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