December 19, 2016 • 22 mins
A lot of people in the tech industry have a fascination with defying death. But only a few of them are actually working on ways to achieve it. This week, Bloomberg Technology's Ashlee Vance goes to Russia to meet one of the pioneers of the cryonics movement. We'll take a look at the technology he's developing, and see how close really he is to cracking the code to eternal life.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
A lot of people in the tech industry have a
morbid fascination with not just living healthier or living longer,
but actually defying death. The quest for immortality, of course,
is one of the driving causes of humanity, underlying many religions,
which often pose an afterlife or consciousness survives. Ashley Vance,
(00:27):
you track down someone in Russia who says you don't
need faith to believe in immortality, but science. Back in October,
I traveled to Russia, just outside of Moscow to meet
this guy named Danilla Medvedev. He's the CEO of a
company called Cryo Russ, which specializes in cryonics, or freezing
(00:47):
your body as you await a cure to an illness
or a better future. So he's serious about this. He
is freezing people in the hopes that they can be
revived at a later day to live forever. He's dead
serious about it. Very good. Tell us a little bit
about Danila. What is he like. He's this dude who
had sort of a traditional background. He had studied economics,
he was a bit of an academic, and then, like
(01:09):
a lot of these people do, he had a revelation
that he wanted to do something else with his life,
he got super into technology and then I always taken
it to this very extreme conclusion where he's got the
cryonics operation. And he's also the leader of Russia's transhumanist movement.
So those are people that want to augment their body
(01:29):
to take in as much technology as possible and really
become what I would think of as kind of a
cyborg or a half human half machine. And he is,
for all intents and purposes, the spiritual leader of this
movement in Russia. Now, over the last year, you've traveled
around the world for your video series Hello World, and
you've met a lot of eccentric technologists. Where does Daniella rank. Yeah,
(01:51):
so I've got the centric engineer and then the guys
like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, who are these charismatic
figures of technology g movements. But I would say he
is the only one I've run across that is a
true religious figure. He's the pied piper of trans humanism
in Russia, and he's got this combination of the technology
(02:14):
that he's selling, some technology that he's developing, and then
he gives all these speeches around town all the time,
and and all these people show up and and really
buy into his movement and into that. And he's an
original character. He's very eccentric, he's very smart, he is charismatic,
and he's a one of a kind. Let's listen to
Danilla here on the Russian transhumanist movement. In the Russian
(02:40):
consumers movement, we have free goals. So first is immortality,
then omnimportance like complete upgrade of for all the intellectual,
physical capability and the safe singularity. Real trans humanism is
not built on hope. Trus humanism is build on suffering,
breaking yourself in the process and new to yourself. Time
(03:10):
has come for people to accept that death is no
longer about just dying and being doors in the ground,
but it's really about choice. Hi, I'm Bradstone and I'm
(03:32):
Ashley Vance, and this week i'm decrypted. As we sit
on the precipice of two thousand and seventeen, still locked
in our mortal coils, We're taking you to Russia to
meet the futuristic scientists and entrepreneurs looking for a way
to cheat death. We'll take you through the technology they're developing,
what eternal life might feel like, and how far they've
got with turning their sci fi ideas into reality by
(03:55):
the end of this episode. As long as you're comfortable
with the idea of a company storing your deep capitated
head and liquid nitrogen, maybe even YouTube can live forever.
So back in October, I traveled to Russia, just outside
of Moscow, to a suburb called Sergey Pacade. You drive
(04:17):
down this little neighborhood, there's little houses there. It looks
kind of picturesque idyllic, and you turn down this one
driveway and there's this big white warehouse and inside of
that there's these two giant vats. Now are it's curious
about this? Is it advertise outside of the warehouse? What
the horrors that are inside? No, you would have no
idea that your neighbor is freezing bodies and heads of
(04:41):
humans and animals next door. And the neighbors were quite
curious when we showed up to film all this stuff. Now,
are these people who have died or who are on
the brink of death, who are opting for this route?
The ones in the vats are already dead. He's this
company Cryer Risk that DANIELO runs has attracted wealthy people
from all over the world. Basically, if you want to
(05:02):
freeze yourself. You can only do it in two places today.
In the United States there's two companies that do this,
and Russia is the second option. And so you do
get people from all over the world, but a lot
from Europe in Asia, and so far they have about
sixty people who have chosen to freeze themselves. It's a
mix of half of that is heads and half of
(05:22):
that is the full body. You get a discount if
you just do the head. It's about sixteen thousand dollars
for the head, thirty six thousand dollars for the body.
This is probably the wrong time to advise parental guidance
for this episode of Decryptid. So you know, it's it's
optimistic sort of thing, and this is a one time
fee by the way to uh, it's it's a one
time feed. You You've got to hope that the Cryo
(05:43):
Rise keeps its funding going for eternity. And the funny
thing I thought as well in these vats that I
saw where that there are a mix of animals, so
people also freeze their beloved pets and there were dogs, there,
there was a chinchilla, There was a what is the
story behind the chinchilla did you find that out? Same
thing as with everybody. It's some pet that they just
(06:04):
couldn't beloved chinchilla, beloved parakeet being frozen for one day
when they can be revived exactly. And the setup is
you've got these two big tanks and to keep the
head extra cold, the heads are placed near the bottom
of the tank, and so if you've got your body
in there, you're hanging upside down with your your feet
up top and your head down near the bottom. All
(06:26):
it sounds like this movement is getting a little bit
of traction on Russia. It is so Russia has this
long history, it's about two hundred years long of searching
for immortality. There were these philosophers that wrote about it.
During the nineteen seventeen Revolution. A lot of the rhetoric
behind the revolution was was the merging of science and
(06:48):
people and that that science would keep Russia strong, and
that carried on all through the Soviet era. And then
today cry O Rouse has about sixty paying customers, and
I think it is the only cry next company that
it's business is expanding rapidly. Well, here's Danilla again talking
a little bit about the underpinnings of the movement in Russia.
(07:09):
You can start trans humans projects by yourself. You have
to get a lot of people, and the best way
to do is just to show them this grant vision,
this idea of cosmic development, and then this all fits together.
Of course, we want to make chronics totally accessible and
(07:31):
available to everybody, because it just makes a lot of sense,
and it shouldn't be expensive. It should be cheap and
available to everybody by default. So that's what we want
to see in in twenty or thirty years. Uh. In
addition to that, we want to have clinical applications of
chronics the hypothermit technologies, so that you can just stop
(07:53):
a human and then restarted and do that as you
can do with computer programs. Actually, let me ask you,
the people that opt for this treatment, have they already
passed away or they near death. It's a mix of
people that sign up for this kind of thing. There
are older people who are closer to dying who sign up,
(08:14):
and for the most part, those are the ones that
are in the VAT. But as part of this trans
humanist movement you see tons of young and middle aged people.
They come to hear DANIELI speak at these these lectures
and for the most part, what I tended to notice
is that their technofiles, they're people who are just super
(08:34):
into technology. They tend to be quite free thinking. Um.
It was like a real mix though, of women and men,
which I was impressed by. It wasn't just a bunch
of dudes in this conference room listening to this guy.
And I think it's the kind of people that that
believe and stuff that you hear about, like the singularity
(08:55):
and and that we're heading to this more glorious future
where man and machine merge, and your brain is augmented
by computers and we can do all these fantastic things
that we can't do today. So half the people want
to cure some kind of illness and they want to
just come back when we've got a cure to that,
and then half the people really want to see what
the world is like in the future. I'm curious, did
(09:18):
you get the sense that trans humanism is more mainstream
in Russia than it is in the United States. Sorry
for me to say for sure, because I've oddly covered
the trans humanist movement in the United States that I
said to follow. A lot of these people, especially, there's
a lot of overlap with singultarians, people who believe in
the singularity and the trans humanist. The Russian version of this,
(09:42):
it was very passionate. They have a there's like a
romance in Russia that I think is missing in the
United States. In the US, it tends to be very
pragmatic and scientific in this Silicon Valley logical thing. Of course,
we would want to live forever if we can, and
if we have these tools to do it, let's do it. Russia,
it really did have this romanticism to it, and it
(10:04):
sounds vague, but of poetry. I mean it comes from
this background, this philosophical background of things they believe in,
and I think the culture there, they've been steeped in
this link between science and society in a different way
than we have been in the States. And and to
me it was I'd say it's almost refreshing. I liked
it more there. Did you ask Dan l if he
(10:25):
plans to freeze himself. He definitely plans to freeze himself.
And he lives this very rigid lifestyle today to try
and he's saving up obviously for the expense he is
and he's he lives a very frugal lifestyle, and then
he does things like he he dyes his hair because
he doesn't want any gray hairs to pop up. He
thinks that this is just all part of the transhumanist commitment.
(10:48):
You have to fight aging anyway you can, so moving
from cryogenics to augmenting the body with technology. Uh. In
the episode of Hello World, you you talked about an
experimental operation where a surgeon inserted a chip from a
credit card under the skin of someone's hand. It was
actually sort of hard to watch. Made me a little queasy.
(11:11):
Why who was that and why were they doing it? Well,
this is all part of Danilla's empire, i would say,
in Russia. So he has cry a ruse and the
cry onics, but then he's also sort of a technology
mogul in Russia. He's got this virtual reality software that
he's working on. He told me that he's creating the
most amazing database in the world that's gonna put Oracle
(11:33):
and all these other things that we have to shame,
although he was a little shaky on the details of
exactly how that would work. And then he's got these
followers who where things like brain wave monitors and this
guy that you mentioned who put a chip into his
hand instead to say that looks like an affection in
the making. To me, I've seen other people do this
kind of thing. This was the grossest one I've ever seen.
The chip is bigger than a postage stamp, and it's
(11:56):
this big hunk of metal, And it's not really a
doctor who's to get in. It was some guy with
huge plug earrings that they found in all these tattoos.
And he's sitting there and he slices the guys did
not look like a hygienic environment that said at all.
And they slice this guy's hand open and they shove
this huge metal chunk in there. And the entire purpose
(12:16):
of this was just so that the guy could use
it like a credit card when he goes to the store,
and just like you would tap your phone to pay
for something, he just taps his hand. But it's all
as symbol. Was there technology there or was it just
a sort of audacious experiment. I think it was actually
like an NFC chip. But the stuff all looks silly,
but as part of a statement they're trying to make,
(12:37):
which is we're willing to already go through these things
to adapt our body with whatever we have available to us.
Do you know if the hand work with Apple Pay,
it's only Google? I think Google Wallet. So transhumanists also
have some interesting ideas about how human nature needs to change,
(13:00):
how humans will need to learn utmost self control if
they're ever going to be able to harmonize with machines.
And I want to play another clip of Danilla here.
It was probably my favorite scene from the interview. Transcuminism
is about self control. We should strive to be perfect
in every way. Food is uh is horrible, and we
(13:22):
have some projects in the Russian Pursumous movement to actually
get rid of food. Sex is really overrated, and once
we move from this biological existence to a more mentioned
like existence, we'll forget about sex very quickly. In humans today,
love is essentially addiction. Do you love your wife? Yes?
(13:45):
I do love my wife, but I realize it's really
extremely dangerous because love is unpredictable, and just one step
from love is hatred. If we can fix that, it
doesn't really matter that we've become a different fishes. What
matters is we can find and be happy, productive, creative.
We can control what we want to do with So, Ashley,
(14:08):
how do you think Danilla's wife reacted to this interview.
She actually runs cry or rouse with him and when
she present and he said that she wasn't, but I
think she is also a believer in all these things
that he says. I'm curious what was going through your
head as Danilla was telling you all this. I've done
some research on him beforehand, so I actually knew a
little bit of what was gonna come. And I knew
(14:29):
that if I asked him about sex, love, and food,
he was going to give me these very utilitarian answers back.
It is funny having those guys that are cross from
you and be married, have this wife, and even have
this business with her, and tell you that loving her
is some sort of horrible thing that he's trying to
get over. I have to say, as a marketing line,
(14:50):
love is essentially an addiction. Is probably not the most successful.
He might need to work on that a little bit.
I mean, how much is tongue in cheek? Does he
really think he can get rid of these fundamental tolls
of human relationships? He does think that any think it's
necessary for trans humanism. I could never quite figure out why.
I mean, when he would describe getting rid of love
and sex and food. To me, you're just left wondering
(15:12):
what's left if you're gonna live forever, or even if
you're gonna enjoy technology. It's like, what's the point of
doing all this stuff if if you're not going to
have these most basic pleasures that that humans really gravitated.
Talks about being freed up to be happy, creative, productive,
but right, what does what does that mean without the
context of relationships. That was the part I could never
(15:35):
figure out. And to me, he never even gave me
a really good answer as to what exactly we're striving for.
He was funny. He would talk about trans humanism as
not being for the masses. It is for this select
group of people who are willing to make these sorts
of sacrifices, who are willing to put chips in their body,
(15:55):
willing to give up food and love, and he sees
them as the people will really carry the human species forward.
And so if you're not willing to do all this stuff,
he doesn't really care. He's not trying to build some
lickser for everybody. It's you commit to this lifestyle and
you become part of the chosen few who will carry
(16:16):
on forever. Yeah, that's a good point. There is a
little bit of a tension between the company's need to
propagate these ideas as widely as possible, and yet here
he is talking about how really he's viewing it to
something for his friends. So actually make the connection here
between the Russian transhumanist movement and the stuff closer to
home and Silicon Valley from folks like Peter Teal that
we've been talking about over the last few years. Do
(16:38):
you think there's a connection. There are some of these
ideas similar. Yeah. I think for anybody who lives in
Silicon Valley and follows this kind of stuff, it's all
very familiar. You have companies, very serious companies ranging from
Google to Illumina that makes all these gene sequencing machines
and Craig Venor who decoded the genome, pursuing projects to
basically end death. They're trying to do all kinds of
(17:00):
new mapping of DNA and new scientific techniques to figure
this out. But there is this fascination with immortality. I
guess so many of these guys come from the sci
fi world and that's what they grew up reading. And
you see it, right, they get into flying cars and
spaceships and things like that. And I think this is
is the next stage all that humans on the whole
(17:21):
have been fascinated with immortality obviously, you know, for good reason,
for a very very long time. And I think now
there's this feeling in the valley that we may actually
be close to doing this well. And part of that
is that they think that we're close to something called
the singularity. Right, if you can just extend life a
little bit more, you can get to this magical moment
(17:42):
where immortality becomes possible. But for the uninitiated, tell us
what the singularity is and why we should be hoping
to reach it. The singularity is supposed to be that
moment where you can say, computers get as smart as
human beings, and once they reach that point, they begin
to improve themselves and go at this astronaut comical rate
where computers are getting better and better all the time
(18:03):
and and far exceed the intelligence of humans. And the
hope is that somehow humans get taken along on this
ride and you could say, download your brain into a
machine and live forever that way in this glorious computer
run future. So that's one vein of all of this.
Then there's the science vein along the way, which is
(18:23):
to keep us living long enough to reach that point.
I'm curious if Danilla was in the United States and
in his h his frozen Vat operation was outside of
a Washington, d C. Would he be as accepted as
he is in Russia. Now. I don't think so. I
think if the average American went to see his operation
(18:43):
for Sander would strike you as kind of crude. And
I don't think a lot of people would put their
money into something like that. On the other hand, he
is an impressive guy. For all the joking you do,
and and some of the stuff that he does, this
seems very strange. He is extraordinarily bright, he's extraordinarily persuasive.
(19:04):
He has an answer for almost everything you do. We
posted this video on YouTube, and I see him in
the comments section going to battle with all the people,
and and he handles them. He don't, you know, he
doesn't attack them when they say he's a freak or
anything like that. He just says, why do you think that?
And here's the reasons why I think this, And and
he tries to persuade people to his vision. And I
(19:25):
met a handful of people there who had changed their
lives because this guy had come around. I don't really
want to replace humanity with post humanity. I may like
other people, I want everybody to be happy, but I
don't want everybody to be post human I want myself
to do that, my friends to do that. Maybe thousands
(19:46):
of people, maybe tens of thousands. I don't want everybody
to believe that there will be a topic which I
view it for you maybe maybe not, don't hope for that. Well,
(20:13):
now the moment of truth for this episode of Decrypted, Ashley,
would you yourself consider freezing your body and becoming a
cryonics customer? I didn't think about this more. After going
to Moscow and seeing this thing firsthand. I think what
I've decided is I really wish I could freeze myself
at five, or at least if I'm gonna live forever, friend,
(20:37):
and if I'm gonna live forever, I want to be
year old me living forever. I definitely don't want to
be eighty year old me with all these issues that
just linger forever. On the other hand, I will tell
you this. You know it's thirty six thousand bucks to
freeze your body or about half that to freeze your head.
If I was at the end after seeing these operations,
(21:00):
do I think it will work? Probably not, but I
would pay that to to try. What would you do?
I think as much as I'm sort of unsettled by
the whole idea and um kind of freaked out by it,
I think that if I was facing the choice, I'm
so curious about what the future holds. If there's even
a small percentage that it would work, I might consider it.
(21:21):
It's the logical thing to do it. And that's it
for this week's decrypt It. Thanks for listening and tell
us what you think of this strange world of cryonics.
Would you want to live forever? I'm on Twitter at
at Bradstone and I'm at Valley Hack. And be sure
to subscribe to our show on iTunes or wherever you
(21:44):
get your podcasts and leave us a rating or a review.
That's what helps listeners find our show. You can check
out Ashley's Hello World video series at Bloomberg dot com
slash Hello World. Think of This podcast is just a
little taste for what Ashley discovers in the episode. Believe me,
it gets a whole lot creepier in the video and
our last episode of the season is in Chile. It
(22:06):
drops later this month, near the end of December. Today's
podcast was produced by Pied gud Cary, Magnus Hendrickson and
Liz Smith. Alec McCabe as head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll
see you next week.
A lot of people in the tech industry have a
morbid fascination with not just living healthier or living longer,
but actually defying death. The quest for immortality, of course,
is one of the driving causes of humanity, underlying many religions,
which often pose an afterlife or consciousness survives. Ashley Vance,
(00:27):
you track down someone in Russia who says you don't
need faith to believe in immortality, but science. Back in October,
I traveled to Russia, just outside of Moscow to meet
this guy named Danilla Medvedev. He's the CEO of a
company called Cryo Russ, which specializes in cryonics, or freezing
(00:47):
your body as you await a cure to an illness
or a better future. So he's serious about this. He
is freezing people in the hopes that they can be
revived at a later day to live forever. He's dead
serious about it. Very good. Tell us a little bit
about Danila. What is he like. He's this dude who
had sort of a traditional background. He had studied economics,
he was a bit of an academic, and then, like
(01:09):
a lot of these people do, he had a revelation
that he wanted to do something else with his life,
he got super into technology and then I always taken
it to this very extreme conclusion where he's got the
cryonics operation. And he's also the leader of Russia's transhumanist movement.
So those are people that want to augment their body
(01:29):
to take in as much technology as possible and really
become what I would think of as kind of a
cyborg or a half human half machine. And he is,
for all intents and purposes, the spiritual leader of this
movement in Russia. Now, over the last year, you've traveled
around the world for your video series Hello World, and
you've met a lot of eccentric technologists. Where does Daniella rank. Yeah,
(01:51):
so I've got the centric engineer and then the guys
like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, who are these charismatic
figures of technology g movements. But I would say he
is the only one I've run across that is a
true religious figure. He's the pied piper of trans humanism
in Russia, and he's got this combination of the technology
(02:14):
that he's selling, some technology that he's developing, and then
he gives all these speeches around town all the time,
and and all these people show up and and really
buy into his movement and into that. And he's an
original character. He's very eccentric, he's very smart, he is charismatic,
and he's a one of a kind. Let's listen to
Danilla here on the Russian transhumanist movement. In the Russian
(02:40):
consumers movement, we have free goals. So first is immortality,
then omnimportance like complete upgrade of for all the intellectual,
physical capability and the safe singularity. Real trans humanism is
not built on hope. Trus humanism is build on suffering,
breaking yourself in the process and new to yourself. Time
(03:10):
has come for people to accept that death is no
longer about just dying and being doors in the ground,
but it's really about choice. Hi, I'm Bradstone and I'm
(03:32):
Ashley Vance, and this week i'm decrypted. As we sit
on the precipice of two thousand and seventeen, still locked
in our mortal coils, We're taking you to Russia to
meet the futuristic scientists and entrepreneurs looking for a way
to cheat death. We'll take you through the technology they're developing,
what eternal life might feel like, and how far they've
got with turning their sci fi ideas into reality by
(03:55):
the end of this episode. As long as you're comfortable
with the idea of a company storing your deep capitated
head and liquid nitrogen, maybe even YouTube can live forever.
So back in October, I traveled to Russia, just outside
of Moscow, to a suburb called Sergey Pacade. You drive
(04:17):
down this little neighborhood, there's little houses there. It looks
kind of picturesque idyllic, and you turn down this one
driveway and there's this big white warehouse and inside of
that there's these two giant vats. Now are it's curious
about this? Is it advertise outside of the warehouse? What
the horrors that are inside? No, you would have no
idea that your neighbor is freezing bodies and heads of
(04:41):
humans and animals next door. And the neighbors were quite
curious when we showed up to film all this stuff. Now,
are these people who have died or who are on
the brink of death, who are opting for this route?
The ones in the vats are already dead. He's this
company Cryer Risk that DANIELO runs has attracted wealthy people
from all over the world. Basically, if you want to
(05:02):
freeze yourself. You can only do it in two places today.
In the United States there's two companies that do this,
and Russia is the second option. And so you do
get people from all over the world, but a lot
from Europe in Asia, and so far they have about
sixty people who have chosen to freeze themselves. It's a
mix of half of that is heads and half of
(05:22):
that is the full body. You get a discount if
you just do the head. It's about sixteen thousand dollars
for the head, thirty six thousand dollars for the body.
This is probably the wrong time to advise parental guidance
for this episode of Decryptid. So you know, it's it's
optimistic sort of thing, and this is a one time
fee by the way to uh, it's it's a one
time feed. You You've got to hope that the Cryo
(05:43):
Rise keeps its funding going for eternity. And the funny
thing I thought as well in these vats that I
saw where that there are a mix of animals, so
people also freeze their beloved pets and there were dogs, there,
there was a chinchilla, There was a what is the
story behind the chinchilla did you find that out? Same
thing as with everybody. It's some pet that they just
(06:04):
couldn't beloved chinchilla, beloved parakeet being frozen for one day
when they can be revived exactly. And the setup is
you've got these two big tanks and to keep the
head extra cold, the heads are placed near the bottom
of the tank, and so if you've got your body
in there, you're hanging upside down with your your feet
up top and your head down near the bottom. All
(06:26):
it sounds like this movement is getting a little bit
of traction on Russia. It is so Russia has this
long history, it's about two hundred years long of searching
for immortality. There were these philosophers that wrote about it.
During the nineteen seventeen Revolution. A lot of the rhetoric
behind the revolution was was the merging of science and
(06:48):
people and that that science would keep Russia strong, and
that carried on all through the Soviet era. And then
today cry O Rouse has about sixty paying customers, and
I think it is the only cry next company that
it's business is expanding rapidly. Well, here's Danilla again talking
a little bit about the underpinnings of the movement in Russia.
(07:09):
You can start trans humans projects by yourself. You have
to get a lot of people, and the best way
to do is just to show them this grant vision,
this idea of cosmic development, and then this all fits together.
Of course, we want to make chronics totally accessible and
(07:31):
available to everybody, because it just makes a lot of sense,
and it shouldn't be expensive. It should be cheap and
available to everybody by default. So that's what we want
to see in in twenty or thirty years. Uh. In
addition to that, we want to have clinical applications of
chronics the hypothermit technologies, so that you can just stop
(07:53):
a human and then restarted and do that as you
can do with computer programs. Actually, let me ask you,
the people that opt for this treatment, have they already
passed away or they near death. It's a mix of
people that sign up for this kind of thing. There
are older people who are closer to dying who sign up,
(08:14):
and for the most part, those are the ones that
are in the VAT. But as part of this trans
humanist movement you see tons of young and middle aged people.
They come to hear DANIELI speak at these these lectures
and for the most part, what I tended to notice
is that their technofiles, they're people who are just super
(08:34):
into technology. They tend to be quite free thinking. Um.
It was like a real mix though, of women and men,
which I was impressed by. It wasn't just a bunch
of dudes in this conference room listening to this guy.
And I think it's the kind of people that that
believe and stuff that you hear about, like the singularity
(08:55):
and and that we're heading to this more glorious future
where man and machine merge, and your brain is augmented
by computers and we can do all these fantastic things
that we can't do today. So half the people want
to cure some kind of illness and they want to
just come back when we've got a cure to that,
and then half the people really want to see what
the world is like in the future. I'm curious, did
(09:18):
you get the sense that trans humanism is more mainstream
in Russia than it is in the United States. Sorry
for me to say for sure, because I've oddly covered
the trans humanist movement in the United States that I
said to follow. A lot of these people, especially, there's
a lot of overlap with singultarians, people who believe in
the singularity and the trans humanist. The Russian version of this,
(09:42):
it was very passionate. They have a there's like a
romance in Russia that I think is missing in the
United States. In the US, it tends to be very
pragmatic and scientific in this Silicon Valley logical thing. Of course,
we would want to live forever if we can, and
if we have these tools to do it, let's do it. Russia,
it really did have this romanticism to it, and it
(10:04):
sounds vague, but of poetry. I mean it comes from
this background, this philosophical background of things they believe in,
and I think the culture there, they've been steeped in
this link between science and society in a different way
than we have been in the States. And and to
me it was I'd say it's almost refreshing. I liked
it more there. Did you ask Dan l if he
(10:25):
plans to freeze himself. He definitely plans to freeze himself.
And he lives this very rigid lifestyle today to try
and he's saving up obviously for the expense he is
and he's he lives a very frugal lifestyle, and then
he does things like he he dyes his hair because
he doesn't want any gray hairs to pop up. He
thinks that this is just all part of the transhumanist commitment.
(10:48):
You have to fight aging anyway you can, so moving
from cryogenics to augmenting the body with technology. Uh. In
the episode of Hello World, you you talked about an
experimental operation where a surgeon inserted a chip from a
credit card under the skin of someone's hand. It was
actually sort of hard to watch. Made me a little queasy.
(11:11):
Why who was that and why were they doing it? Well,
this is all part of Danilla's empire, i would say,
in Russia. So he has cry a ruse and the
cry onics, but then he's also sort of a technology
mogul in Russia. He's got this virtual reality software that
he's working on. He told me that he's creating the
most amazing database in the world that's gonna put Oracle
(11:33):
and all these other things that we have to shame,
although he was a little shaky on the details of
exactly how that would work. And then he's got these
followers who where things like brain wave monitors and this
guy that you mentioned who put a chip into his
hand instead to say that looks like an affection in
the making. To me, I've seen other people do this
kind of thing. This was the grossest one I've ever seen.
The chip is bigger than a postage stamp, and it's
(11:56):
this big hunk of metal, And it's not really a
doctor who's to get in. It was some guy with
huge plug earrings that they found in all these tattoos.
And he's sitting there and he slices the guys did
not look like a hygienic environment that said at all.
And they slice this guy's hand open and they shove
this huge metal chunk in there. And the entire purpose
(12:16):
of this was just so that the guy could use
it like a credit card when he goes to the store,
and just like you would tap your phone to pay
for something, he just taps his hand. But it's all
as symbol. Was there technology there or was it just
a sort of audacious experiment. I think it was actually
like an NFC chip. But the stuff all looks silly,
but as part of a statement they're trying to make,
(12:37):
which is we're willing to already go through these things
to adapt our body with whatever we have available to us.
Do you know if the hand work with Apple Pay,
it's only Google? I think Google Wallet. So transhumanists also
have some interesting ideas about how human nature needs to change,
(13:00):
how humans will need to learn utmost self control if
they're ever going to be able to harmonize with machines.
And I want to play another clip of Danilla here.
It was probably my favorite scene from the interview. Transcuminism
is about self control. We should strive to be perfect
in every way. Food is uh is horrible, and we
(13:22):
have some projects in the Russian Pursumous movement to actually
get rid of food. Sex is really overrated, and once
we move from this biological existence to a more mentioned
like existence, we'll forget about sex very quickly. In humans today,
love is essentially addiction. Do you love your wife? Yes?
(13:45):
I do love my wife, but I realize it's really
extremely dangerous because love is unpredictable, and just one step
from love is hatred. If we can fix that, it
doesn't really matter that we've become a different fishes. What
matters is we can find and be happy, productive, creative.
We can control what we want to do with So, Ashley,
(14:08):
how do you think Danilla's wife reacted to this interview.
She actually runs cry or rouse with him and when
she present and he said that she wasn't, but I
think she is also a believer in all these things
that he says. I'm curious what was going through your
head as Danilla was telling you all this. I've done
some research on him beforehand, so I actually knew a
little bit of what was gonna come. And I knew
(14:29):
that if I asked him about sex, love, and food,
he was going to give me these very utilitarian answers back.
It is funny having those guys that are cross from
you and be married, have this wife, and even have
this business with her, and tell you that loving her
is some sort of horrible thing that he's trying to
get over. I have to say, as a marketing line,
(14:50):
love is essentially an addiction. Is probably not the most successful.
He might need to work on that a little bit.
I mean, how much is tongue in cheek? Does he
really think he can get rid of these fundamental tolls
of human relationships? He does think that any think it's
necessary for trans humanism. I could never quite figure out why.
I mean, when he would describe getting rid of love
and sex and food. To me, you're just left wondering
(15:12):
what's left if you're gonna live forever, or even if
you're gonna enjoy technology. It's like, what's the point of
doing all this stuff if if you're not going to
have these most basic pleasures that that humans really gravitated.
Talks about being freed up to be happy, creative, productive,
but right, what does what does that mean without the
context of relationships. That was the part I could never
(15:35):
figure out. And to me, he never even gave me
a really good answer as to what exactly we're striving for.
He was funny. He would talk about trans humanism as
not being for the masses. It is for this select
group of people who are willing to make these sorts
of sacrifices, who are willing to put chips in their body,
(15:55):
willing to give up food and love, and he sees
them as the people will really carry the human species forward.
And so if you're not willing to do all this stuff,
he doesn't really care. He's not trying to build some
lickser for everybody. It's you commit to this lifestyle and
you become part of the chosen few who will carry
(16:16):
on forever. Yeah, that's a good point. There is a
little bit of a tension between the company's need to
propagate these ideas as widely as possible, and yet here
he is talking about how really he's viewing it to
something for his friends. So actually make the connection here
between the Russian transhumanist movement and the stuff closer to
home and Silicon Valley from folks like Peter Teal that
we've been talking about over the last few years. Do
(16:38):
you think there's a connection. There are some of these
ideas similar. Yeah. I think for anybody who lives in
Silicon Valley and follows this kind of stuff, it's all
very familiar. You have companies, very serious companies ranging from
Google to Illumina that makes all these gene sequencing machines
and Craig Venor who decoded the genome, pursuing projects to
basically end death. They're trying to do all kinds of
(17:00):
new mapping of DNA and new scientific techniques to figure
this out. But there is this fascination with immortality. I
guess so many of these guys come from the sci
fi world and that's what they grew up reading. And
you see it, right, they get into flying cars and
spaceships and things like that. And I think this is
is the next stage all that humans on the whole
(17:21):
have been fascinated with immortality obviously, you know, for good reason,
for a very very long time. And I think now
there's this feeling in the valley that we may actually
be close to doing this well. And part of that
is that they think that we're close to something called
the singularity. Right, if you can just extend life a
little bit more, you can get to this magical moment
(17:42):
where immortality becomes possible. But for the uninitiated, tell us
what the singularity is and why we should be hoping
to reach it. The singularity is supposed to be that
moment where you can say, computers get as smart as
human beings, and once they reach that point, they begin
to improve themselves and go at this astronaut comical rate
where computers are getting better and better all the time
(18:03):
and and far exceed the intelligence of humans. And the
hope is that somehow humans get taken along on this
ride and you could say, download your brain into a
machine and live forever that way in this glorious computer
run future. So that's one vein of all of this.
Then there's the science vein along the way, which is
(18:23):
to keep us living long enough to reach that point.
I'm curious if Danilla was in the United States and
in his h his frozen Vat operation was outside of
a Washington, d C. Would he be as accepted as
he is in Russia. Now. I don't think so. I
think if the average American went to see his operation
(18:43):
for Sander would strike you as kind of crude. And
I don't think a lot of people would put their
money into something like that. On the other hand, he
is an impressive guy. For all the joking you do,
and and some of the stuff that he does, this
seems very strange. He is extraordinarily bright, he's extraordinarily persuasive.
(19:04):
He has an answer for almost everything you do. We
posted this video on YouTube, and I see him in
the comments section going to battle with all the people,
and and he handles them. He don't, you know, he
doesn't attack them when they say he's a freak or
anything like that. He just says, why do you think that?
And here's the reasons why I think this, And and
he tries to persuade people to his vision. And I
(19:25):
met a handful of people there who had changed their
lives because this guy had come around. I don't really
want to replace humanity with post humanity. I may like
other people, I want everybody to be happy, but I
don't want everybody to be post human I want myself
to do that, my friends to do that. Maybe thousands
(19:46):
of people, maybe tens of thousands. I don't want everybody
to believe that there will be a topic which I
view it for you maybe maybe not, don't hope for that. Well,
(20:13):
now the moment of truth for this episode of Decrypted, Ashley,
would you yourself consider freezing your body and becoming a
cryonics customer? I didn't think about this more. After going
to Moscow and seeing this thing firsthand. I think what
I've decided is I really wish I could freeze myself
at five, or at least if I'm gonna live forever, friend,
(20:37):
and if I'm gonna live forever, I want to be
year old me living forever. I definitely don't want to
be eighty year old me with all these issues that
just linger forever. On the other hand, I will tell
you this. You know it's thirty six thousand bucks to
freeze your body or about half that to freeze your head.
If I was at the end after seeing these operations,
(21:00):
do I think it will work? Probably not, but I
would pay that to to try. What would you do?
I think as much as I'm sort of unsettled by
the whole idea and um kind of freaked out by it,
I think that if I was facing the choice, I'm
so curious about what the future holds. If there's even
a small percentage that it would work, I might consider it.
(21:21):
It's the logical thing to do it. And that's it
for this week's decrypt It. Thanks for listening and tell
us what you think of this strange world of cryonics.
Would you want to live forever? I'm on Twitter at
at Bradstone and I'm at Valley Hack. And be sure
to subscribe to our show on iTunes or wherever you
(21:44):
get your podcasts and leave us a rating or a review.
That's what helps listeners find our show. You can check
out Ashley's Hello World video series at Bloomberg dot com
slash Hello World. Think of This podcast is just a
little taste for what Ashley discovers in the episode. Believe me,
it gets a whole lot creepier in the video and
our last episode of the season is in Chile. It
(22:06):
drops later this month, near the end of December. Today's
podcast was produced by Pied gud Cary, Magnus Hendrickson and
Liz Smith. Alec McCabe as head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll
see you next week.
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