Insatiable: Mark Mannucci

Dave

00:00:50 Really? [Athena confirms] Like, what sort of things?

Athena

00:00:51 Well, so we, um, I talked to Mark Manucci who is a documentary film maker who is really engaged in how to present science in a documentary form and engage both sort of the science side and the human side at the same time. So he's made documentaries about like, what happens to you microbially when you die. Um, what happens, uh, to you, um, if you're, uh, he did a whole, um, a whole documentary about brain death. So, we talk about that some. Um, and, and we just talking about zombification cause he's kind of really gotten into zombification ever since I started talking to him about it, um, when I met him a few years ago. So yeah, it's uh, it's kind of a, you know, free ranging conversation, but then we really bring it back to how curiosity can really drive us, um, both to, uh, kind of learn about these things that are dark. But then also sometimes it can be a vulnerability to be curious.

Dave

00:02:06 Interesting. So it's a little similar to morbid curiosity, right?

Athena

00:02:09 Yeah, there's definitely some interplay between this episode and the last episode with Barb Natterson.

Dave

00:02:15 Alright, sounds good.

Athena

00:02:16 Alright, so let's hear from Mark Manucci.

Dave

00:02:18 All right.

Intro

00:02:21 [Psychological by Lemi]

Athena

00:02:57 Thank you so much for be here with us. Mark, would you introduce yourself in your own words?

Mark

00:03:00 Sure. I'm a, I'm a documentary filmmaker, media maker. I don't know what you'd call what I do anymore. Films, what are those? Uh, television programs, what are those? But we make pictures with sounds and music to tell stories. So that's what, that's what I do. That's what I do with my, my partner Jonathan Halperin.

Athena

00:03:28 Excellent. And how did you get into this field? Was it something you always sort of knew that you wanted to do or,

Mark

00:03:37 I was just telling somebody this the other day that I was going through my things and I found a Manila folder, uh, from when I was 12 years old. It said, "Star Productions" and I opened it and there was some lined paper and it said, "Inventory one super eight camera four rolls of film", turned another page, "Script" for some little kidnap in the park film and I was 12. So, yeah, it's something I've, I've, uh, I've wanted to do without having had a clue as to what it meant.

Athena

00:04:10 And you were already into like the morbid things like kidnap in the park. [laughter]

Mark

00:04:14 Kidnap in the park, Yeah. Well, you know, that's, that's, that's the interesting stuff. But I really, I had no clue as to, uh, what it would mean to spend your life doing this. I, I remember also when I started, when I was 20, I said, "Geez, by the time I get to 50. I wanta, all I care about is wanting to do really interesting projects. I don't want to, it's all I care about." And uh, so, that time came and it was like, wow, yeah, boy, I, but it sure is hard, you know, it just gets, uh, it gets denser and denser and harder and harder and much, much more fun as time goes on. And I haven't quite figured out what that is. Maybe, you just get more fluent in your skills and you go deeper into, into the kind of stories you tell. And so it makes it harder because you have a higher bar each time, but it's also, it gets to be more fun as time goes on.

Athena

00:05:19 Yeah, so, what kind of stories do you like to tell?

Mark

00:05:22 You know, uh, I've made everything from kids TV. I used to direct a series called Reading Rainbow.

Athena

00:05:34 I watched that when I was a kid. [laughter]

Mark

00:05:40 Oh god! Alright. Alright. We won't go too deep into that then. Yeah, I spent a lot of time doing that.

Athena

00:05:41 It was, it was awesome. I loved it so, yeah.

Mark

00:05:43 Well, great. Thank you. Uh, I, uh, I directed about 35 episodes of that and that's really how I cut my teeth. And then I, I did art programming for, for public television and I did a lot of dance. And theater, and then, since then, I've done subjects that have ranged from a story about the last 45 days of, uh, of the lives of three men on death row in Texas and what that was like for them to, uh, short films about the microbiome and what that means to us. To a recent film, a definitive, a biographical film about James Watson. Um, the, uh very controversial, uh, uh, biologist who was the co-discoverer of DNA and, uh, who, whose life came crashing down when he, uh, made a series of, of really unfortunate race or racist remarks 10 years ago that he affirmed in our, in our film. So it brought, brought his life crashing down once more. The film is really about, you know, what is science, what is true brilliance, what is a true intellect and what is pseudoscience?

You know, and how a man who can win the Nobel Prize can still be subject to the same, seduced by the same kind of pseudoscientific notions that people who are far less, uh, uh, accomplished in the scientific realm than he is, could, could, could be subject to, and then, uh, and then the, the way that affects people.

Athena

00:07:32 Would you say he was zombified by the pseudoscience?

Mark

00:07:35 He's zombified by something. And I think, that something is ego. And, you know, thinking about zombification, we've, we've talked about this, so what, what zombie is pulling the strings of, of that ego?

Athena

00:07:58 Right, who, who benefits ultimately from that?

Mark

00:07:58 Who benefits?

Athena

00:08:02 Yeah. Or is it some byproduct of other processes? Just, gone awry.

Mark

00:08:07 Yeah. You know, I think that, uh, I think that, you know, if I were a shrink, I would say not Watson has some kind of narcissistic complex and uh, but I'm not, so I'll just say that he's a person who is extremely, uh, self involved. And so the actions he takes all seem to benefit some need he has for some kind of self aggrandizement. And what is that about? What's, why, you know, why is the person in the next room self effacing and able to devote 100% of their energy towards helping someone else?

Athena

00:08:52 So that brings up a really deep question about whether you can be zombified by your own ego, by yourself, in a sense.

Mark

00:09:03 I think you can be zombified by your own ego. Uh, and I think that if you look at zombification objectively, an altruist is, as zombified as a narcissist, but it's a different germ. You know, it's a different, something else is controlling them and the degree to which it's some external organism or whatever that's above my pay grade. But, I think in terms of sort of the structure of, if you ask the question, is there a zombie pulling the strings of our consciousness in some fashion, its as likely to happen with an altruist as a narcissist; with a, with a Trump as a Carter. So, uh,

Athena

00:09:55 So, should we be aspiring to not be zombified or is it just that like,

Mark

00:09:58 I don't think there's any chance of not being zombififed. I'm not sure we'd want to not be zombified.

Athena

00:10:09 But, presumably some things, it's not good to be zombified by other things, maybe.

Mark

00:10:15 I think there is. I think that, uh, yeah, but it raises a question of, are you just lucky to not be zombified past the point at which there can be incredible harm to you or you could inflict incredible harm on other people? You know, it's, uh, just, can I talk about the conference?

Athena

00:10:39 Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.

Mark

00:10:39 There were two things that were notable about the conference.

Athena

00:10:42 So, Mark was one of our speakers at the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting.

Mark

00:10:45 Yeah. And I just, I tried to attend as many talks, it was just an amazingly eyeopening, uh, way of thinking for me. But I guess the first one I attended was uh, Diana Fleischmann's. Where she was talking a lot about sex and um, the zombification mechanisms involved with sexual attraction. Uh, she was speaking specifically of the spread of venereal disease, but she was also talking about marriage and the negotiations that happened within a marriage that are subject to unknown zombification processes. Right. So that's fascinating and, and some of those were very positive things. They were ways of negotiating within a, within a relationship, uh, that your zombie was controlling, presumably, that had saluatory beneficial effects for the balance of the relationship. And if both people were zombified and complimentary ways, good things could happen. And then, there was the mock trial where, you know, the case was, was an extreme thought experiment, but clearly this, this level of zombification which led to murder and cannibalism.

Athena

00:12:10 Right. So the set up for the mock trial was that, uh, husband walked in on his wife with another guy who was a guy that he had worked with or something. Right? Is that right? Am I remembering that right?

Mark

00:12:23 That's, that's the essential triangles, part of it.

Athena

00:12:26 And then the husband, murders the [Mark suggests, "the lover"] the lover, and [Mark fills in "and eats him"] eats him. Yes. It's a zombie situation.

Mark

00:12:32 And uh you know, uh, [laughter] That's uh,

Athena

00:12:35 Right and then the question was, you know, was he [Mark finishes the question "in control"]? Yeah.

Mark

00:12:41 Was he, 'he' or was he, 'them' or was he, 'it'? Or, what was he? Yeah, and it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very compelling question when you start to ask that for every action you take from the time you wake and God only knows what zombie processes happen in your sleep. But, from the time you wake, when there is a, uh, whether it's an illusion or an actual willful intent on your part, every action you take, to what extent are they subject to zombification? It's just, you know, it's incredible.

Athena

00:13:21 Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I started doing this thing where I will not go on my email until after 10:00 AM because I realized if I start on my email, then I get zombified by all of these things that are just like, you know, "do this", "this is urgent" or "this is...", you know, and then my brain is just filled up with all this stuff and I can't actually, write.

Mark

00:13:43 So you think you're, you're, you're fighting that zombification?

Athena

00:13:46 Well, maybe for, you know, two hours in the morning. [laughter]

Mark

00:13:51 So, I would look at it as in,in, in, cause I've been completely zombified by your zombification thoughts. [laughter] But, uh, I would look at it that no, your counter-zombies won over the other other zombies for an hour and a half or two hours.

Athena

00:14:13 So, the anti-zombification memes are spreading like zombies? [laughter]

Mark

00:14:15 No, they're just different zombies, with a different intent. [Athena laughs and agrees] And, and uh, I mean that's the way I'm now thinking of.

Athena

00:14:25 So there's no way to get away from the zombification, it's just replacing one type with another type?

Mark

00:14:30 Exactly. You know, that's exactly it. We did these microbiome films and one of the you know, facts in the, in Ed Yong's book upon which this, this series was paved, based, "I Contain Multitudes", was this number 38 billion, I can't even remember anymore, 38 billion, 38 trillion microbes that live on and within us. Okay fine. It's just a number. But then when we started to do the art for the film and we started to try and figure out a way to visualize that, we came up with some kind of, you know, creepy crawly tattooy pattern of microbes all over your body. When I saw that and then started thinking about the whole zombie thing, I was like, well, there's no way to escape this. You know, I mean, if there's 38 million creatures with even an iota of intent and will to live, on you in, in you, what are you going to, you're not going to answer your email or you're going to do, you don't stand a chance. [laughter] And, uh, um, I don't know. I find it, I find it, uh, less depressing than I thought I would. Uh, cause we're all dealing with it.

And, uh, you know, you can go I guess, eastern philosophy on this and that we're all sort of one tapestry of existence, [Athena suggests, "interconnected influences"] interconnected existence. I guess you can think of it that way. But, uh, mostly it's just fascinating.

Athena

00:16:02 So, a lot of the films that you have done have, in a way, kind of been about health, medicine, death [Mark interrupts with "a lot of death"], a lot of death. So where, where did the interest in death come from?

Mark

00:16:18 You know uh, it, it, uh, it's funny. I, I, uh, I started, uh, to work with National Geographic and just by happenstance I got asked to do a film called "Moment of Death", which is about that interval between life and death, which is, of course ever-lengthening with modern medicine, you know, it just resurrected, took neurons and 32 dead pigs you know. So, was that brain dead? Or was it not dead? You know. Um,

Athena

00:16:50 Can you tell us a little bit about that time period? [Mark asks, 'That interval?"] I mean, that's the potentially the undead time, right? So, definitely related to this podcast.

Mark

00:16:58 It's the undead time. That undead time is, is, is lengthening in, in, in, in, in surprising ways and, uh, and, and certainly in terms of, of, of duration, you know, the, the history of brain death is a, is a fascinating, fascinating thing. You know, uh, that ,

Athena

00:17:22 What is brain death mean, exactly?

Mark

00:17:24 What does brain death mean? And, and, and, uh, and, and, and when does it happen? You know, there, there are legal definitions of brain death, which is, uh, no detectable ac- activity. And then there's, uh, um, uh, other, uh, considerations that come in when there's reflex activity. When you're on a respirator and your body is still pink and rosie and, and the cells are still alive. Uh, you know, and the brain is, is, is not a decaying, you know, are you, are you in a state of, of, of life or death at that point? And, uh, and the history of, of how these definitions came about had a lot to do with technology. It had a lot to do with what we could detect, you know, uh, in the 19th century, the, the, there was a, uh, uh, a thing called the waiting mortuary in Germany. So when you're in this un-dead or this what-dead, uh, phase, um, because it was rec- there was an such an extreme fear of premature burial. Because, people would fall into all sorts of catatonic trances and comas and, and states of being where their metabolism was, so low.

Athena

00:18:49 Why was that happening all the time?

Mark

00:18:51 It was happening because if, if, if you were unfortunate enough to be in one of these, to have a, uh, a condition that would put you in, in, uh, in that kind of coma with a barely detectable metabolic response via temperature, you would be put in, in, in these wards called 'waiting mortuaries' and not to be treated, but they were just, you know, rooms full of beds, popular in Germany. Uh, I don't know if we had them in the United States. And, um, until you began to smell, [Athena, surprised says, "are you serious?"] you were considered neither dead nor alive. You were considered in this indeterminate state. [Athena exclaims, "Wow"] The tests then were, uh, pins under the fingernails, uh nipple pincers, pencils up the nose, uh, cranks that would pull the tongue out and if there was no detectable response from these, of course if you're in a coma, you could still, not detect these things so it doesn't really prove anything, mirror to the, to the, uh, uh, nostrils to see if it fogged up. Until you demonstrated some sign of life, uh, uh, and if you began to smell, um, you would only then would you be removed and buried. [Athena exclaims, "Wow'] Yeah. Yeah.

And what's interesting is, in doing this film, uh, we went to uh, we were filming at UCLA and we were filming a test to brain death and, [Mark laughs] I'm laughing because it was just so jarring. It was, it was, it was a very tragic circumstance where the young man.

Athena

00:20:35 Isn't there this situation also, where like things that are just so like tragic and dark and horrible like that, we laugh sometimes and it's like just a way to deal. [Mark agrees] My, I have a, a colleague friend who is an ER physician and he says like, "if anybody knew what they were saying in the break rooms and laughing about it would just, yeah.

Mark

00:20:57 They would think they were, you know, evil people. Yeah.

Athena

00:21:00 Yeah. But it's just how they deal cause it's just constantly all this bad shit happening. Yeah.

Mark

00:21:06 And so, so, you know, I had just done this section on the film on the waiting mortuary and there we were and you know, the neuro surgeon took a pen and stuck it under the thing. You know, here we are 120 years later and you stuck it into the toe of the subject and he cranked his neck back and forth and he shined. But, and I was like, oh this is just, this is like, and yes, they have all the, they have all the high, you know, beep, beep, beep, all the stuff around. But they're still, they want to touch death, you know, they want to know, they want to touch the body and they want to feel whether a person is dead or alive.

00:21:43 And they used the same techniques 20 years ago.

Athena

00:21:46 Wow.

Mark

00:21:47 Yeah. It's really fascinating. Anyway, so I did that film and then, uh, and then the death row film.

Athena

00:21:54 Can I ask you about, you said people want to touch death, like

Mark

00:21:57 yeah...

Athena

00:21:58 they wannna...

Mark

00:21:59 Well a doctor. I think a doctor who's not a, again, to your point, that they're very newer to some of the more, uh, disturbing aspects of, of, of, of death, uh, want to, um, feel it and touch it and palpate it and understand, you know, it's the, you know, they, they don't want to, they want to rely on their own senses to understand life has left a, a body...

Athena

00:22:27 until the body starts smelling it could be alive.

Mark

00:22:30 I think they, uh, I think they, uh, yeah, yeah. I hope they haven't gotten to, they don't use that, that deck. [Athena agrees]

Athena

00:22:39 Yeah. That'd be unfortunate. But, uh, but then I guess if we use that criterion for zombies, zombies smell bad. Right? So they must be dead.

Mark

00:22:48 Well, yeah. I mean, and the zombies, the zombies don't necessarily care about what you as a human define as life and death. Uh, I'm not sure it matters to them. To all of them. To some of them, it must matter. We did another story about the blossom of life that begins after death. So when your body dies, your anti zombie troops, your immune system,

Athena

00:23:29 they're gone.

Mark

00:23:30 Gone. And, uh, that's a very, very happy state of affairs for any kind of zombification that was existing within you. There is no check and balance anymore. And while your native cells are decaying, this bacterial bloom is just, you know, it's like thick. It's like an algae bloom. It's just, it's, it's, uh, it's an amazing fusion of life. It's just a, if you just look at life, it's like, you know, this force, this energy in your dead body life is, is blooming.

Athena

00:24:09 And finally the pay off for all those microbes that were just patiently waiting for you to die so that they could eat you alive from the inside,

Mark

00:24:16 From the inside.

Athena

00:24:17 Yeah.

Mark

00:24:17 Yeah. And then they then, saited and full and happy, they explode to the world and do it again. [laughter]

Athena

00:24:25 What a story of blossoming life.

Mark

00:24:27 Yeah. Yeah. (laughter) That was the work of a, of a young scientist too, I hope can come to one of your conferences, Jessica Metcalf.

Athena

00:24:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Mark

00:24:39 Great. Great lady at Colorado State University. Yeah.

Athena

00:24:43 So you're kind of taking something that is like really morbid and disgusting and making it about beautiful, you know, resilience of life or something.

Mark

00:24:53 Yeah.Yeah. No, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a real challenge. And, uh, you know, we, uh, we, uh, we try to have fun with these, uh, with these programs about death because ultimately your entertainment zoomb, your zombies, your certain brains zombies want to be entertained when they watch and they watch movies. And so, uh, it does no good to try and tell a story, uh, uh, that isn't fun and engaging and interesting. But, you know, obviously there's sensitivities, uh, that you have to tread. So in the, in the moment of death film and in the moment of death film when we're, we're, we're dealing with actual people, you, you, uh, you tread more lightly than in a film about microbes where...

Athena

00:25:43 Right.

Mark

00:25:44 You can have a lot more fun.

Athena

00:25:45 Yeah.

Mark

00:25:47 Uh, with bringing them to life because you're at people or cartoon characters.

Athena

00:25:50 Right. Right. Yeah. So I cut you off when you were about to go on to talk about the death row film.

Mark

00:26:00 Yeah. I don't know how that fits into the whole paradigm, other than it was, was a, it was another angle on, on death. Um, which was, which was a just, you know, it was Texas. It was, it was enlightening. There was, there was, you know, three men each with three very, very different stories, one a, one a man who became inebriated and committed his crime. And another, a young teenager who peer pressure, he was, uh, uh, uh, uh, compelled to, to do a murder by his fears and his defense was that, uh, he, uh, one of his friends shot this old lady prior to he did. And so that he was shooting a dead person, so he couldn't be convicted of murder and uh, Texas didn't go for that excuse. Uh, and then the third guy was a guy who your classic, uh, you know, insane killer who said that the wrong person was in the cell and that the real Johnny was out on the streets and they had the wrong Johnny and the Johnny, the devil was still out there, uh, dangerous, but that the Johnny they had, you know, and he was a real split personality kind of, but it was a, so that was a, that had no science in it at all other than the science of uh, lethal injection so that people understood that.

Athena

00:27:41 The situations, right. I mean, you had someone who was insane potentially, right. So zombified by who knows what kind of neural disturbance, someone who was compelled by their peers, zombified by their peers.

Mark

00:27:59 And the other one by alcohol and jealousy and you know, it was one of those crime, crimes of passion.

Athena

00:28:04 Yeah. So then, in doing that film, this whole sort of question of like influence and what actually, you know, who's under the influence of what and where did the crime?

Mark

00:28:21 It was, it was, that was, those were things we thought about for the entire time we were doing this film, which, which, you know, we got to know these characters, I got to know them and follow them, follow their story through their executions.It was a very odd process to talk to people for two and three months and then, and then their day came and then you met up with them again but in the funeral home it was a, it was a disturbing and, uh, uh, enlightening process.

Athena

00:29:00 Well then I think, I imagine too, in making the film, then you're seeing them again...right? Because you're seeing, you're seeing the interviews that you did with them and then the footage that you,

Mark

00:29:12 And then you work with them for months afterwards with the interviews so they're alive again. In that way, it was a, it was an experience I'll never, I'll never forget and it, and it wasn't an innocence project. I fell it wasn't up to exonerate them. They all, they all, uh, admitted their culpability. I mean, even this young man who said that he shouldn't be convicted of murder did admit to shooting this woman. So it was, uh, it was about them coming to terms with the forces that controlled them at the time in their life. I made committed this crime to 12 years earlier, they had all been on death row forever.

Athena

00:29:53 Well, then I guess the other, you know, control issue is the fact that, you know, as a society, we have a system for punishing people who do these acts right? And so that's, you know, potentially another aspect of zombification but one that's for the collective good right? To be not, I mean, maybe not, not killing, but having some system for...

Mark

00:30:23 For correction.

Athena

00:30:24 Yeah.

Mark

00:30:25 Yeah. It wouldn't be the way that I would correct these situations. I don't think it did uh, it ultimately did any good. And there's all sorts of statistics about, you know, uh, uh, about death penalty and actually having an effect on violent crime. But, uh, yeah, it is a, it is an attempt at a corrective, you know, uh, even if, even if not the, the one that, that I think is, is the, is the path to take.

Athena

00:31:04 The goal is ultimately, you know, to, uh, at least the way that it's framed is that the goal of that is to change people's behavior. Right. So they don't do those things.

Mark

00:31:16 The goal of the death penalty , I don't

Athena

00:31:19 Or is that venegence?

Mark

00:31:19 is to, is to, is, is, it's been, it's been explained as, as a, a deterrent. So the goal is to change other people's behavior, not the behavior of the people who will never be allowed out again. Uh, it doesn't matter about their behavior. Uh, it's been described as a, uh, way to, uh, uh, create some kind of, of healing and reconciliation and, um, uh.

Athena

00:31:49 It's kind of hard to reconcile and heal when killing people, is involved, yeah.

Mark

00:31:54 It is. It is and, and, and retribution, uh, you know, the biblical eye for an eye, um, none of which seem to have an effect on violent crime because they're not committed with the kind of intent that would be deterred by a death penalty. So, uh, but yeah, it is a, it is a misguided form of, uh, misguided social corrective. A lot of mass incarceration is.

Athena

00:32:28 Yeah. Well maybe that would be a good topic for us for like a future podcast actually, talk about incarceration because I mean, talk about like controlling people's behavior, right? I mean, if you're incarcerated, there is a limited repertoire of things that you can do, you kind of getting zombified by a system.

Mark

00:32:50 Absolutely. And there's a, you know, there, there is a movement that is, that is a very hard for a lot of people to take, uh, that calls for abolishing prisons all together. And, uh, it's a complicated, complicated subject and I'm not really qualified to talk about it, but, uh, you know, but the premise being that the kind of incarceration that we have, uh, only reinforces the culture of criminality only inbitters people only diminishes their productivity, doesn't do anything to re- regenerative, anything healing, anything to, but sheer punishment. So that we have the illusion that a whole class of people has been removed from society. It goes back, we were talking back cancer earlier. You know, it's as if we're treating felons as if they're some kind of diseased organisms that need to be sequestered, quarantined, put away, removed and uh, um, so that they can't infect us anymore.

Athena

00:34:11 When I was at the, um, at Stanford for a couple of months, a few years ago, there was a professor who gave a talk, um, he was visiting and I remember was he said that in California, more money is spent on prisons than on universities.

Mark

00:34:30 I wouldn't be surprised. It, uh, it, it costs way more on, this is one of the statistics we learned. To, to, um, to, uh, go through the process of having somebody on death row, than putting them in prison for life because of all the incredible, uh, legal expenses that, and the resources that are involved. So I wouldn't be surprised at that statistic. Uh, it takes a lot more energy and money to suppress and incarcerate and imprison people than it does to let them loose with their intellect and let them follow their impulse to learn.

Athena

00:35:17 Want more water?

Mark

00:35:17 Yeah. I'd love some. Thanks. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And then the, the third film was about the choices we make for our bodies, our physical bodies after we die.

Athena

00:35:35 Mhmmm that's really interesting.

Mark

00:35:36 And, uh, it was fascinating. It was fascinating. And you know, it began with the, the classic choice that's still probably, I would say, vastly more popular, which is the funeral home burial with embalming and a open casket viewing. And uh, and uh, and it went all the way to people who made the choice to follow their loved one through the process of dying to preparing their body for burial, uh, in a, in a home funeral and then actually doing the, uh, and actually bearing that person in a, it's not a cemetery really, it's more like a park, um, where they're in the woods in there, you know, so if you go to the, there's one in Texas, it's beautiful. It's, it's a beautiful, just 30 or 40 acres and you'd never know there were, it was a burial ground because people are, you know, they see stones here and there, but you're in the forest and, um, and all the choices, there's so many choices in between in India, In Varanasi, they burn the body in a ritual, uh, um, uh, way by the river, a ritual, cremation.

Um, and then right near you and Scottsdale, there's Alcor, which is, you know, probably most of us, many of us would consider it the most insane choice you could make, which is, um, to freeze your body, either your entire body or to sever your head, uh, and to only preserve your head uh, in the hope that you could reattach it to another body or be reanimated in a way that didn't require a physical body. Uh, uh. The theory b,eing that to get your whole body working again would probably take more than just getting your brain working again. And, uh, and it's a choice that certain people make, it's very affordable.

Athena

00:38:06 How much does that cost?

Mark

00:38:06 Um, you know, I think it's, it's probably like your cable TV bill I think. [Laughter]

Athena

00:38:11 Are you serious?

Mark

00:38:11 Yeah, it's not much more than that. Um, and then the money gets invested in a trust fund and they invest it and it grows and, and uh, so you have, you know, money to take care of yourself. And obviously it's just like health insurance but younger, like they want to attract younger people because I get that, that monthly fee for longer and uh, but it's a viable business and I was there and see all electronic cryo tanks and people, you know, it's not a theoretical thing. People are actually there in the hope that one day they'll come back. And then if you think about it, uh, so, so the...

Athena

00:38:54 It feels like a parallel with the living mortuary, of sorts.

Mark

00:38:57 It's very interesting. That's true. It's a parallel with the living mortuary. It's a, it's a preemptive, a living mortuary. It's as if the people in the living mortuary, the families have, "doesn't matter if I'm alive or dead, freeze me now, we'll work it out later", you know. And in fact, there is a, there is a big cultural, they operate all over the world and, uh, China's a big market for them. And in the United States, somebody has to be pronounced brain dead, uh, in order for them to collect the body. They can't go to the ICU. You can't sign your husband, mother, brother, sister, wife, over to Alcore when you're at a minimal level of, of, of metabolic activity, you have to be dead-dead. Just what the doctors call it. They don't call it dead. Dead is reversible. Dead is reversible. In the medical profession, dead is reversible and dead-dead is not reversible.

Athena

00:40:00 Seriously? There's dead and there's dead-dead?

Mark

00:40:01 This one doctor, at UPenn, that's the way he explained to me. Dead. You know, you can be dead, but I can get you back. But like you have a heart attack, your heart stops beating your dead, or at least for most of human existence, you were dead. Now you're not dead. Now you're, you're, you're not dead until you're dead-dead until the defibrillation for however long doesn't work, then your dead-dead.

Athena

00:40:20 This implies that overkill isn't meaningless.

Mark

00:40:24 That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. So, so you have to be dead, dead to go to Alcor. You can't be just dead. And, um, uh, but in China you can be dead or you, you can not even be dead.

Athena

00:40:37 Are you serious?

Mark

00:40:38 Yeah, you can be, you can sign, uh, uh, the, the, uh, threshold at which you can be, um, pulled off of any kind of support is legally lower, minimally not, it's, you can't, you know, you, it, you can't just say, "I don't feel well, I'm ready". And you can't say you can't use it as a type of assisted suicide. But for them, the way they explain it, the fresher the body, the better the freezing, the better, the freezing, the better, the chance if you're coming back. So if, if, if it's a matter of a couple of hours between being almost dead or dead and dead, dead, you're better off in the earlier side of the, of the, of the, of the, of the spectrum. So it's interesting. So they, they, uh, they talk about that and then, so they know if they fly, they bought it. We were there and they had a body flown from some other country that was waiting for, it's a, it's really interesting. And the head of the, the Max, Can't remember the last,

Athena

00:41:48 The head, the head [laughter]

Mark

00:41:50 He, you know, he puts it quite simply. He says, "well look, what if you got to lose? Really, really, you were going to be buried or cremated, which is completely irreversible. What really? What have you got to lose? You've paid us the money." Okay.

Athena

00:42:08 There might be an afterlife.

Mark

00:42:09 Maybe I will come back

Athena

00:42:09 What do you have to lose?

Mark

00:42:09 But really, what do you have to lose?

Athena

00:42:13 You might as well believe in us?

Mark

00:42:14 But here's the question. Okay. I come back in 300 years, 250 years. Let's, let's say, technology is there to bring or to even 200,nobody I know is alive, I have no job, I have no home, I may not even be able to speak the language that's being spoken. I certainly won't know the cultural norms.

Athena

00:42:48 Any skills that you have will be completely obsolete.

Mark

00:42:51 Obsolete as hell. So actually part, part of the money goes for a, uh, I don't know how they structure it because it hasn't come into play yet, but part of the money will go for a cultural, uh, re-animation unit that will help people who are brought back.

Athena

00:43:17 Oh my gosh, they have really thought about this.

Mark

00:43:20 Yeah. They really thought about it because they'll say, well, so your body is back, but that's doesn't do you any good if you're completely detached from the, the, the prevalent culture of the day. Yeah. Is that living? So, uh, so there's a cultural reanimation training.

Athena

00:43:38 Yeah. But, but so I mean, the argument of what you have to lose, it's the exact same argument that has been made for why you should potentially believe in a higher power because you won't have anything. You don't have anything to lose. Right. So, so it sounds like there's almost like, quasi religious vibe to this whole thing.

Mark

00:44:00 In fact, uh, I can't remember his last name. Max. Uh, so, uh, you mean he's a transhumanist. So there is a, there is a strong philosophical underpinning to the whole operation.

Athena

00:44:16 So why are they doing cryogenic freezing in Scottsdale? Where in the summer it can be 120 degrees?

Mark

00:44:25 That's a good question. [Laughter] I uh, I, I don't remember the, uh...

Athena

00:44:31 I mean I imagine they have some like pretty good backup generators and stuff.

Mark

00:44:35 They havem yeah, we looked at all of that.

Athena

00:44:36 How long would that last? Like if there was like a serious issue with power?

Mark

00:44:41 he, he did a whole interview section about how, uh, if World War III happened, those tanks would still be supplied with enough liquid nitrogen to, uh, last for, for tens and tens of years. Oh, here's the thing, there is no electricity involved in cryogenics. It's, it's, it's there, there is, I mean there's, there's some, you know, you have to keep the lights on in the place. But the tanks are, are called doers and they're, you know, incredibly physically insulated and the bodies are sitting in liquid nitrogen, which is heavy and sits in these tanks. And that liquid nitrogen needs to be recharged only every so often. And they have their own liquid nitrogen plant that they own.

Athena

00:45:36 Wow!

Mark

00:45:36 So begs the question if somebody bombed their liquid nitrogen plant what would happen? But they say we're off the grid in terms of being able to supply this liquid nitrogen to you. You will always be bathed in liquid nitrogen for ever.

Athena

00:45:53 Wow.

Mark

00:45:54 Uh, do not worry. And if all the lights go off at liquid, nitrogen stays cold. He's a salesman [laughter]

Athena

00:46:00 If you want to preserve the possibility of just being undead for having your body frozen or, I mean, should we just think of it as a living, as like a tomb, but one where you're bathed in nitrogen? [Laughter]

Mark

00:46:17 That's, it's the, it's the inverse of cremation. It's, it's a tomb where you're bathed in nitrogen. Uh, you'll either come back or you won't in the state, the undead state that you're in, it makes no difference to you. Uh, you're zombies resting. Everybody's taken a break.

Athena

00:46:40 Yeah. So it makes me wonder like, so if 300 years from now they figured out how to reanimate those bodies, like would people be like, those are monsters?

Mark

00:46:53 It's very likely. Right. You know, or, or are they the other? You know? And would they be, you know, relegated to some kind of, of, of, of, of inferior status or some kind of discrimination. I mean, they were there people from, you know, another time.

Athena

00:47:14 Yeah. And there'd be people who, you know, had the means at least to do this and then they're in a future where, I don't know, that could be a really interesting movie or something.

Mark

00:47:26 Yeah. And then imagine that, that you, you know, it's like one of the concepts is you have a pancreatic cancer, you've just died from pancreatic cancer. You're reanimated at a time when they can reverse all the damage or this or that would be a choice where you've, you've cut your, you've said, and your body is, has been damaged to, to, to a point beyond return. And it just be your head. But there are other conditions that are incurable now, and the theory is that you will be, uh, uh, awakened once those conditions are now easily curable.

Athena

00:48:09 That's the theory, huh?

Mark

00:48:10 That's, that's one of the, one of the theories. But the other people, people want to live, you know, I think the other thing is, you know, and this goes back to Watson who have the self involvement. Uh, we did an interview with a young woman who said, I just want to live forever. She didn't have any disease or anything. She said, I just, I just want to live forever, you know, I want to know that in a thousand years I'll be around. And when my new body, a second body gets sold, I'll freeze again, and then I'll freeze again. And then I just want to live forever.

Athena

00:48:46 So she was somebody who had signed up to have her head frozen and then she would get the new bodies.

Mark

00:48:51 She was 20 or 32. She signed up to have her head frozen. That's correct.Yeah. She lives in Phoenix. Are there a lot of people like that who live there, I don't know, but, uh, yeah, she, uh, she, uh, that was her, that was her, uh, intent.

Athena

00:49:10 Since she signed up in her twenties. It was probably fairly cheap for her, right?

Mark

00:49:13 Fairly cheap. She wears a little ankle bracelet that says in case of death call Alcor and has their number on the, and the Alcor team comes and uh, takes you away and the legal papers have all been signed so that it's a, they have now legal custody of your body.

Athena

00:49:30 Oh, that might be a good conversation piece. Like if she's on a date. Yeah my anklet [laughter]

Mark

00:49:33 Yeah, check it out.

Athena

00:49:41 So Mark, you have been working in entertainment really for your whole life. Yeah. And a little bit earlier when we were chatting, you brought up like how, you know, people want to be entertained and you have to kind of take that into consideration as you're putting together the films that you make. To what extent do you feel like that like drive to entertain is like a constraint versus like a, an opportunity or you know, how does that zombify you, if it does?

Mark

00:50:19 Yeah, no, it's a good, it's a good zombification constraint. And I think you need to, you know, I, I think you need to look at the what, what you mean by the word entertain. You know, when I, when I hear it played back to me from you, I think oh well that sounds like, you know, stand up comic or [Athena suggests, " or a circus"] or sitcoms or there's gotta be a laugh every 30 seconds. And I think that entertain means, and, and, and my partner, John and I talk about this all the time, our shorthand and we're writing even something serious as we go, "there's not enough Vaudeville in it." You know, there's not enough..." it's or, or, or, "that act, it's all Vaudeville". And we use that term because we, all of us like stories that grab us by the throat and don't let us go till the end, until they satisfy us in some way. And that's what we mean by entertain. So we've got to take the material and unwrap it and unravel it in a way that is like spinning a good yarn, telling a good tale, telling a good joke.

We use, we use when we, when we're writing a script or an outline, we're saying this punchline isn't any good and we don't mean we're writing jokes, but punchline is where we gotta land. So that you go, "oh, I get it" or "Wow, I didn't know that." And there's enough mystery and questions. There's enough, you still want to learn about as the stories, uh, happening to, to, to pull you through. So that's when I, going back to what I talked about when I started about what's getting more difficult and denser and more rewarding is I think being able to learn how to do that just a little better than when one started where you tend to go, okay, here's the story and here it is. And you know, and now you seduce and cajole and play and deliberately withhold and then pick this point to reveal this part. And you know,

Athena

00:52:37 So, your sort of keeping people engaged with a narrative arc that has certain complexities.

Mark

00:52:43 And I don't think that it's any, you know, some people might even go, well your documentary filmmaker. You've, you have to tell a true story. Well, we're not talking about the difference between truth and this truth. We're telling you about how you tell that story. And you know, we've all encountered people who, who, who, uh, who sit down and can tell you a story and you just, you can't, you know, it's just they're masters at it. And others who, but plot point, that should be at the end. They do it at the beginning and then they go off in time and then they're confused and they use a prep. You know, some of that is just mechanical nuts and bolts, but it's, it's, you know, that's the crossword, that's the intellectual part of this job, that process that, that I just, I just love. Yeah. That's what entertainment means. Keeping you interested, even when it's a subject that has a kind of disturbing or gruesome aspect to it. If there's a reason to learn about it, then you have to learn about it and then entertain it.

Athena

00:53:51 Yeah. Well, I mean, you could think of that also as just approaching the process of teaching someone something.

Mark

00:54:01 Absolutely! The best teachers are the ones who can do this.

Athena

00:54:04 Yeah.Yeah. But with taking the audience into account, right. Because I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, I have to teach and they teach from, I have this knowledge in my head, I'm going to, [Mark suggests, "dump it out"] dump it out and then you can figure out how it all fits together. No, but if you don't present it in a way that someone else's brain can latch on to, then you know...then what's the point? You're not actually reaching someone. You're, you're just throwing a bunch of random things out there that their brain can't put together.

Mark

00:54:38 So here's a zombie thing cause this reminds me of, of, of uh, talking about the zombies that drive us. What is it? What is curiosity? Is there as zombie process behind curiosity. Why do we want to, why are we so turned on and we hear a question that we don't know the answer to? Why do we want to hang in there and find out? You know, you could tell somebody something manifest and you know, uh, birds are dinosaurs or you could say that bird, why? What is it? Why is that? Did you know that an eagle is a dinosaur or a hummingbird is a dinosaur? What the hell? You know why? And then you start to think about it and then you start to play out the information that way. And I remember hearing, and I have no idea how apocryphal this is, uh, when I was doing a neuroscience film many years ago about human decision making and I heard a story about, um, uh, an experiment that was being financed by the Associated Press. And it was an attempt to quantify, to find out what people were the most curious and how much of a reward system there was? How much pleasure they derived from finding out the answer to something?

Athena

00:56:13 Interesting.

Mark

00:56:15 So they looked at FMRIs where they looked at how intensely the brain lit up in certain people when they got the answer to something. There's a question, there's a mystery, and when they were, you know, a lot of activity as they're trying to in the frustration period and then this, this different kind of activity when they got the result. And I heard that the reason that the Associated Press financed it, and again, this could be completely baloney, (laughter) but it just struck me in any case, was to find out what people would be the most passionate reporters that just needed to get to the bottom of the story. And the more drive they had, the more innately, the more part of who they were, whether it was zombies or whatever that made them want to get the answer, the less they could be paid.

Athena

00:57:04 Ohhhhh. [laughter]

Mark

00:57:06 So I have no idea. [laughter]

Athena

00:57:09 That sounds like academia right? [laughter]

Mark

00:57:14 But one can imagine some corporations saying if we can find out if there's worker bees out there who just want to do the work for the pleasure of doing the work and don't really look at the paycheck. Wouldn't that be great? We'll hire those people! [laughter] I don't know if that's true but, yeah.

Athena

00:57:27 Wow. Wow. Well, uh, probably in entertainment and film and all that there's a lot of people who just want to. [laughter]

Mark

00:57:36 I'm one of those people. [laughter]

Athena

00:57:36 Yeah. You're a zombie. You're zombified by who knows what. Your curiosity? Is it your curiosity that's zombifying you?

Mark

00:57:47 Yeah.It's, it's two things. It's my curiosity, but it's also this, this intense pleasure and trying to figure out how to take the facts and break them down in a way that are just utterly engaging, entertaining, and fun to, to receive on the part of an audience. I just love that architectural challenge.

Athena

00:58:13 Yeah. So at the end of every one of these podcasts, I always ask sort of what your version is of the zombie apocalypse, of like the kind of zombification that we've been talking about. And now, I feel like we've talked about so many different kinds of zombification talked about what entertainment, talked about, sort of the, um, you know, all of these issues of like are, you know, who is in or what's in control of behavior. Uh, we've talked about, um, society controlling, we talked about the undead in various ways. Um, so I, there's a lot of potential directions we could go with the, the zombie apocalypse of, and so the idea is like, if you took this kind of zombification, you just amplified it, you, you know, ratcheted up. So, um, so if we take like the one we were just talking about curiosity, you ramp that one up, what does that..what's the zombie apocalypse of of that or whichever, whatever you want to take.

Mark

00:59:21 Is an apocalypse always a bad thing? [laughter]

Athena

00:59:22 It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. I guess, yeah.

Mark

00:59:26 Eating, eating flesh, that's, that's probably a bad thing. Uh, I don't know. You know, uh, I guess insatiable curiosity. The apocalypse with insatiable curiosity is ah, you know, I can imagine actually a very hellish scenario there where you, you know, you, you don't even sleep because you are so consumed with moving from one narrative hit one hit of curiosity pleasure to the other that like a, like a junkie who's, you know, gets desensitized to their drug. You just never stop and you never rest and you never take the time to think about the implications of a story...

Athena

01:00:23 Oh.

Mark

01:00:23 You know, the consequences of the story because once you've gotten that hit, you know, it's not enough and you've got to go solve the next thing and find the next thing. And it's kind of like looking at your news apps in a way. I mean, we're kind of, we're kind of experiencing that apocalypse a little bit now. You know, what, what was, what did it say in his report? And what happened? And what did you know Trump do today and what did, what, what, what happened? You know boom, boom, boom. You're...

Athena

01:00:54 We're in the insatiable curiosity apocalypse.

Mark

01:00:54 Your thumbs are the, your thumbs are the first organ of that insatiable curiosity phase and you just, you know, you're looking for that next hit. And uh, yeah.

Athena

01:01:04 And there's always something to fee, there's always a feed right?

Mark

01:01:07 There's always a feed, you know and will it ever be enough?

Athena

01:01:14 Hmm. 01:01:17 Thank you.

Mark

01:01:18 Yeah. Yeah.

Athena

01:01:19 Thank you for sharing your brains with us. [laughter]

Mark

01:01:24 Whatever's for, yes, you're welcome! Whatever's in there, I'm happy to share. [laughter]

Athena

01:01:26 Thank you

Outro

01:01:44 [Psychological by Lemi]

Athena

01:02:47 Thank you to the Department of psychology and ASU in general for supporting this podcast, especially the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Thank you to also to the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. If you're looking for us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, we are zombified pod and our website is zombified.org. You can also find us on Patreon. Please consider supporting us. Just $1 a month will help us make this ad free, no zombification educational podcast. And uh, thanks for to all the brains that helped to make this podcast to Tal Rom,who does our awesome sound, to Neil Smith, our illustrator, um, and to Lemi, the artist behind our song Psychological. Thanks also to everyone in my lab who helped to make this podcast happen.

01:03:51 So at the end of each episode, I share my brains, I offer a story or a connection to my work or sometimes, a wild speculation, sometimes some combination of those things. And so today I have to admit, I was a little bit paralyzed by, uh, what to say because it felt like there's so many things I wanted to say, but um, I kind of couldn't figure out exactly where to start and where to end. So I'm going to offer a few different thoughts. So one is, I have to say, this episode just made me think a lot about like, would I actually want to be undead when I die? Like if there was a way to somehow preserve myself, like the, you know, cryogenic approach, but sort of like guaranteed to work. Like if we knew that it worked, would I even want to do that? What I want to be able to come back to life in the future, you know? And if that involved me not being in my body, right? So just my head on a different body or just my brain or my consciousness in something else, would I want that and would that be me if it was not my body and it was just my brain?

And then you get into like, well, what if it just the, you know, neural patterns and it wasn't even in a brain if you downloaded it into another brain. So yeah, at that point, my brain just starts hurting. And I don't know the answer to those questions. I don't know. I think I kind of want to just die when I die. I don't know that I want to be in this kind of like weird, liminal space where I'm sort of alive, but not really me. Um, yeah. I think at this point I'm just going to opt for like when I die, I die. But I want to reserve the right to change my mind about that depending on how technology develops.

01:05:57 Okay. And the other thing I wanted to offer, and this is, this is totally a wild speculation. Um, if you have been listening to the earlier episodes and we did some episodes about stress, um, there, uh, and we also did some episodes about microbes and manipulation. So, you know, we're going to try to like pull some of it together here. So here is a wild speculation. So, um, in this episode Mark talks a little bit about how when we die, there are microbes that just bloom, right? And so they consume us from the inside out when we die. So from their perspective, the perspective of their fitness interests here, and I'm not implying that there is any consciousness or any intention here, but from their perspective, from their fitness interests, they do better when we die. And so you could imagine a scenario where certain microbes are actually under evolutionary pressure to induce their host to die sooner than they otherwise would. And you know, thinking about this from a physiological perspective, well that kind of seems like what happens with some infectious diseases, right?

That they might potentially, um, hasten the death of the organism um, and that could actually allow some infectious diseases to have access to the resources of the organism when the organism dies. So that doesn't seem too crazy. But what if we think about, um, what could it be the case that microbes could evolve to manipulate the behavior of their host to make them more likely to die? So maybe make them panic or freak out in a situation where freaking out actually reduces their survival probabilities. So I have to admit that I came up with this hypothesis because, um, I was driving in a sort of rural area around Sedona and Arizona and certain times of the year, there are these rabbits all over the place. And when you drive, they seem to want to cross the right in front of your car as close as possible to your car. And I don't know if that's just a coincidence or if they're doing some sort of, you know, demonstration of how fast they are to a car that looks like a predator or something. Um, or if maybe there's something going on where they are actually being influenced by microbes, that would be better off if they died anyway at, like I said, it's a wild speculation.

Um, but I think it's a pretty fun hypothesis to consider and something that could potentially be going on in all sorts of different systems. In fact, um, our, a guest we had on a couple episodes ago, Joe Alcock has a really interesting, um, hypothesis about heatstroke and how heatstroke might actually, um, be partially a result of microbes that are sort of, um, like jumping ship. Like, uh, maybe not jumping ship, but like ready to sort of turn on the organism because, uh, it is kind of like a sinking ship. So anyway, if you're interested in all these kinds of questions about microbes and manipulation and, um, definitely check out the Joe Alcock episode if you haven't yet, because we spent like the whole episode talking about crazy ways that parasites and, um, bacteria and viruses can manipulate their hosts. Thank you for listening to zombified: your source for fresh brains.

Outro

01:10:04 [Psychological by Lemi]