Latest / Core Memory / He’s Here To End Death - EP 90 Dr. Emil Kendziorra

Transcript

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

0:00
SPEAKER_00: For many years in science fiction and in the real world,
0:04
SPEAKER_00: we've been talking about this idea of freezing your body.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: You get cancer.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: We don't know how to cure it.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you could freeze your body,
0:12
SPEAKER_00: freeze your brain in time, keep it in a vault somewhere, and then...
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Come back when we know how to cure these things.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: It's often called the field of cryonics.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: There's a company called Alcor that has been around for almost 50 years,
0:28
SPEAKER_00: if not 50 years, that has a vault.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: Ted Williams is in there, I think.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: And then now there are new attempts to update this technology, modernize it.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: This is where our guest today comes in, Emil Kenziora.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: He is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: They are You can think of them slightly as a European version of Alcor,
0:52
SPEAKER_00: although they are operating in Europe and the United States now.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: They will send a team to come get you when you're meeting your demise
1:01
SPEAKER_00: and take your body to a vault, fill it with some fluids.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: You don't fully want to freeze it.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: You want to bring it near freezing and preserve you.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: The technology does not really work yet.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: We don't know how to bring somebody back, but there are People working on that.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow Bio's working on that.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: A company called Until Labs is working on that type of technology.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: It's a fascinating time.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Something I've been into for quite a while.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: It seems creepy to some people.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't fully work,
1:32
SPEAKER_00: so it's a little sketchy,
1:33
SPEAKER_00: but I find this idea endlessly fascinating and fun to talk about.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: You're going to enjoy the meal.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: He's...
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Refreshingly realistic and not overly hypey about all this stuff.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: It was a great chat.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: I am Ashley Vance.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: This is Core Memory.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: We're getting weird like usual.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: We're not talking about cryonics anymore.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: People don't like that term.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about biopreservation.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: Emil, this is one of my favorite topics.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad you're here.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: We arranged this a little last minute.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: You were in town for this vitality conference.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't think they want to call it a vitality conference.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: I would say it's like a long-term, like, you know, far in the future longevity conference.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: It looked like an all-star lineup of the most, um, some of the usual suspects.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: So that's some of the,
2:41
SPEAKER_00: the more adventurous people that I like to cover at the daring edge of these ideas.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, what was it?
2:48
SPEAKER_01: It was like three days of, uh, yeah, yeah.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Last year was like eight weeks, like eight conferences over eight weeks.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: And now they compressed it into, I think three, four days.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, I will be going next year.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: I didn't find out until kind of too late.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, But it was my thing.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: And what you're doing is my thing.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: So often I do a ton of research before we do this.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: We arrange this kind of last minute.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And then when I did start poking around, I was like, screw it.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go with the audience on this journey to talk about your technology
3:23
SPEAKER_00: and what you guys are trying to do.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: Broadly, it's the cryonics field.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: And people...
3:30
SPEAKER_00: Maybe familiar.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: I would guess if anyone is familiar with Alcor has been this American company,
3:36
SPEAKER_00: I think based in Arizona.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: Been working on this for decades.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Many decades.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: 50 plus years.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: So kind of freezing heads and bodies in this facility.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Trying to not freeze them.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, preserving them.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think, well, I don't know a ton about the company, so I don't want to be...
3:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm disrespectful or not, but I always feel like a mixed reputation.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: They've been at it for a long time.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: It's never 100% clear to me that what they're doing works or that they know it will work.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: People might have heard of like Ted Williams, the baseball player, having his body there.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I just think they've been the largest example maybe of a popular example
4:19
SPEAKER_00: of this technology.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: They've been covered a ton.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: And then now...
4:23
SPEAKER_00: We're in the midst of a bit of a new wave.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: So you guys are tomorrow bio, and we're going to get into your approach.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: And then we've got Until Labs with Laura Deming.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: I think she does not like to be called a cryonics company.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, neither do we.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: So let's get... We'll talk about that, because I know it's...
4:41
SPEAKER_00: I always want to find the right...
4:43
SPEAKER_00: I want to use the right words.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: I...
4:46
SPEAKER_00: I described Laura that way.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: She got upset.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: And so I, I want to, I want to use the right words.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: And, um, why don't you tell us, and then I've got a story to tell.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh, please.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Cryo-Roos, which.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't even know them.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: The Russian
4:59
SPEAKER_00: version of this who I actually went to go visit a few years ago,
5:03
SPEAKER_00: but, but so tell me if it's not cryotics or that's not the best term.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: What are you guys trying to do?
5:08
SPEAKER_01: So I think the problem with the word is that it's loaded from the past, right?
5:12
SPEAKER_01: It's not technically wrong,
5:14
SPEAKER_01: but it's like,
5:16
SPEAKER_01: you know,
5:16
SPEAKER_01: there was a good amount of maybe communication that I would have done differently
5:20
SPEAKER_01: over the last decades.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: So I think the new word is kind of biostasis.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, and that applies to, you know, bio and stasis, right?
5:27
SPEAKER_01: Biological material, putting it into stasis, stopping time in quotation marks.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: And that could be for cells, that could be for organs, that could be for whole organisms.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: And what I like as a term is applied biostasis.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: There's a research field, biostasis, you know, cells and so on.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: And there's actually a good amount of renaissance in that field.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of new companies are starting up and should be announcing over
5:47
SPEAKER_01: the next couple of months.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: And then we do applied biostasis.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Applied biostasis.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And you said when I was talking about Alcor, not freezing.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: All this is about holding your brain or your body in this moment in time
6:00
SPEAKER_00: to hopefully bring it back one day when...
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Cures to things that have happened.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: There's myriad reasons why you might want to do this.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to freeze it because you start exploding cells.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: It's like when you put a tomato into a fridge or a freezer, in fact.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: And then tomorrow you take that tomato out.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: It's not a nice tomato anymore.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: And you can do that with a strawberry as well.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And it's mush.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: You don't want that.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: And this is what ice crystals do.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: They're sharp and various other types of damage.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: And then after that, it's not nice anymore.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: And of course, we don't want that with organs or humans.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: OK.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: So we're trying to do biostasis.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Then you're trying to hold it in some kind of fixed state that's not doing damage.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: So basically what you do, you try to do what they do in science fiction movies.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: When they go to another star and 40 light years travel or whatever,
6:49
SPEAKER_01: and you just cry or preserve someone and they wake up.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Having a nap.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I haven't aged a day and all of that.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: And that's the long-term goal.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: Right now, what you do, you cryopreserve.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: The technical term for that is vitrify.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: It's basically making tissue into a glass-like state.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: And that allows you to cool down even to cryogenic temperatures,
7:10
SPEAKER_01: like super like 320 Fahrenheit negative,
7:13
SPEAKER_01: like negative 196, without ice crystal formation.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: So you replace all water,
7:19
SPEAKER_01: all blood in the body against that cryoprotective agent,
7:22
SPEAKER_01: and then you cool down very fast first and very slow and so on and so on.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: To then bring tissue into that glass-like state.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: And then for argument's sake,
7:36
SPEAKER_01: in the future technology might allow you to reverse that process at a time
7:41
SPEAKER_01: when currently uncurable diseases are already curable.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: So you get rid of all the blood.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: And put this cryoprotectant in.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you basically perfuse it in with heart-lung machines.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: At least in our case we do, right?
7:54
SPEAKER_01: So just like you would in OR,
7:55
SPEAKER_01: we put a heart-lung machine on the ascending,
7:58
SPEAKER_01: the big vessel, the ascending orta, big vessel in the chest, right?
8:01
SPEAKER_01: And then blood goes out, water goes out, cryoprotective agent goes in.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: And is the cryoprotective agent, is that a place where...
8:10
SPEAKER_00: Everybody has their own secret recipe, or is this a well-known formula?
8:13
SPEAKER_01: To some degree, everybody has their own variant.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: By and large, their solutions, think of them as medical-grade antifreeze.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: They're like solutions that, even at tremendously low temperatures, don't freeze.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: What is it?
8:28
SPEAKER_01: What kind of fluids?
8:29
SPEAKER_01: It's usually a combination of five big components,
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SPEAKER_01: usually DMSO,
8:33
SPEAKER_01: which is dimethyl sulfate oxide, formamide, ethyl glycol, these types of things.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: It's a mixture of those, and everybody has slightly the same, how they exactly do the mixture.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: So I went, as I mentioned, I went to Russia, I think it was 2018.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: I was in Moscow.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: There's a company called Cryorus.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: I have no idea if it still exists.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: I should Google here.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, I will do in a second.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: There was a gentleman who was, you know, he was a transhumanist.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: He was into the singularity.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: He was something of like a Pied Piper of transhumanism in Moscow.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: He had kind of like a cult.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: It's one of my favorite things I've ever done in my life.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: So he, you know, he says, I'll take you.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: He was, he's doing the Russian, I would call it like the T-Move version of Alcor.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: It was, it was like the low end, the low end.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: The garage version, but not in a good way.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Quite literally the garage version.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So we, we hop in this van, we drive, Moscow's huge and it's full of traffic.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: I think we drove for like two hours.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: We start getting to these outer rings of Moscow and then the suburbs,
9:42
SPEAKER_00: and then they start to give way to these,
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Still kind of the suburbs, but it's a little more rural.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: The things are spreading out.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: We turn down the street, go down.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: I don't even think the road was paved.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so then there's a house and it's got a shed.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just thinking in my head, like, no way.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: This is actually where we're going.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: And we go in, they have these two giant cylinders.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look like something you could possibly buy at Home Depot or some kind
10:08
SPEAKER_00: of like farming surplus store.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: These two giant cylinders.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: They had a bunch of animals in there.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: I remember it was like dogs and cats and parakeets.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And so people had sent in their animals they want to preserve.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: And then they had human heads in there.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: We got like the liquid nitrogen delivered.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: And we're like pouring it in these tanks.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
10:32
SPEAKER_00: it was
10:32
SPEAKER_01: pretty...
10:33
SPEAKER_01: And now you understand why current organizations don't want to be associated with
10:36
SPEAKER_01: that type of the...
10:37
SPEAKER_00: With this.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is Russia.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: It was...
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: It was a pretty fun experience for me just to kind of like see this and dig into it.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: I actually loved the,
10:51
SPEAKER_00: there's this part of Soviet culture that's my favorite,
10:55
SPEAKER_00: which was, it was like a very futuristic belief system.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: This whole idea of,
11:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:01
SPEAKER_01: we're going to the stars and we're going to live forever and,
11:03
SPEAKER_01: you know, all of that stuff.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: That very strongly originated in the Soviet Union.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Like in this beautiful way.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think just because of the way the Soviet Union progressed that it felt
11:15
SPEAKER_00: so bureaucratic and slow and falling behind.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: But you forget that the philosophy was exactly right.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: It really is.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: It's almost like of this moment,
11:24
SPEAKER_00: this idea of sending human intelligence out through the universe was kind of
11:29
SPEAKER_00: the goal.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And so they were...
11:32
SPEAKER_00: You could feel it.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we'd talk to a doctor.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: There was the guy I was telling you about,
11:35
SPEAKER_00: about the Pied Piper,
11:36
SPEAKER_00: but we were with a surgeon who kind of went through what he would do,
11:41
SPEAKER_00: you know, to preserve his body.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: And man, I mean,
11:43
SPEAKER_00: he was like a poet when he talked about this stuff and like why you would want
11:46
SPEAKER_00: to do it and the...
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I was like in tears.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: I was moved.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: No, I get it.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: I think the issue here is a bit that the ideas might be the right ones,
11:55
SPEAKER_01: but the execution, to be fair, I don't has been.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: And if someone asks us,
12:01
SPEAKER_01: is there an organization in Europe, then we say, no, apart from us, there is none.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Right.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: Because honestly, I think for all intents and purposes, they're irrelevant by now.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of, you know, Bigger problems at those organizations recently.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: And they're set up as kind of like not how I would set them up.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: They run like long-term storage is not with nonprofits.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: It's with companies.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: They've been very unstable and so on.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: For me, they do not exist.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: OK. And totally to your point, there's been Alcor, and then there was this Russian knockoff.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: And then, yeah, it got hard to find things.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And now some are popping up.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: So tell me how you got into this.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Did you grow up in Germany?
12:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: I did.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: So longevity,
12:42
SPEAKER_01: and when I say longevity,
12:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't mean the skin cream type of longevity or let's be,
12:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean the how can we figure out so
12:49
SPEAKER_01: that every one individual can choose how long they would like to live.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: Not talking about immortality,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: for me that's a philosophical term,
12:56
SPEAKER_01: but definitely not accepting that some people at 40 get cancer and
13:02
SPEAKER_01: then they're being told they have six weeks to live.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: How can we figure that out?
13:06
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, for me in my personal So I
13:15
SPEAKER_01: studied medicine.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: So I'm a doctor by training, right?
13:20
SPEAKER_01: Totally different field.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: Did you practice?
13:23
SPEAKER_01: I was already properly disillusioned with the speak of academic research
13:27
SPEAKER_01: while being... No, so my goal was never to practice.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: My goal was to do an MD, then a PhD, and then go into research, right?
13:33
SPEAKER_01: Back then, you know...
13:35
SPEAKER_01: And I did that because when I was 14,
13:38
SPEAKER_01: 13, whatever, I felt like dying is not a particularly great idea.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: And apparently a lot of children have that idea,
13:43
SPEAKER_01: like this kind of existential angst kind of thing.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: I remember having this with my son.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: For most people, this goes away apparently.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: For me, this never went away.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, I enjoy almost every day.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: I would definitely like to see the future.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: And I also really, really don't want to be dead.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
14:00
SPEAKER_01: but being aware that that is kind of on the horizon,
14:03
SPEAKER_01: even when I was very young, I said, okay,
14:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm studying medicine,
14:06
SPEAKER_01: I do a PhD,
14:07
SPEAKER_01: and then I've tried to figure out how we can,
14:09
SPEAKER_01: with the in quotation marks traditional approach to longevity,
14:11
SPEAKER_01: how can we figure out how to make humans live significantly longer, right?
14:17
SPEAKER_01: Like I think it's very tough to say if you really want to be immortal.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Immortal is like a really, really, really long time, right?
14:23
SPEAKER_01: It's almost as scary as being dead forever, right?
14:26
SPEAKER_01: But then again,
14:26
SPEAKER_01: I at least would like to have the choice every day to say I want another day, right?
14:30
SPEAKER_01: And if that turns out to be really long, amazing, right?
14:33
SPEAKER_01: So I started medicine and then again,
14:34
SPEAKER_01: you know, I was pretty disillusioned with how fast academic research is.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: All my high school friends went into computer science or business school,
14:42
SPEAKER_01: so we started building companies.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: Because at that point I knew that I'm not going to stay in academia.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: I didn't do the PhD because that felt like it's not the right path anymore.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: And then after graduation,
14:54
SPEAKER_01: so I finished my doctoral thesis and I stayed as much in the lab as I could and saw
14:58
SPEAKER_01: the least amount of patients.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: And then I started tech companies.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: It had nothing to do with longevity.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: Just at that point, I didn't find anything that was high impact.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: And then I built two tech companies, sold two tech companies.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: And now,
15:12
SPEAKER_01: finally,
15:14
SPEAKER_01: since 2019, 2020,
15:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm finally doing what I really want to do,
15:18
SPEAKER_01: which is trying to figure out how we can Allow people to live significantly longer.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: And when you said you chose to do the tech companies instead of the longevity field
15:26
SPEAKER_00: because you didn't see anything promising.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, after graduation, I looked at the field, right?
15:31
SPEAKER_01: And when I say promising for longevity,
15:35
SPEAKER_01: I do not mean, you know, we live healthier when we're 85.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: By the way,
15:38
SPEAKER_01: that's a great,
15:40
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:40
SPEAKER_01: it's A, it might be great business and B, it's also a very worthwhile cause, right?
15:45
SPEAKER_01: But For me, if you look at these morbidity curves, the older people get, the more they die.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: In the past, a lot of people were already dead by 50.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: Now people make it more healthy, healthy, healthy, and then they die.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: So it seems to be much easier from a scientific perspective
16:02
SPEAKER_01: to figure out how we can make people healthier longer.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: But then again,
16:06
SPEAKER_01: everybody since the beginning of time is somewhere dead between,
16:09
SPEAKER_01: you know, 85 and 95.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: And then once in a while, there's someone who makes it to 100 or 120 or something like that.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: So that health span is much easier to expand, it seems, than lifespan.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: So I always wanted to work on the heart problem because,
16:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:24
SPEAKER_01: if everybody else figures out how to live healthy,
16:26
SPEAKER_01: amazing,
16:26
SPEAKER_01: then I'll just,
16:27
SPEAKER_01: you know, take whatever they do, be it the treatment, be it the pill, whatever.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: But then I'd rather work on what can be done to them, Okay.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: So what did you see in 2019?
16:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nothing.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: That's my issue.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, you do make the switch from tech companies to going to... Oh, sorry.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: In 2020.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: So again,
16:46
SPEAKER_01: I looked at when I sold my last company in 2020,
16:50
SPEAKER_01: I again looked at the field and didn't find anything in this traditional longevity.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: Right.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: So...
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Then I said, okay, so of course I knew cryopreservation back then, right?
16:59
SPEAKER_01: And I was signed up with Alcon for many, many years.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: Because,
17:02
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:02
SPEAKER_01: it was a meaningful,
17:04
SPEAKER_01: if something happens to me, it might not be great yet, but at least it is a backup.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: At least it gives me a non-zero chance at the very least, right?
17:11
SPEAKER_01: And then I said, okay, so we're not going to figure out how to live longer.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: And I very much still fingers crossed that I'm wrong, but I need to build a stopgap measure.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: There needs to be a bridging technology that when people
17:25
SPEAKER_01: who are currently old can use it,
17:26
SPEAKER_01: of course,
17:27
SPEAKER_01: but also people who might grow,
17:29
SPEAKER_01: who might be 85 in 40 years or so,
17:32
SPEAKER_01: who have that bridging technology so that the rest of the world has more time
17:35
SPEAKER_01: to figure out how we live longer.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: When you sign up for Alcor, what does that mean?
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Do you do a membership?
17:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you sign up, basically you sign up with them, right?
17:43
SPEAKER_01: You sign all the contracts.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: Legally speaking, basically you sign a body donation agreement, right?
17:47
SPEAKER_01: You say,
17:47
SPEAKER_01: if I die,
17:48
SPEAKER_01: I would like to donate my body to that organization for long-term cryo storage,
17:52
SPEAKER_01: right?
17:53
SPEAKER_01: You pay a monthly fee and then usually you take out life insurance, right?
17:56
SPEAKER_01: And say, okay,
17:57
SPEAKER_01: so there's a life insurance policy and Somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000 US.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: And that life insurance policy pays out to the organization.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: And that is the money that covers long-term storage and the procedure.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: And do you get to go visit the site and see where you're going to win?
18:15
SPEAKER_01: You can, yeah, of course.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: I did not before signing up.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, I've been there a couple of times, but yeah.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: And part of it is when you die,
18:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, somebody has to be there to harvest you in the right way, right?
18:29
SPEAKER_00: How do they arrange that internationally?
18:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: So this was one of the reasons why we said,
18:35
SPEAKER_01: listen, apparently we need to build something on our own, right?
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Because a couple of my friends were signed up,
18:40
SPEAKER_01: and at some point we started thinking about how would this work
18:44
SPEAKER_01: if something would actually happen to us here in Europe, right?
18:47
SPEAKER_01: And then the answer was like, there was no good answer.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: I have a friend who...
18:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm probably going to get bits of this story wrong because it's only been told to me
18:57
SPEAKER_00: a couple times over Scotch.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: But I definitely have the basics right.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was somehow part of this Alcor network and somebody died.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: It was either a Burning Man or a party or possibly because there's two instances
19:13
SPEAKER_00: that I'm blending together.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: And this guy had to like be cutting off heads and Yeah,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: so we don't, by the way, don't do that at all.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, head prior preparation is not possible with us.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but I mean, it's for that reason.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: It is sort of, I mean, you only have this moment in time to do this right.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah,
19:30
SPEAKER_00: his buddy was part of,
19:33
SPEAKER_00: you know, signed up for Alcor, and then he was like a harvester.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know what they call it, but yeah, had to deal with this.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so fundamentally, we, of course, need to send teams as well, right?
19:42
SPEAKER_01: So we have teams, we have seven ambulances and teams all over Europe.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: We have now two in building, three ready, two in building in the US.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: California, New York, and there will be a second one in California.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: In Texas will be one, and then in Florida.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: So basically, these are medical teams.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: Think of them as mobile operating rooms with doctors and perfusionists and so on.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: If you're not 22 and ride a motorcycle or go bungee jumping or cave diving or any
20:15
SPEAKER_01: of those things, statistically people die at old age of a known disease.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: Where the doctors tell them, listen, the cancer that you have, it has metastasized now.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: It's not curative anymore.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: It's palliative.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: You have six months.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: And then people reach out to us.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: And they say, listen, the doctor has just told me, listen, this is not looking good.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: I see.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: On our side, the logistics starts, you know, the logistics wheels start turning, right?
20:46
SPEAKER_01: And then when doctors say, listen, this is now really, this is coming to an end.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: We think it's days to weeks.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: Then we reposition one of our teams to wherever the patient is, right?
20:57
SPEAKER_01: They might be in a hospital.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: They might be in a home hospital.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: They might be in a hospital.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: And then in quotation marks,
21:02
SPEAKER_01: we wait in front of the hospital or the location until the attending doctor says,
21:06
SPEAKER_01: we have tried everything.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: Nothing we've tried works.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: The only thing what we can do now,
21:11
SPEAKER_01: we can take the pain away potentially,
21:12
SPEAKER_01: but this person is going to die in the next couple of days.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: And then when they pronounce,
21:18
SPEAKER_01: right, so the heart stops and then the doctor legally declares that person dead.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Then we can take over.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: So in an ideal logistics way,
21:26
SPEAKER_01: we're standing in front of the room if the hospital allows us, right?
21:28
SPEAKER_01: The second,
21:28
SPEAKER_01: we're not touching the patient before they're legally pronounced,
21:31
SPEAKER_01: and we're not allowed to, and I think this also shouldn't be done.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: And then the second they die, immediately we're taking over.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: And then the procedure for cryopreservation starts.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: This episode is brought to you by Brex.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: I spend all of my time inside of
21:46
SPEAKER_00: the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots.
21:52
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22:00
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22:02
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22:04
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22:09
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22:19
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22:28
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22:40
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22:49
SPEAKER_00: I have a million questions, but let's do it while we're here.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Let's walk through what would happen.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: I want to go backwards in a minute, but while we're here, let's walk through.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I've just been declared I'm in wherever.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm in Zurich.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: Let's
23:04
SPEAKER_01: make you do a road trip.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm in Paris.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: I've just been pronounced legally dead.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: What does the next day look like?
23:12
SPEAKER_01: So basically what happens, right?
23:13
SPEAKER_01: When the heart stops, All the cells at the same time don't have oxygen anymore.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: And then they start basically a self-recycling process, right?
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Be it apoptosis or other processes.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: But they're basically fundamentally initially self-recycling.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: And they're energy dependent.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: So depending on how fast your metabolism runs,
23:29
SPEAKER_01: these recycling processes that is then leading to irrecoverable death,
23:34
SPEAKER_01: those are running faster.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: So what we want to do, we want to slow down these degradation processes.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: And for that, there's two things.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: We cool.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: And we do something similar to CPR.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Even though it's not CPR,
23:46
SPEAKER_01: because we don't want to resuscitate, so it's called CPS, cardiopulmonary support.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: So we give oxygen, we could do chest compressions, right?
23:52
SPEAKER_01: We stop the cells from dying, plus we cool down.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: And the further we cool down, the slower these degradation processes work.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: There's examples in medicine.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: Some people die.
24:05
SPEAKER_01: Usually common examples are when they go ice skiing and then fall into the ice or skiing.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: There's famous cases in every country.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: People can be resuscitated if they're cold.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: An hour after death, right?
24:19
SPEAKER_01: There's a saying in medicine that says you're only dead if you're warm and dead, right?
24:23
SPEAKER_01: Because cold protects you.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: So we do that, right?
24:26
SPEAKER_01: And then- With ice?
24:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, with ice initially, right?
24:30
SPEAKER_01: So we flow water around the body.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: We do chest compressions with these thumper devices so that no one needs to do it, right?
24:39
SPEAKER_01: We give oxygen.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: We give a range of medications like from anticoagulation, so anti-clotting medication and so on.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: Then we cool down further and further and further, right?
24:49
SPEAKER_01: And before we go under zero degrees Celsius,
24:52
SPEAKER_01: so where we would freeze,
24:54
SPEAKER_01: we start replacing the body, the water and the blood in the body.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: In the hospital.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: We can do that.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: So the hospitals usually don't allow it.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: For them, you know, the person is that their job in quotation marks is done, right?
25:06
SPEAKER_01: But we do it in these mobile operating rooms.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: So we can do it on site if the hospital allows.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: So far, hospitals have been very, very supportive, right?
25:14
SPEAKER_01: Because it is the wish of the person.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: And we're basically just executing the wish of the patient.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: So we do a large-scale operation.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: So it's basically open-heart surgery.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: It's just like you would in an operation room.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: And then we attack, we cannulate the ascending aorta, this big vessel in the body.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: We put a heart-lung machine on it.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: And then we push low-concentration cryoprotective agent first,
25:39
SPEAKER_01: wash our And then we ramp up the cryoprotective agent concentration.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: The further we ramp it up, the further we cool down.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: Because now the body is already protected against,
25:49
SPEAKER_01: to some degree at least, ice crystal formation.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: And then we do this further, further, and further.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: Depending on where we are, we either now bring the person directly to Switzerland in our case.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: We have underground cryo storage in Switzerland.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: It's not under the mountain, but it's a bit underground at least.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: And then there we cool down.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: First of all, we do a CT scan to evaluate the quality of preservation.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: If people allow us,
26:17
SPEAKER_01: we take micro samples of their spinal column or brain,
26:20
SPEAKER_01: like very, very small samples, right?
26:22
SPEAKER_01: But that only is done with consent,
26:24
SPEAKER_01: of course, to see if the fine structure of the brain looks good as well.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: And then CT scan, then we cool down over usually 100 hours.
26:35
SPEAKER_01: So initially very fast and very,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: very slow because otherwise you get thermal stress,
26:40
SPEAKER_01: you get fracturing, cracking of the structure.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: And then we put them into like...
26:46
SPEAKER_01: Large-scale,
26:48
SPEAKER_01: the ones that you explained from Russia,
26:50
SPEAKER_01: ours are from a medical product company, so they don't look Home Depot-like.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: They're like 12 feet high.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know,
27:03
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
27:04
SPEAKER_01: four feet in diameter about like really,
27:06
SPEAKER_01: really large stainless steel so-called doers.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: Like hard vacuum insulated.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: And from the outside, you can touch them, right?
27:14
SPEAKER_01: Whatever.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: And then on the inside, they're negative 320 Fahrenheit, negative 196 Celsius.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: So extremely cold temperature.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: And there at that temperature now you can,
27:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
27:24
SPEAKER_01: if this takes 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or 100 years,
27:26
SPEAKER_01: and I have no idea how long it will take.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: You can maintain this for decades and centuries at that temperature.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's at this really low temperature, but because you put in the cryoprotectant,
27:37
SPEAKER_01: the bodies.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: That allows you to do that.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: And so this whole process, How long is that the first part of just I'm outside the hospital?
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Like a couple hours, like four
27:47
SPEAKER_00: or five hours, right?
27:48
SPEAKER_00: And then I'm going on a road trip in the ambulance?
27:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: Or I'm going on like a private jet?
27:53
SPEAKER_01: Either one is possible.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: So there's like four ways how this can be done, right?
27:58
SPEAKER_01: So if you're very close to Switzerland, we're doing this all at our facility, right?
28:01
SPEAKER_01: If you're farther away,
28:01
SPEAKER_01: let's say you're in Madrid or you're in London or you're in Paris, right?
28:04
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere in Europe, right?
28:05
SPEAKER_01: Then we drive you back.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the US, we have ambulances here as well.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: So we do the procedure here.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: We then cool you to dry ice temperature.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: And then we just fly you over.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: So funny enough, initially we were like, this flying over part seems to be sketchy or difficult.
28:21
SPEAKER_01: Funny enough, that has been the easiest part ever.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: You just go with any of the big airlines.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: They put you into a cargo hold.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: At dry ice, of course, we put a tremendous amount of dry ice.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: And then you just arrive in Switzerland without having warmed up at all.
28:35
SPEAKER_01: And then we continue.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, what is the, is there like a car name for the bot?
28:40
SPEAKER_00: What's the customs on the?
28:41
SPEAKER_01: Yes, funny enough, initially this was also a bit of a,
28:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
28:44
SPEAKER_01: a topic where we were like,
28:45
SPEAKER_01: you know, this is not something that has been done every day.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: But we're now very good friends with all the,
28:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
28:50
SPEAKER_01: import-export people and the customs people and the Border Patrol people and so on.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: Funny enough, this is very simple.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: Like there has not been any issue at all with this.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: And have you been in the Amulet?
29:00
SPEAKER_00: Have you been in the Amulet?
29:01
SPEAKER_01: Many times.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: So whenever you do one of these forefront things,
29:07
SPEAKER_01: you need to get a,
29:09
SPEAKER_01: I very much agree with Elon Musk and these people,
29:11
SPEAKER_01: you need to be on the factory floor.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: You need to get a feeling for it.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: And so I've been part of it.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: So initially all cases, every one I was there, right?
29:20
SPEAKER_01: Now just for logistics reasons, sometimes it doesn't work.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: For example, let's say someone, you know, one of our members dies now in Europe, right?
29:25
SPEAKER_01: I will not be there quick enough, right?
29:28
SPEAKER_01: But for all of them, I'm either on site or I'm there with video.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: So all of our ambulances,
29:33
SPEAKER_01: they're outfitted with like,
29:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
29:36
SPEAKER_01: bi-directional audio,
29:37
SPEAKER_01: like multiple 4K cameras and like remote monitoring equipment and so on.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: So I can help and advise.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: How many times have you guys done this?
29:44
SPEAKER_01: So we have now 30-something people in long-term storage.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: Not all of them.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: We took over some from other organizations.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, a good chunk.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Mostly in Switzerland?
29:54
SPEAKER_01: No, all over Europe and the US.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: In fact, all of our last cases, for whatever reason, we're all in New York.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: And where's the storage in the US?
30:00
SPEAKER_01: There's no U.S. storage as of yet.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: But there will be one.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: We're now planning to build a second storage.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: So where are the U.S. ones all?
30:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they all go to Switzerland.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Oh, they all go to Switzerland.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay, okay.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: And I know I looked on the website.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have prices for this.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: It was somewhat similar to what you're describing.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: It's like in the US, it's like $220,000 US.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: So it's $55 a month, right?
30:27
SPEAKER_01: $55 a month, right?
30:28
SPEAKER_01: And that is your membership.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: That basically keeps the teams on standby for you, right?
30:32
SPEAKER_01: And of course, funds a bit of research and pushing forward, right?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: And then so that's a subscription, basically, right?
30:38
SPEAKER_01: You pay this.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: You sign up with us.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: You put a credit card.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: You pay $55 a month.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: And then you sign the contract.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: And then the contract stipulates that if you die at the time,
30:46
SPEAKER_01: you don't need to send that money to us now, right?
30:48
SPEAKER_01: Once you die,
30:49
SPEAKER_01: there needs to be 220,000 euros with the non-profit foundation in Switzerland,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: right?
30:54
SPEAKER_01: And that money now you either take out life insurance, right?
30:56
SPEAKER_01: We work with large life insurance organizations in Europe and the US and so on.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: Or you wire the money to us now or you wire it in the future or whatever, right?
31:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's the cost.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: It's not that expensive.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, on one hand, it's not that expensive.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, that's the minimum.
31:13
SPEAKER_01: So the private jet service, that's not included in that price.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: So that is the minimum that you need to charge to make cryopreservation work.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: Around 80 of that is for the procedure, and the rest is for long-term storage.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: And that money goes to an asset management foundation in Switzerland.
31:30
SPEAKER_01: They invest that money.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: And then pay for annual costs to keep you on cryostasis out of the return.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: Right.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: And then hopefully,
31:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:38
SPEAKER_01: let's say,
31:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:39
SPEAKER_01: the next 60, 80 years, you know, stock market performs like it did in the past.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: You wake up and you're just rich.
31:45
SPEAKER_01: You know, fingers crossed.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: Or at least there's enough money to whatever the procedure will cost to revive you.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the rest you get back.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: That would suck though because you could die like pretty well off and
31:55
SPEAKER_00: then you wake up and inflation has, it would be nicer to wake up with your money.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: So we're setting up an asset management, a separate asset.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: So there's one asset management foundation that is there to keep you in cryostasis, right?
32:08
SPEAKER_01: And there will be a second one now, will probably be in Lichtenstein.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: That trust or a foundation where at the end of your life,
32:14
SPEAKER_01: you can say, you know, half of my money goes to my children.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Half of that money goes into that trust or foundation.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: And then that trust invests that money, right, so that you don't get affected by inflation.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Because the thing is, when you're dead, you're not a legal entity anymore.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: So you cannot hold assets while you're dead.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: So you need to give them to another organization.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: And that organization in its statute says,
32:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:35
SPEAKER_01: when these people come back and these are the rules how they need to be back,
32:39
SPEAKER_01: And then we hand that money back.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: So we really have to trust you.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: This would be a good way to...
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Not me.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, I built this in a way so that... Because I will be there.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: I will be right next to you if you sign up.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: So for me, this is highly important that this does not rely on me.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: So it needs to be structurally sound from a governance standpoint,
33:00
SPEAKER_01: from a statute standpoint and so on so that when I go into cryostasis,
33:04
SPEAKER_01: which I hope I don't need to.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: I hope I just take the pill.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: But if that doesn't happen or if AI doesn't solve everything for us in a couple
33:11
SPEAKER_01: of years,
33:12
SPEAKER_01: but for the scenario that I need to be in cryostasis,
33:16
SPEAKER_01: then it's highly, highly important to me that this works fully without me.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: And the cold storage in Switzerland, it's what, like a cave or some...
33:26
SPEAKER_01: It's a research institute that we've built.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: So I set up a foundation.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: So I set up two foundations.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: One is a private benefit to the benefit of the people in cryostasis.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: And the other is a nonprofit foundation.
33:37
SPEAKER_01: And they've built a building a bit north of the Zurich Airport.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: It's a research institute.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: It has a lab, CT scanner, and an operation room, and whatever.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: And then it has one story underground built into a small hill.
33:51
SPEAKER_01: Long-term cryo storage, right?
33:53
SPEAKER_01: And of course, it's Switzerland.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: It's a safe country and so on.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: But being underground, some edge cases, you might be a bit more protected.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: Oh, right, yeah.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And there you are.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: You could go to Svalbard.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: They have the scene vault.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: You could.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: You could.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: There, the logistics might, in fact, be difficult.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've been there on a private jet.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: You can do it.
34:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, you can do it.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: It might not be 220K anymore.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: It might need to be a bit more expensive.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: I think for now, Switzerland is a good balance.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to fly into the Zurich airport.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: And then it still provides you that level of security.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: And in the future, to be fair, we have a backup agreement with an Australian organization.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: So if anything geopolitically goes wrong in Switzerland,
34:32
SPEAKER_01: we can relocate to Australia and vice versa.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: And then now the next one will be in the U.S., right?
34:37
SPEAKER_01: So if anything goes bad in Europe, you can go to the U.S.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: So down the line,
34:40
SPEAKER_01: my goal is to have multiple locations,
34:43
SPEAKER_01: maybe one there as well, to be able to mitigate geopolitical risk.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I went to Svalbard to...
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Bury the world's open source code in case of apocalypse that we would have software
34:56
SPEAKER_00: to reboot civilization.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, now we just need some people to implement the software again.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: There was lots
35:03
SPEAKER_01: of room.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: Room is not going to be the
35:06
SPEAKER_00: issue, I think.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
35:07
SPEAKER_00: they have these old coal mines that are defunct and so you've got all your miles
35:12
SPEAKER_00: of cave to go through.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: When you first brought this up in Switzerland, were regulators...
35:21
SPEAKER_00: Did they have questions or people were pretty OK with this?
35:24
SPEAKER_00: So the village where we are,
35:29
SPEAKER_01: there was carnival once.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: We were on the front page of their small carnival pamphlet or something.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: So there were not questions.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: So we met with them after a while.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: Because initially we started building and we didn't put a large banner up and say,
35:48
SPEAKER_01: listen, this is what we're doing here.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: And then Switzerland is a very liberal country.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: So they were like, listen, yeah, cool.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for letting us know, but what can we say?
35:57
SPEAKER_01: It's legal.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing against it.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: So we have, of course, very extensive expert opinions how Oh, this is legal and so on.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: It has not been litigated in most countries.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: In some it has, like in the UK and I think in Australia and the US as well to some degree.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: And then in the UK, for example, one of the highest courts decided that is a right of a person.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: Because there was a case where a young child,
36:23
SPEAKER_01: like 14 or something,
36:24
SPEAKER_01: died of cancer and one of their parents wanted to do it, the other didn't.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: And it was decided it is the right of that person to do that.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: So most countries,
36:32
SPEAKER_01: if you make that choice with informed consent,
36:36
SPEAKER_01: and that's very important for me,
36:37
SPEAKER_01: people need to know that, listen,
36:38
SPEAKER_01: you can be put into cryostasis right now,
36:40
SPEAKER_01: but we do not know when and if you can be taken out.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: The only thing, I'm very confident, the chance is higher than cremation.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, your choice is not do you want to be cryopreserved or this other great thing.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: The choice is do you want to be cryopreserved or do you want to be cremated or buried?
36:56
SPEAKER_01: And if that's the choice, I would always say, listen, I definitely want to be cryopreserved.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: So if you make that choice with informed consent,
37:03
SPEAKER_01: you make that for yourself,
37:05
SPEAKER_01: then so far all legislators and all,
37:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:10
SPEAKER_01: whenever it was argued in front of a court, have decided this is the person's right.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: All right, well,
37:16
SPEAKER_00: let's get into the reputation of some of this and where the technology has moved.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, some people get freaked out by this.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like, whatever, you're already dead.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: It's like, do whatever you're going to do.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: Of course, that's my argument, yeah.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
37:29
SPEAKER_00: I think, I don't know, there's a creepiness or something, you know, just around it.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: And then some people just like,
37:36
SPEAKER_00: whatever, just let life be life and let's not try to preserve this.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: But I think the biggest knock has always been...
37:43
SPEAKER_00: You know,
37:43
SPEAKER_00: so there's this aura,
37:44
SPEAKER_00: this mystique surrounding it,
37:45
SPEAKER_00: but then it was just like, look,
37:46
SPEAKER_00: this is kind of bullshit because nobody's bringing this thing back based on
37:51
SPEAKER_00: the way you've preserved it anyway.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: So it's,
37:54
SPEAKER_00: it's just, it's,
37:55
SPEAKER_00: there's a bit of false hope in all this barring some incredible miracle in
38:00
SPEAKER_00: the future where you can reverse this damage that you've already done to this thing.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: So what,
38:04
SPEAKER_00: what do you And I don't know if we're calling out alcohol or just the field
38:09
SPEAKER_00: in general.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: What do you guys do that's different that gives us more hope that this might work?
38:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: So first of all, I think miracles do happen sometimes, right?
38:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, iPhones are miracles.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: If you go 50 years back, Iphones are unimaginable, right?
38:22
SPEAKER_01: So space flight, so are heart transplantations, right?
38:26
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of new stuff that comes around feels like a miracle first, right?
38:30
SPEAKER_01: But of course,
38:31
SPEAKER_01: I definitely do not want to rely on like,
38:33
SPEAKER_01: you know, fingers crossed, let's hope for miracles, right?
38:36
SPEAKER_01: So my position is the following.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: So cryopreservation in the very beginning, you know, was very low quality.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: We didn't fully know that it's like 50 years ago, right?
38:47
SPEAKER_01: Now we have a better understanding of what needs to be preserved that based
38:52
SPEAKER_01: on our current understanding of neuroscience, this might work, right?
38:56
SPEAKER_01: We ran a large study with neuroscientists to ask them like,
38:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:59
SPEAKER_01: what are the parts of the brain that need to be kept around so
39:03
SPEAKER_01: that you're kept around, right?
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Your memories, your personality, your identity, all of that, right?
39:08
SPEAKER_01: And now the field needs to be able to preserve that.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: And then once we have that fully done and all the check marks,
39:17
SPEAKER_01: then we need to move on figuring out based on whatever new knowledge comes out,
39:21
SPEAKER_01: what in addition could you do?
39:22
SPEAKER_01: So I think about this in the following way.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: I want to wake up in the future and whoever wakes me up tells me,
39:28
SPEAKER_01: dude, you could have stopped optimizing 20, 30 years before you did.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: You preserved yourself way higher in quality than you would have needed to.
39:38
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: Fine.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: I want that.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: So our organization, we will never say, and we're quite adamant.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: So I'm on Until Lab's website right now.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: It's been a while since I reported on them.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: I think I did the first story ever when they came out.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: So some of my knowledge will be a little dated.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: But if I remember Laura Deming and Hunter,
40:27
SPEAKER_00: her co-founder, I mean,
40:28
SPEAKER_00: I think their central argument is they're not taking that risk
40:33
SPEAKER_00: that you're – You're taking, I think, cryopreservation doesn't work as is today.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what they want to work on.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: And so they've been doing these experiments with.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: And they should.
40:44
SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely so.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: So we do a lot of research as well, right?
40:48
SPEAKER_01: So they do only research.
40:49
SPEAKER_01: We do research and we provide it as a service, right?
40:52
SPEAKER_01: Now, I think this is, by the way, a totally valid path to do it like that, right?
40:57
SPEAKER_01: I chose the path that we're taking for two reasons.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: A, I do not want to be distracted by organs.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: If you take the path like we want to research it now,
41:07
SPEAKER_01: maybe we want to take VC money, right, and so on, you need to have a product soon.
41:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, VCs want to divest after, you know, 10 years or whatever.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: And there might be some evergreen funds now and so on that have a longer horizon.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: But by and large, you need to do something that works financially soonish, right?
41:22
SPEAKER_01: So that forces you to think about organs, right?
41:25
SPEAKER_01: Organs in the future, you know, you can almost 3D print organs now.
41:28
SPEAKER_01: Organs is not going to be the issue.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: So I want my teams and my researchers to think about the brain and the brain only.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: Are there any commercial applications or great commercial applications,
41:39
SPEAKER_01: except for maybe spaceflight, right?
41:41
SPEAKER_01: Are there any great ones for preserving brains right now?
41:44
SPEAKER_01: Not so much.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: Just Bexorg.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure, for research and so on.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: There are some, but it's less so.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, the organ preservation market is a much bigger market for now.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: So I want to focus on that.
41:57
SPEAKER_01: And then the second reason is the following.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think,
42:01
SPEAKER_01: so if someone has cancer today, right,
42:04
SPEAKER_01: let's say,
42:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
42:05
SPEAKER_01: 45-year-old,
42:06
SPEAKER_01: and unfortunately we have a good amount of very young people who are in cryostasis
42:09
SPEAKER_01: with us, you know, even 30-year-olds, right?
42:12
SPEAKER_01: If someone has cancer today and they're being told that they have six months
42:16
SPEAKER_01: to live,
42:17
SPEAKER_01: for them the decision is not,
42:19
SPEAKER_01: do I want this great technology that might be in the 20 years?
42:22
SPEAKER_01: For them the decision is now, do I want to be cremated or do I want to be cryopreserved?
42:27
SPEAKER_01: So from a moral perspective,
42:29
SPEAKER_01: given comprehensive informed consent,
42:33
SPEAKER_01: I think it's the right thing to offer this now.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: And it's our obligation to ensure that informed consent.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: It's our obligation to push the technology forward so it gets better.
42:42
SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a strong argument to be made that you should do this now as well
42:47
SPEAKER_01: because otherwise these people would get cremated.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: And then One last argument is I think it is acceptable if in the future it turns out
42:57
SPEAKER_01: that someone we cryopreserved cannot be revived.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, we just didn't preserve the thing that needs to be preserved.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: What is not acceptable?
43:05
SPEAKER_01: Acceptable is that we decide based on current and incomplete knowledge
43:10
SPEAKER_01: that we do not preserve that person because we think it might not work.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what do we know what is possible in 100 years?
43:16
SPEAKER_01: And in the future, it turns out that person could have been revived.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: So from a moral perspective,
43:21
SPEAKER_01: we decided that we'd rather take that path Where we might preserve people
43:25
SPEAKER_01: that cannot be revived in the future.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: But we err on the side.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: We err on that side.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: Instead of running the risk that we currently say, no, we think this doesn't work yet.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: Go for cremation.
43:37
SPEAKER_01: And then in the future, it turns out that it would have been possible.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: So how many people do... You said you have about 30.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: How many are head versus body?
43:46
SPEAKER_00: So we don't do head at all.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: Like head, like, you know, if you want to talk about, you know...
43:51
SPEAKER_01: The icky feeling that some people had, most of that comes from head people.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: And I get that to some degree.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: So we do either whole body or you can have your brain preserved like in
44:00
SPEAKER_01: the brain biobank, right?
44:01
SPEAKER_01: Just the brain.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, so how many do body versus brain?
44:04
SPEAKER_01: So it's like almost everybody does whole body.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: So like 80, 90%.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we started out just doing whole body.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: We added on brain for people who just say, listen, I cannot afford it.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: I want to do it, but I cannot afford it.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: And we can offer brain much more affordably.
44:20
SPEAKER_00: So we've done a story on Bexorg,
44:24
SPEAKER_00: and we've done a video, which please go to our Substacker YouTube channel.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: You can see it.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: So people have died.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: They get the human brain.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: They have a perfusion device that they've built and a proprietary fluid based
44:40
SPEAKER_00: on worms that they pump into the body.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, they say today they can keep...
44:47
SPEAKER_00: Sort of bring the brain back after death in this biologically functional way.
44:55
SPEAKER_00: And they can do that for a day or two.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: I think they have a line of sight.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to reveal too much,
45:01
SPEAKER_00: but I think they have a line of sight on weeks and then maybe months at some point.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: And then, yeah, I mean, is there a world where instead of doing this whole...
45:13
SPEAKER_00: Cooling process and everything,
45:14
SPEAKER_00: you just keep a brain on the brain equivalent of a heart-lung,
45:18
SPEAKER_00: a perfusion device just indefinitely.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: Probably, as
45:22
SPEAKER_01: of today, probably not.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: You could maybe do that, but it would still age, right?
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Because aging, a good factor of aging It's just the metabolism.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: Just that stuff is going on, right, makes, you know, lets you age or the effects of that.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: So if you keep it on some, you know, if you keep the metabolism running, then if you could...
45:44
SPEAKER_01: But for all, I think it's probably not possible for that purpose.
45:47
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair,
45:48
SPEAKER_01: probably, again,
45:49
SPEAKER_01: and I always say that if AI solves everything for us soon, right,
45:52
SPEAKER_01: then of course all my predictions of the future are not worth it anyway, right?
45:56
SPEAKER_01: But let's say that does not happen,
45:57
SPEAKER_01: then probably all this longevity stuff will take a bit longer than we might hope.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: So we probably need to maintain cryostasis for decades, potentially.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: Becks are...
46:08
SPEAKER_00: And I think they've backed this up that they turn off kind of the thinking,
46:11
SPEAKER_00: feeling parts of the brain for the work they're doing.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: I suppose you would want to,
46:17
SPEAKER_00: you would just be this brain in a vat, possibly just screaming for decades.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, fingers crossed that that would not be the case.
46:25
SPEAKER_01: That's where we go into dystopian science fiction world.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: Luckily, dystopias are not that likely.
46:29
SPEAKER_01: I think I'm very, I very much thinks we're going towards that.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: A positive future.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: But that would not be great.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: Once you're in cryostasis, nothing goes on.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: So all metabolic processes, everything.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: At these temperatures, atoms can wiggle around a bit.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: But there's nothing going on.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: You don't have consciousness during time in cryostasis.
46:49
SPEAKER_01: So it's similar.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know how, of course, this will be.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: But the closest I think we currently have is being under general anesthesia.
46:56
SPEAKER_01: Where you close your eyes, and then you wake up.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: And then you ask the doctors like, you know, when are we starting?
47:01
SPEAKER_01: The doctor's like, what do you mean?
47:02
SPEAKER_01: We've been operating on you for 12 hours, right?
47:04
SPEAKER_01: Because you don't have any experience of that time.
47:07
SPEAKER_01: So cryopreservation as much, of course, we currently can say will be the same.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: You close your eyes and you open your eyes and it might have been 50 years in the future.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: When you take the samples today that you're able to take,
47:17
SPEAKER_00: how much degradation do you see in the brain tissue?
47:21
SPEAKER_01: So it really depends.
47:22
SPEAKER_01: So it depends on under which conditions those cryopreservation cases are being done, right?
47:26
SPEAKER_01: So we always try to start minutes after death.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: Your heart stops, ideally in a window where you could, in theory, resuscitate that person.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: But of course, you don't do that because they have a terminal condition.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: But in that window...
47:41
SPEAKER_01: But sometimes logistically,
47:44
SPEAKER_01: theoretically someone could call us now and say,
47:45
SPEAKER_01: listen, my friend who has signed up with you guys just died.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, thousands of miles away.
47:53
SPEAKER_01: And then we would still rush and get there because it was their choice.
47:58
SPEAKER_01: But at that point the quality is not great at all.
48:02
SPEAKER_01: We still do it because it was their decision and based on that moral framework
48:06
SPEAKER_01: that it's better to have someone in the future who cannot be revived.
48:09
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell them that Go in the bathtub with a bunch of ice while you're on your way?
48:13
SPEAKER_01: Realistically, that's not really possible, right?
48:14
SPEAKER_01: Because if someone dies and they die under some conditions,
48:17
SPEAKER_01: they're in a hospital and they don't let you to put ice in a bathtub
48:21
SPEAKER_01: or anything like that.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: Cooling is generally good, right?
48:24
SPEAKER_01: But logistics mostly prohibits any stronger interventions.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's do the idealized case.
48:31
SPEAKER_00: Everything's gone your way.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: You've nailed it, and then you're able to take a sample after a year.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: What do you find in the brain?
48:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: So it was published recently by a case that was done under, and you can check it out.
48:50
SPEAKER_01: It's in MIT Tech Review and in multiple big publications,
48:54
SPEAKER_01: where a brain was preserved under close to ideal circumstances.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: And there,
48:59
SPEAKER_01: so what you do,
49:00
SPEAKER_01: right, we do CT scanning to see if the cryoprotective agent has gotten everywhere.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: That gives you, that shows us that we haven't frozen anything.
49:07
SPEAKER_01: What you can also do,
49:08
SPEAKER_01: you can take these small samples,
49:09
SPEAKER_01: right, and then you put them into an electromicroscope.
49:11
SPEAKER_01: And then you see,
49:12
SPEAKER_01: you zoom in like crazy,
49:13
SPEAKER_01: and then you see the fine structure of how the brain is supposed to look.
49:18
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
49:19
SPEAKER_01: you might see some small changes,
49:21
SPEAKER_01: but by and large,
49:22
SPEAKER_01: I think the general consensus is that that is how it's supposed to look.
49:26
SPEAKER_01: And some people might disagree and they like slightly different procedures and so on.
49:30
SPEAKER_01: But based on,
49:32
SPEAKER_01: so I think there's at least a very,
49:33
SPEAKER_01: and of course,
49:34
SPEAKER_01: I can't say what happens in the long future,
49:36
SPEAKER_01: in the far future, but I think there's a very good probability that this will work.
49:40
SPEAKER_01: We recently asked doctors,
49:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:42
SPEAKER_01: if you get cryopreserved under good conditions,
49:45
SPEAKER_01: what's the probability that you will come back?
49:47
SPEAKER_01: And the median was 25.5%.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: That's the average opinion of doctors in the US, sample size like 300 something.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: 25.5% is the median estimated probability that it works.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: Every day we do operations where the probability of survival is way less than that.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: To be fair,
50:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm not making a claim doctors have a great,
50:10
SPEAKER_01: you know, have much cryopreservation background knowledge.
50:14
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's more like a gut feeling.
50:17
SPEAKER_01: It's more like a gut feeling.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: So I would not rely necessarily on doctors making that call.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: But I think cryopreservation should be a choice.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: If you say the chance is higher than zero, That's enough for me.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: Because that's the only thing I think I can strongly defend.
50:37
SPEAKER_01: Everything else depends on actually bringing people back so
50:39
SPEAKER_01: that you can calculate some probability.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: So I want our people,
50:43
SPEAKER_01: our customers and our members,
50:45
SPEAKER_01: I want them to make the choice based on only and exclusively the knowledge
50:50
SPEAKER_01: the chance is higher than cremation.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: We happen to live in a moment in time
50:54
SPEAKER_00: where there's different bets along this problem in many ways.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: One would be Creating some kind of whole brain emulation, digitizing a brain.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: There's different ways you could go about that, but that's in the realm of feasible.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: I think intellectually there's the idea of Whole body,
51:18
SPEAKER_00: rejuvenation,
51:19
SPEAKER_00: replacing all your,
51:20
SPEAKER_00: rejuvenating your organs as you go and just refreshing this thing that we have.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: And then there's what you guys are doing.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: There's probably a couple other things sort of around the edges.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: You could have picked any one of these paths.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: So why, why this particular, why did you put your effort and time into this path?
51:42
SPEAKER_01: My whole career has been trying to figure out how not to die.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: So I care for money as a functional necessity to do what I want to do.
51:56
SPEAKER_01: If I, you know, many years in the future have a small yard or a big yard, I don't care.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: And to be fair,
52:00
SPEAKER_01: if cryopreservation works at some point,
52:01
SPEAKER_01: it's going to be a big yard because then it's going to be great business and
52:04
SPEAKER_01: the best business in the world, right?
52:06
SPEAKER_01: But this is not why I'm doing this.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: I do this because I do not want to die, right?
52:11
SPEAKER_01: So I chose this path.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: So the rejuvenation,
52:16
SPEAKER_01: be it partial reprogramming and all of these things, they've been recent hot topics.
52:21
SPEAKER_01: And I have my fingers crossed that this stuff works.
52:24
SPEAKER_01: But then again, my research was mostly in cancer research.
52:28
SPEAKER_01: For decades, the best cancer research people in the world, and we have the same IQ as they do.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: They've said for many, many decades...
52:37
SPEAKER_01: We will have cancer cured in 10 years.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: In 2005,
52:40
SPEAKER_01: and this is always the example I have on slides,
52:42
SPEAKER_01: in 2005,
52:43
SPEAKER_01: the National Cancer Institute,
52:45
SPEAKER_01: they had this so-called directives challenge where they said,
52:47
SPEAKER_01: our declared goal and all the big cancer associations signed onto that.
52:51
SPEAKER_01: Our big goal is to cure cancer in 10 years.
52:54
SPEAKER_01: That would have been 2015.
52:56
SPEAKER_01: Since then, we've spent around half a trillion on cancer research.
53:00
SPEAKER_01: And of course, cancer,
53:01
SPEAKER_01: as everybody knows,
53:01
SPEAKER_01: it's more than 10 years now since that endpoint and still second leading cause
53:05
SPEAKER_01: of death.
53:06
SPEAKER_01: So my point is prediction in medicine and biotech and biological research are very, very hard.
53:13
SPEAKER_01: If I'm wrong, I'm happily wrong.
53:15
SPEAKER_01: Then I don't need to be cryopreserved and I just take the pill, do the treatment, whatever.
53:18
SPEAKER_01: Fine by me.
53:20
SPEAKER_01: But if I'm right, then,
53:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
53:22
SPEAKER_01: and again,
53:23
SPEAKER_01: AI doesn't solve everything,
53:24
SPEAKER_01: then I'm going to be 85 at some point and someone tells me I have six weeks to live.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: At that point,
53:28
SPEAKER_01: I want to make sure that I have a good backup and give the other people,
53:32
SPEAKER_01: the other directions, more time.
53:34
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, you also need to have the skill set to do something, right?
53:38
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know,
53:40
SPEAKER_01: these other real deep research paths,
53:42
SPEAKER_01: I think this is not fully my interest or skill set.
53:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: Are you venture backed?
53:49
SPEAKER_00: Who's paying for this?
53:49
SPEAKER_01: We're not very traditional institutional,
53:53
SPEAKER_01: so basically not money that says we want to have return after X years, right?
53:58
SPEAKER_01: So we're an organization that says we have a long-term goal and we're not going to pivot.
54:04
SPEAKER_01: If there's something where you can make more money tomorrow,
54:07
SPEAKER_01: tough luck, then that's not what we're doing.
54:09
SPEAKER_01: We're here as a mission-driven organization that makes it work.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, when it works, it's going to be great business.
54:18
SPEAKER_01: And it might be the biggest business ever at that point, right?
54:21
SPEAKER_01: So there could be tremendous returns.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: They're just usually probably,
54:24
SPEAKER_01: I think, a bit further out than the normal investment horizon of a VC fund.
54:28
SPEAKER_01: So we usually have, our investors are the people who are normally limited partners in VC funds.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: So family offices, ultra high net worth people, The founders of well-known large companies.
54:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, is anybody public?
54:44
SPEAKER_01: I haven't asked recently.
54:46
SPEAKER_01: They're not super secretive.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: They talk about it and so on.
54:50
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, big companies.
54:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
54:54
SPEAKER_01: And then, yeah,
54:55
SPEAKER_01: family offices,
54:55
SPEAKER_01: people who say, We have a good amount of investors who are also our customers.
54:59
SPEAKER_01: We have customers who then became investors, right?
55:03
SPEAKER_01: Who say, I'm okay with this taking longer.
55:06
SPEAKER_01: And even if I just get a great credit preservation down the line, I don't see money.
55:10
SPEAKER_01: I've talked to some people who said, listen, I'm not doing this for me to see the return.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing this for my grandkids to see the return.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, listen, hopefully it doesn't take that long, but, you know, fine by me.
55:21
SPEAKER_00: It's always the concern, though, that...
55:24
SPEAKER_00: This company might, a company that does this might go out of business.
55:27
SPEAKER_00: And so how much, I mean, how do you give people peace of mind that you've raised enough money?
55:31
SPEAKER_00: Do you guys say how much you've brought in?
55:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:34
SPEAKER_01: So on the core business, we are ramen profitable.
55:39
SPEAKER_01: So we could,
55:40
SPEAKER_01: if we don't spend on research, right,
55:42
SPEAKER_01: if we just bring the team down to a size where we can do all the procedures and so
55:46
SPEAKER_01: on, we would be able to operate it profitable.
55:48
SPEAKER_01: So we have a lot of downside protection, but of course my goal is to push it forward.
55:53
SPEAKER_01: All my last companies I ran like every other startup where sometimes you wake up
55:58
SPEAKER_01: and you have three weeks of money left and now you need to quickly raise
56:01
SPEAKER_01: and get some safe agreements in otherwise you're not going to make payroll.
56:05
SPEAKER_01: This organization we run a bit more conservatively.
56:09
SPEAKER_01: So we always have a year or two years or even three years of money on the account
56:13
SPEAKER_01: when we raise new money.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: We have a corporate structure where...
56:19
SPEAKER_01: Basically, how much we dilute and how much governance works are almost completely separated.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: So even if we dilute more and need to take more money,
56:26
SPEAKER_01: we still keep control of the organization.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: And again, the deal with investors is this is a long-term goal.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: If I want to do sell cryoposition tomorrow, they can kick me out.
56:35
SPEAKER_01: But if we're keeping on mission and working on human cryopreservation
56:39
SPEAKER_01: for future revival, then I have a lot of control.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: We as founders have a lot of control.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: And then the long-term storage is totally independent from us.
56:50
SPEAKER_01: There is any way no money to be made in that field.
56:53
SPEAKER_01: So that is done by non-profit foundations.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: They luckily have very large scale donors, philanthropic donors.
57:01
SPEAKER_01: So they have years and years and years of money and have basically a financial model
57:06
SPEAKER_01: where the return of that money that is being put aside at
57:09
SPEAKER_01: that asset management organization pays for annual cost.
57:13
SPEAKER_01: So as long as you can get at least 1-2% above inflation in returns,
57:20
SPEAKER_01: You maintain that structure just off the interest or the returns.
57:23
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
57:23
SPEAKER_01: since we have a 60 to 80 years investment horizon,
57:26
SPEAKER_01: because revival is not going to be 10 years,
57:29
SPEAKER_01: then
57:31
SPEAKER_01: you can invest with a target of 6 to maybe 8 or maybe even 10% annual return
57:38
SPEAKER_01: because you have such a long investment horizon.
57:39
SPEAKER_01: So if it goes down, so what?
57:41
SPEAKER_01: So as much as I currently can think of,
57:44
SPEAKER_01: the structure should not go out of business anytime soon.
57:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's still not totally clear to me.
57:51
SPEAKER_00: Why not just open a European branch of Alcor since it is recognized?
57:55
SPEAKER_00: What do you guys do that's different?
57:56
SPEAKER_00: I still can't, I'm
57:58
SPEAKER_01: not 100%.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: So when I decided in 2019 that this is what I will do,
58:01
SPEAKER_01: I traveled around the US and around Europe and met everybody in the space,
58:06
SPEAKER_01: researchers, Alcor, other organizations and so on.
58:08
SPEAKER_01: Because I wanted to understand.
58:09
SPEAKER_01: So they've been around for 50 years, right?
58:12
SPEAKER_01: Worldwide back then,
58:14
SPEAKER_01: where like four and a half thousand people at all organizations were signed up
58:18
SPEAKER_01: So there's more super yachts in the world than people signed up
58:21
SPEAKER_01: for cryopreservation.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to like, why is that?
58:25
SPEAKER_01: And of course, they're not like 100 people team.
58:28
SPEAKER_01: So there's also not much funding.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: And then I met all of them.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: And after that, I understood.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: And it's similar to how before there was Uber and now Waymo and so on, there were taxis.
58:40
SPEAKER_01: And in theory, they kind of do the same thing.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: So the question would have been,
58:43
SPEAKER_01: Uber, why don't you just open another branch of that taxi company?
58:48
SPEAKER_01: And then if you meet that taxi company, you understand these are totally different things.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: So I want to run this.
58:56
SPEAKER_01: They're non-profits.
58:57
SPEAKER_01: Non-profits are great for long-term storage,
58:59
SPEAKER_01: but non-profits are not great of pushing it, of having drive in the company.
59:07
SPEAKER_01: So I think they've lost that.
59:09
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, they've been doing something for 50 years and signups have not been that fast.
59:14
SPEAKER_01: So I understand why this is not easy to maintain this push for many, many decades.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: But I want to have that push.
59:20
SPEAKER_01: I want to have that startup-like Urgency and drive and so on.
59:24
SPEAKER_01: So we grow right now.
59:26
SPEAKER_01: We grow 20 times faster than the next one.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: And that's still not fast enough, right?
59:31
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't get me to millions of people signed up, right?
59:33
SPEAKER_01: But that kind of shows the difference.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: Like what startup can say we grow 20 times faster?
59:38
SPEAKER_01: And this is half because we're starting to do a good job,
59:41
SPEAKER_01: but it's also half because everybody else is just way too slow.
59:45
SPEAKER_01: So this had unfortunately not been a thing.
59:48
SPEAKER_00: I would have already left if that would have been the case.
59:50
SPEAKER_00: You wanted this clean slate.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: Clean slate.
59:53
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to have a governance structure where stuff can be done.
59:56
SPEAKER_01: I still remember,
59:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't know who I talked to,
59:57
SPEAKER_01: but one of these organizations I talked to and I said,
59:59
SPEAKER_01: listen, guys, We built all this online signup flow and webpage and so on and new.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_01: If you want to have it, guys, take it as well.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_01: It helps the market.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_01: Competition is not our issue.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: And then I said, changing the webpage is a board decision for us.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, uh-huh, okay.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_01: I start to understand why stuff isn't fast here.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_01: And of course, I want nothing of that.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_01: So we have this combined structure where long-term storage is with nonprofits.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_01: Great, but everything is horribly slow there, but it's supposed to be.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: It's supposed to give safety.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_01: And then we have a startup-like,
1:00:31
SPEAKER_01: or a startup speed organization that does not need to deal with the slowness of
1:00:38
SPEAKER_01: a foundation that can run max speed.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_00: So you seem like you have this Silicon Valley-like energy.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: When I've been to Switzerland and I've been to startups, they do not.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_00: They are quite sleepy.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: And even though it's a startup.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: I like to hang out there as a tourist, but I would not like to build there.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_00: So why not have the company actually based in the US?
1:01:00
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_01: So to be fair, in Switzerland, we only have the slow foundation.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_01: Switzerland is perfect for that.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, everything is safe, everything is secure and so on.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: The company is based in Berlin in Germany,
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: which is still not Silicon Valley, but there's a bit more drive there.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_01: The problem for me was I started a lot of companies in the past on the site,
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: like not companies that are startups, but businesses.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: And now a good amount of them are profitable.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_01: And I don't run them, of course, they have all management.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_01: The problem is Germany has extremely strong exit taxation.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: So if I would ever leave as a tax resident in Germany, it would not be...
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: Millions and millions and millions.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: Not painful, but not, because it's dry taxation, right?
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: It's not like, you know, it's dry taxation of the valuation of those companies.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: And since they're not startups, they don't have venture capital, so they're mostly owned by us.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: So unfortunately, that doesn't work.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: So our structure right now, how we do it, right?
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: We have a U.S. subsidiary.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_01: We basically do the best of both worlds.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_01: We will probably flip the organization to a U.S. holding, right?
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: So that it's easier to raise here.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_01: And then we have a distributed team that has a European headquarters or like
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: a European location, which we anyway need because we cover Europe, right?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: And then it has a US one to cover the US.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_00: Since euthanasia is increasingly being legalized and I know is legal in
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: at least parts of Europe,
1:02:31
SPEAKER_00: why not,
1:02:32
SPEAKER_00: can you not piggyback on that and actually start this process exactly
1:02:37
SPEAKER_00: when you want even before the The body has been declared dead.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, before you cannot, right?
1:02:45
SPEAKER_01: So euthanasia,
1:02:46
SPEAKER_01: and most to be fair, like,
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: as you said,
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: like in some parts of the world, this is still a bit of contentious topic.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: So is euthanasia, right?
1:02:52
SPEAKER_01: And combining two contentious topics, usually both sides don't like to do that at all.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_01: So what you can do,
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: you can sequentially do that in theory,
1:03:01
SPEAKER_01: but we are not involved in the euthanasia part at all.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_01: We don't touch that even with a 10-foot pole.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: Because combining these things, you get in a lot of ethical and legal and moral issues.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: But of course,
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: if someone says, listen,
1:03:14
SPEAKER_01: I have decided to do that euthanasia path and I qualify and I've talked to all
1:03:17
SPEAKER_01: the psychiatrists and so on and that's fine.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: And then they sign up with us or are signed up with us.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_01: We're going to do our thing.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: But we're only going to do our things once we have a legal pronouncement by
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: an attending physician that says and then we can take over.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: Combining these two things is legally not possible and again has a lot of moral
1:03:35
SPEAKER_01: and ethical implications as well.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm racking my brain.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I can think of a sci-fi instance where this goes well.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_00: Usually you're...
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: Frozen in time,
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: you wake up,
1:03:45
SPEAKER_00: something quite drastic has happened in the world or to your personal relationships,
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: I guess,
1:03:52
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:03:52
SPEAKER_00: as a... To
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: be fair, how many sci-fi movies in general do you know that go well?
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: It's just dystopian futures make better movies, right?
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the culture series and so on,
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: there are some that are,
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: optimistic and utopian,
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: but most sci-fi movies,
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: this is not because of cryopreservation being potentially risky,
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: it's more so it makes for the better movies if something goes on.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, the...
1:04:14
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to run through this in my head.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you talked about grandchildren.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_00: Hopefully it doesn't take that long.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_00: That wouldn't be too scary if I woke up in a couple generations, I think.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: If this took two, three,
1:04:25
SPEAKER_00: four hundred years,
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: that could be quite exciting and also horrifying because it would just be...
1:04:31
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think everybody has this thought exercise of you're like from the 1700s
1:04:35
SPEAKER_00: and then you... Yeah, how would that work?
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: Cars and phones and the internet and you just feel so...
1:04:41
SPEAKER_00: Even if you were into it,
1:04:43
SPEAKER_00: you would feel so like whatever world you knew,
1:04:46
SPEAKER_00: this would be alarming,
1:04:47
SPEAKER_00: I think,
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: and things would be moving at this pace that you just,
1:04:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, On the plus side, you could take like a warm shower whenever you wanted.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: And things like that.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: But I feel like,
1:04:58
SPEAKER_00: man, if you were used to the pace of life in this previous era, it would be hard.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_01: It would be.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_01: So for me personally, right?
1:05:08
SPEAKER_01: So again, my choice is not do I want this or just do I want to continue living, right?
1:05:13
SPEAKER_01: Even if I would fully think I'm waking up 500 years from now, right?
1:05:17
SPEAKER_01: I would still say, listen, I'll figure it out.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_01: The idea of being dead forever and not seeing any of the amazing future,
1:05:25
SPEAKER_01: it's always worse for me.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_00: What if you wake up, everybody's already transhumanist, you're the dumbest, slowest...
1:05:32
SPEAKER_01: Fine by me.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_01: Give me a beach somewhere.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_01: Listen, I'll live on the beach.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_01: I'll surf all day long.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_01: I'll figure out new kite surfing.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: I'll figure it out.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: So I think there's a couple of futures that could happen.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: One could be as long as fundamental interactions of human life are still the same.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_01: Of course, not sitting in a studio like that.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_01: But if we have dinner together and we leave our phones in our pockets,
1:05:52
SPEAKER_01: then the interaction that we're having,
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: even the topics,
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: maybe not in Silicon Valley, but in the rest of the world, the topics are...
1:05:58
SPEAKER_01: Usually topics that you could have had 200 years ago, right?
1:06:02
SPEAKER_01: We eat with a fork and a knife and we have a glass and we have a plate and all of that stuff.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_01: The food is going to be exactly the same, right?
1:06:07
SPEAKER_01: So as long as these fundamental human interactions stay the same,
1:06:10
SPEAKER_01: I think you have a chance of being, you know, to catching up.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_01: Now, there could be a world where,
1:06:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:06:16
SPEAKER_01: everything is like super adventurous,
1:06:17
SPEAKER_01: like, you know, humans don't have the same form anymore, whatever, right?
1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, you can think of all these sci-fi things.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: I think in this case,
1:06:24
SPEAKER_01: I would assume,
1:06:25
SPEAKER_01: and I assume that's because history has gone like that,
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: that future societies would assign moral value to us.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_01: Because we as a society have over hundreds of years,
1:06:35
SPEAKER_01: we have assigned more and more and more moral value to other people.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: In the past, no one thought about it.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_01: Are people in rural countries, in third world countries, can we help them somehow?
1:06:47
SPEAKER_01: This was not a thing in the 1600s at all.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_01: So it's just how can we conquer them?
1:06:54
SPEAKER_01: So I think that the trajectory is we assign more moral values to others.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, of course, the future is going to be post-scarcity.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: So I would assume that if it's in their power,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: they would say,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: well, these humans from the past might not be able to catch up to us.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, let's give them Australia, right?
1:07:12
SPEAKER_01: And they can live there in their 21st century.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: And we slowly over years and decades catch them up.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_01: So I'm reasonably optimistic.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_01: And if this doesn't happen,
1:07:22
SPEAKER_01: if there is in fact a dystopian future,
1:07:24
SPEAKER_01: then I think the likelihood of waking up is negligible
1:07:27
SPEAKER_01: because dystopian futures don't care.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_01: The likelihood that there's this dystopian future that cares
1:07:32
SPEAKER_01: about bringing back people from the past.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't see that as a high probability.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_00: You should wake up with like a cyanide pill necklace.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: Ready in your...
1:07:41
SPEAKER_00: If it's like this Mad Max.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_00: You're like, all right, thanks.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, but no thanks.
1:07:44
SPEAKER_00: You can't even get a drink of water.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: It's like, ah.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: No, of course.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_01: Fair.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, in most futures, you know, even if it turns out that you really don't like it.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_01: Again, we've been saying like euthanasia and medical aid in dying has been more liberalized.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_01: And there are countries right now.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_01: I don't think any state in the U.S. allows that.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_01: But there are countries in the world that allow medical aid in dying just
1:08:06
SPEAKER_01: because you say my quality of life is not how I want it.
1:08:11
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:08:11
SPEAKER_01: You don't need to have any disease or anything.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: It's rare.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_01: But I would assume a future society would allow that more and for better or for worse.
1:08:17
SPEAKER_01: But so...
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: The likelihood that you're somehow stuck in the future and you just hate it,
1:08:24
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a risk I'm willing to take.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_00: And what would have to happen?
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: So you've put in this cryoprotectant.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_00: So I guess you remove that.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_00: Then you put blood back in.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_00: You begin a rewarming process.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_00: Process.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we'll move past the curing whatever killed you.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's assume you've done that.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we'll figure that out at some point.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you've cured the cancer.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: Or shortly after you wake up, you zap the tumor.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's essentially just what has to happen is you just got
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: to warm everything back up again.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, by and large.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_01: So what you would do, right?
1:09:00
SPEAKER_01: So currently, you cannot attempt to revive humans.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_01: For many reasons, but one being that you cannot warm them up fast enough.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_01: For variety of how these cryoprotective agents work,
1:09:09
SPEAKER_01: you need to cool them down very fast for them to work and you need
1:09:14
SPEAKER_01: to warm up even faster, right?
1:09:16
SPEAKER_01: Cooling down you can do, warming up you cannot do, it's just too fast.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_01: You don't get the,
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: it's like putting something in the microwave where on
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: the outside it's already burning and on the inside it's still a clamp of ice.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: Energy deposition in In large volumes is very difficult.
1:09:29
SPEAKER_01: And humans are too large and have a bad ratio of surface area to volume.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_01: So warming them up is very difficult.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_01: So you need to do that fast.
1:09:38
SPEAKER_01: You need to get rid of all the cryoprotective agent because at high temperatures,
1:09:41
SPEAKER_01: cryoprotective agent is toxic.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: So you need to get that gone, that needs to go out quick.
1:09:48
SPEAKER_01: And then due to that still existing toxicity and also due to,
1:09:52
SPEAKER_01: of course,
1:09:53
SPEAKER_01: cryopreservations being done under clinical emergency-like situations,
1:09:57
SPEAKER_01: there's going to be some damage.
1:09:58
SPEAKER_01: And there can even be a lot of damage.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_01: You would need to be able to repair that.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_01: The historic kind of how that would happen is molecular nanotechnology.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:10:10
SPEAKER_01: there was Eric Drexler and all these people who came up with the idea,
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: which of course currently is still,
1:10:14
SPEAKER_01: you know, not something that we can do right now.
1:10:17
SPEAKER_01: But then again, We're also talking about the far future here.
1:10:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, I remember you're refreshing my memory.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_00: When I went to Until Labs, they were working on this warming up process as well.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_00: And how do you tackle that problem where you get the heat?
1:10:31
SPEAKER_00: Right, no.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_01: So are we, right?
1:10:33
SPEAKER_01: There's like dielectric rewarming.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: There's nano rewarming.
1:10:36
SPEAKER_01: I think that's what Until Labs do.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: We're focused on high-frequency ultrasound rewarming, which is something that
1:10:40
SPEAKER_00: we're doing more.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: Because you've mentioned you're doing research.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: So that is a big part of the business.
1:10:44
SPEAKER_01: So for us, it's two parts of research, right?
1:10:46
SPEAKER_01: So since we have...
1:10:48
SPEAKER_01: All our stakeholders, right?
1:10:50
SPEAKER_01: They care more about being, you know, how can you put them into cryostasis better, right?
1:10:56
SPEAKER_01: Whereas the rewarming site in theory, right?
1:11:01
SPEAKER_01: Once you're in cryostasis,
1:11:02
SPEAKER_01: if this takes 20 years or 100 years or whatever, how many years, right?
1:11:04
SPEAKER_01: It does not really matter, right?
1:11:05
SPEAKER_01: Because you have the time.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_01: Now, so we focus more on how to put people with a focus on the brain into cryostasis
1:11:13
SPEAKER_01: and these rewarming technology we in quotation marks just do because if you could
1:11:19
SPEAKER_01: at some point show that you can cryopreserve a mouse or a rat and the rat is dead
1:11:27
SPEAKER_01: and now it's alive again.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_01: Suddenly people who currently do not care about this topic,
1:11:32
SPEAKER_01: from pharmaceutical companies to VCs and so on,
1:11:35
SPEAKER_01: suddenly everybody's like,
1:11:36
SPEAKER_01: oh my god, now there's actually real strong proof of principle and proof of concept.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_01: So we're doing some amount of the research for that subject.
1:11:44
SPEAKER_01: Side of things.
1:11:46
SPEAKER_01: We do not work that much on organs.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_01: If there's something great as a side product,
1:11:52
SPEAKER_01: if you find something that's great for organs, amazing, cool, we'll spin it out.
1:11:55
SPEAKER_01: But I want to have my team and everybody,
1:11:57
SPEAKER_01: and myself as well,
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: non-distracted,
1:12:00
SPEAKER_01: laser-focused on the big vision and the big mission,
1:12:03
SPEAKER_01: not distracted with all the other things that now suddenly I care about FDA approval
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: and so on, which you can have the whole team care about that.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: Which, of course,
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: for brains and whole humans is not something that you need or require right now.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's just a hospital.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm running,
1:12:16
SPEAKER_00: as you're talking,
1:12:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about what Neuralink wants to do if they get to the point
1:12:21
SPEAKER_00: where people are having elective brain implants.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_00: Elon always talks about it as if it's getting LASIK.
1:12:26
SPEAKER_00: I always picture these Neuralink stores that you show up to and some robot chuxes in your head.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_00: I could see where you guys would have...
1:12:36
SPEAKER_00: These places in different cities where you're trying to get the body to... Yeah.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_01: So if there's a time, right?
1:12:41
SPEAKER_01: If there's a time where AI...
1:12:44
SPEAKER_01: Super AI and superintelligence is not coming around,
1:12:47
SPEAKER_01: and of course beneficial super AI that is,
1:12:50
SPEAKER_01: that solves aging for us in quotation marks.
1:12:54
SPEAKER_01: So if that is a trajectory of the future,
1:12:56
SPEAKER_01: which again people are going to disagree how high that probability is,
1:12:59
SPEAKER_01: but then that time might come where we have not solved all diseases yet,
1:13:04
SPEAKER_01: but we have gotten really good at cryopreservation.
1:13:06
SPEAKER_01: Where basically now it's like,
1:13:08
SPEAKER_01: you know, and every hospital has its cryopreservation department.
1:13:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what I was asking.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_00: Are we heading to a world where all this stuff does just take place in a hospital?
1:13:17
SPEAKER_00: Because I was picturing the Neuralink store.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_00: I was picturing your thing.
1:13:20
SPEAKER_00: I was picturing the liver,
1:13:24
SPEAKER_00: you know, you go to freshen up your liver with a little IPSC infusion.
1:13:30
SPEAKER_00: Maybe this all just takes place in a hospital as this stuff matures.
1:13:33
SPEAKER_00: But there's something kind of different because you...
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: For some of these other things,
1:13:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you go to a hospital usually in these very bad circumstances.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_00: It's mostly about trying to fix something that's going very wrong in a moment.
1:13:46
SPEAKER_00: Whereas this other stuff is more elective.
1:13:47
SPEAKER_00: And like, do we end up with like a, Longevity clinic that has all these services.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_01: I think we are only adding up with that,
1:13:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:13:56
SPEAKER_01: the stores,
1:13:57
SPEAKER_01: the cryopreservation store,
1:13:59
SPEAKER_01: if biostasis and cryopreservation becomes fully reversible, right?
1:14:03
SPEAKER_01: Because at that point, like, you know, it needs to be fully reversible.
1:14:06
SPEAKER_01: It needs to be fully safe.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_01: It needs to have all the approvals.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_01: I think this is pretty far in the future.
1:14:10
SPEAKER_01: There could be another future where it is part,
1:14:13
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:14:13
SPEAKER_01: how now,
1:14:14
SPEAKER_01: you know, when the oncology department says, listen, we have tried everything.
1:14:19
SPEAKER_01: The person is going to die.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_01: Then we're going to transfer that person to the Palliative Care Department.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_01: Now in the future,
1:14:24
SPEAKER_01: once cryopreservation,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: of course,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: is much,
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: much better right now than it is today and has significantly more proof, right?
1:14:30
SPEAKER_01: There might be,
1:14:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:14:30
SPEAKER_01: a future where they say the oncology department will be like,
1:14:33
SPEAKER_01: okay, listen, where do you want to go?
1:14:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to go to the palliative care department or do you want to go to
1:14:36
SPEAKER_01: the cryopreservation department, right?
1:14:37
SPEAKER_01: The biostasis department, right?
1:14:39
SPEAKER_01: And then at that point,
1:14:41
SPEAKER_01: it might be under a clinical trial or like even maybe fully established as medicine,
1:14:46
SPEAKER_01: but not to a degree yet where it's like fully in and out,
1:14:48
SPEAKER_01: just reversible and you do it in a store-like.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: I think that is a far future.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_01: And then again,
1:14:53
SPEAKER_01: of course,
1:14:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm basically working for that probability of futures
1:14:58
SPEAKER_01: where AI does not solve longevity for us,
1:15:03
SPEAKER_01: where it's not like there's now a drug that can just cure all diseases
1:15:06
SPEAKER_01: or multiple treatments,
1:15:08
SPEAKER_01: where we still do die,
1:15:10
SPEAKER_01: but cryopreservation is significantly better than it is today.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_00: I say this with all due respect.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_00: You...
1:15:17
SPEAKER_00: You seem sane and rational.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:15:22
SPEAKER_00: We talked about the reputation historically.
1:15:24
SPEAKER_00: When I talked to Laura.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for the great compliment.
1:15:27
SPEAKER_00: When I talked to Laura, she's also brilliant.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_00: I think some people might find her ideas eccentric.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_00: I feel like you explained this in a very matter-of-fact way.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_00: You're quite transparent about what you guys can do.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_00: And can't do, you still must have people that are just like, you're fucking crazy.
1:15:45
SPEAKER_00: So funnily enough, way less than I thought.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_01: So when I started this organization, we had a crisis communication agency on retainer.
1:15:51
SPEAKER_01: Because we thought, listen, there's going to be constantly attacks.
1:15:54
SPEAKER_01: I had a bit of,
1:15:54
SPEAKER_01: before starting,
1:15:55
SPEAKER_01: I had a bit of fear that my friends are going to be like,
1:15:57
SPEAKER_01: listen, dude, don't call me anymore.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_01: None of that has happened.
1:16:01
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's partially because of communication, right?
1:16:05
SPEAKER_01: And so now I have a tremendous amount of interviews and so on.
1:16:10
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I have more interviews that I regretted in my last company,
1:16:13
SPEAKER_01: which was a standard med tech and telemedicine company than I have now.
1:16:18
SPEAKER_00: To be fair, maybe I got better at communication.
1:16:20
SPEAKER_01: Let's change this.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_01: What can we do?
1:16:23
SPEAKER_01: I think the point here is the following.
1:16:25
SPEAKER_01: I think cryopreservation has two things or three things that make it morally questionable.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_01: One is overselling it.
1:16:35
SPEAKER_01: Selling it, listen, just sign up, 80% chance, you're going to be fine.
1:16:39
SPEAKER_01: So informed content is important.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_01: The second point is important that I think you have some amount
1:16:44
SPEAKER_01: of maybe more obligation to make it accessible to everybody.
1:16:47
SPEAKER_01: Of course, that's not going to be the case in the future.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we're probably starting a really high price with the price.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_01: Private jets, right?
1:16:56
SPEAKER_01: Which is going to be a million or so, right?
1:16:59
SPEAKER_01: For people who say, listen, I don't care.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_01: Like, just do the best that is possible.
1:17:03
SPEAKER_01: And then last but not least,
1:17:05
SPEAKER_01: we have an obligation to put research,
1:17:08
SPEAKER_01: to push research both for putting people into cryovision and as time goes by,
1:17:12
SPEAKER_01: also revival.
1:17:14
SPEAKER_01: But apart from that, it is just a personal choice.
1:17:18
SPEAKER_01: And we ran those studies as well where we asked people,
1:17:20
SPEAKER_01: listen, cryopreservation, is it moral, is it immoral, should it be legal, right?
1:17:24
SPEAKER_01: And depending on how you ask and who you ask,
1:17:27
SPEAKER_01: it's somewhere 90 plus percent that say,
1:17:30
SPEAKER_01: I think in the US it was 2 point something
1:17:33
SPEAKER_01: or 3 point something percent say it should be illegal
1:17:36
SPEAKER_01: and 3 point something percent say it's immoral.
1:17:39
SPEAKER_01: There's almost nothing where 90% of people agree.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_01: So to be fair, there's a bit of a bias in that data is like internet users.
1:17:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not the general population.
1:17:47
SPEAKER_01: So we undersurveyed rural areas.
1:17:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's the same in Germany.
1:17:53
SPEAKER_01: It's the same in Switzerland.
1:17:57
SPEAKER_01: We very rarely had an online debate with some pastor recently.
1:18:02
SPEAKER_01: And that person was even like, yeah, Jesus,
1:18:04
SPEAKER_01: he didn't fully say that, but it was close to one step from Jesus would do it.
1:18:08
SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to some really adversarial, fun debate, but it's rare.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_01: But the cryonics name, word still hangs over this in a bad way.
1:18:20
SPEAKER_01: I think to some degree.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, in the past, and again, I think Alco and so on, they always...
1:18:26
SPEAKER_01: Did their best effort.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_01: They're good people.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_01: The organization is stable and has been around for a long time and all of that.
1:18:34
SPEAKER_01: But there were definitely people in the past that had
1:18:37
SPEAKER_01: a significantly more aggressive communication and stubbed people's toes
1:18:42
SPEAKER_01: and maybe were not as clear as saying, listen,
1:18:45
SPEAKER_01: this is a choice as a last-ditch effort similar to expanded access
1:18:49
SPEAKER_01: and compassionate use.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_01: Where in standard medicine,
1:18:52
SPEAKER_01: if you have an incurable disease and there's a clinical trial
1:18:56
SPEAKER_01: that Maybe there is something that could save you or extend your life a bit.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_01: More and more countries and almost all Western countries have that now
1:19:06
SPEAKER_01: where you can take unapproved medication because the alternative is dying.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_01: And now in states like Montana, you have Right to Try, where it's the same concept.
1:19:15
SPEAKER_01: If you give consent,
1:19:17
SPEAKER_01: and of course in my mind,
1:19:19
SPEAKER_01: absolutely if the alternative is dying,
1:19:22
SPEAKER_01: Then I think everybody has comprehensive and very extensive rights to say,
1:19:27
SPEAKER_01: I want to try this.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_01: Because in my worldview, if I die, that's it.
1:19:33
SPEAKER_01: And of course, in my worldview, that's it.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_01: There is nothing after.
1:19:38
SPEAKER_01: So I think that should be everybody's right.
1:19:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm not breaking any new ground here,
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: but there is,
1:19:43
SPEAKER_00: Kurt Vonnegut writes this great story about people that are living forever
1:19:46
SPEAKER_00: and how horrible society becomes and you've got to Grandpa's hanging around forever.
1:19:54
SPEAKER_00: And I think there is, I have to have one of the best lives in the world.
1:20:00
SPEAKER_00: I get to run around the world meeting interesting people.
1:20:02
SPEAKER_00: That's all I do.
1:20:04
SPEAKER_00: And so I love my life and I enjoy my work and my family's wonderful, all of that.
1:20:09
SPEAKER_00: There is still...
1:20:11
SPEAKER_00: A tedium to life as you get older and things repeat.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_00: But you are also compelled as a human to want to preserve your life.
1:20:23
SPEAKER_00: I can just see the situation where you're hanging on because you're programmed
1:20:28
SPEAKER_00: to want to hang on in your DNA,
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: but actually you've done everything and there's these conflicting...
1:20:37
SPEAKER_01: So in my mind, right,
1:20:41
SPEAKER_01: we're not working for,
1:20:42
SPEAKER_01: like whenever the title of something is immortality, I'm trying to make that.
1:20:47
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but I'm even thinking, it's like, yeah.
1:20:49
SPEAKER_01: Let's say a thousand years or 10,000 years.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_00: Or even I could do like 85 or I could do like 160.
1:20:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:55
SPEAKER_00: You'd want to do 160 because you'd want to check all this stuff out,
1:20:59
SPEAKER_00: but man, then you're still having all those existential pangs I think we all have.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_01: I think it's better to think about, do you want to do another day?
1:21:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:21:07
SPEAKER_01: And so if I'm healthy at 85, right,
1:21:10
SPEAKER_01: I think it makes it a wrong,
1:21:13
SPEAKER_01: it's very difficult to think, what will I do over the next 100 years?
1:21:17
SPEAKER_01: It's difficult to think, what do I want to exactly do over the next 10 years?
1:21:21
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:21:21
SPEAKER_01: So I'm working for giving people the chance to do another day.
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: I think that's the easier way to think about it, right?
1:21:26
SPEAKER_01: And if someone at some point says, if you ask people right now, do you want to live another day?
1:21:31
SPEAKER_01: There's pretty much no one who says no, right?
1:21:33
SPEAKER_01: Yes, if you have like tremendous amounts of pain and so on, maybe.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: This is what I mean though.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_00: So my dad's 93 and he would say he wants to live another day.
1:21:43
SPEAKER_00: His life is just, he doesn't remember what it used to be like.
1:21:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he...
1:21:48
SPEAKER_00: He sits out in the sun all day, but he used to love to read.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_00: He can't read anymore.
1:21:53
SPEAKER_00: He can't see anything.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_01: Maybe he enjoys sitting in the sun enough.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_00: But that's what I don't think he does, but he says he does.
1:21:58
SPEAKER_00: But I think he's actually really depressed.
1:22:00
SPEAKER_01: Some deeper programming that kind of lets you not...
1:22:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like I think he's actually really depressed and sad.
1:22:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:22:07
SPEAKER_01: So apart from that, so these things in the future, I'm very optimistic that these are solved.
1:22:12
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:22:12
SPEAKER_01: So again, like I think...
1:22:14
SPEAKER_01: So living healthy is much easier,
1:22:16
SPEAKER_01: even at old age,
1:22:17
SPEAKER_01: good quality of life,
1:22:19
SPEAKER_01: physically and mentally, that's much easier to achieve than actually living longer.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
1:22:24
SPEAKER_01: if we're talking about the far future when you come back from cryostasis,
1:22:27
SPEAKER_01: by definition almost,
1:22:29
SPEAKER_01: you would only bring people back once you can cure the underlying condition that led
1:22:32
SPEAKER_01: to their death,
1:22:33
SPEAKER_01: plus you can extend their life with good quality of life significantly.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_01: And then if someone really, really runs out, so I would like to do a career as a surfer.
1:22:44
SPEAKER_01: No chance to do that in parallel, right?
1:22:46
SPEAKER_01: And I would also, I like art and like a lot of different things, right?
1:22:50
SPEAKER_01: So I think, and of course, the future, there will be so many more opportunities, right?
1:22:55
SPEAKER_01: That you could even not imagine right now, right?
1:22:57
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think I personally would run out of stuff to do, right?
1:23:02
SPEAKER_01: And then again,
1:23:02
SPEAKER_01: we need to also remember,
1:23:03
SPEAKER_01: at that time, cryopreservation technology would be so advanced, right?
1:23:07
SPEAKER_01: That you say, listen,
1:23:08
SPEAKER_01: I kind of feel like I've now lived on Mars a bit and on the stars and I've been
1:23:11
SPEAKER_01: on one of these generation ships going to the next star and I'm kind of good.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_01: The technology at that point would probably be sufficiently good to just say,
1:23:20
SPEAKER_01: okay, then I'm going to cryostasis for another 50 years and let's look at it again.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_01: But again, all of that is highly speculative, right?
1:23:27
SPEAKER_01: I do not know how the future will look.
1:23:30
SPEAKER_01: I just know that today there's more people who honestly and fully
1:23:33
SPEAKER_01: and completely say,
1:23:35
SPEAKER_01: I would like to live another day than people where maybe it's questionable or people
1:23:39
SPEAKER_01: who say, I actually do want to be done tomorrow.
1:23:42
SPEAKER_00: You guys don't allow for elective cryopreservation today.
1:23:47
SPEAKER_01: Elective is legally not possible.
1:23:49
SPEAKER_01: So you can say, I'm going to one of the medical aid in dying states and do that there.
1:23:54
SPEAKER_01: And then you can call us and say, listen, Tuesday next week.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about Next year, somebody brings a rat back from cryopreservation.
1:24:06
SPEAKER_00: It's perfectly fine.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_00: It's doing great.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_00: Then the year after that, somebody brings a primate back.
1:24:12
SPEAKER_00: And then now...
1:24:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm in my 40s.
1:24:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to get past my 40s.
1:24:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'm knocking on your door saying, hey.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, so if at that point that's approved, right?
1:24:24
SPEAKER_01: So at that point,
1:24:25
SPEAKER_01: of course,
1:24:26
SPEAKER_01: it would be fully need to be FDA,
1:24:27
SPEAKER_01: EMA, or whatever regulatory body there is, be fully approved, right?
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: If that is the world we're going towards, right?
1:24:34
SPEAKER_01: And once there is enough evidence that actually it does work, right?
1:24:38
SPEAKER_01: Now you could put people into cryostasis, but you cannot take them out.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_01: Then, I mean, we would not be against it.
1:24:43
SPEAKER_01: But right now,
1:24:44
SPEAKER_01: this is not something to realistically think about or advocate for
1:24:48
SPEAKER_01: or anything like it because the technology is not there yet.
1:24:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_01: It would never be able to be approved by any regulatory body right now
1:24:54
SPEAKER_01: because it's just not there.
1:24:56
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm thought exercising.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_01: No, in the future.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_00: You might have people to like check out on their family.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_00: You're like, eh.
1:25:04
SPEAKER_00: 45, I'm still pretty good.
1:25:06
SPEAKER_00: I want to feel what this is like in a couple hundred years just to see.
1:25:10
SPEAKER_00: You guys are on your own now.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, listen, I'm very high on individual choice.
1:25:16
SPEAKER_01: You could advocate that maybe you leave But then again,
1:25:20
SPEAKER_01: there's people who say, listen, I want to now have a divorce and I want to leave.
1:25:23
SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing, right?
1:25:24
SPEAKER_01: Like you just say,
1:25:25
SPEAKER_01: I divorced my family and I go to another country now because,
1:25:29
SPEAKER_01: you know, I don't, so we have these concepts right now.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_01: It sounds It's not super weird that someone checks out on their family and says,
1:25:36
SPEAKER_01: I go into cryostasis, right?
1:25:37
SPEAKER_01: But it is not something fundamentally different than I don't want to live with you guys anymore.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_01: I'll move to another country.
1:25:43
SPEAKER_01: I'll divorce you and I'll never see you again, right?
1:25:45
SPEAKER_01: And this is happening.
1:25:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not good, but it's not something fundamentally different.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_00: And then, boy, I mean, again,
1:25:51
SPEAKER_00: not breaking new ground,
1:25:52
SPEAKER_00: but the whole idea of marriage and how many years you're married.
1:25:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_01: To be fair, once we live longer, there was a time when everybody died at 40 on average, right?
1:26:05
SPEAKER_01: And people still, and now we cannot imagine that how would a life work, right?
1:26:09
SPEAKER_01: That would be, you know, you would die in your best time, right?
1:26:13
SPEAKER_01: And just got a bit into working and just got your skills built and so on,
1:26:17
SPEAKER_01: and then you die, right?
1:26:18
SPEAKER_01: And this was time in the past, right?
1:26:20
SPEAKER_01: So...
1:26:23
SPEAKER_01: Basically my point,
1:26:24
SPEAKER_01: and of course this is a high level argument right now,
1:26:26
SPEAKER_01: kind of, right, is always we will figure this out.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_01: How will society look when everybody lives to 200?
1:26:32
SPEAKER_01: I currently don't know exactly.
1:26:34
SPEAKER_01: But then again,
1:26:34
SPEAKER_01: there was a time when everybody lived to 40 and now we cannot imagine that
1:26:38
SPEAKER_01: and we would say,
1:26:39
SPEAKER_01: well, now society when everybody lives to about 80, It works, right?
1:26:43
SPEAKER_01: So I'm pretty sure it will be figured out how to,
1:26:46
SPEAKER_01: because it's not like,
1:26:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:26:48
SPEAKER_01: usually it's not like from tomorrow onwards,
1:26:50
SPEAKER_01: everybody lives to like significantly more time.
1:26:52
SPEAKER_01: So we have time to adapt it.
1:26:54
SPEAKER_00: Are you married?
1:26:55
SPEAKER_01: I'm, for all intents and purposes,
1:26:57
SPEAKER_01: not legally, but I've been, you know, we have many companies together.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_01: So separating my partner and me would be more difficult than traditional marriage.
1:27:05
SPEAKER_01: Do you have kids?
1:27:07
SPEAKER_01: I do not have kids.
1:27:08
SPEAKER_01: Is your partner signed up?
1:27:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the first date, so she was like, yeah, this is fine.
1:27:13
SPEAKER_00: So you're both signed up?
1:27:14
SPEAKER_01: First date, we discussed it.
1:27:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:27:16
SPEAKER_00: And do you get to be preserved near each other?
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: You can, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: What does it look like?
1:27:22
SPEAKER_01: So it's like three, like, you know, like really tall, you know, 12 feet high.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_01: Think of like a thermos flask, but like super big, right?
1:27:32
SPEAKER_01: Tremendously big.
1:27:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and fill it with liquid nitrogen.
1:27:36
SPEAKER_01: You can't see into them.
1:27:37
SPEAKER_00: So you have to do the same thing I saw.
1:27:38
SPEAKER_00: You have to replace the liquid nitrogen.
1:27:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we don't do it with buckets or anything like that.
1:27:43
SPEAKER_01: No, there's a large bulk outside tank,
1:27:45
SPEAKER_01: right, where there's like liquid gas companies everywhere.
1:27:48
SPEAKER_01: It's super important for medication, for medicine, and so on.
1:27:51
SPEAKER_01: So you have a liquid gas company coming with a big,
1:27:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:27:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
1:27:54
SPEAKER_01: like a huge semi,
1:27:57
SPEAKER_01: refills a big outside bulk tank,
1:27:59
SPEAKER_01: a couple thousand gallons,
1:28:01
SPEAKER_01: and then that outside bulk tank is Is connected to the inside tanks where people are
1:28:06
SPEAKER_01: in, right?
1:28:07
SPEAKER_01: And then they have level sensors.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_01: So when the level drops, they're being automatically refilled and so on.
1:28:12
SPEAKER_00: I assume it's a bit different than the setup in Russia
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: where I was next door smoking cigarettes and taking vodka shots while we waited.
1:28:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can do vodka sheds in Switzerland as well,
1:28:21
SPEAKER_01: but yes, I imagine it looks quite different.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed being at the longevity facility while we were hunched over a bottle of vodka.
1:28:31
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_00: All smoking cigarettes waiting for the liquid nitrogen.
1:28:35
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_01: That's not, no, no.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, it's a very different picture.
1:28:40
SPEAKER_00: Emil, thank you so much.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_00: This is one of my favorite topics.
1:28:44
SPEAKER_00: I find it so intellectually fascinating.
1:28:47
SPEAKER_00: I just think it's fantastic.
1:28:52
SPEAKER_01: Everything that's interesting is kind of on that forefront of what's possible right now.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: I want to be at the edge of science fiction and science.
1:28:59
SPEAKER_01: I think this is where interesting stuff happens.
1:29:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:29:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, is there anything massive we left out?
1:29:04
SPEAKER_00: I know we could talk about this for hours.
1:29:06
SPEAKER_01: No, you can, you can talk about this for ages.
1:29:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, uh, no, like,
1:29:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:29:09
SPEAKER_01: if this is something that is interesting to someone,
1:29:11
SPEAKER_01: like, you know, always, I'm always happy to talk about this.
1:29:13
SPEAKER_01: It has become my life.
1:29:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:29:14
SPEAKER_00: And they go to tomorrow bio.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:29:16
SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow bio.
1:29:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm, I'm very available.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, always reach out and, um, We have the perfect audience for you.
1:29:23
SPEAKER_00: We should do a Core Memory discount code or something.
1:29:26
SPEAKER_01: I'll definitely send you one.
1:29:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm not joking.
1:29:28
SPEAKER_00: I'll send you one.
1:29:29
SPEAKER_00: You could not have a better audience.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
1:29:32
SPEAKER_01: I'll send you a discount code for people who want to sign up.
1:29:35
SPEAKER_01: Discount code forever, basically.
1:29:37
SPEAKER_01: Not time limited.
1:29:38
SPEAKER_01: We could give it to our subscribers.
1:29:40
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:29:41
SPEAKER_01: Let's definitely do that.
1:29:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:29:42
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:29:43
SPEAKER_00: We're making deals for the afterlife.
1:29:45
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:29:46
SPEAKER_01: For the future life, the second life.
1:29:47
SPEAKER_00: The future life, yes.
1:29:49
SPEAKER_00: All right, man, thank you so much for coming on.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:29:53
SPEAKER_00: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
1:29:56
SPEAKER_00: Ashlee Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
1:30:00
SPEAKER_00: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
1:30:04
SPEAKER_00: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
1:30:08
SPEAKER_00: And the show is edited always by the...
1:30:12
SPEAKER_00: John Sortland.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much to Brext for all your support and thank you most of all
1:30:18
SPEAKER_00: to everybody for listening or watching.
1:30:21
SPEAKER_00: We love you.
1:30:22
SPEAKER_00: Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.
1:30:28
SPEAKER_00: Thank you and we'll see you again.