Question:
What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?
His response:
A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.
The best way to convince people to give you money is to offer them something of exceptionally high value.
It's perverse logic to imply that a service has lower value because people are willing to pay for the service.
Tragically, the extremely small number of people who have signed up for cryonics proves it's not a "marvelous way" to "convince people to give you money."
I think the fixed version of the statement is that the persuasiveness-to-actual-value ratio is high, so even if persuasiveness is low, that just translates to the actual value being lower still.