Cryonics

Flightless Bird

David Farrier

Society & Culture, Documentary, Comedy

4.9 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week's Flightless Bird, David Farrier explores cryonics - freezing human corpses in the hope they may one day be resurrected by future humans! We interview James Arrowood, CEO of Alcor, America’s biggest cryonics outfit, to talk about the perception of this practice and what it means for Alcor’s 250 bodies on ice. Email us your feedback: flightlessbirdchat@gmail.com Links - Death To Dust: What Happens To Dead Bodies? http://www.galenpress.com/extras/extra32.htm - Melbourne Woman On Ice: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-16/second-person-cryogenically-frozen-southern-cryonics/105517102 - A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal” https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/13/144721/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi-a-ha, Hayden. It's David. How are you?
0:09.0	I'm okay. Thank you, David.
0:11.4	I'm going to cut straight to the chase. We're doing a Flight of This World episode about cryonics.
0:18.2	Yep.
0:18.6	And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the science,
0:24.7	or some would say the pseudoscience of cryonic. Yeah, well, I'm sure I'll have quite a few,
0:31.1	as soon as you explain to me what cryonics is. So cryonics is where you freeze a human body shortly up to death with the hope that
0:42.3	one day you will be able to, once technology has advanced enough, we will be able to figure out
0:46.9	how to bring said frozen person back. Do you do it shortly after death or can you do it a little
0:52.3	bit before death? I think if you do it just before death, I think that's murder.
0:56.6	So I think it has to be like very, like as soon as possible after.
1:00.6	No, but, but, but, but, but, but, wait one second here.
1:03.7	What if I say, look, I'm about to die.
1:05.5	Can you freeze me?
1:06.7	So, like, there's that movie with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz.
1:12.9	Oh, uh, vanilla sky.
1:15.7	Yeah.
1:16.2	And so there he has a bad accident.
1:19.1	He's like, no, just put me in like the dream realm.
1:21.5	And I'll just live there until you can get me back.
1:24.8	And that seemed ethical to me.
1:26.0	I don't think that that movie threw up any
	...

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