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

Ashlee Vance (0:00)

For many years in science fiction and in the real world, we've been talking about this idea of freezing your body. You get cancer, we don't know how to cure it. Perhaps you could freeze your body, freeze your brain in time, keep it in a vault somewhere, and then come back when we know how to cure these things. It's often called the field of cryonics. There's a company called Alcor that has been around for almost 50 years, if not 50 years, that has a vault. Ted Williams is in there, I think. Then now there are new attempts to update this technology, modernize it.

This is where our guest today comes in, Emil Kendziorra. He is the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio. You can think of them slightly as a European version of Alcor, although they are operating in Europe and the United States now. They will send a team to come get you when you're meeting your demise and take your body to a vault, fill it with some fluids. You don't fully want to freeze it. You want to bring it near freezing and preserve you. The technology does not really work yet. We don't know how to bring somebody back, but there are people working on that. Tomorrow Bio is working on that. A company called Until Labs is working on that type of technology. It's a fascinating time.

Something I've been into for quite a while. It seems creepy to some people. Doesn't fully work, so it's a little sketchy, but I find this idea endlessly fascinating and fun to talk about. You're going to enjoy, Emil. He's refreshingly realistic and not overly hypey about all this stuff.

It's a great chat. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. We're getting weird like usual. We're not talking about cryotics anymore. People don't like that term. We're talking about biopreservation. Here we go.

Emil, this is one of my favorite topics. I'm so glad you're here. We arranged this a little last minute. You were in town for this vitality conference.

Emil Kendziorra (2:26)

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

Ashlee Vance (2:34)

It looked like an all-star lineup of the most... Some of the usual suspects are some of the more adventurous people that I like to cover at the daring edge of these ideas.

Yeah. It was like three days of...

Emil Kendziorra (2:50)

Yeah, yeah. Last year was like eight weeks, like eight conferences over eight weeks, and now they compressed it into, I think, three, four days.

Ashlee Vance (2:57)

Okay, okay. Well, I will be going next year.

Emil Kendziorra (3:00)

Yeah, you should.

Ashlee Vance (3:00)

I didn't find out until kind of too late.

But it was my thing. And what you're doing is my thing. So often I do a ton of research before we do this. We arrange this kind of last minute, and then when I did start poking around, I was like, screw it. I'm going to go with the audience on this journey. To talk about your technology and what you guys are trying to do. Broadly, it's the cryonics field.

Emil Kendziorra (3:28)

Yeah.

Ashlee Vance (3:29)

And people may be familiar, I would guess if anyone is familiar with Alcor, has been this American company, I think based in Arizona.

Emil Kendziorra (3:37)

Yeah.

Ashlee Vance (3:38)

Been working on this for decades.

Emil Kendziorra (3:40)

Many decades. Yeah. 50 plus years.

Ashlee Vance (3:42)

So kind of freezing heads and bodies in this facility.

Emil Kendziorra (3:47)

Trying to not freeze them. Yeah.

Ashlee Vance (3:49)

I mean preserving them.

And I think, well, I don't know a ton about the companies.

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

Emil Kendziorra (4:36)

To be fair, neither do we.

Ashlee Vance (4:38)

So let's get, we'll talk about that, because I know it's, there's, I always want to find the right, I want to use the right words. I described Laura that way, she got upset, and so I want to use the right words. And why don't you tell us, and then I've got a story to tell about Cryo-Roos, which.