He’s Here To End Death - EP 90 Dr. Emil Kendziorra

For many years in science fiction and in the real world, we've been talking about this idea of freezing your body. You get cancer. We don't know how to cure it. Perhaps you could freeze your body, freeze your brain in time, keep it in a vault somewhere, and then come back when we know how to cure these things. It's often called the field of cryonics. There's a company called Alcor that has been around for almost 50 years, if not 50 years, that has a vault. Ted Williams is in there, I think. And then now there are new attempts to update this technology, modernize it. This is where our guest today comes in, Emil Kenziora. He is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio. They are, you could think of them slightly as a European version of Alcor, although they are operating In Europe and the United States now, they will send a team to come get you when you're meeting your demise and take your body to a vault, fill it with some fluids. You don't fully want to freeze it. You want to bring it near freezing and, and preserve you. The technology does not really work yet. We don't know how to bring somebody back, but there are people working on that. Tomorrow Bio is working on that. A company called Until Labs is working on that type of technology. It's a fascinating time, something I've been into for quite a while. It seems creepy to some people, doesn't fully work, so it's a little sketchy, but I find this idea endlessly fascinating and fun to talk about. You're going to enjoy Emil. He's refreshingly realistic and not overly hypey about all this stuff. It was a great chat. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. We're getting weird like usual. We're not talking about cryonics anymore. People don't like that term. We're talking about biopreservation. Here we go. Emil, this is one of my favorite topics. I'm so glad you're here. We arranged this a little last minute. You were in town for this Vitality conference.

I don't think they want to call it a Vitality conference. I would say it's like a long-term, far in the future longevity conference.

It looked like an all-star lineup of the most— some of the usual suspects, and then some of the more adventurous people that I like to cover at the daring edge of these ideas. Yeah. Um, no, what was it? It was like 3 days of, uh, yeah.

Yeah. Like last year was like 8 weeks, like 8 conferences over 8 weeks. And now they compressed it into, I think, 3, 4 days.

Okay. Okay. Well, I will be going next year. I didn't find out until kind of too late. Um, but it was my thing and what you're doing is my thing. So often I do a ton of research before we do this. We arranged this kind of last minute. And then when I did start poking around, I was like, screw it. I'm gonna just go like with the audience on this, this journey to talk about your technology and what you guys are trying to do. Broadly, it's the cryonics field. Yeah. And people may be familiar, I would guess if anyone is familiar with Alcor has been this American company, I think based in Arizona.

Yeah.

Been working on this for decades.

Many decades.

Yeah.

Like 50 plus years.

Yeah. kind of freezing heads and, and bodies in this facility.

Trying to not freeze them.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, preserving them. Yeah. And I think, well, I don't know a ton about the company, so I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be disrespectful or not, but I, I always feel like a mixed reputation. They've been at it for a long time. It's never 100% clear to me that what they're doing works or that they know it will work. People might have heard of like Ted Williams, the baseball player, having his, his body there. I mean, I just think they've been the, the, the largest example maybe of a popular example of, of this technology. It'd be covered a ton. And then now we're in the midst of a bit of a new wave. So you guys are Tomorrow Bio and, and you're, we're gonna get into your approach. And then we've got Until Labs with Laura Deming. I think she does not like to be called a cryonics company.

To be fair, neither do we, but neither do I.

Yeah. So let's get, we should, we'll talk, we'll talk about that cuz I know it's, There's, there's, I always want to find the right, I want to use the right words. I, I, I, I described Laura that way and she got upset. And so I, I want to, I want to use the right words. And, um, why don't you tell us? And then I've got a story to tell about CryoRus, which—

Yeah, I don't even know of them.

The Russian, like, for me, they don't even exist version of this, who I actually went to go visit a few years ago. But, but so tell me if it's not cryotics or that's not the best term. What are you guys trying to do?

So I think the problem with the word is that it's loaded from the past, right? It's not technically wrong, but it's like, you know, there was a good amount of maybe communication that I would have done differently over the last decades. So I think the new word is kind of biostasis.

Okay.

You know, and that applies to, you know, bio and stasis, right? Biological material, putting it into stasis, stopping time in quotation marks. And that could be for cells, that could be for organs, that could be for whole organisms. And what I like as a term is applied biostasis. There's a research field, biostasis, cells and so on. And there's actually a good amount of renaissance in that field. So a lot of new companies are starting up and should be announcing over the next couple of months. And then we do applied biostasis.

Applied biostasis. And you said when I was talking about Alcor, not freezing. All this is about holding your brain or your body in this moment in time to hopefully bring it back one day when Cures to things have happened, or there's myriad reasons why you might want to do this. You don't want to freeze it because you start exploding cells.

Yeah. So it's like when you put a tomato into a fridge or a freezer, in fact, right? And then tomorrow you take that tomato out, it's not a nice tomato anymore. And you can do that with a strawberry as well. And, you know, it's mush, right? You don't want that. So, and this is what ice crystals do. They're sharp and various other types of damage. And then after that, it's not nice anymore. And of course, we don't want that with organs or humans.

Okay. So we're trying to do biostasis, then you're trying to hold it in some kind of fixed state that's not doing damage.

So basically what you do, you try to do what they do in science fiction movies, right? When they go to another star and 40 light-years travel or whatever, and you just cryopreserve someone and they wake up. Have a good nap. Yeah, haven't aged a day and all of that. And that's the long-term goal. Right now, what you do, you cryopreserve. And the technical term for that is vitrify. It's basically making tissue into a glass-like state. And that allows you to cool down even to cryogenic temperatures, like super, like 320 Fahrenheit negative, like -196, without ice crystal formation. So you replace all water, all blood in the body against that cryoprotective agent, and then you cool down. Very fast first and very slow and so on and so on, to then put transfer or bring tissue into that glass-like state. And then for argument's sake, in the future, technology might allow you to reverse that process at a time when currently incurable diseases are already curable.

Yeah. And then so you get rid of all the blood and put this cryoprotectant in.

Yeah. You basically perfuse it in with heart-lung machines. At least in our case, we do, right? So just like you would in OR, we put a heart-lung machine on the ascending— the big vessel, the ascending aorta, big vessel in the chest, right? And then blood goes out, water goes out, cryoprotective agent goes in.

And is the cryoprotective agent— is that a place where everybody has their own secret recipe, or is this a well-known formula?

To some degree, everybody has their own variant. By and large, the solutions— think of them as medical-grade antifreeze, right? They're like solutions that Even at tremendously low temperatures, don't freeze.

So what is it? What kind of fluid?

It's usually a combination of you know five big components: usually DMSO, which is dimethyl sulfoxide, formamide, ethylene glycol—these types of things. Okay. And it's a mixture of those, and everybody has slightly their say. You know how they exactly do the mixture. Okay. Okay.

So I went, as I mentioned, I went to Russia. I think it was 2018. I was in Moscow. There's a company called CryoRus. I have no idea if it still exists. I should Google here. Well, I will do in a second. There was a gentleman who was, you know, he was a transhumanist. He was into the singularity. He was something of like a Pied Piper of transhumanism in Moscow. He had, he had kind of like a cult. Yeah. Following. It's one of my favorite things I've ever done in my life. So he, you know, he says, "I'll take you." He was—he's doing the Russian. I would call it like the Timu version of Alcor. It was—it was like the low end, the low end, the garage version, but not in a good way. Quite literally, the garage version. So we—we hop in this van. We drive. Moscow's huge, and it's full of traffic. I think we drove for like two hours. We start getting. to these outer rings of Moscow and then the suburbs, and then they start to give way to these still kind of the suburbs, but it's a little more rural. The things are spreading out. We turn down the street, go down. I don't even think the road was paved. And yeah, so then there's a house and it's got a shed, and I'm just thinking in my head like, no way, is this actually where we're going?

Yeah.

And we go in, they have these 2 giant cylinders. I mean, look like something you could possibly buy at Home Depot or some kind of like farming surplus store. These 2 giant cylinders, they had a bunch of animals in there. I remember it was like dogs and cats and parakeets. And so people had sent in their animals they wanted to preserve, and then they had human heads in there. We got like the liquid nitrogen delivered and we're like pouring it in these tanks. And I mean, it was pretty—

And now you understand why current organizations don't want to be associated with that type of work.

With this. Well, This, this, this, you know, it was Russia. It was right. It was a, it was a pretty fun experience for me just to, just to kind of like see this and, and dig into it. I, I actually loved the— there's this part of Soviet culture that's my favorite, which was, it was, it was like a very futuristic belief system.

Absolutely. This whole idea of, you know, we're going to the stars and we're going to live forever and, you know, all of that stuff. that very strongly originated in, in, in, in, in the Soviet Union.

Like in this beautiful way. Sometimes I think just because of the way the Soviet Union progressed that it felt so bureaucratic and slow and falling behind, but you forget that the philosophy was exactly right. It really is. Um, it's almost like of this moment, this idea of sending human intelligence out through the universe was kind of the goal. And so they were You could feel it. I mean, we talked to a doctor, the guy I was telling you about, about the Pied Piper, but we were with a surgeon who kind of went through what he would do to preserve this body. And man, I mean, he was like a poet when he talked about this stuff and like why you would want to do it. And yeah, I mean, I was like in tears. I was moved.

No, I get it. I think that the issue here is a bit that the ideas might be the right ones, but the execution To be fair, I don't have been. And if someone asks us, is there an organization in Europe, then we say no, apart from us, there is none.

Right.

Because honestly, you know, like, I think for all intents and purposes, they're irrelevant by now. There was a lot of, you know, bigger problems at those organizations recently. And they're set up as kind of like not how I would set them up. You know, they run like long-term storage is not with nonprofits, it's with companies. They've been very unstable and so on. So yeah. For me, they do not exist.

Okay. Well, so totally to your point, there's been Alcor and then there was this Russian knockoff and then, yeah, it got hard to find things and now some are popping up. So tell me how you got into this. Did you grow up in Germany?

Yeah, I did.

Okay.

So longevity, and when I say longevity, I don't mean the skin cream type of longevity or let's be, you know, I mean the how can we figure out so that every one individual can choose how long they would like to live? Right. Not talking about immortality. I feel for me, that's a philosophical term, but definitely not accepting that, you know, someone who's, you know, some people at 40 get cancer and then they're being told they have 6 weeks to live, right? How can we figure that out? And to be fair, for me, in my personal worldview, someone who's 85 and gets terminal cancer has just as much the right to live another year, another 10 or whatever, than someone who's 40. So I studied medicine, so I'm a doctor by training, right? Totally different field.

Did you practice?

I was already properly disillusioned with the speak of academic research while being— no, so my goal was never to practice. My goal was to do an MD, then a PhD, and then go into research.

Okay.

Right? Back then, you know, and I did that because when I was, you know, 14, 13, whatever, I felt like dying is not a particularly great idea. And apparently a lot of children have that idea, like this kind of existential angst kind of thing.

I remember having this with my son.

For most people, this goes away apparently. For me, this never went away. So, And to be fair, I enjoy almost every day, right? I would definitely like to see the future. And I also really, really don't want to be dead.

Yeah.

And of course, but being aware that that is kind of on the horizon, even when I was very young, I said, okay, I'm studying medicine, I do a PhD, and then I've tried to figure out how we can, with the, in quotation marks, traditional approach to longevity, how can we figure out how to make humans live significantly longer, right? I think it's very tough to say if you really want to be immortal. Immortal is like a really, really, really long time, right?

Yeah.

It's almost as scary as being dead forever, right? But then again, I at least would like to have the choice every day to say I want another day, right? And if that turns out to be really long, amazing, right? So I studied medicine and then again, I was pretty disillusioned with how fast academic research is. All my high school friends went into either computer science or business school, so we started building companies, right? Because at that point, I knew that I'm not going to stay in academia. I already didn't do the PhD because that felt like it's not the right path anymore. And then after graduation, so I finished my doctoral thesis, which was I stayed as much in the lab as I could and saw the least amount of patients. And then I started tech companies. Had nothing to do with longevity. Just at that point, I didn't find anything that is high impact.

Okay.

So then I built 2 tech companies, sold 2 tech companies, And now, finally, since 2019, 2020, I'm finally doing what I really want to do, which is trying to figure out how we can allow people to live significantly longer.

And when you said you chose to do the tech companies instead of the longevity field because you didn't see anything promising.

Yeah, after graduation, I looked at the fields, right? And when I say promising for longevity, I do not mean we live healthier when we're 85. By the way, that's a great— A, it might be great business, and B, it's also a very worthwhile cause, right? But for me, if you look at these morbidity curves, the older people get, the more they die, right? In the past, a lot of people were already dead by 50. Now people make it more healthy, healthy, healthy, right? And then they die, then they die. So it seems to be much easier from a scientific perspective to figure out how we can make people healthier longer. But then again, everybody since the beginning of time is somewhere dead between 85 and 95. And then once in a while, there's someone who makes it to 100 or 120 or something like that. So that healthspan is much easier to expand, it seems, than lifespan. So I always wanted to work on the hard problem because if everybody else figures out how to live healthy, amazing, then I'll just take whatever they do, be it a treatment, be it a pill, whatever. But then I'd rather work on what can be done to then live longer.

Okay, so what did you see in 2019?

Yeah, nothing. That's my issue.

But I mean, you do make the switch from tech companies to going to precision medicine.

Oh, sorry. In 2020, yeah. So again, I looked at, when I sold my last company in 2020, I again looked at the field and didn't find anything in this traditional longevity field, right? So then I said, okay, so of course I knew cryopreservation back then, right? And I was signed up with Alcor for many, many years. 'Cause it was meaningful. If something happens to me, it might not be great yet, but at least it is a backup. At least it gives me a non-zero chance at the very least, right? And then I said, okay, so we're not gonna figure out how to live longer. And I very much still fingers crossed that I'm wrong, but I need to build a stopgap measure, right? There needs to be a bridging technology that when people who are currently old can use it, of course, but also people who might grow and who might be 85 in 40 years or so, who have that bridging technology so that the rest of the world has more time to figure out how we live longer.

When you sign up for Alcor, what does that mean? You do a membership?

Yeah, you sign up— basically, you sign up with them, right? You sign all the contracts. Legally speaking, basically, you sign a body donation agreement, right? You say, if I die, I would like to donate my body to that organization for long-term cryostorage, right? You pay a monthly fee, and then usually you take out life insurance, right, and say, okay, so there's a life insurance policy. And somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000 US. And that life insurance policy pays out to the organization. And that is the money that covers long-term storage and the procedure.

And do you get to go visit the site and see where you're going to—

You can. Yeah, of course. I did not before signing up. Now, of course, I've been there a couple of times. But yeah.

And part of it is When you die, I mean, somebody has to be there to harvest you in the right way, right? How did they arrange that internationally?

Yeah, so exactly. So this was one of the reasons why we said, listen, apparently we need to build something on our own. Okay. Because, because, you know, a couple of my friends were signed up and at some point we, you know, we started thinking about, you know, how would this work if something would actually happen to us here in Europe, right? I've got it. And then the answer was like, There was no good answer.

I have a friend who— I'm probably going to get bits of the story wrong because it's only been told to me a couple of times over scotch. But I definitely have the basics right. I mean, he was somehow part of this Alcor network and somebody died. It was either a Burning Man or a party or possibly because there's 2 instances that I'm blending together. And this guy had to be cutting off heads.

Yeah. So we don't, by the way, don't do that at all. Like, head prioritization is not possible with us.

Okay. But I mean, it's for that reason, it is sort of crazy. I mean, you only have this moment in time to do this right. And so, yeah, his buddy was part of Alcor, signed up for Alcor, and then he was like a harvester. I don't even know what they call it, but yeah, had to deal with this.

Yeah. So fundamentally, we of course need to send teams as well, right? So we have We have teams, we have 7 ambulances and teams all over Europe, right? We have now 2 in building, 3 ready, 2 in building in the US, California, New York, and there will be a second one in California. In Texas will be one, and then in Florida. So basically these are medical teams. Think of them as mobile operating rooms, right? With doctors and perfusionists and so on. So if you're not 22 and ride a motorcycle or go bungee jumping or cave diving or any of those things, right? Statistically, people die at old age of a known disease, right? Where the doctors tell them, listen, the cancer that you have, it has metastasized now.

Yeah.

It's not curative anymore, right? It's palliative. You have 6 months, right? And then people reach out to us. So, and they say, listen, the doctor has just told me, listen, this is not looking good.

I see.

And then on our side, the logistics starts. The logistics wheels start turning. And then when doctors say, listen, this is now really— this is coming to an end. We think it's days to weeks. Then we reposition one of our teams to wherever the patient is. They might be in a hospice. They might be in home hospice. They might be in a hospital. And then, in quotation marks, we wait in front of the hospital or the location until the attending doctor says, We have tried everything. Nothing we've tried works. The only thing what we can do now, we can take the pain away potentially, but this person is going to die in the next couple of days. And then when they pronounce, right, so the heart stops and then the doctor legally declares that person dead, then we can take over. So in an ideal logistics way, we're standing in front of the room if the hospital allows us, right? The second we're not touching the patient before they're legally pronounced, and we're not allowed to, and I think this also shouldn't be done. And then the second they die, immediately we're taking over. Okay. Right. And then the procedure for cryopreservation starts.

This episode is brought to you by Brex. I spend all of my time inside of the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots. Very often the business is struggling, and then all of a sudden things click and take off. Then the company's expenses spin out of control. They either have to clamp down, start counting pennies, Or cross their fingers, hope for the best that the quarter or the year comes out okay. Brex was built to handle exactly these situations. It helps you move fast, spend smarter at the same time. They've got credit cards, banking, expense management all in one place. They've got AI technology looking over everything, taking care of tasks for you. No more chasing down receipts. We use Brex at Core Memory. It has been a godsend and given me back so much time. Giants like Anthropic in Zoom use Brex as well, and so do tens of thousands of startups. You should use Brex, and you can find out exactly how to do that by going to brex.com/corememory. I have a million questions, but let's do it while we're here. Let's walk through what would happen. Yeah, I want to— I'll go backwards in a minute, but let's— while we're here, let's walk through. Okay, so I've, I've just been declared I'm in Wherever, I'm in Zurich.

Sure.

Or let's make—

That's easy.

Let's make you do a road trip. Yeah, I'm in Paris. I've just been pronounced legally dead. What does the next day look like?

So basically what happens, right, when the heart stops, all the cells at the same time don't have oxygen anymore. And then they start basically a self-recycling process, right? Be it apoptosis or other processes, but they're basically fundamentally initially self-recycling and they're energy dependent. So depending on how fast your metabolism runs, These recycling processes that is then leading to irrecoverable death, those are running faster. So what we want to do, we want to slow down these degradation processes. And for that, there's 2 things. We cool and we do something similar to CPR, even though it's not CPR because we don't want to resuscitate. So it's called CPS, cardiopulmonary support. So we give oxygen, we could do chest compressions, right? We stop the cells from dying, plus we cool down. And the further we cool down, the slower these degradation processes work. And there's examples in medicine. So some people die, usually common examples are when they go ice skiing, right? And then fall into the ice and then, or skiing. And there's this like famous cases in every country. People can be resuscitated if they're cold for an hour after death, right? There's a saying in medicine that says you're only dead if you're warm and dead.

Yeah.

Right? protects you. So we do that, right? And then—

With ice or—

Yeah, with ice initially, right? So we flow water around the body. We do chest compressions with these thumper devices so that no one needs to do it, right? We give oxygen. We give a range of medications like from anticoagulation, so anti-clotting medication and so on. And then we cool down further and further and further, right? And before we go under 0 degrees Celsius, so where we would freeze, we start replacing the body, the water and the blood in the body.

In the hospital?

We can do that. So the hospitals usually doesn't allow that because for them, you know, the person is dead, their job in quotation marks is done, right? But we do it in these mobile operating rooms. So we can do it on site if the hospital allows. So far, hospitals have been very, very supportive, right? Because it is the wish of the person. And we're basically just executing the wish of the patient. So we do a large-scale operation. So it's basically open-heart surgery, right? It's just like you would in an operation room. And then we attach, we cannulate the ascending aorta, this big vessel in the body. We put a heart-lung machine on it. And then we push low-concentration cryoprotective agent first, wash out blood, and then we ramp up the cryoprotective agent concentration. The further we ramp it up, the further we cool down because now the body's already protected against, to some degree at least, ice crystal formation. And then we do this further, further, and further. And then depending on where we are, we either now bring the person directly to Switzerland in our case, right? We have underground cryo storage in Switzerland. It's not under the mountain, but it's a bit underground at least. And then there we cool down. First of all, we do a CT scan. Right, to evaluate the quality of preservation. If people allow us, we take micro samples of their spinal column or brain, like very, very small samples, right? But that only is done with consent, of course, to see if the fine structure of the brain looks good as well. And then CT scan, then we cool down over usually 100 hours. So initially very fast and very, very slow.

Wow.

Because otherwise you get thermal stress, you get fracturing, cracking of the structure. And then we put them into large-scale, the ones that you explained from Russia. Ours are from medical product companies, so they don't look Home Depot-like. They're 12 feet high, I don't know, 4 feet in diameter, about really, really large stainless steel, so-called dewars. They're like hard vacuum insulated. And from the outside, you can touch them, right? Whatever. And then on the inside, they're -320 Fahrenheit, -196 Celsius. So extremely cold temperature.

Okay.

Right? And there at that temperature, now you can, you know, if this takes 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or 100 years, and I have no idea how long it will take, you can maintain this for decades and centuries at that temperature.

So it's at this really low temperature, but because you put in the cryoprotectant, the body is—

That allows you to do that.

Okay. And so this whole process, how long is that? The first part of just, I'm outside the hospital?

Like a couple hours, 4 or 5 hours. Right.

And then I'm going on a road trip in the ambulance? Yeah, you can.

Like private jet. Right. Either one is possible. So there's like 4 ways how this can be done. Right. So if you're very close to Switzerland, we're doing this all at our facility, right? If you're farther away, let's say you're in Madrid or you're in London or you're in Paris, right, somewhere in Europe, right, then we drive you back, right? If you're in the US, right, we have ambulances here as well. So we do the procedure here. We then cool you to dry ice temperature, right? And then we just fly you over.

Okay.

So funny enough, initially we were like, you know, this flying over part seems to be sketchy or difficult. Funny enough, that has been the easiest part ever.

Okay.

You know, you just go with any of the big airlines. They put you into cargo hold. Add dry ice, of course. We put a tremendous amount of dry ice so that— and then you just arrive in Switzerland without having warmed up at all. And then we continue.

And yeah, what is the— is there like a carnet for the body? What's the customs on the—

Yeah, so funny enough, initially this was also a bit of a topic where we were like, this is not something that has been done every day. But we're now very good friends with all the import-export people and the customs people and the border patrol people and so on. Funny enough, this is very simple.

Okay.

Like, there has not been any issue at all with this.

And have you been in the ambulance? Have you—

Many times.

Yeah, so you've—

Yeah, like, no, I mean, like, so whenever you do one of these forefront things, right, you need to get a, you know, I very much agree with Elon Musk and these people. You need to be on the factory floor. You need to get a feeling for it, right? If you just, and so I've been part of, not, so initially all cases, every one I was there, right? Now, just for logistics reasons, sometimes it doesn't work. For example, let's say someone, you know, one of our members dies now in Europe, right? I will not be there quick enough. Right. But for all of them, I'm either on site or I'm there with video. So all of our ambulances, they're outfitted with bidirectional audio, multiple 4K cameras, and remote monitoring equipment and so on. So I can help and advise.

How many times have you guys done this?

So we have now 30-something people in long-term storage. Not all of them. We took over some from other organizations, but yeah, a good chunk.

Mostly in Switzerland?

No, all over Europe and the US. In fact, all of our last cases, for whatever reason, were all New York.

And where's the storage in the US?

There's no US storage as of yet. Okay. But there's one, there will be one. We're now planning to build a second storage.

So where are the US ones all?

Yeah, they all go to Switzerland. Oh, they all go to Switzerland? Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Amazing. And I know you, I looked on the website. I mean, you have prices for this, right? It was somewhat similar to what you're describing. Yeah.

It's like in the US, it's like $220,000. US. So it's $55 a month, right? $55 a month, right? And that is your membership. That basically keeps the teams on standby for you, right? And of course funds a bit of research and pushing forward, right? And then, so that's a subscription basically, right?

Yeah.

You pay us, you sign up with us, you put a credit card, you pay $55 a month, and then you sign the contract. And then the contract stipulates that if you die at the time, you don't need to send that money to us now, right? Once you die, there needs to be €220,000 with the nonprofit foundation in Switzerland. Right. And that money, now you either take out life insurance, right? We work with large life insurance organizations in Europe and the US and so on. Or you wire the money to us now, or you wire it in the future or whatever, right? Yeah, so that's the cost it takes.

It's not that expensive.

Yeah, on one hand, it's not that expensive. To be fair, that's the minimum. So the private jet service, that's not included in that price, right? So that is the minimum that you need to charge to make cryopreservation work.

Okay.

Around 80% of that is for the procedure, and the rest is for long-term storage. And that money goes to an asset management foundation in Switzerland. They invest that money and then pay for annual costs to keep you in cryostasis out of the return. And then hopefully, let's say, the next 60, 80 years, stock market performs like it did in the past.

You wake up and you're just rich?

Fingers crossed. Or at least there's enough money to whatever the procedure will cost to revive you. And in fact, the rest you get back.

That would suck though, because you could die pretty well off and then you wake up and inflation has— it would be nicer to wake up with your money working for you.

Totally. So we're setting up an asset management, a separate asset. So there's one asset management foundation that is there to keep you in cryostasis, right? And there will be a second one now, will probably be in Liechtenstein, that trust or a foundation where at the end of your life you can say, half of my money goes to my children. Half of that money goes into that trust or foundation. And then that trust invests that money, right? So that you don't get affected by inflation. Right? Because the thing is, when you're dead, you're not a legal entity anymore. So you cannot hold assets while you're dead. So you need to give them to another organization. And that organization's in its statute says, you know, when these people come back and these are the rules how they need to be back, then we hand that money back.

Okay. So we really have to trust you. This would be a good way to—

Not me. And to be fair, I built this in a way so that, because I will be there, I will be right next to you, right? If you sign up, right? So for me, this is highly important that this does not rely on me. So it needs to be structurally sound from a governance standpoint, from a statute standpoint, and so on. So that when I go into cryostasis, which I hope I don't need to, I hope I just take the pill, but if that doesn't happen, or if AI doesn't solve everything for us in a couple of years, but for the scenario that I need to be in cryostasis, then it's highly, highly important to me that this works extremely well. fully without me.

Okay. And the cold storage in Switzerland, it's what, like a cave or some—

It's a research institute that we've built. So I set up a foundation. So I set up 2 foundations. One is a private benefit to the benefit of the people in cryostasis, right? And the other is a nonprofit foundation. And they've built a building a bit north of the Zurich Airport, right? Where it's a research institute. It has a lab, CT scanner, operation room, and whatever. And then it has one-story underground built into a small hill, long-term cryo storage, right? And of course it's Switzerland and it's a safe country and so on. But being underground, some edge cases, you might be a bit more protected.

Oh, right.

And there you are.

You could go to Svalbard where they have the seed vault.

You could, you could. Just the logistics of that is, there the logistics might in fact be difficult.

Yeah, yeah. I've been there on a private jet. You could do it.

Yeah, no, you can do it. Absolutely. It might not be $220K anymore. It might need to be a bit more expensive. I think for now, Switzerland is a good balance, right? It's easy to fly into the Zurich Airport, right? And then it still provides you that level of security. And in the future, to be fair, we have a backup agreement with an Australian organization. So if anything geopolitically goes wrong in Switzerland, right, we can relocate to Australia and vice versa. And then now the next one will be in the US, right? So if anything goes bad in Europe, we can go to the US. So down the line, my goal is to have multiples locations, maybe one there as well, to have to be able to mitigate geopolitical risk.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I went to Svalbard to bury the world's open source code in case of apocalypse, that we would have software to reboot civilization.

So yeah, now we just need some people to, you know, you can put some people to, you know, to implement the software again.

There was lots of room.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Room is not going to be the issue, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. They have these old coal mines that are defunct and So you've got all your miles of cave to go through. When you first brought this up in Switzerland, were regulators, did they have questions or people were pretty okay with this?

So the village where we are, right, they had, there was carnival once, like, you know, this, like, we were made, like, we were on the front page of their small carnival, whatever. Pamphlet or something. So there were not questions. So we met with them after a while, right? Because initially we started building and we didn't put a large banner up and say, listen, this is what we're doing here. And then Switzerland is a very liberal country. So they were like, listen, yeah, cool. Like, thanks for letting us know. But, you know, what can we say? It's legal. Yeah, it's fine. There's nothing against it, right? So there was not— we have, of course, very extensive expert opinions how this is legal and so on. It has not been litigated in most countries. In some it has, like in the UK and I think in Australia and the US as well to some degree. And then in the UK, for example, one of the highest courts decided that is a right of a person, right? Because there was a case where a young child, like 14 or something, died of cancer and one of their parents wanted to do it, the other didn't. And it was decided that it is the right of that person to do that. So most countries, right, if you make that choice with informed consent, And that's very important for me, right? People need to know that, listen, you can be put into cryostasis right now, but we do not know when and if you can be taken out. The only thing I'm very confident, the chance is higher than cremation, right? And to be fair, like, you know, your choice is not, do you want to be cryopreserved or this other great thing? The choice is, do you want to be cryopreserved or do you want to be cremated or buried?

Yeah.

Right? And if that's the choice, I would always say, listen, I definitely want to be cryopreserved.

Yeah.

So if you make that choice with informed consent and you make that for yourself, Then so far, all legislators and all, you know, whenever it was argued in front of a court, have decided this is the person's right.

Okay. All right. Well, let's get into the reputation of some of this and where the technology has moved. Obviously, some people get freaked out by this. I don't know. I mean, it's like, whatever, you're already dead. It's like, do whatever you're going to do. But of course, that's my argument. But, you know, I think I don't know, there's a creepiness or something, you know, just around it. And then some people just like, whatever, just let life be life and let's not try to preserve this. But I think the biggest knock has always been, um, you know, so there's this, this aura, this mystique surrounding it, but then it was just like, look, this is kind of bullshit because nobody's bringing this thing back based on the way you've preserved it anyway. So it's, it's just, it's— there's a bit of false hope. in all this, barring some incredible miracle in the future where you can reverse this damage that you've already done to this thing. So what do you, and I don't know if we're calling out Alcor or just the field in general, what do you guys do that's different that gives us more hope that this might work?

Yeah. So first of all, I think miracles do happen sometimes, right? Like, I mean, iPhones are miracles. If you go 50 years back, iPhones are unimaginable. So is spaceflight, so are heart transplantations, right?

Mm-hmm.

So a lot of new stuff that comes around feels like a miracle first, right? But of course, I definitely do not want to rely on like, you know, fingers crossed, let's hope for miracles, right? So my position is the following. So cryopreservation in the very beginning, you know, was very low quality. We didn't fully know that it's low back 50 years ago, right? we have a better understanding of what needs to be preserved, that based on our current understanding of neuroscience, this might work, right? We ran a large study with neuroscientists to ask them, like, you know, what are the parts of the brain that need to be kept around so that you're kept around, right? Your memories, your personality, your identity, all of that, right? And now the field needs to be able to preserve that. And then once we have that fully done and, you know, all the checkmarks, then we need to move on figuring out based on whatever new knowledge comes out, what in addition could you do? So I think about this in the following way. I want to wake up in the future and whoever wakes me up tells me, dude, you could have stopped optimizing like 20, 30 years before you did, right? You preserved yourself way higher in quality than you would've needed to. I'm like, okay, cool, fine, right? I want that, right? So Our organization, we will never say, and we're quite adamant to not building a culture that feels like we're good enough. We always want to say there's more to be done. We can get better, right? Because you can preserve some things right now. You can do cells, you can do small organs, right? You can even do small organisms, right? And you revive them and they keep their memories. To be fair, it's small worms, right? So it's not exactly the same, but it works. So now, in quotation marks, we need to scale this up.

So I'm on Until Labs website right now. It's been a while since I reported on them. I think I did the first story ever when they came out. So some of my knowledge will be a little dated, but if I remember Laura Deming and Hunter, her co-founder, I mean, I think their central argument is, is they're not taking that risk that you're, you're taking. They think cryopreservation Doesn't work as is today. And so that's what they want to work on. And so they've been doing these experiments with—

And they should. It's absolutely— so we do a lot of research as well, right? So they do only research. We do research and we provide it as a service, right? Now, I think this is, by the way, a totally valid path to do it like that, right? I chose the path that we're taking for 2 reasons. A, I do not want to be distracted by organs. If you take the path like we want to research it now, maybe we want to take VC money, right? And so on. You need to have a product soon. VCs want to divest after 10 years or whatever. And there might be some evergreen funds now and so on that have a longer horizon. But by and large, you need to do something that works financially soonish, right? So that forces you to think about organs. Organs in the future, you can almost 3D print organs now. Organs is not going to be the issue. So I want to think— I want my teams and my researchers to think about the brain and the brain only. Are there any commercial applications or great commercial applications except for maybe spaceflight, right? Are there any great ones for preserving brains right now? Not so much.

There's Baxter Org.

Yeah, sure, for research and so on, there are some, but it's less so. Like, you know, the organ preservation market is a much bigger market for now, right? So I want to focus on that. And then the second reason is the following. I think so. So if someone has cancer today, right, let's say, you know, 45-year-old, and unfortunately, we have a good amount of very young people who are in cryostasis with us, you know, even 30-year-olds, right? If someone has cancer today, and they're being told that they have 6 months to live, for them, the decision is not, do I want this great technology that might be in 20 years? For them, the decision is now, do I want to be cremated or do I want to be cryopreserved? So from a moral perspective, given comprehensive informed consent, I think it's the right thing to offer this now. And it's our obligation to ensure that informed consent. It's our obligation to push the technology forward so it gets better. But I think there's a strong argument to be made that you should do this now as well, because otherwise these people would get cremated. And then one last argument is, I think it is acceptable if in the future it turns out that someone we cryopreserved cannot be revived. We just didn't preserve the thing that needs to be preserved. What is not acceptable is that we decide based on current, on incomplete knowledge that we do not preserve that person because we think it might not work. I mean, what do we know what is possible in 100 years? And in the future, it turns out that person could have been revived. So from a moral perspective, we decided that we'd rather take that path where we might preserve people that cannot be revived in the future, but we err on that side instead of running the risk that we currently say, no, we think this doesn't work yet, go for cremation, and then in the future it turns out that it would've been possible.

Okay. So how many people do— you said you have about 30. How many are head versus body?

So we don't do head at all. If you want to talk about the icky feeling that some people had, most of that comes from head people. And I get that to some degree. So we do either whole body or you can have your brain preserved like in the brain biobank, right? Just the brain.

Oh, well, so how many do body versus brain?

So it's like almost everybody does whole body. So like 80, 90%. In fact, we started out just doing whole body. We added on brain for people who cannot— who just say, listen, I cannot afford it. I want to do it, but I cannot afford it. And we can offer brain much more affordably.

So we've done a story on, on Bexorg, and we've done a video, which please go to our Substack or YouTube channel. You can see it. So they, they, they, people have died. They get the human brain. They have a perfusion device that they've built and a proprietary fluid based on, on worms that they pump into the body. You know, they say today they can keep sort of bring the brain back after death in, in this, this biologically functional way. Um, and, and they can do that for a day or two. I think they have a line of sight. I don't want to, I don't want to reveal too much, but I think they have a line of sight on, on weeks and, and then maybe months at some point. And then, yeah, I mean, are you—

Yeah.

Is there a world where instead of doing this whole cooling process and everything, you just keep a brain on the brain equivalent of a heart-lung machine, a perfusion device, just indefinitely?

Probably as of today, probably not. You could maybe do that, but it would still age, right? Because aging, a good factor of aging is just the metabolism, just that stuff is going on, right? Makes, you know, lets you age or the effects of that. So if you keep it on some If you keep the metabolism running, then if you could, but for all, I think it's probably not possible for that purpose. And to be fair, probably again, and I always say that if AI solves everything for us soon, then of course all my predictions of the future are not worth it anyway, right? But let's say that does not happen, then probably all this longevity stuff will take a bit longer than we might hope. So we probably need to maintain cryostasis for decades potentially.

And his bags are Says, and I think they've backed this up, that they turn off kind of the thinking, feeling parts of the brain for the work they're doing. I suppose you would want to— you would just be this brain in a vat, possibly just screaming for decades.

Yeah, I mean, fingers crossed that that would not be the case. That's where we go into dystopian science fiction world. Luckily, dystopias are not that likely. I think I very much think we're going towards a positive future. But that would not be great. Once you're in cryostasis, nothing goes on.

Yeah.

Right, so all metabolic processes, everything, like at these temperatures, you know, atoms can wiggle around a bit, but there's nothing going on that, so that, you know, you don't have consciousness during time in cryostasis. So it's similar, it will, well, I don't know how, of course, this will be, but the closest I think we currently have is being under general anesthesia, where, you know, you close your eyes, and then you wake up, and then you ask the doctors, like, you know, When are we starting? The doctor's like, what do you mean? We've been operating on you for 12 hours, right? Because you don't have any experience of that time. So cryopreservation, as much of course we currently can say, will be the same. You close your eyes and you open your eyes and it might have been 50 years in the future.

When you take the samples today that you're able to take, how much degradation do you see in the brain tissue?

So it really depends. So it depends on under which conditions those cryopreservation cases are being done, right? So we always try to, you know, start minutes after death. You know, your heart stops, ideally in a window where you could, in theory, resuscitate that person. But of course, you don't do that because, you know, they have a terminal condition. But in that window. But sometimes logistically, right? Theoretically, someone could call us now and say, listen, I, you know, my friend who has signed up with you guys just died, right? I don't know, thousands of miles away, right? And then we would still rush and get there. because it was their choice, right? But at that point, the quality is not great at all. We still do it because it was their decision and based on that moral framework that it's better to have someone in the future who cannot be revived.

Do you tell them to go in the bathtub with a bunch of ice while you're on your way?

Realistically, that's not really possible, right? Because if someone dies and they die under some conditions, they're in a hospital and they don't let you put ice in a bathtub or anything like that. Cooling is generally good, right? But logistics, mostly prohibit any stronger interventions.

Okay, well, let's do the idealized case. Everything's gone your way, you've nailed it, and then you're able to take a sample after a year. What do you find in the brain?

Yeah, so it was published recently, right? By a case that was done under, and you can check it out, it's in MIT Tech Review and like in multiple big publications, where a brain was preserved under close to ideal circumstances. And there, so what you do, right? We do CT scanning to see if the cryoprotective agent has gotten everywhere. That gives you, that shows us that we haven't frozen anything. What you can also do, you can take these small samples, right? And then you put them into an electron microscope. And then you see, you zoom in like crazy, and then you see the fine structure of how the brain is supposed to look. And, you know, you might see some small changes, but But by and large, I think the general consensus is that that is how it's supposed to look. And some people might disagree and they like slightly different procedures and so on. But based on— so I think there's at least a very— and of course, I can't say what happens in the long future, in the far future, but I think there's a very good probability that this will work, right?

Okay.

We recently asked doctors, you know, if you get cryopreserved under good conditions, what's the probability that you will come back? And the median was 25.5%. So 25%, that's the average opinion of doctors in the US, sample size like 300-something. 25.5% is the median estimated probability that it works, right? Every day, we do operations where the probability of survival is way less than that. To be fair, I'm not making a claim doctors have a great, you know, have much cryopreservation background knowledge. So I think it's more like a gut feeling. It's more like a gut feeling. So I would not rely necessarily on doctors making that call. But I think cryopreservation should be a choice. If you say the chance is higher than zero, that's enough for me.

Sure.

Because that's the only thing I think I can strongly defend. Everything else depends on actually bringing people back so that you can calculate some probability. So I want our people, our customers and our members, I want them to make the choice based on only and exclusively the knowledge the chance is higher than cremation.

We happen to live in a moment in time where there's different bets along this problem in many ways. One would be creating some kind of whole brain emulation, digitizing a brain. Different ways you could go about that, but that's in the realm of feasible, I think, intellectually. There's the idea of whole-body rejuvenation, replacing all your— or rejuvenating your organs as you go and just refreshing this thing that we have. And then there's what you guys are doing. There's probably a couple other things sort of around the edges. You could have picked any one of these paths.

Yeah.

Yeah, so why this particular, why did you put your effort and time into this path?

So I've been, my whole career has been trying to figure out how not to die. Like, so I care as for money as this is a functional necessity to do what I wanna do. But if I, you know, many years in the future have a small yacht or a big yacht, I don't care. And to be fair, if cryopreservation works at some point, it's gonna be a big yacht, 'cause then it's gonna be great business and the best business in the world, right? But this is not why I'm doing this. I do this because I do not want to die, right? So I chose this path. So the rejuvenation, be it partial reprogramming and all of these things, right? They've been recent hot topics. And I have my fingers crossed that this stuff works. But then again, my research was mostly in cancer research for decades. The best cancer research people in the world, and they're not We have the same IQ as they do, right? They've said for many, many decades, we will have cancer cured in 10 years, right? In 2005, and this is always the example I have on slides, in 2005, the National Cancer Institute, they had this so-called Director's Challenge where they said, our declared goal, and all the big cancer associations signed onto that, our big goal is to cure cancer in 10 years. That would have been 2015. Since then, we've spent around half a trillion on cancer research. And of course, cancer, as everybody knows, it's more than 10 years now since that endpoint and still the second leading cause of death. So my point is prediction in medicine and biotech and biological research are very, very hard. If I'm wrong, I'm happily wrong, right? Then I don't need to be cryopreserved and I just take the pill, do the treatment, whatever. Fine by me. But if I'm right, then, you know, and again, AI doesn't solve everything, then I'm going to be 85 at some point and someone tells me I have 6 weeks to live. At that point, I want to make sure that I have a good backup and give the other people, the other directions more time. And then you also need to have the skill set to do something, right? Like, you know, these other real deep research paths, I think this is not fully my interest or skill set.

Okay. Are you venture-backed? Who's paying for this?

We're not very traditional institutional. So basically not money that says we want to have return after X years. Right? So we are an organization that says we have a long-term goal and we're not gonna pivot. If there's something where you can make more money tomorrow, tough luck. Then that's not what we're doing. We're doing— we're here as a mission-driven organization that makes it work. To be fair, when it works, it's gonna be great business and it might be the biggest business ever at that point, right? So there could be tremendous returns. They're just usually, probably, I think, a bit further out than the normal investment horizon of a VC fund. So we usually have— our investors are the people who are normally limited partners in VC funds. So family offices, ultra-high net worth people, the founders of well-known large companies.

Yeah, is anybody public?

I don't— I haven't asked recently. They're not super secretive. They talk about it and so on. But like, you know, Big companies.

Okay.

And then, yeah, family offices, people who say— we have a good amount of investors who are also our customers. We have customers who then became investors, right? Who say, I'm okay with this taking longer. And even if I just get a great credit preservation down the line, I don't see money. I've talked to some people that said, listen, I'm not doing this for me to see the return. I'm doing this for my grandkids to see the return. It's like, okay, listen, hopefully it doesn't take that long, but fine by me.

It's always the concern, though, that this company might— a company that does this might go out of business. And so how much— I mean, how do you give people peace of mind that you've raised enough money? Do you guys say how much you've brought in?

Yeah. So on the core business, we are ramen profitable. So we could— if we don't spend on research, right, if we just bring the team down to a size where we can do all the procedures and so on, we would be able to operate it profitable. So we have a lot of downside protection. But of course, my goal is to push it forward. All my last companies, I ran like every other startup, you know, where, you know, sometimes you wake up and you have 3 weeks of money left, and now you need to quickly raise and get some SAFE agreements in. Otherwise, you're going to, you know, not going to make payroll. This organization, we raise, we run a bit more conservatively. So we always have a year or 2 years or even 3 years of money on the account when we raise new money, right? We have a corporate structure where basically how much we dilute and how much governance works are almost completely separated. So even if we dilute more and need to take more money, we still keep control of the organization. And again, the deal with investors is this is a long-term goal. If I want to sell cryopreservation tomorrow, they can kick me out. But if we're keeping on mission and working on human cryopreservation for future revival, then I have a lot of control, or we as founders have a lot of control. And then the long-term storage is totally independent from us, right? There is anyway no money to be made in that field. So that is done by nonprofit foundations. They luckily have very large-scale donors, philanthropic donors. So they have years and years and years of money and have basically a financial model where the return of that money that is being put aside, right, at that asset management organization, pays for annual cost. So as long as you can get at least 1 to 2% above inflation in returns, you maintain that structure just off the interest or the returns. And of course, since we have a 60 to 80 years investment horizon, because revival is not going to be 10 years, then you can invest with a target of 6 to maybe 8 or maybe even 10% annual return. Because you have such a long investment horizon. So if it goes down, so what? So as much as I currently can think of, the structure should not go out of business anytime soon.

I mean, it's still not totally clear to me why not just open a European branch of Alcor since it is recognized. What do you guys do that's different? I still can't, I'm not 100%.

So when I decided in 2019 that this is what I will do, I traveled around the US and around Europe and met everybody in the space, researchers, Alcor, other organizations, and so on. Because I wanted to understand. So they've been around for 50 years, right? Worldwide, back then, were like 4,500 people at all organizations were signed up, right? So like, there's more superyachts in the world than people signed up for cryopreservation, right? So I wanted to like, why is that, right? And of course, they're not like 100-people teams, so there's also not much funding. And then I met all of them, and after that, I understood. And it's similar to how before there was Uber and now Waymo and so on, there were taxis. And in theory, they kind of do the same thing. So the question would've been, Uber, why don't you just open another branch of that taxi company? And then if you meet that taxi company, you understand these are totally different things, right? So I want to run this. They're nonprofits. Nonprofits are great for long-term storage, but nonprofits are not great after pushing it, of having drive in the company. So I think they've lost that. To be fair, they've been doing something for 50 years and signups have not been that fast. So I understand why this is not easy to maintain this push for many, many decades. But I want to have that push. I want to have that startup-like urgency and drive and so on. So we grow right now, we grow 20 times faster than the next one. And that's still not fast enough, right? It doesn't get me to millions of people signed up, right? But that kind of shows the difference. Like what startup can say we grow 20 times faster? And this is half because we're starting to do a good job, but it's also half because everybody else is just way too slow. So that's what had not, unfortunately, not been a thing. I would have already left if that would have been the case.

You wanted this clean slate and this—

Clean slate. I wanted to have a governance structure where stuff can be done. I still remember, I don't know who I talked to, but one of these organizations I talked to and I said, listen guys, we built all this online signup flow and webpage and so on. And if you want to have it, guys, take it as well. It helps the market. Competition is not our issue, right? And then they said, changing the webpage is a board decision for us. And then I was like, okay, I start to understand why stuff isn't fast here. And of course, I want nothing of that.

Yeah.

So we have this combined structure where long-term churches, with nonprofits. Great, but everything is horribly slow there, but it's supposed to be. It's supposed to give safety. And then we have a startup-like, or it's a startup speed organization that does not need to deal with the slowness of a foundation that can run max speed.

So you seem like you have this Silicon Valley-like energy. When I've been to Switzerland and I've been to startups, they do not. They are quite sleepy.

Yes.

Even though it's a startup.

I like to hang out there as a tourist, but I wouldn't listen. I would not like to build there.

So why not have the company actually based in the US?

Yeah. So to be fair, in Switzerland, we only have the slow foundation. Switzerland is perfect for that. Everything is safe, everything is secure, and so on. The company is based in Berlin, in Germany, which is still not Silicon Valley, but there's a bit more drive there. The problem for me was I started a lot of companies in the past on the side, like not companies that are startups, but businesses, right? And now a good amount of them are profitable and I don't run them. Of course, they have all management. The problem is Germany has extremely strong exit taxation. So if I would ever leave as a tax resident in Germany, it would not be— It would be millions and millions and millions. Not painful, but not— because it's dry taxation, right? It's not like, you know, you would— it's dry taxation of the valuation of those companies. And since they're not startups, they don't have venture capital, so they're mostly owned by us.

Okay.

So unfortunately, that doesn't work. So our structure right now, how we do it, right? We have a US subsidiary. We basically do the best of both worlds. We will probably flip the organization to a US holding. So that it's easier to raise here. And then we have a distributed team that has a European headquarters, or like a European location, which we anyway need because we cover Europe. And then it has a US one to cover the US.

Since euthanasia is increasingly being legalized, and I know is legal in at least parts of Europe, why not— can you not piggyback on that and actually start this process Exactly when you want, even before the body has been declared dead.

Yeah, before you cannot, right? So euthanasia, and most, to be fair, like, you know, as you said, like in some parts of the world, this is still a bit of contentious topic. So is euthanasia, right? And combining 2 contentious topics, usually both sides don't like to do that at all. So what you can do, you can sequentially do that in theory, but we are not involved in the euthanasia part. at all. We don't touch that even with a 10-foot pole. Because combining these things, you get in a lot of ethical and legal and moral issues. But of course, if someone says, listen, I have decided to do that euthanasia path and I qualify and I've talked to all the psychiatrists and so on, and that's fine, and then they sign up with us or are signed up with us, we're going to do our thing. But we're only going to do our things once we have a legal pronouncement by an attending physician. That says, and then we can take over. Combining these 2 things is legally not possible and again has a lot of moral and ethical implications as well.

I'm racking my brain. I don't know if I can think of a sci-fi instance where this goes well. Usually you're frozen in time, you wake up, something quite drastic has happened in the world or to your personal relationships. I guess, you know, as a—

To be fair, how many sci-fi movies in general do you know that go well? It's just dystopian futures make better movies, right? I mean, the Culture series and so on. And there are some that are optimistic and utopian, but most sci-fi movies— this is not because of cryopreservation being potentially risky. It's more so it makes for the better movies if something goes wrong.

Right. So, I mean, I was trying to run through this in my head. I mean, you talked about grandchildren. Hopefully it doesn't take that long. That wouldn't be too scary if I woke up in a couple generations. I think if this took 200, 300, 400 years, that could be quite Quite exciting and also horrifying because it would just be— I sometimes, I think everybody has this thought exercise of you're like from the 1700s and then you—

Yeah. How that works.

Cars and phones and the internet and you'd just feel so, even if you were into it, you would feel so like whatever world you knew, this would be alarming, I think. And things would be moving at this pace that you just, I mean, on the plus side, you could take like a warm shower whenever you wanted. Totally. And things like that. But I feel like, man, If you were used to the pace of life in this previous era, it would be hard to adjust.

It would be. So for me personally, right, so again, my choice is not do I want this or just want to continue living, right? Even if I would fully think I'm waking up 500 years from now, right, I would still say, listen, I'll figure it out. Like the idea of being dead forever and not seeing any of the amazing future Right? It's always worse for me.

What if you wake up, everybody's already transhumanist, you're the dumbest, slowest—

Fine by me. Give me a beach somewhere. Listen, I'll live on the beach. I'll surf all day long. I'll figure out new kitesurfing. I don't know. I'll figure it out, right? So I think there's a couple of futures that could happen, right? One could be as long as fundamental interactions of human life are still the same, right? Of course, not sitting in a studio like that. But if we have dinner together and we leave our phones in our pockets, Then the interaction that we're having, even the topics, maybe not in Silicon Valley, but in the rest of the world, the topics are usually topics that you could have had 200 years ago, right? We eat with a fork and a knife, and we have a glass, and we have a plate, and all of that stuff. The food is going to be exactly the same, right? So as long as these fundamental human interactions stay the same, I think you have a chance of catching up. Now, there could be a world where everything is like super advanced, like humans don't have the same form anymore, whatever, right? Like, you can think of all these sci-fi I think in this case, I would assume, and I assume that's because history has gone like that, that future societies would assign moral value to us because we as society have over hundreds of years, we have assigned more and more and more moral value to other people. In the past, no one thought about our people in rural countries or in third world countries, can we help them somehow? This was not a thing in the past. in the 1600s at all. So it was just, how can we conquer them? So I think that the trajectory is we assign more moral values to others. Hopefully, of course, the future is going to be post-scarcity. So I would assume that if it's in their power, they would say, well, these humans from the past might not be able to catch up to us, but let's give them Australia, right? And they can live there in their 21st century. And we slowly over years and decades, catch them up. So I'm reasonably optimistic. And if this doesn't happen, if there is in fact a dystopian future, then I think the likelihood of waking up is negligible because dystopian futures don't care. The likelihood that there's this dystopian future that cares about bringing back people from the past, I don't see that as a high probability.

You should wake up with a cyanide pill necklace. Ready in your— if it's like this Mad Max—

You're like, all right, thanks, Thanks, but no thanks.

You get a drink of water. It's like, ah.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks. No, no, no. No, of course. And to be fair, like, you know, in most futures, you know, even if you then, it turns out that you really don't like it. Again, we've been saying like euthanasia and medical aid in dying has been more liberalized. And there are countries right now, I don't think any state in the US allows that, but there are countries in the world that allow medical aid in dying just because you say my quality of life is not how I want it, right? You don't need to have any disease or anything, right? It's rare, but I would assume a future society would allow that more, and for better or for worse. But so the likelihood that you're somehow stuck in the future and you just hate it is, I think it's a risk I'm willing to take, right?

And what would have to happen? So you've put in this cryoprotectant. So I guess you remove that, then you put blood back in. You begin a rewarming process. I mean, let's we'll move past the curing whatever killed you. Let's assume you've done that.

Yeah, we'll figure that out at some point.

Yeah. So you've cured the cancer, or you know shortly after you wake up, you zap the tumor. I mean, that's essentially just what has to happen is is you just got to warm everything back up again and yeah, by and large.

So so what you would do, right? So currently you cannot attempt. to revive humans for many reasons, but one being that you cannot warm them up fast enough. For a variety of how these cryoprotective agents work, you need to cool them down very fast for them to work, and you need to warm up even faster, right? Cooling down you can do, warming up you cannot do. It's just too fast. You don't get the— you know, it's like putting something in the microwave where on the outside it's already burning and on the inside it's still a clump of ice. Energy deposition in large volumes is very difficult. And humans, are too large and have a bad ratio of surface area to volume, right? So warming them up is very difficult. So you need to do that fast. You need to get rid of all the cryoprotective agent because at high temperatures, cryoprotective agent is toxic, right? And so you need to get that gone. That needs to go out quick. And then due to that still existing toxicity and also due to, of course, cryoprotective cryopreservations being done under clinical emergency-like situations, there's going to be some damage. And there can even be a lot of damage, right? You would need to be able to repair that. Now, the historic kind of how that would happen is molecular nanotechnology. You know, there was Eric Drexler and all these people who came up with the idea, which of course currently is still, you know, not something that we can do right now. But then again, we're also talking about the far future here.

Well, I remember you were refreshing my memory when I went to Until Labs, they were working on this warming up process as well.

Yeah.

And how do you tackle that problem where you get the heat.

Right. No, so are we, right? Like, there's like dielectric rewarming, there's nano rewarming. I think that's what Antler Labs do. We're focused on high-frequency ultrasound rewarming, which is something that we're doing more.

Because you've mentioned you're doing research, and so that is a big part of the business.

So for us, it's 2 parts of research, right? So since we have all our stakeholders, right, they care more about being, you know, how can you put them into cryostasis better, right? Whereas the rewarming side, in theory, right, once you're in cryostasis, if this takes 20 years or 100 years or whatever, how many years, right, it does not really matter, right? Because you have the time. Now, so we focus more on how to put people, people with a focus on the brain, into cryostasis. And these rewarming technology, we in quotation marks just do, because if you could at some point show that you can cryopreserve a mouse or a rat, and the rat is dead, and now it's alive again. Suddenly, people who currently do not care about this topic, from pharmaceutical companies to VCs and so on, suddenly everybody's like, oh my God, now there's actually real strong, strong proof of principle and proof of concept. So we're doing some amount of the research for that side of things, right? To actually— we do not work that much on organs, right? Because organs, if there's something great as a side product, You know, if we find something that's great for organs, amazing, cool, we'll spin it out. But I want to have my team and everybody and myself as well, non-distracted, laser-focused on the big vision and the big mission, not distracted with all the other things that now suddenly I care about FDA approval and so on, which, you know, you can have the whole team care about that, which of course for brains and whole humans is not something that you need or require right now.

Maybe it's just the hospital. I'm running, as you're talking, I'm thinking about what Neuralink wants to do. If they get to the point where people are having elective brain implants, Elon always talks about it as if it's getting LASIK. I always picture these Neuralink stores that you show up to and some robot chucks this in your head. I could see where you guys would have these places in different cities where you're trying to get the body to quickly.

So if there's a time, right, if there's a time where AI does super AI and super intelligence is not coming around, and of course beneficial super AI that is, that solves aging for us, in quotation marks, right? So if that is a trajectory of the future, right, which again, like, people are gonna disagree how high that probability is, but then that time might come where we have not solved all diseases yet, but we have gotten really good at cryopreservation, where basically now it's like, you know, every hospital has its cryopreservation department.

Well, that's what I was asking. Are we heading to a world where all this stuff does just take place in a hospital? Or I'm just, 'cause I was picturing the Neuralink store, I was picturing your thing, I was picturing, The liver, you know, you go to freshen up your liver with a little iPSC infusion. Maybe this all just takes place in a hospital as this stuff matures. But there's something kind of different because you, for some of these other things, I mean, you go to a hospital usually in these very bad circumstances. It's mostly about trying to fix something that's going very wrong in a moment, whereas this other stuff is more elective. And like, do we end up with like a— Longevity clinic that has all these services.

Right. I think we're only adding up with that, you know, the stores, the cryopreservation store, if biostasis and cryopreservation becomes fully reversible, right? Because at that point, like, you know, it needs to be fully reversible. It needs to be fully safe. It needs to have all the approvals. I think this is pretty far in the future. There could be another future where it is part, you know, how now, you know, when the oncology department says, listen, we have tried everything. person is going to die, then we're going to transfer that person to the palliative care department. Now, in the future, once cryopreservation, of course, is much, much better right now than it is today and has significantly more proof, right? There might be a future where they say the oncology department will be like, okay, listen, where do you want to go? Do you want to go to the palliative care department or do you want to go to the cryopreservation department, right?

Yeah.

The biostasis department, right? And then at that point, it might be under a clinical trial or like even maybe fully established as medicine. But not to a degree yet where it's like fully in and out, just reversible, and you do it in a store-like. I think that is a far future.

Yeah.

And then again, of course, I'm basically working for that probability of futures where AI does not solve longevity for us, where it's not like, you know, there's now a drug that can just cure all diseases or like multiple treatments, where we still do die, but cryopreservation is significantly better than it is today.

I say this with all due respect. You, you seem sane and rational. Yeah. I think so. But, you know, there's been, we talked about the reputation historically when I talked to Laura.

But thank you for the, for the great compliment.

When I talked to Laura, she's also brilliant. I think some people might find her ideas eccentric. I feel like you explain this in a very matter-of-fact way. You're, you're quite transparent about what you guys can do. And can't do, you still must have people that are just like, you're fucking crazy.

So funnily enough, way less than I thought. So when I started this organization, right, we had a crisis communication agency on retainer because we thought, listen, there's going to be constantly attacks. I had a bit of, before starting, I had a bit of fear that my friends are going to be like, listen, dude, don't call me anymore, right? None of that has happened. And I think it's partially because of communication, right? So now I give a tremendous amount of interviews and so on. Maybe I have more interviews that I regretted in my last company, which was a standard medtech and telemedicine company, than I have now. To be fair, maybe I got better at communication.

It changes. What can we do?

No, it's not— I think the point here is the following. I think cryopreservation has 2 things that, or 3 things that make it morally questionable. One is overselling it, right? Selling it, listen, let's just sign up, 100% chance, or like 80% chance you're gonna be fine, right? So informed consent is important. The second point is important that I think you have some amount of maybe moral obligation to make it accessible to everybody, right? Of course, that's not gonna be the case in the future, right? Like if people pay, in fact, we're trying probably starting like a really, probably starting like really, really high price with the private jets, right? Which is gonna be a million or so, right? For people who say, listen, I don't care, like the Just do the best that is possible. And then last but not least, we have an obligation to push research, both for putting people into cryopreservation and as time goes by, also revival. But apart from that, it is just a personal choice. And we ran those studies as well where we asked people, listen, cryopreservation, is it moral? Is it immoral? Should it be legal? And depending on how you ask and who you ask, it's somewhere 90-plus percent that say— I think in the US it was 2-point-something or 3-point-something percent say it should be illegal and 3-point-something percent say it's immoral. There's almost nothing where 90% of people agree, right? So to be fair, there's a bit of a bias in that data. It's like internet users. It's not the general population. So we undersurveyed rural areas. And that's the same in Germany, it's the same in Switzerland. So like, none of— like, we very rarely had a, like, an online debate with some pastor recently, and that person was even like, yeah, Jesus— he didn't fully say that, but it was close to one step from Jesus would do it. Yeah. Um, so I have, I have, like, I'm looking forward to some really adversarial, uh, fun debate, but, uh, it's rare.

But the cryonics name, word, Still hangs over this in a bad way.

I think to some degree, like in some, to be fair, like in the past, and again, I think, you know, Alco and so on, they always did their best effort. Like they're not, they're not, they're good people. They're like, and the organization is stable and has been around for a long time and all of that. But there were definitely people in the past that had a significantly more aggressive communication, right? And stubbed people's toes and maybe were not as clear as saying, listen, This is a choice as a last-ditch effort, similar to expanded access and compassionate use, where in standard medicine, if you have an incurable disease and there's a clinical trial that maybe there is something that could save you or maybe extend your life a bit, more and more countries and almost all Western countries have that now where you can take unapproved medication because the alternative is dying. And now in states like Montana, you have right to try, where it's the same concept. If you give consent, and of course, in my world, in my mind, absolutely, if the alternative is dying, then I think everybody has comprehensive and very extensive rights to say, I want to try this. Because in my worldview, if I die, that's it. And of course, in my worldview, that's it. There is no Nothing after, right? So I think, I think that should be everybody's right.

I'm not breaking any new ground here, but there is— Kurt Vonnegut writes this great story about people that are living forever and how horrible society becomes. And, and you've got grandpas hanging around. Yeah. Forever. And I think there is— I have, I've got, I have to have one of the best lives in the world. Like it's a run around the world, meeting interesting people. That's all I do. And so I enjoy— I love my life and I enjoy my work and my family's wonderful. All of that. There is still a tedium to life as you get older and things repeat.

Yeah.

But you are also compelled as a human to want to preserve your life. I could just see the situation where you're hanging on because you're programmed to want to hang on in your DNA, but actually done everything and it's, there's these conflicting forces.

So my, in my mind, right, we're not working for, like whenever the title of something is immortality, I'm trying to—

You said it, okay, but I'm even thinking it's like, yeah, okay.

Let's say 1,000 years or 10,000 years.

Or even I could do like 85 or I could do like 160. You'd want to do 160 because you'd want to check all this stuff out, but man, then you're still having those, All those existential pangs I think we all have.

I think it's better to think about, do you want to do another day?

Yeah.

Right? And so if I'm healthy at 85, right, I think it makes it a wrong— it's very difficult to think, what will I do over the next 100 years? It's difficult to think, what do I want to exactly do over the next 10 years? Right? So I'm working for giving people the chance to do another day. I think that's the easier way to think about it, right? And if someone at some point says, if you ask people right now, do you want to live another day? There's pretty much no one who says no, right? Yes, if you have like tremendous amounts of pain and so on, maybe.

This is what I mean though. So my dad's 93 and he would say he wants to live another day. His life is just, he almost, he doesn't remember what it used to be like. I mean, he sits out in the sun all day, but he can't really, he used to love to read. can't read anymore, can't see anything.

Maybe he enjoys sitting in the sun enough.

But that's what I don't think he does, but he says he does. But I think he's actually really depressed.

Some deeper programming that lets you not—

Yeah, I think he's actually really depressed and sad.

Yeah. So apart from that, so these things in the future, I'm very optimistic that these are solved, right? So again, I think living healthy is much easier, even at old age, good quality of life, physically and mentally, that's much easier to achieve than actually living longer, right? And of course, if we're talking about the far future when you come back from cryostasis, by definition almost, you would only bring people back once you can cure the underlying condition that led to their death, right? Plus you can extend their life with good quality of life significantly, right? And then if someone really, really runs out— so I would like to do a career as a surfer, right? No chance to do that in parallel, right? And I would also— I like art and like a lot of different things, right? So I think, and of course, the future, there will be so many more opportunities that you could even not imagine right now. So I don't think I personally would run out of stuff to do. And then again, we need to also remember, at that time, cryopreservation technology would be so advanced that you say, listen, I kind of feel like I've now lived on Mars a bit and on the stars, and I've been on one of these generation ships going to the next star. I'm kind of good. The technology at that point would probably be sufficiently good to just say, okay, then I'm going to cryostasis for another 50 years and let's look at it again. But again, all of that is highly speculative, right? I do not know how the future will look. I just know that today, there's more people who honestly and fully and completely say, I would like to live another day, than people where maybe it's questionable or people who say, I actually do want to be rather Be done tomorrow.

You guys don't allow for elective cryopreservation today?

Elective is legally not possible, right? So you can say, I'm going to one of the medical aid-in-dying states, right? And do that there. Right. And then you can call us and say, listen, Tuesday next week.

Yeah. I'm talking about next year, somebody brings a rat back from cryopreservation. It is, it's was perfectly fine. It's doing great. Then the year after that, somebody brings a primate back. And then now I'm in my 40s. I don't want to get past my 40s. And I'm knocking on your door saying, hey, I just want to get a primate.

Yeah, I mean, so if at that point that's approved, right? So at that point, of course, it would fully need to be FDA, EMA, or whatever regulatory body there is, be fully approved, right? If that is the world we're going towards, right? And once there is enough evidence that actually it does work, right now you could probably into cryostasis, but you cannot take them out, right? Then, I mean, we would not be against it. But right now, this is not something to realistically think about or advocate for or anything like it because the technology is not there yet, right? It would never be able to be approved by any regulatory body right now because it's just not there.

Oh, no, I'm thought exercising.

No, in the future.

You might have people that like check out on their family.

Yeah.

You're like, eh, I'm 45, I'm still pretty good. I want to feel what this is like in a couple hundred years just to see. You guys are on your own now.

Yeah, listen, I'm very high on individual choice, right? So if someone, like, you could advocate that, you know, maybe, you know, you leave your family alone. But then again, there's people who say, listen, I want to now have a divorce and I want to leave. It's the same thing, right? Like, you just say, I divorce my family and I go to another country now because, you know, I don't— so we have these concepts right now. It sounds super weird that someone checks out on their family and says, I go into cryostasis, right? But it is not something fundamentally different than, I don't want to live with you guys anymore. I'll move to another country. I'll divorce you and I'll never see you again. And this is happening. It's not good, but it's not something fundamentally different.

Right. And then, boy, I mean, again, not breaking new ground, but the whole idea of marriage and how many years you're married. Yeah.

To be fair, once we live longer, there will come a time. There was a time when everybody died at 40 on average. And people still, and now we cannot imagine that, how would a life work, right? That would be, you would die in your best time, right?

Yeah.

And just got a bit into working and just got your skills built and so on, and then you die, right? And this was time in the past, right? So basically my point, and then of course this is a high-level argument right now, kind of, right? It's always, we will figure this out. How will society look when everybody lives to 200? I currently don't know exactly. But then again, there was a time when everybody lived to 40, and now we cannot imagine that. And we would say, well, now society, when everybody lives till about 80, it works, right? So I'm pretty sure it will be figured out how to— because it's not like, you know, usually it's not like from tomorrow onwards everybody lives to like significantly more time. So we have time to adapt to it.

Are you married?

I'm, for all intents and purposes, not legally, but I've been We have many companies together, so separating my partner and me would be more difficult than traditional marriage.

Do you have kids?

I do not have kids.

Is your partner signed up?

Yeah. Well, the first date, she was like, yeah, this is fine.

You both signed up?

First date, we discussed it.

Yeah. And do you get to be preserved near each other?

You can. Yeah.

What does it look like?

So it's like 3 really tall, You know, 12 feet high. Think of like a thermos flask, but like super big, right? Tremendously big. And yeah, and filled with liquid nitrogen. You can't see into them.

So you have to do the same thing I saw. You have to replace the liquid nitrogen.

Yeah. So we don't do it with buckets or anything like that. No, it's like there's a large bulk outside tank, right? Where there's like liquid gas companies everywhere. It's super important for medication, for medicine and so on. You have a liquid gas company coming with a big, I don't know, like a huge semi, refills a big outside bulk tank, a couple thousand gallons, and then that outside bulk tank is connected to the inside tanks where people are in, right? And then they have level sensors. So when the level drops, they're being automatically refilled and so on.

I assume it's a bit different than the setup in Russia where I was next door smoking cigarettes and taking vodka shots while we waited for them.

I mean, you can do vodka shots in Switzerland as well, but yes, I imagine it looks quite different.

I enjoyed being at the longevity facility while we were hunched over a bottle of vodka, smoking cigarettes, waiting for the liquid nitrogen to come.

No, no, no, no, that's not— no, no, that's— I think, yeah, it's a very different picture.

Emil, thank you so much. This is my— it's one of my favorite topics. I find it so intellectually fascinating. I think it is— I just think it's It's fantastic.

Oh, awesome. Yeah. No, everything that's interesting is kind of on that forefront of what's possible right now. I want to be at the edge of science fiction and science. I think this is where interesting stuff happens.

Okay. Is there anything massive we left out? I know we can talk about this forever.

No, you can talk about this for ages. Like, no, like, you know, if this is something that's interesting to someone, like, you know, I'm always happy to talk about this. It has become my life.

Okay. And they go to Tomorrow Bio.

Yeah, Tomorrow Bio. I'm very available. So, you know, Always reach out and, um, we should do like a, we have the perfect audience for you.

We should do a Core Memory discount code or something.

I'll definitely send you one. I mean, I'm not joking. I'll send you one.

No, wait, you could not have a better audience.

No, absolutely. I'll send you a discount code for people who want to sign up. Listen, um, discount code forever, basically. Okay. Not, not time limited.

We could give it to our subscribers, our paid subscribers.

Absolutely. Let's definitely do that.

Okay. All right. All right. We're making deals for the afterlife.

Exactly.

For the future life, the second life. The future life, yes. All right, man. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance, and/or Kylie Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by The John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brext for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again. Thank you.