah, but some people say that mind uploading after mind uploading. You're essentially not yourself. They say it's, it's just a version of you, it's a copy of you. What's your thoughts about that? Ah,
(42:55) Max: That's a complicated issue. I actually wrote my, my doctoral dissertation on that topic, so Wow. I have a lot on that. I think one thing we have to think of what, what really is the self, first of all, people don't really think about that very much. They think they this body or a set of release. I think essentially what you are is your psychology over time. So one of the philosophers who thought about this a lot, John Locke back a few centuries ago, he said, you are the chain of memories over time. So you remember most of what you remember yesterday, yesterday's memories were pretty much the same as the ones before. So you have kind of a chain of memory connections over time, time. As long as you have that you're the same pers.
I think you got it basically Right But it's not just memory. For instance, our dispositions the ways we tend to react to things, it's not really a memory as such, but that's a very important part of who you are. It's your values, right? If I know who you are, I can predict how you're responding various situations based on your values. That's not a memory, but it's psychological connectedness over time. And that is not something that depends on the specific body. So I could, I mean obviously atoms change over time. Cells change over anything from hours to months. So later in life you don't have a single atom left pretty much that you had early on in life. So we know it's not the atoms, it's not even the cells that matter. We could in principle change out each of my neurons for a mechanical component that did the same job. And at the end of it, I think I'd still be the same person.
Now with uploading it's a little more tricky because yeah, you could transfer your brain into software that's not so bad 'cause you've got a single individual. So maybe you can say, okay, that's me, but if you take my brain and scan it and make two copies or have a backup copy, you get worried because, well, but I'm person A, I become B and C. But B and C are different individuals, aren't they? Well, yes, but what that shows is identity doesn't matter. The logical identity is broken down, but you still survive. You still continue. You just become two people now. They’re different from each other. They want each survive individually, but one person has become two. We see that with amoebas and other forms that can divide, but we're not used to that with human minds. But to me that's not a matter of losing yourself. It's a matter of you, you've duplicated yourself, which I wouldn't do in practice 'cause you have to fight over who gets my wife and my house and my dog. So there's a lot of practical problems with that.
(44:58) Briar: You'd have to share. But what about if you did divide yourself and then over time, because you're these two different versions. So say I had one version that was living in New York and then say my other version was living in Dubai. And that would actually be great because I often feel like I have to be in two places at once. I've got my businesses in Dubai and New York, but over time these two different beings would have different experiences, so surely would start at the same spot. But then over time we might become two different people with two very different values.
(45:34) Max: So my view is if you, if I made two copies of myself, if my original brain was destroyed in the uploading process and there was two of me if one of those was destroyed immediately, there's not much loss because they're pretty much identical. But as you say, over time they're going to diverge a lot. And then it's not a comfort if one survives because it's become a different person. But you can imagine that we might spin off copies of ourselves temporarily, like well partial personalities that can handle certain tasks that aren't our full self. And then we could maybe reintegrate those a few days later or a few weeks later. But the longer you go and the more diversion, the harder it'll be to integrate that.
(46:04) Briar: The More you'll have to fight over your wife and your dog. Yeah, exactly. .
(46:07) Max: But I think the idea of partial personalities people are starting to kind of understand that because now with AI we can develop personal agents who may learn from us and actually act like we would. So it's not very futuristic anymore to say we may have personal agents that act exactly like I do. They pick up the phone, answer the phone for me, maybe do certain jobs that I don't have to do, but they're acting just like I do. So we can imagine more sophisticated versions that actually maybe kind of are me, but then we can reintegrate those into ourselves.
(46:31) Briar: It's kind of fascinating really. And as you were talking about values before, it made me think about how humans at the end of the day, we're almost like a little bit of an algorithm, really, aren't we? I'm sure Facebook, with all of our data that it has on us, I'm sure it could even predict our decisions more than what we probably even could for ourselves.
(46:51) Max: We're not very good at understanding why we do things. So we can maybe predict what we do based on the past, but we're very bad at understanding why we do things. Psychologists have shown this, they've done experiments where we can actually show that people will give an explanation for why they did something. But you can actually experimentally demonstrate that that can't have been the real reason. So we actually make up reasons. So we do something and then we invent a story to explain why we did it. And the reason is we don't really understand that what's going on in our minds. We have this kind of Cartesian roof from, Rene Decart who thought that the mind was this kind of unified single thing that you could understand. It was transparent. It's not like that at all. It's a bunch of different evolutionary parts that have, it's kind of a clue over time that parts that don't really interoperate that clearly.
So we may have feelings, like, again, anxiety and depression and we say, well why am I feeling this? And you don't really know. And again, going back to the evolutionary development of the brain, that's because we develop this tendency to see something react and then emote to it. We don't need to know why we just do it. So we have these pathways going from the emotional centres, like the amygdala to the cognitive centres that make us behave. But we don't have many pathways going in reverse. So you can't really introspect very well. You can't understand why you're feeling something. You can try and figure it out and that's why you got a psychotherapist. Sometimes it's, why am I doing this? I can't stop it. I don't understand it. But you don't have any direct access to your emotions. So that's one thing we could greatly improve. I think by building new neural pathways, you don't need uploading. We can actually biologically re-engineer the brain to put new pathways in would make us have better self-understanding. And I think with better self-understanding, we'd have better empathy with other people as well.
(48:18) Briar: I think it's also fascinating and I obviously I can continue talking for such a long time with you, but there's one thing that I want to sort of finish on. So for anybody watching this, say they want to get into cryonics, how can they participate and get involved and sign up?
(48:32) Max: Well you can check out the various cryonics organizations as The, Alcor Life Extension Foundation is alcor.org is the one I've been involved with for a long time. There's The Cryonics Institute in Michigan. There's a very promising new one or relatively new one in Europe Tomorrow Biostasis, they can check that out. If you're in Europe, that's probably your best bet. You might also take a look at the organizational blog, biostasis.substack.com where we discuss a lot of the current research and, and directions in that. Also hold out for my book. I'm writing a book on cryonics because I keep thinking, what, what book can I recommend? And there isn't one, so I said, well, I better write it then so hopefully someone next year there'll be a book out on c cryonics and biostasis.
(49:07) Briar: And what about transhumanism? How can people get involved and learn more about that?
(49:10) Max: By the Transhumanist Reader is a good start. We,
(49:12) Briar: It's an excellent book.
(49:16) Max: We created that precisely to be a kind of a comprehensive overview. So it's got some classic essays, from the 90s and earlier on a lot of these main topics, including stuff that was way ahead of its time. We foresaw digital money and crypto currencies way before other people, for instance. A lot of things we were saying back then people thought were crazy and today is like normal stuff now. So we have a few things like that to boast of, but it's a good historical book but also has new essays as well. So it's a good way to get started. My personal blog, maxmoore.substack.com, I have a lot of transhumanist writings on there. I'm actually republishing some stuff from years ago and I'm also putting together a collection of essays from the last 40 or 30 years or so. So I'm getting old now. So it's, over 30 years of essays including some classic work like the extropian principles, which is my particular version of transhumanism. I just published an essay on, people's fears about living long and being stagnant. There’s a lot of transhumanists writing on my blog too, and I have links to other people's blogs who are quite sympathetic.
(50:10) Briar: Amazing. Well, today has just been so incredible to speak to you and learn so much and have fun. Yeah, it has been fun, hasn't it? So yeah I look forward to coming and yeah, maybe catching up in Arizona and, and seeing the facility and things like this.
(50:28) Max: Come visit and we'll come visit you as well.
(50:29) Briar: I've invited you to come to Dubai. A hundred percent. You have to come be
(50:33) Max: They have a vision of future too, which is interesting.
(50:40) Briar: they do. And I think in terms of longevity and, and things like this, I think as you said before, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the topic that's starting to get a bit more attention as it should as well.
(50:48) Max: Something positive people get interested in, hopefully. We talked a bit about governments. One way we could try to approach governments to support this better is right now the population is aging quite rapidly. Even worse in China, we don't have it so bad here. Japan is really bad. So what can you do about that? It's going to bankrupt the social security systems. So what you can do is you can stop people aging. So if you can stop the aging process or slow it down, people can work longer. They'll be healthier. You wouldn't have to support them, in hospitals so much. 'cause we spend huge amounts of money on sicknesses that shouldn't really exist. And those are mostly age related conditions. So by doing something about the aging problem, we're going to also solve these massive financial and demographic problems.
I think that's a promising approach to government. 'cause you’re showing the problem they're going to have. That's get them voted out of office. We have a solution for you if you fund this. And we spend huge amounts of money on cancer research. But most cancer, there's a few exceptions, but most cancer is age related. Now young people rarely get cancers except certain special ones. Same with heart disease. So if we solve aging, we solve cancer, we solve Alzheimer's, we solve all these very expensive problems at once. So I think that's the kind of the sales point to government.
(51:53) Briar: No, I agree with you. And I think it's fascinating to see how much money they put towards this sick care system that we're presently in and hardly anything towards actually creating a proper healthcare system.
(52:06) Max: Getting at the root cause of things is, I mean, it's more difficult, but there aren't many incentives to deal with that because you have to produce a very expensive drug, you have to spend a lot of money. You have to go through trials. The government makes it a lot more expensive than necessary. So then you have to, have patents on it. You have to better make money back. Having something that isn't patentable, that's like a basic health preservation thing is more difficult. So I think there is recognition of that, but it's hard to get a grip on it. But if you actually have treatments for aging and the government, this is an important point. The FDA the Food and Drug Administration does not recognize aging as a disease. So right now, if you have a treatment that might do something about aging, you can't do a clinical trial 'cause it's not recognized as, as an issue that has to change. Once we recognize aging as a disease, you can go to the F D A unfortunately you have to go through the F D A, it can then approve the trial and we can actually get treatments for aging. But right now it doesn't even recognize it as a problem. So
(52:54) Briar: It's fascinating. And I think when people challenge my view about potentially being able to solve aging and experts like you and things like this, it makes me wonder why not. They're not even thinking back to the olden days where humans used to die when they're like 30 or 40 or they used to die of tooth cavities and things like, these are things that if we died of a tooth cavity these days, people would be horrified. But it's just like a quick trip to the dentist and it's solvable. So I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we look back and we're like, oh my God, we used to die at 70. Like, what the heck?
(53:27) Max: That's an important point because yeah, people who say, well why should you live longer? That's not normal. Well go back a little bit. It was normal to die at 20 or 30 or 40 at the best. So why is today's lifespan the exactly right one, it was different 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. Why is today's exactly the right one? That's obviously nonsense. So it's just that you've settled. It's called the status quo bias. What is today is what we think is, is normal and right, but it wasn't just a short time ago, it won't be in the future. So I think if you ask people, well, should we shorten life by five years? Like for instance, people say life will be meaningless if it's stretched out, well, should we kill people earlier? Will their lives be more meaningful by compressing their lives? That gets 'em to think a little bit more critically, I think.
(54:07) Briar: Well today's been absolutely wonderful. It's been so fun Thank you Max More for joining me for coffee.
