Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And so, you're listening to a special episode of the Science of Everything podcast on brain preservation and the abolition of death.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this episode is an interview that I did with actually a friend of mine, Ariel Zelensnikov Johnson.

I talked with him, his recently published book called The Future Loves You.

So this book is about the idea of how we might abolish death by taking measures to preserve the brain,

or indeed potentially the whole body, of people upon death or just prior to death,

in a way that allows the information that constitutes

their personal identity to be preserved and then potentially used to reconstruct them as a

simulation or potentially through other means at some point in the future. So in the interview,

we go through some of the science and a bit of the philosophy behind all that and talk about the details. So it's quite an interesting episode. So very thought-provoking as well. So hopefully there'll be something of interest to you here. So without further ado, let's get started with the interview. I'm a neuroscientist like James. I'm a research fellow at Monash University, where in my day job, I do neuroscience

of consciousness. So trying to understand the relationship between brains and subjective experiences

and colors and all that. But I'm also very interested in the history and future of scientific

and medical technology. Specifically, I've always been

fascinated by how we've gone from a world where we had essentially no medicine, maybe some herbs,

maybe primitive things like amputations for infected limbs to a world today where we have,

you know, imperfect medicine, but a lot more treatments compared to what existed centuries ago. And also I'm also quite curious about what's

going to happen in the future, like what sort of medical and scientific developments will

we see in 10 years, 20 years, 40 years, 100 years from now. As part of that, and probably like many of you listening, I've always been very interested in

science fiction.

And among that, sort of ideas around, would it be possible to ever have some sort of way

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