Crazy Town: Episode 120. You Ain’t Gonna Live Forever: The Dos and Don’ts of Legacy Building

Rob Dietz:
I am Rob Dietz.

Jason Bradford:
I'm Jason Bradford.

Asher Miller:
And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to CrazyTown, where if you say the word death, we'll kill you.

Rob Dietz:
Immortality projects represent an often irrational and sometimes even unconscious way to tamp down anxiety about death. There are some shocking examples of people, especially those with lots and lots of money, who try to leave some sort of mark in a futile attempt to keep from facing death. In this episode, we run a special fantasy football style draft to take a look at immortality projects, some horrendous, but some with positive effects. Hey, Jason. Hey, Asher. Welcome to the show today.

Asher Miller:
Thank you.

Jason Bradford:
Great to be here with you.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Today I'm excited because we are going to add a bit of fun, maybe you could even call it some extra spice, to one of the most fascinating topics we've ever covered here in Crazy Town.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my gosh. What a setup. We'd better deliver.

Rob Dietz:
Right? Right. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to build on the episode that we did that's called Fear of Death and Climate Denial, and we actually re-released this episode last time in our feed. So listeners, if you want go listen to that first. It's a really good preamble to what we're discussing today. We recorded a fresh intro and slapped that on there, but that episode about the fear of death, I loved making it. I found it absolutely fascinating.

Asher Miller:
It didn't make you -

Jason Bradford:
Morbid fascination.

Asher Miller:
- More filled with hatred and outgroup animus or any of that stuff?

Jason Bradford:
Did you want vengenace after that episode? Vengence.

Rob Dietz:
You guys are hitting on why I loved it so much. I became a super villain in an X-Men comic.

Asher Miller:
I like it. Nice.

Rob Dietz:
No, in that episode, we covered the idea that we, humans, we act irrationally as a result of knowing that we're going to die one day. That's it in a nutshell. The fear of death has profound effects on our psychology. And in our attempt to deny that we're going to die, that harsh reality, we just get these really screwed up behaviors.

Jason Bradford:
And what's great about this, I mean, what's wickedly wonderful is that we usually don't even know about it.

Asher Miller:
I think that's the key part.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Asher Miller:
It's that if you're aware of it and you're conscious of that fear of death, I think that actually helps tamp down on some of these things. It's more the unconscious stuff.

Jason Bradford:
Because people get put into these experiments, they don't even know they're in an experiment. So there's this one where these judges, I don't know how this was done exactly, but apparently judges were like in a court, they're doing petty crime stuff, little misdemeanors. Judges reminded of their death someday when they go into court, they're going to hand out harsher sentences.

Asher Miller:
Life in prison.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah.

Rob Dietz:
This why it's important to understand this is happening. Like when I get angry at my dog, I quickly realize and apologize and just tell her that I'm afraid of dying.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, that's perfect.

Rob Dietz:
And fix my behavior.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah. Yeah. I know there was another experiment that people were more willing to inflict pain with hot sauce. I mean, it's not going to kill anyone, but yeah, add a little more habenaro.

Asher Miller:
I've got to say, maybe one of our approaches is to come up with relatively benign ways of people expressing their fear of death, because what we have right now is some pretty ugly shit going on with all the scapegoating that's happening, the deep partisanship around political lines, the othering of people that don't look like us. It's bad. We covered that a little bit in our Escape Routes episode. I think it was Episode 92, Escaping Otherism: Why Dr. Seuss could never find a Rhyme for Genocide. That was a pretty good title, I've got to say.

Jason Bradford:
What I think somebody should do, this would be fun if one of the listeners wants to go down a crazy rabbit hole and have fun, get on a giant whiteboard, and they put index cards of all our episodes and titles, and then they have pins -

Asher Miller:
Oh, the yarn thing?

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, pins and strings of yarn, and they're connecting each one because that would be a great picture.

Rob Dietz:
Well then they realize that there's no connection whatsoever. These guys who claim to be systems thinkers, they're just going off in wild directions. Okay, so today's episode, we get to add another irrational behavior to the mix. It's something that we didn't cover much in that episode, and that's the concept of the immortality project. You want to define that for our listeners, Jason?

Jason Bradford:
I'd love to, and it's actually in our notes. It's written right in front of me, so this is going to be really easy. Okay.

Asher Miller:
Don't pull the curtain back, dude.

Jason Bradford:
Sorry, yeah the fifth wall or something. I don't know which wall it is, okay. To tamp down on your anxiety about death. Basically what we're talking about is when you do something to make a lasting impression on the world. So if your physical body is going to die and decompose, you might take on a project that lives beyond your lifetime. So this is what we are calling an immortality project.

Rob Dietz:
So I want to do this in a fun way. So we're bringing back the draft akin to say, fantasy football or in the NBA, and what we're going to do is we're going to have three rounds in which each of us gets to pick our "favorite." I'll put that in quotes. "Favorite" immortality projects. So round one is going to be the biggest, most absurd, most off-putting immortality project that you've observed out there in your life or in the news or wherever. Round two will also have some absurdity to it, but these are really small and really inane, maybe ineffective attempts at achieving immortality. And then round three, we're going to do something quite wild. We're going to change our perspective. That round is about an example of someone putting their death anxiety to good use. Kind of you were alluding to this, Asher, before. Maybe we find a better way to channel. So round three is going to be doing an immortality project that's good for people and the planet.

Jason Bradford:
Nice.

Rob Dietz:
I did a random drawing, and so the pick order is going to be Jason, then me, then Asher.

Jason Bradford:
Nice.

Asher Miller:
I love going last.

Jason Bradford:
I love going first. So here is mine. You know, everybody, most people seem to be in awe of the Egyptian pyramids, right? They're tourist attractions, people climb on them and take pictures.

Asher Miller:
I think you're not allowed to do that.

Jason Bradford:
Not anymore?

Asher Miller:
You're not supposed to.

Jason Bradford:
Okay. But in the past you did, right? I find them to be one of the most offensive displays.

Asher Miller:
Oh, really? This is a hot take. Yeah.

Jason Bradford:
A complete self-possessed narcissism, arrogance and denial of death in human history. These are hideous. If you understand -

Asher Miller:
Hideous.

Jason Bradford:
What went into them, right. If you look at them -

Asher Miller:
These are the largest structures that were ever built for thousands of years. And you called them hideous.

Jason Bradford:
And they were built with hundreds of thousands of slaves. So the Egyptian empire would go and they would capture and enslave people, bring them to Egypt, put them on work gangs. They usually didn't live very long, and they would burn through hundreds of thousands of people over 20 years or so to build one of these big pyramids. The death and mayhem represented by each one of these pyramids is obscene.

Rob Dietz:
That's probably what each block is meant to convey. This block represents 20 people that die, and then you see how many blocks create the thing.

Jason Bradford:
And then, inside there's this gilded casket, literally. Gilded casket with a mummy, and often the mummy is holding a mummy of their cat or whatever inside. So they're sacrificing pets.

Rob Dietz:
It's like a James Bond villain with a cat.

Asher Miller:
But they're servants as well. Didn't they bury people with . . . ?

Jason Bradford:
Yeah. And then there's like a chamber of loot. So then for -

Asher Miller:
But they need all that for when they come back.

Rob Dietz:
So this is the original cryogenic freezing chamber without the cryogenics.

Jason Bradford:
But just think about the minds of these Pharaohs. They are at levels that we only now can comprehend.

Asher Miller:
Well, the other thing that happened with Pharaohs was that they would try to outdo each other, right?

Jason Bradford:
Yes, exactly.

Asher Miller:
They were trying to get bigger and bigger at a certain point.

Jason Bradford:
Oh, you've got a little pyramid.

Asher Miller:
Exactly.

Rob Dietz:
Well remember too, our episode on skyscrapers where we were making fun of the competition for the tallest building. That's the original skyscraper too. So what did you call? You said they were pyramids of hideousness or something like that.

Jason Bradford:
Something like that.

Rob Dietz:
I mean, just double down on it.

Jason Bradford:
Completely. So yes, there we go. There's another thread, another yarn between this episode and our skyscraper episode now.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Okay, so your number one pick is the pyramids.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Rob Dietz:
Okay. My turn. For biggest, most absurd, most off-putting immortality project that I've ever observed. I got to give you guys a little story to begin. When I left college, I got a job in environmental policy consulting, and three years later, after paying off my student loans, I was just done fried. I got to get out of corporate America. So I quit my job, took the summer off to ride a bicycle across the country, and when I came back, I didn't know how I wanted to reenter the workforce. So I was applying for jobs. I actually interviewed at the now defunct Investment Bank, Lehman Brothers.

Jason Bradford:
RIP.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Thankfully I didn't get that job, so I started contracting with my old company, which it was funny because was making more money per hour, but working a lot less. But this is America, so I didn't have healthcare. So I realized if I want to have healthcare and a social life, I've got to rejoin the workforce. So I ended up with a job at this litigation consulting company. They provided expert testimony in court cases.

Jason Bradford:
Yes, I know of these.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah, it was absolute drudgery, but there were really smart people working there. I had these colleagues that were funny and smart, and I was like, I want to start a company with these guys. We could have this boutique consulting company. I had just come off of billing my old company a bunch of money. I was like, I think I could really make this work. So I tried to recruit some of these people and nobody was having it, and I was really sad. We could have called it Dietz Enterprises or The Dietz Company, Dietz-R-Us, Dietzanomics, Deitz-Mart.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, you could have had your name plastered all over this thing.

Rob Dietz:
Any number of narcissistic choices.

Asher Miller:
Okay, so what you're telling us is that the biggest, most absurd immortality project was your attempt of your own business.

Rob Dietz:
Well, it's my kind of end road. So I've already brought up the Lehman Brothers. I want to give you a couple highlights of that corporation. Founded in 1844 in Montgomery, Alabama as a general store. Henry Lehman opens up a general store.

Jason Bradford:
Really?

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. So then his brothers, Meyer and Emanuel come on board and they become a commodities trading company, and their main commodity is cotton in the 1850s, Montgomery, Alabama. Do you think there's any shadiness suspicious Pre-Civil war, Alabama?

Jason Bradford:
Probably.

Rob Dietz:
Maybe it has something to do with the pyramids.

Asher Miller:
At least it was organic at that point.

Rob Dietz:
Right. They didn't have that good a pesticide. Right. So in 1906, the Lehman Brothers shifted into investment banking with the help of another immortality project oriented company, Goldman Sachs. And then by 2007, they had grown into the fourth largest investment bank in the U.S. They were very much into mortgage backed securities. I suggest you go watch one of my favorite movies, the Big Short, if you want to see how that one turned out. The housing market crashed, and this is the amazing thing that happens when you're researching stuff for Crazy Town. I looked up the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, it still holds the record as the biggest default in history. It was $691 billion in debt when they declared bankruptcy.

Asher Miller:
So far it's the biggest. I mean, we're blowing some pretty big bubbles right now. Debt bubbles.

Jason Bradford:
The AI investment is going to be 3 trillion or so. So let's see. Hold my beer, AI says. So I wonder if that Lehman's catalog, which is that primitive tool catalog, have you heard of this?

Rob Dietz:
No, I don't know that.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my gosh. I wonder if this is an offshoot.

Asher Miller:
So that's actually their true lasting legacy was the catalog.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, the general store catalog. It's like a general store catalog from the 1800s.

Rob Dietz:
It could be.

Jason Bradford:
I'm wondering if it was like one of the cousins is like, I'm just going to stick with it. You go off. And they're still around. Whereas Lehman, so are you saying naming a corporation that survives is the immortality thing?

Rob Dietz:
Well, to me, the way I would label the draft pick is establish a massive exploitative profit driven company and then put your name all over it. A couple other examples, Peabody Energy, which was originally Peabody Coal. You've got a John Prine song about that, how his county in Kentucky got wiped off the map by Mr. Peabody's Coal train.

Paradise - John Prine:
And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County down by the Green River where Paradise Lay. Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

Rob Dietz:
And then of course, the Trump organization, with some of the most consumptive luxury industries in a conglomerate and now comes with a lifetime supply of political corruption.

Jason Bradford:
I like this because it used to be you would put your name on a stadium, but then they keep switching it up. That's not lifetime.

Asher Miller:
You have to keep sponsoring

Jason Bradford:
And they tear him down and there's a new one.

Asher Miller:
See, this is where Trump is smart. I mean, right now he's trying to hold hostage some funding for the state of New York so that they'll change the name of Penn Station to be Trump Station.

Jason Bradford:
Oh no no.

Asher Miller:
I think, which airport, Dulles Airport, maybe he's trying to change into Trump as well. You know, it's hard to change those. You can't do it quite like the sponsorship of a sports stadium or something like that. So he's got the right idea here.

Rob Dietz:
There's a bonus to my draft pick too, which comes with irony, right? Because of this sort of immortality project, you have these companies that are bringing us much closer to mortality.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Rob Dietz:
So they're actually doing the opposite -

Jason Bradford:
They don't know that.

Rob Dietz:
Of what they want to be doing.

Jason Bradford:
They don't know that.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Alright.

Jason Bradford:
Okay.

Asher Miller:
So don't actually look at my tabs.

Jason Bradford:
Okay. I won't look.

Asher Miller:
We're just talking here.

Jason Bradford:
I'm not going to look. I'm not going to look.

Rob Dietz:
Alright, we're turning to you, Asher. What is your number one?

Asher Miller:
Mine's different. Okay. This is not the biggest. It's not actually something that you would see physically anywhere. Right?

Rob Dietz:
When you were in grade school, did your teachers give you N's and U's for follows directions? Like needs improvement or unsatisfactory.

Asher Miller:
Probably not. I don't know. I wasn't in class, so I'm not sure.

Rob Dietz:
That explains it.

Asher Miller:
So I want to talk about Henry VIII.

Jason Bradford:
Wow. Big robes. I think I remember. Big robes.

Asher Miller:
Big beard, big belly.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah.

Asher Miller:
Yeah. So Henry VIII was the Tudor King of England, famous for having many wives, famous for killing some of them. He had six wives between 1509 and his death in 1547. And it was all driven by his need to have a male heir.

Jason Bradford:
Oh, right, right, right.

Asher Miller:
Right. So this was all about the immortality of the Tudor lineage.

Jason Bradford:
Right.

Asher Miller:
His first wife that he married, who was actually the wife of his brother, I think. Basically, they tried and tried for years unsuccessfully to have a male heir. He wound up deciding that he had to annul that wedding even though they had actually had sex because you couldn't get divorced at the time. And this actually led to basically the breakup in England and the creation of the Church of England.

Jason Bradford:
Because he couldn't get Rome to annul it.

Asher Miller:
He couldn't get an annulment. Right.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my.

Rob Dietz:
I'm having trouble following. I'm still wondering what the hell his brother was thinking about all of this.

Asher Miller:
His brother was dead.

Rob Dietz:
Okay, that's better.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah. You tend to inherit your brother's wife when they die back in the day.

Asher Miller:
He had two marriages annulled. He had two wives killed. He accused them of basically cheating on him, right? One of his wives died just soon after childbirth, and then I think the last one outlived him. But he basically was relentlessly trying to get this male.

Jason Bradford:
But did he get one? I can't remember.

Asher Miller:
No.

Jason Bradford:
Oh, the poor guy.

Asher Miller:
Queen Elizabeth.

Jason Bradford:
Oh. So then we had to have female queens. This is where that started.

Rob Dietz:
Jason, man, your sympathies are in the wrong place here.

Asher Miller:
Had to have female queens? And that was the whole split it with the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, because they were daughters from different wives. There was all this stuff going on. But again, this is a form of an immortality project.

Jason Bradford:
I've got to watch some costume drama and just get -

Asher Miller:
Oh, there's some great - There are actually some great books about that period.

Jason Bradford:
My wife is really into these costume dramas, so I got to just sit next to her on the couch or something like that. Masterpiece Theater, or something like that.

Asher Miller:
Sure.

Jason Bradford:
Okay.

Rob Dietz:
That's a good one. Yeah, that is a good one. I like that. Hey, this is Rob. Crazy Town is planning a mailbag episode in which we read and respond to your emails. So if you have a question, an idea for an episode, maybe an insult to hurl at Jason or Asher, or maybe you've got an example of how you navigate the mean streets of Crazy Town, well we'd love to hear from you. So please send us an email to [email protected]. That's crazy [email protected].
Okay. That's round one in the books of our big off-putting immortality projects. Round two, we're hitting smaller, maybe more inane attempts at achieving immortality. So Jason, take it away with your second round draft pick.

Jason Bradford:
Okay. Are you guys ready to have steam sort of come out of your ears like a cartoon?

Rob Dietz:
I'm always ready to have steam.

Jason Bradford:
Okay. I'm just going to read you a quote from a news article. You ready?

Asher Miller:
Sure.

Jason Bradford:
Jonathan Pavone and Daniel Plata, both 28 years old, were sentenced this Friday, November 4th, three years after they tagged their aliases Cluer and Vaylor in bold letters at several sites at White River Narrows in 2019, perhaps most glaring was a large 20 foot long graffiti mark that appeared on a rock face with petroglyphs. At the time, one of the convicted men posed in front of his work for a photograph.

Asher Miller:
Ugh. These fucking people,

Jason Bradford:
There are hundreds, thousands of these petroglyphs that are getting graffitid by small minded -

Asher Miller:
Stupid fucksheads. God.

Jason Bradford:
Ignorant dufuses who hike out and go, "Oh, 4,000 years ago, somebody scratched a rock. I'm going to put my lipstick on this," or whatever.

Rob Dietz:
That was an incredible impression of what they probably say as they're defacing the petroglyphs.

Asher Miller:
I don't think they probably know that they're 4,000 years old. They just see something old and they're like, yeah.

Jason Bradford:
Some of them do. There's these ones that, these people that put that -

Asher Miller:
People are worse.

Jason Bradford:
They take out spray cans and are like white power and stuff like this because they're just trying to be -

Asher Miller:
They're trolling.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, they're trolling. This is our land, not yours. You ancient Indian people.

Asher Miller:
Fucking assholes.

Jason Bradford:
This happens all the time. On November 17th, this is 2025, a Utah woman was sentenced for vandalizing a panel of Native American petroglyphs in southern Utah in 2024. Her punishment, 12 months of probation, and nearly $15,000 in fines and restitution fees. And the problem is -

Asher Miller:
We should have told the judge right beforehand that he's going to die so she could get a longer sentence.

Jason Bradford:
I know. This is not enough. What is it? What is it? Ahhh.

Rob Dietz:
I think they might - they're thinking that the original people that put the petroglyphs up were having an immortality project of their own and they're just trying to mask that.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah.

Rob Dietz:
How's that for rationalization?

Jason Bradford:
There you go. That's fine. That's fine.

Rob Dietz:
No, that one is very frustrating and I'm glad that I have the next pick because I'm going to bring things back to a kind of funnier level, I think.

Jason Bradford:
Thank you.

Rob Dietz:
So in my years of university attendance, my professors had pretty nondescript titles. Like I had a professor named Bob Geegangak, Professor of Environmental Studies.

Asher Miller:
That's a great name.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah, it is. People called him, Geeg. Randy Diamond, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. But now professors have these bizarre titles thanks to an immortality project. So my draft pick is the act of obscenely wealthy people putting their names on professorships.

Jason Bradford:
This is a good one.

Rob Dietz:
So I went over to the Harvard, I went over to Harvard University's Department of Economics for some fine examples. You've got the Fred and Eleanor Glimp, Professor of Economics. You've got the Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy, and you've got the Morton L. and Carol S. Olshan Professor of Economics. Now I'm not making fun of the people. Let me just be clear.

Asher Miller:
Which people?

Rob Dietz:
Any of them.

Asher Miller:
The professors?

Rob Dietz:
Either the one who is the professor, or the ones whose names are in the professorship. I mean, I think they're trying to give away their money and all, but I'm making fun of the practice. This is a really odd way to have your name live on for eternity. I get it. Sometimes it can be about remembering somebody. I don't know if these people were in fact wealthy or if they were just like the university really loved them and wanted their name on a professorship.

Jason Bradford:
No, no, no, no. We know. What are you talking about? How naive can you be? What the fuck?

Rob Dietz:
But it does, I mean, it does beg the question.

Asher Miller:
It's a pay to play. Come on.

Rob Dietz:
Well, you've got to think. Does Harvard really need to be reduced to selling Professor titles?

Asher Miller:
Of course it does.

Jason Bradford:
Harvard is ridiculous.

Rob Dietz:
We know that Trump wants to sue Harvard for a billion dollars.

Asher Miller:
That's what he should be suing them for because they didn't name any of their chairs after him. Right?

Jason Bradford:
I mean, they do have the largest endowment. They're super wealthy, but you can never have enough is what you realize.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. $57 billion is their current endowment. Anyway, that is mine. The weird professor names.

Jason Bradford:
That's a good one. Thank you, sir.

Asher Miller:
Well, guess what guys? I'm still not following rules. I am doing this one a little bit differently because I feel like we should actually talk about something that -

Jason Bradford:
Relevant and meaningful?

Asher Miller:
That's actually part of this immortality project thing, and that is actually trying to be immortal.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, I agree.

Asher Miller:
We're talking about stupid attempts at leaving some kind of legacy behind. But I want to just talk about people's attempts, literal attempts to achieve immortality. Right?

Jason Bradford:
I know. I thought that was too easy. I didn't go there, but thank you for doing the easy one.

Asher Miller:
Sure. The easy one. Okay. Well, I want to go back in history, right? Because probably the earliest example of this, known example, is the Epic of Gilgamesh, right? So it is a poem written over 3,000 years ago, and in it, Gilgamesh, he's a king of a city called Uruk in ancient Sumer, and he goes on a journey to discover everlasting life after the devastating loss of his friend in Enkidu. But there's a parable in this story, which is that on his journey, he can't find the magical elixir to life. He discovers that actually immortality comes from leaving behind a great legacy.

Jason Bradford:
Uh huh.

Asher Miller:
In this case, it was like building big walls for -

Jason Bradford:
Floods.

Asher Miller:
No, for the city to defend against people.

Jason Bradford:
Okay, that's good too.

Asher Miller:
So it'd be nice if people learned that lesson. Unfortunately, not everyone took that lesson to heart, right? So I want to talk about, I dunno if you guys remember this, we might've talked about this person very briefly in an episode that we did. Episode 51, A Load of Papal Bull, right?

Jason Bradford:
Yes. That was a great one too. Another thread. Another pin in the board.

Asher Miller:
Yeah, thank you. So you guys might not remember Pope Innocent VIII.

Jason Bradford:
That's a great name.

Asher Miller:
Great name. Yeah, totally.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my gosh.

Asher Miller:
Well, that episode of ours was actually about Pope Alexander VI, right? He was the one, he was super corrupt. I don't know if you remember this. We talked about the way he basically bought his papacy, right? He's now infamous, I would say infamous for the papal bulls that he passed when early in his term of being pope, I guess you call it that. And those are the papal bulls that basically split up the globe between Spain and Portugal. They basically gave religious justification for colonization. But the only reason he became Pope was because Pope Innocent VIII died and he got a stroke, and they decided that they were going to try to save his life. And the way that they were going to do that was to do a blood transfusion with three young men. Right?

Jason Bradford:
Back in the day? How did that work?

Asher Miller:
This is the, I think, first known case of blood transfusion. Well, it didn't work.

Jason Bradford:
Did the young men die?

Asher Miller:
The three guys died too.

Jason Bradford:
Of course.

Asher Miller:
Everyone died.

Rob Dietz:
Well, they didn't know about blood type back then I betcha.

Asher Miller:
It didn't work, right but this was an attempt. And the reason I bring this up is because blood transfusions are one of the ways that people now -

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, we're getting better.

Asher Miller:
Yeah. Well, first of all, yes, blood transfusions, we got better at them. They've actually saved a lot of lives. But some people are looking at doing blood transfusions. Again, back to getting young blood so that you could extend your lifespan, right? Rejuvenate your cells and everything.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah. It's a vampire method.

Asher Miller:
So you won't be surprised at the kind of the heart of the beast for this kind of stuff. Both university research projects are happening, looking at doing these kinds of things. And new startups are coming online to offer these services to people in Silicon Valley, right?

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, of course.

Asher Miller:
And you've got cases of Peter Thiel investing in some of this stuff or showing interest in it.

Jason Bradford:
Oh God.

Asher Miller:
You've got the Open AI guy who has also expressed some interest in the past in this. So, you know, it's still alive.

Jason Bradford:
We've talked about our favorite guy like this, Brian Johnson.

Asher Miller:
Yes.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Asher Miller:
But I think you've got to just mention briefly Brian Johnson who has the best name for this.

Jason Bradford:
He's got the best name because of the next thing I'm going to tell people. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Plug your ears if you need to. Totally legitimate. Brian Johnson posted on X, data of his nighttime erections. I guess he has some sort of ring he puts on that can tell how long he's expanded. And his data he put side by side with his 19-year-old son's data.

Asher Miller:
Right.

Jason Bradford:
Basically saying, look, I get hard about as much as my young son. This is how good my protocol is.

Asher Miller:
But he's also, wasn't he getting blood transfusions from his son?

Jason Bradford:
Yes, he was getting blood transfusions from his son. These guys are so gross.

Rob Dietz:
Can't we just go back to the, I want to be immortal by freezing my head in a deep freeze when I die? Do we have to resort to -

Jason Bradford:
That Han Solo thing when he - What was that?

Rob Dietz:
Frozen in carbonite.

Jason Bradford:
In Empire Strikes Back.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my God. And his expression. I mean the acting there.

Asher Miller:
He didn't choose that. That's a little different.

Jason Bradford:
No, he didn't. But the fact that -

Asher Miller:
At least of the cryogenic stuff, you're choosing to have your head chopped off and put in a freezer, however dumb that is.

Rob Dietz:
Unbelievable.

Jason Bradford:
Introducing Red Dawn Three: Ice Burn in Manitoba. A new motion picture brought to you by the people who made Melania. When the paratroopers of the world's largest paramilitary police force descended into the quiet town of Winkler Canada, they thought victory would be quick and decisive, but they didn't anticipate running into the Winkler Wolverines, a ragtag team of high school hockey players who are wicked good with sticks, face masks, and skate blades.

Rob Dietz:
What's this invasion all about? I thought we were friends.

Asher Miller:
We asked you to go home nicely, eh. Now eat my puck, Yankee scum.

Rob Dietz:
Quick climb onto the Zamboni. We're chasing them Hoosiers out of town.

Jason Bradford:
Red Dawn Three: Ice Burn in Manitoba, checking the fascist back across the border.

Rob Dietz:
Wolverines.
Alright. Two rounds of the draft in the books. You have one more round to make your mark here. So round three is an immortality project that's actually good for people on the planet. So Jason?

Jason Bradford:
I'm just so happy to be able to talk about something nice. This is great. This is a real feel good story. Are you guys familiar with the Atlantic Coastal Rainforest in Brazil?

Rob Dietz:
No. I mean, I can imagine they exist.

Jason Bradford:
I've never been.
I haven't been either. I'd love to, but you can think of the Andes as this mountain range, and then there's this very long, you go across the continent to the east and you get across the continent. And on the eastern edge of South America, there's this rainforest along the Atlantic coast, hence the name.

Asher Miller:
That's different than the Amazon?

Jason Bradford:
Yes. Because you've got mountains. The Amazon's all pretty lowland. So you get mountains. They're not super tall, but they're tall enough to get different biomes. You get cloud force essentially.

Asher Miller:
Nice. I know you love cloud force.

Jason Bradford:
I love cloud force. And so what ends up happening is there's a ton of endemism because you have this isolated mountain range. That's how endemism tends to occur. So it's considered a biodiversity hotspot. And hotspots are places where there's a lot of richness, species richness, a lot of endemism, and there's a lot of threat. So there's a lot of habitat loss, for example.

Rob Dietz:
Endemism, meaning they're basically only found in this one place.

Jason Bradford:
Yes. So if you say it's endemic to this area, it means it's only in that area. It's nowhere else in the world. So this is a hotspot for those reasons. High endemism, high species richness, and very little habitats left proportionally. So, I want to highlight the work of a group that was formed in 1998. They were a couple, the Salgados, a husband and wife, and they had 2,300 hectares of deforested land that they sort of inherited in their family. And what they've done since then is they set up a nursery. They go and they collect seeds from trees of this forest type in the region. They bring 'em back to the nursery, they grow 'em out, they reforested their entire property. And now of course they're finding partnerships and they're getting this forest, this ecosystem rebuilt. And so thousands of hectares are now getting reforested. Millions and millions of these trees are being planted. And the imagery of this place, you look at it and there's this denuded, and now it's this lush rainforest again. Obviously it's young, but it's highly diverse and it's a start, right? And they are actually then impacting the fate, perhaps, of this entire hotspot eco region.

Rob Dietz:
So your draft pick is ecosystem repair.

Jason Bradford:
And this particular place, and it is, oh my - Okay, yeah, here it is. Instituto Terra is the name of the organization. Instituto Terra.

Rob Dietz:
Alright. Yeah, we'll get the link to that in the show notes. People go check that out. That is an amazing one. And my draft pick has quite a lot in common with yours. Maybe it's a little different. My draft pick is about conservation, which could include ecosystem repair, but it's been 10 years now since our colleague and adherent of deep ecology, Doug Tompkins passed away.

Jason Bradford:
10 years?

Rob Dietz:
10 years.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my gosh.

Asher Miller:
I know. That feels like yesterday.

Rob Dietz:
So Doug was an adventurer at heart, a world-class mountaineer and all around outdoors enthusiast. He died in a kayak accident when his boat capsized in these really big swells on the frigid waters.

Asher Miller:
He died getting other people out of the water. That's what it was.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my God.

Rob Dietz:
Yeah. Their boat capsized on General Carrera Lake. I met him a couple of times. I know you knew him too, Asher. Jason, did you ever meet him?

Jason Bradford:
I've never met him, no.

Rob Dietz:
Well, he helped fund some of the work that I've done in the past with ecological economics. And Doug is best known as an entrepreneur having launched both the North Face and Esprit clothing companies. So anyway, he made a bazillion dollars, that's a direct technical to the nearest decimal point. And after that, he began a conservation effort with his wife, Christine McDivitt Tompkins. They founded Conservacione Patagonica, and they got out on this journey to protect vast swaths of wilderness. And what happened is, after Doug's death in 2018, Christine and the Chilean president announced the creation of five new national parks, the expansion of three others, and they've got these two flagship projects down in the southern end of South America, Pumalín and Patagonia National Parks. So the advice, especially to rich people, instead of putting your money into some exploitative oil and tobacco companies with your name on 'em, maybe you could do some conservation, set aside some lands, leave behind healthy places. I mean, this is akin to what you're talking about, Jason, that is going to support life for generations and hopefully eons to come.

Jason Bradford:
I mean, yeah, this is great because what do these places do? They regenerate. They keep going. So if there's actually any chance of sort of immortality in a sense, it's that the system -

Asher Miller:
Invest in life.

Jason Bradford:
Yeah, the system regenerates. So the trees die, but the forest remains kind of thing.

Rob Dietz:
And maybe when your body decomposes, the atoms can get sucked up in the roots of some tree or some awesome fungus or something.

Jason Bradford:
Yes.

Rob Dietz:
All right, Asher.

Asher Miller:
I'm glad you brought up Doug.

Rob Dietz:
You've got your third pick.

Asher Miller:
I do have my third pick.

Jason Bradford:
Is it going to be another weird one? Well, I've loved your picks -

Asher Miller:
Probably. Well just listen.

Jason Bradford:
I've loved your picks. I can't wait.

Asher Miller:
Okay, so I'm just going to actually have you follow my thought process a little bit for a second. So you think about an immortality project that actually is good for people or the planet. And of course, you could easily think of someone like Andrew Carnegie, right? He was one of the gilded age millionaires, and he decided to leave a legacy behind by building thousands of libraries around the world, most in the U.S. But to me, I'm kind of more interested in forms of immortality that come about naturally or serendipitously or because someone was just so taken by a passion or so gifted in some way, or is so selfless and heroic. So you could talk about great artists like Vincent Van Gogh who became famous after his death. Or you could talk about somebody like Jonas Salk, who's saved countless lives, right?

Jason Bradford:
Yeah.

Asher Miller:
But let's talk about the serendipity part for a second. Okay. So have you guys ever heard of Han Steininger?

Jason Bradford:
No.

Rob Dietz:
No.

Asher Miller:
Han Steininger was the mayor of a small town on the Austrian German border in the 1500s. And he's remembered to this day -

Rob Dietz:
History lessons from Asher today. This is incredible.

Jason Bradford:
You had the Pope, and now you’ve got this.

Asher Miller:
Oh, I've got more.

Rob Dietz:
You've got Gilgamesh and ancient Sumer.

Asher Miller:
I'm not done guys.

Jason Bradford:
I'm so excited.

Asher Miller:
So he's remembered to this day because of his nearly five foot long beard. In fact, that beard that is preserved to this day in a local museum, killed him and it killed him because there was a huge fire that ravaged the town, and he was running away and he tripped on his beard, fell downstairs, and killed himself.

Rob Dietz:
Did the ZZ Top guys know about this?

Asher Miller:
No, apparently not, right? Now, unfortunately, Steininger is not the most famous person born in that town, okay? That claim goes to Adolf Hitler.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my God.

Asher Miller:
Yeah.

Rob Dietz:
Wait, who was he?

Asher Miller:
But okay, that's not my own mortality project that I want to talk about. I want to talk about somebody who should be far better known than they are and immortalized, and that's Raoul Wallenberg. I may have brought him up to you guys before in the past, but Wallenberg is one of my heroes. When my oldest son, Avi, was born, when we were kicking around middle names, Wallenberg made the final list for me in terms of middle names. We went with Biko instead. But Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, and he was sent by the Swedish government to Hungary during World War II as a special envoy. He went there in July 1944 when he was just 32 years old, a few months after the Germans basically started deporting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Jews and gypsies and others to their deaths in camps in Poland. So at a time when Allied Powers had all the evidence that they needed that genocides were taking place and refused to bomb real lines that would've saved lives, Wallenberg took it upon himself to save as many Jews as he could. So over a period of just a few months, he rented over 30 buildings in Budapest. He named them things like the Swedish Library, and he claimed that they were protected by diplomatic immunity. He put out big Swedish flags out in front of these buildings, and he wound up saving almost 10,000 people by giving them protective passes and then housing them in these buildings. And he put his own life at risk. So here's a quote from one of his drivers about Wallenberg intercepting a train that was about to send thousands of Jews to Auschwitz Birkenau, and this is a quote. Quote, "He climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing protective passes through the doors, which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, and then the aerocrossmen began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the aerocrossmen deliberately aimed over his head as not one shot him, which would've been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed out the last of the passports, he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walked to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colors. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off of that train. And the Germans and aerocross were so dumbfounded that they let him get away with it."

Rob Dietz:
That's an amazing story.

Asher Miller:
Sadly, Wallenberg was arrested and disappeared by the Soviets right after the Soviets took over Hungary. They arrested him for espionage, and it was only decades later - Because people were in the hunt for this man. They heard stories of this young Swedish diplomat who saved all of these lives, but it was only decades later that research found evidence. He died in probably the most famous prison in Russian history, Lu Bianca, in 1947 at the age of 34.

Jason Bradford:
Oh my gosh. He was so young.

Asher Miller:
So young, right? And I bring this up because we have a moment right now where there are actually people stepping up in courageous ways in the streets of the United States and many other countries, and we don't know the names of these people. And our leaders, by contrast, are not showing the same amount of courage at all. So if you want to be immortal, do it for the right reasons. Fuck putting your name on a building, grandiose displays of immortality, or trying to prolong your life forever. Just do the right thing.

Melody Travers:
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app. Or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.