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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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
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 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 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, 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 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
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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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? 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, 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 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, 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 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
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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
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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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.