"I think of it more as an ideological statement."
Anti-Death Activist
Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says he's freezing his body when he dies — if only as a moment of anti-death activism.
Thiel explained his "just in case" cryonics aspirations to journalist and former Twitter Filer Bari Weiss on Weiss' podcast, Honestly, in a lengthy podcast episode published last week.
"I think of it more as an ideological statement," Thiel told Weiss, as quoted by Fortune.
"I don't necessarily expect it to work," he continued, "but I think it's the sort of thing we're supposed to try to do."
In other words: cryo might not ultimately work, but as one of the most vocal leaders on the immortality-seeking technological crusade, he's duty-bound to freeze his ol' bag o' bones nonetheless. Gotta walk the walk if you talk the talk.
Mortal Meat Suits
As for where he's seeking to freeze himself, Thiel told Weiss that he's eyeing Alcor, the prominent cryo firm that back in 2009 was accused of both accidentally decapitating and accidentally freezing what appeared to be a can of tuna to the icy head of baseball great Ted Williams.
Thiel's cryo plans aren't all that surprising, as the billionaire's enthusiasm for immortality tech has been widely documented. Along with making some notable investments into immortality tech firms, Thiel was famously accused of seeking blood infusions from young donors. And back in 2014, the VC took anti-aging to a whole new level when he declared to the Telegraph that he was "against" the concept of mortality.
"People have a choice to accept death, deny it or fight it," Thiel told Telegraph. "I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it."
Thiel reiterated a version of that 2014 argument in his recent conversation with Weiss, saying that we should at least understand why humans are doomed to toil away in our mortal meat suits.
"We haven't even tried," the PayPal and Palantir cofounder lamented. "We should either conquer death or at least figure out why it's impossible."
Of course, the answer to that latter point may well be answered by simple biology. And to that end, immortality-seeking cryo has been decried by some experts as something along the lines of a pseudoscientific hail mary.
Regardless, whether Thiel's anti-death investments will one day pay off remains to be seen. But even if he's ultimately unable to attain immortality, at least he'll die trying.
More on immortality tech: Elon Musk Says That Immortality Tech Would Be Very Dangerous
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