Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / Age Reversal, Cryonics, and the Biology of Life Extension - Episode 360
Transcript
- 0:00When we declare someone dead today,
- 0:01what we're actually doing is kind of making a bit of a mistake,
- 0:04just like in the past when people stop breathing,
- 0:06the heart stop beating. Back then we just say they were dead because
- 0:09we didn't know what else to do.
- 0:10We didn't have CPR, we didn't have defibrillation.
- 0:12But today, you know, we know that that boundary is is a lot more blurry than
- 0:15we thought. So our point is that you're not truly gone until
- 0:18the brain has deteriorated beyond the point at which some future technology could
- 0:21repair it.
- 0:22Hey everyone, Dr. Gladden here.
- 0:23I just finished a podcast interview with Max Moore,
- 0:26his PhD. He's a devout transhumanism gentleman,
- 0:30philosophically, which really is about how humans continue to expand and grow
- 0:34and do more and bring technology along,
- 0:37etc. Not terribly spiritual, but still expansive.
- 0:40He also is very involved in biostasis and cryopreservation,
- 0:44and it leads to some really interesting conversations around cryopreservation,
- 0:48where we are, what we do, things like that.
- 0:50So I think you'll enjoy this podcast.
- 0:52Yeah.
- 0:52He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook.
- 0:57Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30 and he's got the science
- 1:02to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
- 1:06Welcome
- 1:07everybody. Max, it's good to have you here on the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
- 1:10Good to be here.
- 1:10Yeah.
- 1:11Thank you. So, you know, you're in an interesting space.
- 1:14Tell us a little bit about how you kind of evolved into transhumanism
- 1:18and philosophical points of view that you've developed.
- 1:21Where where did that start for you?
- 1:22Were you always very thoughtful as a child,
- 1:24or something you got to do with PhD or
- 1:28This this comes off a lot because it's a little hard to explain my interest from
- 1:31my background. My you know, my family was pretty conventional
- 1:33and didn't really think about these ideas at all.
- 1:36I didn't actually have a very academic family.
- 1:37My grandfather on my mother's side was the only person to go
- 1:39to university before me. So yeah,
- 1:41it's a little unusual, but I I got interested in in health in a very early
- 1:45age and actually explicitly in life extension.
- 1:46By the time I was probably thirteen or fourteen,
- 1:48I was taking supplements and exercising,
- 1:50which I still do. So it became very early for me and it really
- 1:54form part of my basic philosophy,
- 1:55which I call the philosophy of extropy,
- 1:57essentially a philosophy of overcoming limits of
- 1:59and continually improving ourselves.
- 2:00And of course life extension and health fit very much into that.
- 2:03So I developed a kind of philosophy of transhumanism around that
- 2:05and practicing life extension and biostasis or cryonics as a backup option,
- 2:09in case in case I don't live long enough until we reach longevity escape velocity,
- 2:13which at my age of sixty two I'm not that optimistic about right now.
- 2:16Okay, well that's interesting.
- 2:17I just finished a interview with Aubrey de Grey before I jumped on this
- 2:21and we were talking about escape philosophy.
- 2:23He thinks it's sometime in the next ten to fifteen years,
- 2:26so maybe sooner. So maybe that's you know,
- 2:28maybe there's hope for you.
- 2:29I hope so, but I'm I'm kind of skeptical about that because I've you know,
- 2:32I go back into the nineteen seventies and eighties and see similar claims back then.
- 2:36And of course Aubrey does make his claim somewhat conditional,
- 2:39it depends on the funding. It does seem like the funding is definitely increasing
- 2:41a lot these days, which is encouraging.
- 2:43But you know, my point is that we still haven't seen even a one year extension
- 2:48in maximum lifespan. Nobody's beaten the record from nineteen ninety seven,
- 2:51it's still a hundred and twenty two years or so.
- 2:52So, you know, it's basically asking us to believe it's gonna happen
- 2:55all at once quite rapidly.
- 2:56And that's possible, but I'm also a little skeptical about the current abilities
- 3:00of AI to solve fundamental problems like this.
- 3:02So I would love to believe that,
- 3:04'cause that put me into my seventies and I'd rather not get older.
- 3:07But ~ I'm I'm I'm skeptical. I'm certainly gonna work very hard at staying alive
- 3:11and healthy, but I also have my biostasis backup option.
- 3:14Okay. Well let's talk about your backup option because it's an option that
- 3:18we haven't really talked about here on the podcast before,
- 3:20which is cryo preservation, if I'm not mistaken.
- 3:23You were involved with Alcor, I it was.
- 3:25Do you want to talk to us a little bit about cryo preservation,
- 3:28kind of how you got involved with that?
- 3:29Yeah, so I've actually been involved with cry cryonics,
- 3:32~ or more generally biostasis.
- 3:34Let me just make a distinction here,
- 3:35because biostasis is the preferred term these days.
- 3:38It includes cryonics. Cryonics is basically human cryopreservation,
- 3:41but there are other methods of preservation like chemical fixation which
- 3:44can be used instead or in combinations.
- 3:46So biostasis is sort of the broader term.
- 3:48But yeah, I've been involved for over forty years.
- 3:50I started the first cryonics organization in Britain back in nineteen eighty six.
- 3:53I also ran the Alcore Foundation,
- 3:55the the current
- 3:56largest cranics organization for almost ten years.
- 3:58And I'm still active in that area.
- 4:00In fact, I just wrote a book on the topic that's ~ I have an agent now looking
- 4:03for a publisher, so hopefully it'll be out fairly soon.
- 4:05It's a very complex issue, but the basic idea is pretty simple.
- 4:07Basic idea is that when we declare Son dead today,
- 4:10what we're actually doing is kind of making a bit of a mistake.
- 4:13Just like in the past when people stopped breathing,
- 4:16the heart stop beating. Back then we just say they were dead because
- 4:18we didn't know what else to do.
- 4:19We didn't have CPR, we didn't have defibrillation.
- 4:21But today, you know, we know that that boundary is is a lot more blurry than
- 4:24we thought.
- 4:25So our point is that you're not truly gone until the brain
- 4:27has deteriorated beyond the point at which some future technology could repair it.
- 4:31And if we jump in very early, as early as possible,
- 4:34like preferably seconds after legal death has been declared,
- 4:36and start cooling the patient,
- 4:38introducing various chemicals to protect the cells,
- 4:40and then eventually stall them at super cold temperatures,
- 4:42the tissues are going to be unchanging,
- 4:43just like you know, we have millions of people walking around today
- 4:46who are cryopreserved as embryos at some point.
- 4:48We have cryopreserved skin and heart valves and corneas and so on.
- 4:51So it's just more complex. We can't re we can't reverse that process today because
- 4:54it
- 4:55requires a very rapid warming,
- 4:56which is difficult in large bodies of tissue.
- 4:58But we're making progress along that way.
- 5:00And we have some very direct evidence that under good conditions that
- 5:02we are actually preserving the ultra structure of the brain in which
- 5:04our memories and personality reside.
- 5:06So it's certainly not a guarantee,
- 5:08and I always emphasize that it's a long shot.
- 5:09There's no guarantee here, no no promises,
- 5:11but it seems like something worth doing if otherwise you're
- 5:13not gonna continue living if you're still enjoying life.
- 5:16There's
- 5:16an interesting point you make that everybody is familiar now with,
- 5:20you know, in vitro fertilization,
- 5:22cryo, storage of embryos, right?
- 5:24People will say, Well, I have four or five or six embryos in storage,
- 5:28or you know, this kind of thing,
- 5:29right? And we really kind of take that for granted,
- 5:31as it's just, you know, matter of fact.
- 5:33It sounds like what you're saying though is that the difference is that it's easier
- 5:37to uniformly warm an embryo than it is to uniformly warm a larger body.
- 5:42Is that right?
- 5:43Or a slice of tissue, yeah. So currently the state of the art
- 5:46in terms of reversibility, and you can see this at twenty first century medicine
- 5:49in California, University of Minnesota,
- 5:50has repeatedly and reliably managed to cryo preserve rat kidneys
- 5:54and then reworn them successfully so they function.
- 5:56And twenty first century medicine even more difficult with with rabbit kidneys,
- 5:59which are larger. So we're talking about home and weight million organs which have
- 6:02already been reversibly cryo preserved.
- 6:04So if someone comes along and says,
- 6:05Well, you know, cryo next is crazy that it's impossible to cryo preserve the brain,
- 6:08well
- 6:08They've got to provide a good argument because we can see that we
- 6:11can already do this with organs.
- 6:12But to do a whole organism, yeah,
- 6:13the problem is you have to re warm at a very rapid rate.
- 6:16it seems strange, but there's a phenomenon called recrystallization.
- 6:19Essentially, as you warm up from cryogenic temperatures,
- 6:21ice crystals can reform and do a lot of damage.
- 6:24So you have to warm very rapidly.
- 6:25And there's various you know, radio frequency,
- 6:27nano warming, there's a number of different methods being researched.
- 6:29But that's the reason why today we couldn't bring back someone who's being
- 6:32cryopreserved, even if they're under very
- 6:34cryobaser under very good conditions.
- 6:35But it doesn't mean that, you know,
- 6:36in the future as we have better repair technology,
- 6:38maybe some kind of man medical nanotechnology.
- 6:40Hopefully we can go in there, fix the problems.
- 6:42And of course there's no point doing this until we fix the aging problem because
- 6:45you know if you get cryobreserve when you're ninety years old,
- 6:47you're obviously not going to last too long.
- 6:49So you'd have to await 'til we've actually beat the aging problem too.
- 6:52Sure. Well it is interesting. If you're heating them up,
- 6:54they would go through a phase where they would develop the ice crystals.
- 6:56Whereas with the preservatives you have they're kind of in a just a static state.
- 7:01I can imagine if you overheated them too,
- 7:03you might vaporize water also,
- 7:05potentially. Or
- 7:07Yeah. Well you've got to you've definitely got to optimize the rate.
- 7:09Yeah. But but you know, we're getting a lot of ~ a lot of knowledge because there's
- 7:12a lot of research going on to this area.
- 7:14If we could r reliably cryopreserve human organs,
- 7:16for instance, it would save you know tens of thousands of lives a year,
- 7:19at least maybe it's in hundreds of thousands,
- 7:21just in this country alone, because right now it's very hard for you to
- 7:24get a a kidney or a heart or a liver across the country rapidly,
- 7:27keeping it cool in time to be transplanted.
- 7:29But if you could actually cryopreserve them,
- 7:31keep them in a cryobank in the hospital,
- 7:32pull them out as needed, that would be you know a massive benefit.
- 7:35So we're relying on the same kind of research that's advancing that.
- 7:38So it's, you know, it's it's it's very much part of the mainstream.
- 7:41It's just that we have a bit more of a a vision of how we could apply this
- 7:44to the whole person.
- 7:45Yeah, you're probably familiar with the company X Therma.
- 7:47Yeah. It's in involved in preservation of organs for transplant and ~ stem cells
- 7:53and things like that. Yes.
- 7:54So
- 7:55no, Shawshe, I think is one of the leading people in that company.
- 7:58Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's right.
- 8:00Yeah. So that's interesting. They're working in that area.
- 8:02So tell us a little bit about your philosophy of continued expansion for the human.
- 8:08I don't know what you know about us,
- 8:10but our view of longevity is that it represents the greatest opportunity that
- 8:15humanity has ever had to actually upregulate or upgrade the human experience.
- 8:19It's not just extra years, right?
- 8:21So the goal for us is, you know,
- 8:23to develop a thirty year old body and a three hundred or a three thousand year
- 8:27old mind.
- 8:28Right, with all the wisdom, insight,
- 8:29perspective, et cetera, that goes along with that.
- 8:32Tell us a little bit about your philosophy of continued improvement.
- 8:36How does that kind of play out for you?
- 8:38But
- 8:38I I call it the philosophy of extropy,
- 8:40which is a term that my friend Tom Bell came up with,
- 8:42which is fit it very nicely because of course in physics you have
- 8:44the idea of entropy, which means in a close yeah,
- 8:47in a closed system when there's no no no energy coming in from the outside,
- 8:50that system will tend to decay and fall towards disorder.
- 8:52Of course the earth is not a closed system because we have
- 8:54the sun coming in, that's why we have life here.
- 8:56But the I so it's it's not meant as a technical term.
- 8:58It's sort of it's not a technical opposite of entropy,
- 9:00but it basically is sort of a metaphor for increasing energy,
- 9:03vitality, intelligence, all the good things in life.
- 9:05And it it's essentially, you know,
- 9:07it's a philosophy that says we should question these limits.
- 9:09Just because we've always had aging and death in the past doesn't mean
- 9:12we always will know the future,
- 9:13right? We've always had slavery for
- 9:14Thousands of years too. We didn't have democracy for thousands of years.
- 9:17So things do change. And, you know,
- 9:18very much what the perspective you you put forward,
- 9:21we can do something about aging,
- 9:22we should, because imagine having a life where you remain absolutely vital
- 9:26and perfectly good health, perhaps even better health than we ha
- 9:28we have today possible, but you're acquiring knowledge and wisdom over hundreds
- 9:31or thousands of years and becoming what I like to call an ultra mature person.
- 9:35You're not gonna be static because we're gonna be changing
- 9:36and improving ourselves in various ways.
- 9:38And a lot of people just kind of scratch their heads about that because they have
- 9:41very static view of life. They seem to think that
- 9:43You know, you're gonna run out of things to do.
- 9:44I recently debated this guy, Ezekiel Manuel.
- 9:48I don't if you you've come across this fellow.
- 9:50He was one of the architects of Obamacare,
- 9:52he's ~ the most widely cited bioethicist,
- 9:54apparently. And he wrote a piece for I'm not sure it was Time magazine,
- 9:57one of those magazines, basically arguing that we should let ourselves
- 10:00die at the age of seventy-five.
- 10:01And I debated this guy earlier this year.
- 10:03It's just a very strange view to me that,
- 10:05you know, my wife is already seventy-six,
- 10:06so she takes offense at that suggestion.
- 10:08I'm not that far away. People seem to have this very narrow view of of
- 10:12Life and possibility. Like you're not gonna run out of things to do
- 10:14in a hundred years or a thousand years.
- 10:16I could write now right now sit down and write down things to keep me busy for,
- 10:19you know, many hundreds of years.
- 10:20And by then there'll be many new things to do.
- 10:22So I really find it strange that unless someone's,
- 10:25you know, really depressed or unhappy or disappointed in their life,
- 10:28why would you not want to carry on living given we're talking about good health?
- 10:31Of course people would make that mistake.
- 10:32They think we're talking about keeping people alive in misery.
- 10:35No, it's not what we're talking about at all.
- 10:37That's right. Yeah. It's interesting when you ask people,
- 10:39do they want to live to be a hundred?
- 10:40Most people say no, because their concept of what it would be like to
- 10:44be a hundred is, you know, not a pretty picture,
- 10:46right? So, but if you say what would it be like if you could live like you were 30,
- 10:50you know, for the rest of your life,
- 10:51then everybody wants that, right?
- 10:53Everybody wants youthfulness. And we can relate to that.
- 10:55We know what that is. You know,
- 10:56it's interesting. I think we're coming to an interesting point around purpose
- 11:00and meaning, right? I think the reason
- 11:02and maybe AI will have an impact on this if jobs are removed or things like that.
- 11:07There could be a crisis of meaning for many people because for many people their
- 11:11job, their families, raising their kids,
- 11:14those provide meaning for them.
- 11:16It sounds like for you that you found a sense of purpose and meaning beyond
- 11:20the routine things. I don't know if you want to speak to that at all.
- 11:23Yeah, I'm actually fairly optimistic.
- 11:25I I think that, you know, people might argue that AI is is different than everything
- 11:29else, but there have been lots of technologies throughout history that have
- 11:31displaced people from various jobs.
- 11:33But we've never actually you know,
- 11:34but we always get new activities.
- 11:35There's no fixed amount, it's kind of an economic fallacy,
- 11:37there's a fixed amount of stuff that we want or fixed amount of labor.
- 11:40So I think as long as we're flexible and willing to do some different things,
- 11:43there's no particular reason why we shouldn't have work if we want it.
- 11:45It may be that, you know, AI is a
- 11:47if if they are super productive and super intelligent,
- 11:49which I don't actually see happening in the near future with the current forms
- 11:52of of AI. But even if even if they are,
- 11:54it may be that we don't have to work if you want a decent standard of living,
- 11:57but people will still want to.
- 11:58And I think there'll be plenty of room for people to collaborate with AIs to do,
- 12:01you know, much greater work than they could do alone.
- 12:03So I and also the current figures,
- 12:05you know, despite I think head of Microsoft or one of the top people
- 12:08at Microsoft said a little while ago that by ~ twenty twenty eight or something,
- 12:12like half of workers in these industries will be unemployed.
- 12:14So far there's absolutely zero sign of that happening.
- 12:16I mean it's that
- 12:17There's no r increase in unemployment.
- 12:19So you know, we've heard these kind of fears for a long time.
- 12:21I tend to take a little more optimistic view as long as we're flexible.
- 12:23Yeah, I know that some companies actually let a bunch of people go
- 12:26and then brought a bunch of people back because they realized that
- 12:29AI couldn't couldn't do what humans could still do,
- 12:32right, in a way. Nonetheless, I think I think humans are kind of at their best when
- 12:36they're creating, either creating or co creating,
- 12:39right? And so if you have something that you find to be a creative outlet,
- 12:43I think this is key in going forward,
- 12:45whether it's music or sports or art or
- 12:49writing books or thinking about things or connecting with people,
- 12:53creating adventures with other people,
- 12:54all those things kind of factor into this creation process.
- 12:58But if you're if you're listening to this and you're wondering,
- 13:01well, geez, you know, if I lose my job and I'm gonna live a long time
- 13:04and be youthful, well, what's the meaning of life?
- 13:05Well I think it's it's about finding ways to create and contribute.
- 13:09I think that's provides a lot of meaning for people.
- 13:12Yeah. We you know, throughout most of our history we've been sort of used
- 13:14to getting meaning from roles that we're basically born into.
- 13:17You know, you're born as a farmer or as an artisan or as a feudal lord
- 13:20or whatever it is, and wasn't really a lot of choice.
- 13:22So you had to sort of make meaning out of that.
- 13:24But today 'cause we could we have a far more choice in what we do,
- 13:27what our occupation is, our interests,
- 13:29our hobbies. So yeah, I agree.
- 13:30Find something that really engage you and and push at that.
- 13:34And it and it doesn't mean it has to be easy.
- 13:35I think you know, part of our problem with our current culture
- 13:37is everybody wants things to be easy.
- 13:39You know, we don't
- 13:39People shouldn't face any consequences.
- 13:41They shouldn't have to, you work hard.
- 13:42They shouldn't have to exercise.
- 13:43There's there's a lot of unhealthy thinking.
- 13:45I'm a little more Nietzschean in my philosophy.
- 13:47I think it's you know you need a vigorous life,
- 13:49you need challenges, you need to push against those challenges to grow.
- 13:51And that's also gives life meaning.
- 13:53So I'm not I'm not favoring a life of sort of just retirement and doing nothing
- 13:56and just being waited on by AIs.
- 13:58I don't think that would be very mean.
- 13:59Meaningful.
- 14:00Yeah, exactly. So are you in a community of people where you kind
- 14:04of share these same principles?
- 14:06Let's call them the transhumanism principles.
- 14:08Is there like a community of folks that you're connected to?
- 14:11Yeah, well
- 14:11we had we used to X Trip Institute,
- 14:13but we closed that down quite a while ago.
- 14:14Although currently we're thinking of restarting something 'cause we
- 14:17had so much interest from people looking back to the nineteen and the eighties,
- 14:20early nineties, when we had a lot of people together.
- 14:22So we've had people filming documentaries over here.
- 14:24So we'll probably start something.
- 14:25But you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of informal network.
- 14:28There's Humanity Plus that my wife pretty much runs,
- 14:30which is a transhumanist organization.
- 14:31There are you our blogs and so on.
- 14:33So we discuss these ideas quite a lot.
- 14:34But most of the
- 14:35There are also conferences, quite a few conferences happen internationally,
- 14:38both on transhumanism and in the biostasis space.
- 14:41When you're biostasis, people tend to be transhumanists because
- 14:43it wouldn't make sense not to be really if you're gonna do that long.
- 14:46So yeah, it's a pretty strong community.
- 14:47I I've spent most of my time right now writing,
- 14:49doing podcasts, getting the book published.
- 14:51So I very much, you know, think about the ideas and communicate them.
- 14:54But I'm right now I'm preparing for a debate in in Qatar and
- 14:57October 15th, where we'll be discussing the Pope's views on AI.
- 15:00And interestingly enough, that the Pope wrote The Encyclical on AI
- 15:03has like a 40,000-word statement.
- 15:05So I'm studying that right now,
- 15:06making the usual kinds of objections that I think are largely mistaken.
- 15:09But ~ yeah, I think the future's gonna be really interesting
- 15:12and generally probably quite good.
- 15:14It's not just that people think of ill health and reject the idea
- 15:17of life extension because of you know assuming ill health.
- 15:19I think another major factor is the culture and the media have promoted this view
- 15:23of the future as as a horrible place.
- 15:25You know, AI is gonna hunt us down or
- 15:28there'll be overpopulation or there'll be too much pollution or
- 15:31too much global warming. But you know,
- 15:32throughout history we've solved more problems we've created,
- 15:34we're better off, we live longer,
- 15:35we're healthier, we're freer. And there's no particular reason why that should
- 15:38end in my view. People tend to take a very narrow view of things,
- 15:41don't understand how how economics works,
- 15:43how technology works. And these are problems that,
- 15:45you know, there are problems in the world,
- 15:47but we overcome them. And there's no reason to think that life is gonna be,
- 15:50you know, the the kind of dystopia you see in so much science fiction.
- 15:54Yeah. No, it's an interesting point.
- 15:56Well, there certainly are dystopian possibilities out there.
- 15:59There's no doubt. I mean, an asteroid could hit us or,
- 16:01you know, things like that. A volcano could change the weather in a big way,
- 16:04or a series of volcanoes, earthquakes,
- 16:07things like that. To your point,
- 16:08life is resilient, you know, if it's ever been proven to be one thing,
- 16:12it's actually incredibly resilient.
- 16:13I think it'd be almost be difficult to exterminate life from the planet apart from
- 16:17the planet being swallowed by the sun,
- 16:19right? Yeah.
- 16:20A lot of people talk about extinction risk these days or existential risk,
- 16:22which I I think is largely overblown.
- 16:24It's kind of it's like people are trying to one up each other that th they
- 16:27got the biggest crisis and this one is gonna destroy everybody completely.
- 16:30But I as you say, I think that's actually quite hard to do.
- 16:33I particularly find it implausible that AI would try to do that.
- 16:36So what are you finding to be some of the ways in which you're challenging yourself
- 16:40right now? What challenges have you laid out for yourself?
- 16:42Well, writing the book
- 16:43was challenge actually. That took a some sustained work.
- 16:46yeah. Yeah, pretty much every day.
- 16:49Challenge ch challenge myself at the gym.
- 16:51I like to work out pretty hard.
- 16:53I've always been fond of doing resistance training,
- 16:55but I'm doing more aerobic exercise,
- 16:56which I don't particularly enjoy,
- 16:57but make doing sprints is actually not so bad.
- 16:59And I realised I was getting stiff.
- 17:01I hadn't really taken care of my flexibility,
- 17:03so I spend more time stretching now too,
- 17:05which also is not particularly fun,
- 17:06but I need I know I need to do that.
- 17:07I I spend a lot of time
- 17:09looking at the longevity evidence,
- 17:11you know, what can we actually do to not die so early,
- 17:13even if we can't extend maximum lifespan right now.
- 17:15And of course that's that's a very difficult issue,
- 17:17as I'm sure you're aware, there's there's a lot of conflicting evidence,
- 17:20people making claims that could be hard to assess.
- 17:22But one thing I did about a little over ten years ago,
- 17:24which I don't know if you've had anybody on the show talk about this.
- 17:26You might want to do so if not,
- 17:28I was in the what are called the trim trials.
- 17:30You're in trim? Yeah. Yeah. I know I know Greg Fay.
- 17:33Yeah, so I was I was actually patient number one there,
- 17:35did the first trim trial, which basically meant taking growth hormone
- 17:38for a year along with metformin and DHEA.
- 17:40Right. And we had our went to Stanford Medical School and had our thymus scanned
- 17:44and indeed the cortex actually regrew,
- 17:46regenerated. So presumably my immune system is now doing pretty well.
- 17:49I never caught COVID, so maybe that's a sign of that.
- 17:51Yeah, let me interrupt you for a second.
- 17:52So for the audience to understand,
- 17:54the trim trial was set up by Greg Fay and his hypothesis was that a lot
- 17:59of aging is related to involution of the thymus gland,
- 18:02which is this gland that sits below the mediastinum here in the center
- 18:05of your chest, at the base of your throat.
- 18:07And that when that involutes then,
- 18:09you know, the immune system has trouble producing new
- 18:13T cells, thymus cells, if you will.
- 18:15And so then you're left with a an aging immune system,
- 18:18and what you've got is what you've got,
- 18:20and eventually it runs out. So his theory was that if he could rejuvenate
- 18:24the thymus gland, then it would enable the immune system to rejuvenate
- 18:29as well and be more youthful. What they demonstrated was that they turned back
- 18:33epigenetic age, I think it was a year or a year and a half.
- 18:36Year and a half, yeah. Yeah. Within one year of giving growth hormone DHEA,
- 18:41which is a
- 18:42a precursor hormone and then metformin to counterbalance any blood sugar issues
- 18:47brought on by the growth hormone.
- 18:49It also activates AMPK, which is has a longevity benefit in and of itself.
- 18:54So and counteracts the the mTOR activation by the growth hormone.
- 18:58So anyway, it's kind of a balanced biochemical approach to
- 19:01to trying to rejuvenate the thymus and the immune system.
- 19:04And we know that one of the one of the main reasons that we die is from immunosines,
- 19:09where the immune system is no longer capable of responding to new challenges,
- 19:12either clearing out taking out the trash,
- 19:14natural killer cells can't prune senescent cells properly,
- 19:17or you can't respond to the next virus that might show up on the planet,
- 19:21right? Or you can't kill off the mu mutation in the cell that could turn into
- 19:25cancer. So
- 19:26Well you break a leg, go into hospital or broken hip or whatever,
- 19:28and you catch an infection in the hospital and you have no immune system
- 19:31to fight it.
- 19:31Yes, ~ exactly. So you so you did trim one,
- 19:35did you do trim two also? No not.
- 19:37Yeah, like I I think it's been quite expensive to follow up.
- 19:40I got in what it was relatively inexpensive early on.
- 19:42But I would the interesting thing,
- 19:43you know, you mentioned the the aging clock reversal.
- 19:45Yeah, so a few years after the trial,
- 19:47Greg sent the blood samples to Steve Horvath,
- 19:50the leading expert in aging clocks.
- 19:51And he said, Yes, you've got like a year and a half younger over the course
- 19:54of the year, which is quite remarkable.
- 19:55That was all in the last three months.
- 19:56So if I do this again, I would like to talk about maybe doing it
- 19:59for eighteen months instead of the twelve and see if we get a larger age reversal.
- 20:02And if that was repeated. But that was that was a a very nice bonus.
- 20:05Yeah. Well we're able to get a much bigger epigenetic age reversals now,
- 20:09just with things that we do here in the clinic.
- 20:11So it kind of paved the way for that kind of thing.
- 20:14It is interesting to to think about rejuvenating the thymus and I wonder
- 20:19if you've had your ~ another follow up MRI to see if the thymus
- 20:22is involuted again or where it might be.
- 20:25I
- 20:25haven't thought actually I'm I'm thinking about doing a whole body RI.
- 20:28I'm kind of debating back and forth as to whether I want to do that or not.
- 20:30But I don't know if that will be sufficient.
- 20:32I may need a more special MRI.
- 20:33I know at Stanford Medical School it was a it wasn't just a regular MRI,
- 20:36it was you know special expertise needed for that.
- 20:39But yeah, that would be good to know if it's been maintained 'cause it's been over
- 20:42it's been how long is it about eleven years now,
- 20:43I think? No, it's
- 20:44Five years.
- 20:45been like eleven years. It was like two thousand and fifteen or sixteen
- 20:48I think I did that. ~
- 20:49Okay.
- 20:50Okay. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.
- 20:52What else are you doing for your own longevity?
- 20:54Well, you know, I think the the main things you do right now are
- 20:57the boring old things that take a lot of work.
- 20:59It's the exercise, it's diet, it's good sleep,
- 21:01you know, controlling stress. That's probably a thing I'm I'm worst at
- 21:05but I make sure I get my sleep,
- 21:06my exercise. ~ diet 'cause even diet is controversial as to which is the best diet.
- 21:11That's something I'm constantly,
- 21:11you know, questioning and trying to work out.
- 21:13But to me it's pretty pretty clear that avoiding a lot of sort of junk foods
- 21:17and empty sugar and empty calories,
- 21:19empty carbs
- 21:21That's a pretty good idea. Whether it should be high protein or not,
- 21:23that's that's more controversial.
- 21:24Whether you should eat meat or not is also more controversial.
- 21:27A lot of the anti meat stuff seems to me to be based on processed
- 21:29red meat rather than you know,
- 21:31a grass fed steak, which is actually extremely nutritious.
- 21:34But that's you that's a controversial issue.
- 21:35But I think just just by getting rid of the junk and controlling calories makes
- 21:39a huge difference in itself.
- 21:40Yeah, I think I think those are all important things.
- 21:42Sleep is a big deal, of course.
- 21:44I think stress management is really,
- 21:46~ really foundational. We see that all the hallmarks of aging
- 21:50are actually accelerated by stress and they're decelerated when people can
- 21:54go into a more flow state, zen state,
- 21:57~ kind of live their life from that perspective.
- 21:59Do you bring any of that into your into your practices?
- 22:02Any meditation or stress management things that you do?
- 22:05Not as much as I should, honestly.
- 22:07~ I'm not a very good meditator.
- 22:08I'm not very patient. So I actually tried transcendental meditation when
- 22:12I was about, I think, eleven or twelve.
- 22:13My Latin teacher at school was an instructor and two of us decided to do it,
- 22:16but I was never very good at it.
- 22:17I just c can't sit still that well.
- 22:19But you know, I think exercise is very good for stress.
- 22:22You know, if I'm feeling, you know,
- 22:23worked up a go for a good workout,
- 22:25I feel better. So that really helps.
- 22:26But yeah, I I could I could probably do better along those lines.
- 22:30Is there anything that you're looking to for the audience to understand more about,
- 22:34you know, preserving people when they die,
- 22:36things that they should be aware of if they're interested in pursuing that
- 22:39or things that you would caution them about or encourage them about?
- 22:43What are your thoughts there? Well
- 22:44I would point them to the to our blog,
- 22:46biostasis substack dot com, where we discuss this in yeah,
- 22:49considerable details, everything from basic stuff to deep dives into research into
- 22:53many different topics. But what I would suggest is it's worth looking into,
- 22:56especially as you get older and your your risk goes up.
- 22:58You know, we've had people choreobreserved in their twenties and thirties,
- 23:01you just don't know when things might happen.
- 23:03A lot of people don't look at it closely because they've they've you know,
- 23:06the media tends to present it as something for rich people.
- 23:08Like you have to be a millionaire to do this,
- 23:10which is not true at all. I started as a poor graduate student and I still do it.
- 23:13Most people use life insurance to pay for it.
- 23:15And there's quite a lot of different options as you know,
- 23:17the relatively high cost options like alcohol,
- 23:19whole body, around 220,000, you can just do the brain eighty hundred thousand.
- 23:23There are other options actually less expensive than that.
- 23:25so it's not, you know, if you're paying with life insurance,
- 23:27it's not actually something only ri rich people can do.
- 23:29So I would disabuse people of that mistaken notion.
- 23:32And it's really to me, it's just an extension of emergency medicine.
- 23:34Just like today when someone heart stops,
- 23:36they stop beating.
- 23:37We do defibrillate them, we do CPR and so on.
- 23:39We don't want to give up on them.
- 23:41So our view is that when someone is declared legally dead today,
- 23:43they're not truly dead in you know an informational sense.
- 23:46We need to preserve them, stop them getting worse,
- 23:48and give more advanced future technologies a shot at repairing
- 23:50the problem and giving them more life.
- 23:51So it doesn't seem to be particularly radical from that point of view.
- 23:54It's actually kind of conservative medicine.
- 23:55We're not throwing away the person.
- 23:57I think, you know, in the future we'll look back on the present and
- 23:59see people who just put people in the earth to be eaten by worms
- 24:02and bacteria or incinerated them and just scratch our heads and go,
- 24:05why?
- 24:06Why did you do that when you could have given them a chance?
- 24:08Yeah, it's interesting, right?
- 24:09Just like people would go back and say,
- 24:11Why did they cut that limb off when it could have been salvaged today?
- 24:14Right. But it's the only option that people really were familiar with.
- 24:17Yeah.
- 24:18And
- 24:18I would also suggest that yeah,
- 24:19if people are interested in this,
- 24:20they should not only read about it carefully,
- 24:21but go visit the organizations,
- 24:23like you know, Alcor, Cryonics Institute in Michigan,
- 24:25Alcor's here in Arizona. They both welcome people to do tours,
- 24:28you can see how it works, you know,
- 24:29there's nothing hidden about it.
- 24:30You can read the case reports,
- 24:31it's all very open. So yeah, if people are not familiar with it,
- 24:33think it's kind of strange thing.
- 24:35I think educating yourself, going to visit,
- 24:36I think will answer a lot of those questions.
- 24:38And it's not an excuse. It's not an excuse not to be a help not to be healthy,
- 24:41by the way. You know, it it's there are some people who
- 24:44make arrangements for cryonics like,
- 24:45that's it, I'm I'm taken care of.
- 24:47But no, you've got to take good care of yourself still.
- 24:49Not only because you want to put off being cryopreserved as long
- 24:51as possible to enjoy life, but because the longer you can put it off,
- 24:54the better the process is likely to be.
- 24:56You know, we learn as we go along.
- 24:57We get better at cryopreserving people.
- 24:58Sure. So if you can buy another ten years,
- 25:00you'll be better conditioned. Plus when if you actually do,
- 25:03you know, legally die, you really want your vascular system to be in good shape.
- 25:07Because we ha we're gonna have to remove all the blood from the body,
- 25:09replace it with a cryo protection solution.
- 25:11And if you haven't taken care of yourself,
- 25:12if your vascular system is
- 25:14blocked up and and no good, we're not gonna perfuse the brain properly
- 25:16and there's gonna be a lot of ice crystal formation which is gonna do damage.
- 25:19So there's a very strong reason to,
- 25:21you know, not just sit back happy and satisfied,
- 25:24but to take care of your health.
- 25:25So you wanna be in great cardiovascular health in order to
- 25:28be cryo preserved optimally.
- 25:30Yeah. I'll give you I'll give you an example,
- 25:32for instance. Fred Chamberlain,
- 25:33who was the co-founder of Alcor back in nineteen seventy two,
- 25:35he was living in Florida, he got prostate cancer and it was,
- 25:38you know, too advanced and metastatized.
- 25:40So we were able to get him over to Arizona with some difficulty,
- 25:43get him on the plane. He he checked into the hospice there and we watched
- 25:46him for several days as he refused food and water,
- 25:48because that's any way you can legally you know end your life here.
- 25:50And then we got him quite a preserved and he got a really good perfusion because
- 25:54~ although he'd had cancer, you know,
- 25:56which would ravage his system.
- 25:57He'd always taken really good care of himself.
- 25:59He was lean, his his vascular system was in great shape in his seventies,
- 26:01and he got a very good cryopreservation,
- 26:03which we know because we do C D scans of patients.
- 26:06And we can actually through the C D scan we can see how well we've removed
- 26:09the blood, blood and fluids from the brain and replaced it with
- 26:11the cryoprotectin solution. And his look really good.
- 26:13And that's not always the case.
- 26:14Interesting. Yeah. Well that is very interesting.
- 26:17So is that routine that you would do a C T scan after you've cro preserved?
- 26:20It
- 26:20is now, yeah. It it it was introduced when I was a president of Alcor
- 26:24and we started doing it then and Alcor now has its own CTU scanner.
- 26:26Tomorrow Biostasis, the largest European Chronicles Organization,
- 26:29does it for every patient. Chronics Institute does not,
- 26:32and and we've been kind of pushing them to do that,
- 26:33but they're sort of the lower budget operation,
- 26:35so it's more difficult for them to afford it.
- 26:37But that's not actually CTs can also be useful
- 26:40done before the procedure, because then that way you can identify surgical work
- 26:44people who have their chests sewn or something which could change their surgical
- 26:47access. It might might show you,
- 26:48you know, various problems you have to work around and during and afterwards.
- 26:51But there are other kinds of feedback too.
- 26:53So we did a case with Dr. Stephen Coles ten years ago,
- 26:56but it's finally got published this year in which we actually took samples
- 26:59of brain tissue, which of course you can do non-destructively as as people
- 27:02do in brain surgery. And actually Greg Fay was involved in this work too,
- 27:05along with other people.
- 27:07examined the the the the brain with ~ electron microscopy,
- 27:10differential scanning calorimetry,
- 27:11various other methods, and was able to show in published peer reviewed work that
- 27:15the structure of the brain looked extremely well intact.
- 27:18You the the neuropills, the neural bodies,
- 27:20the connections, everything looked beautifully well preserved,
- 27:22which is some of the first really direct evidence that's not we're
- 27:26not just hand waving and h hoping about this.
- 27:27We actually have very clear evidence that under good conditions
- 27:30we are preserving those structures.
- 27:32Have you taken I know we talked about embryos,
- 27:34have we have you taken smaller animals,
- 27:37let's say, and cryo preserved them or put them into biostasis and then brought them
- 27:42back? No
- 27:43We wouldn't better bring them back.
- 27:44Like people are often saying, Why don't you bring back a mouse?
- 27:46It's actually very difficult because you know the different organ systems have
- 27:49different requirements and different warming rates.
- 27:50So your organs right now, we're getting pretty good at organs,
- 27:54but any kind of whole organism bigger than microscopic is difficult.
- 27:58We have done microscopic organisms.
- 27:59Actually, my wife Natasha B. Demore was involved in this at Alcore some
- 28:02ten or eleven years ago, where we took she took C.
- 28:04elegans, the little microscopic worms that have a kind of a sinuous shape.
- 28:08They're rather beautiful to watch.
- 28:09And
- 28:09Supported a basic task, which basically used ~ benzaldehyde as
- 28:13a chemical gradient so they would know which direction to go for their food,
- 28:16go this way, not that way, and they could learn that task.
- 28:18They were then cryo-preserved,
- 28:19kept them for all, rewarmed, and then tested,
- 28:22and she was able to demonstrate they actually retained the memory,
- 28:24which is actually the first direct test of memory.
- 28:26It's a very simple memory and a simple organism,
- 28:28but it was a proof of principle.
- 28:29But now we're kind of doing other work with neural tissues.
- 28:32Like there's a you might have heard about the work of these researchers who've used
- 28:36neural tissue to
- 28:37play Pong or to run a flight simulator,
- 28:39for instance. So one really interesting study that I'm I think
- 28:42is actually being funded would be to take this neural tissue,
- 28:45train it to do something like that,
- 28:46a simple task, try to preserve it,
- 28:48bring it back and test it and see if it's retained that's that function,
- 28:51which would be a very good sign that you've preserved it.
- 28:53So you know there's a lot of a lot of evidence based work going on
- 28:56to support what we're doing.
- 28:58Yeah, it goes on in nature also.
- 29:00I saw something really interesting about caterpillars and butterflies,
- 29:03that they could teach a caterpillar something about something to avoid because
- 29:08it was a noxious stimulus or something like that.
- 29:10And then it would go into the cocoon.
- 29:12Of course, it you know, completely almost deconstructs itself
- 29:15to reconstruct itself back into a butterfly,
- 29:18but they showed that the butterfly had r retained that memory.
- 29:21really?
- 29:21Interesting. Which which is interesting,
- 29:23right? So even in nature there's an ability for that to be
- 29:26It's kinda surprising 'cause as you said they really sort
- 29:28of look slightly completely disintegrate and then reforms.
- 29:31Totally. It was very surprising,
- 29:33but they they showed that it that they could do that.
- 29:35So yeah, interesting stuff. And then of course there's epigenetic information
- 29:39to get passed down, right? So it's another sort of form of memory.
- 29:43And you can also, you know, back up your records,
- 29:44'cause let's assume that you don't get perfectly preserved,
- 29:47maybe there'll be some memory loss,
- 29:48which to me is not, you know, is not that I don't have a good memory anyway.
- 29:51I have to keep records of things.
- 29:52So some people have great memories.
- 29:54But if you have you know, as we're doing today,
- 29:56more and more photographic and video records and written records,
- 29:58you could even b have like a digital clone,
- 30:00which would be a sort of a backup where you could use that to interpolate,
- 30:03filling gaps in any memories. So that's sort of another aspect of it too.
- 30:07But hopefully if you do it right,
- 30:08and to me that means getting, you know,
- 30:10preserved.
- 30:11as soon as possible at the point of legal death.
- 30:13So how quickly can that actually occur?
- 30:15Let's say somebody decides to pass away in hospice.
- 30:18Does that mean that the team is there actually poised and ready to
- 30:22go the moment that they are pronounced or
- 30:25It's all possible, yeah. So there's a it really depends on on the circumstances.
- 30:28But I the best way to do it, ~ as I was gonna say,
- 30:31there's a couple of cases I know Alcal's already done in Death with Dignity States,
- 30:34where basically you can ~ and this is what happened.
- 30:37I came in on Monday morning one guy w ~ someone was on the phone
- 30:40to our membership person and said that he was he wanted to go like
- 30:43in two days' time. And we No, no,
- 30:45you can't do that. We have to give us some time to plan.
- 30:47We've never done this before. But basically what we could do in the end,
- 30:49we were able to have a team on site.
- 30:51He took his, you know, ~ end of life medications.
- 30:54And they wait there, and as soon as the doctor declares legal death,
- 30:57within seconds, literally within seconds,
- 30:58you can start restart the whole procedure.
- 31:01In fact, you have to give propofol as the first drug because there's
- 31:04at least a theoretical possibility someone could actually return some level
- 31:07of consciousness, even though they've been declared legally dead.
- 31:09So you give that first, then you have to give blood thinners antases,
- 31:12membrane stabilizers. It was a whole cocktail based on research
- 31:15to protect the cells. So yeah,
- 31:16doing that immediately is the best thing,
- 31:18but we do have evidence that even if it's several hours,
- 31:21Especially if someone's been cooled down,
- 31:23like in the in the morgue or something at four degrees C,
- 31:25that also extends the you know the good date if you like,
- 31:28the the go bad by date. So it's not hopeless if it takes several hours,
- 31:33but it's definitely best to do it instantly.
- 31:35Yeah. Well it's interesting in the hospital when I was doing cardiology work,
- 31:39you know, some people would come in and they would have sort
- 31:41of sudden cardiac death, right?
- 31:43Where their heart would stop. And one of the things that would be done would
- 31:47be to if they were in the ICU,
- 31:49would be to cool them down very quickly,
- 31:51not to forty degrees C, but into the into the eighties.
- 31:55And they showed that, you know,
- 31:57if they were able to fix the heart problem,
- 31:58whatever it was, ~ the aneurysm that ruptured,
- 32:01whatever, and then bring the people back.
- 32:03that they had a substantial improvement in their cognitive abilities were retained
- 32:08as opposed to, you know, suffering brain damage per se,
- 32:12right? So
- 32:13Cold
- 32:13cold medicine's become quite popular.
- 32:14Actually, we had a a visit to Alcohol by Dr.
- 32:16Peter Ree, who was I think Obama's personal physician,
- 32:19but he also did some very interesting surgery research where he actually
- 32:22was calling people quite a lot more than than you said,
- 32:24which is you know what you said is the standard.
- 32:26But he was taking ~ gunshot wound victims and dropping them down,
- 32:29I think what was he going at about twenty degrees C,
- 32:31I think. So quite a quite a large drop.
- 32:32And that basically gave you about ~ four or eight times as long
- 32:35to to operate because of the slow metabolism.
- 32:37Sure. So so yeah, the same principle basically.
- 32:40Yeah, remember the stories about children that would drop through the
- 32:42ice and drown in a frozen lake and be resuscitated,
- 32:45you know, an hour later, kind of thing,
- 32:47right? Same situation. Yeah.
- 32:49And our I R and a half or so there's the there's a classic case
- 32:51of Anna Baggenholm in Sweden who was skiing and fell into a icy lake
- 32:55and basically was not was legally dead for basically an hour and came back pretty
- 32:59much completely intact. It tends to be,
- 33:01as you said, children because they have a higher surface area to volume ratio,
- 33:04so they cool more rapidly. So it slows metabolism faster.
- 33:06So that's really the whole point is we want to slow metabolism
- 33:08as quickly as possible because the faster that's running
- 33:11The worst things are happening.
- 33:12So we ha we do we're doing research into ways of finding faster ways
- 33:15of cooling people. So it used to be people would just be put in an
- 33:18ice bath that wasn't very effective.
- 33:19Then we circ circulate the icy water around the patient.
- 33:22Now we're actually researching something called liquid ventilation,
- 33:24which involves pumping either a saline solution or a poly another sort
- 33:28of oxygen bearing medium through the body into into the lungs because
- 33:31it has a massive surface area and can cool a patient very rapidly.
- 33:34So that's something we're hoping to introduce to accelerate the cooling.
- 33:37Yeah, interesting. We were using something with floor I think it was fluorinated.
- 33:41Fluorocarb
- 33:42fluorocarbons, I think. Yeah, they actually J James Cameron made that popular
- 33:45in ~ the movie The Abyss where the the divers actually were not breathing
- 33:48air they were using this, which actually you can actually do that,
- 33:50yeah.
- 33:51Yeah, we actually tried it in interventional cardiology where we would this
- 33:54was back in the early nineties,
- 33:56we would infuse it down the coronary artery past where the balloon
- 34:00was occluded to protect the downstream heart muscle from ischemia,
- 34:04from lack of blood flow while we were in there working with a balloon.
- 34:07We didn't even have stents at that point in time to try to open an artery.
- 34:10It never really panned out to be all that useful because in the heart there's
- 34:14a lot of collateral circulation and other things going on that it just didn't make
- 34:18that big of a difference.
- 34:19With the
- 34:19lungs you can really you can really make a big difference.
- 34:22Well, Max, it's a very interesting field that you've been involved with.
- 34:25So ever onward, ever upward and ever colder,
- 34:28it sounds like. Yeah.
- 34:30Well, we do store people at minus three hundred and twenty Fahrenheit
- 34:32or minus one ninety six Celsius.
- 34:34So that temperature basically you could stay there for you know a thousand years
- 34:36and be perfectly fresh. Apart from the old cosmic ray knocking a molecule aside,
- 34:41you're not gonna see any change at all.
- 34:42So subjectively it'd be like no time has passed and hopefully you wake
- 34:46up one day and go, Wow, I made it.
- 34:47I'm still going.
- 34:48Uh-huh. I'm still here. All right.
- 34:50Well cool stuff. Well, thanks so much for taking time to chat with us today.
- 34:54You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.
- 34:55I think we're on the same side.
- 34:57Yeah.
- 34:58How do we live young for a lifetime?
- 34:59How do we make 100 the new 30?
- 35:02The answers are out there, and we're bringing them to you every episode.
- 35:06Make sure you're subscribed, check out more episodes right here,
- 35:10and follow us on social media so you never miss a breakthrough.
- 35:14Thanks for listening.