Tomorrow Biostasis Q&A

I’m signed with Alcor, but I also visit Europe. It would make some sense to me if eventually the two groups could make some kind of reciprocal arrangement at least covering the US and Europe. Is there any discussion of that or is it just too early.

• Emil: We are super open to collaborating with anybody. Sometimes the more established organizations have more difficult decision-making processes than we do. We’re talking to all of them, but it might take a good amount of time until any of that comes about.

• Aschwin: I can briefly comment as a quasi Alcor official. It certainly is the case that it has been formally recognized that it would be a good thing if Alcor and Tomorrow Biostasis could put something in place, but that usually doesn’t tend to be easy. This is the first time, I think I can say, from Alcor’s perspective, where there is an initiative in Europe, that we really respect and that we think could be fruitful. There might be some time where Tomorrow Biostasis has members in the US, and then it will be also in his interest of course for Alcor to assist in their cases one way or another. Or there might be so many cases that we need each other regardless of the location. I’m pretty optimistic that these talks will continue moving forward and something will come out of that.

• I wanted to note that it is often a misunderstood that most people die in a sort of really rapid way – actually most people die in a pretty prolonged agonal phase, and then wherever you are (unless it is a country with a very poor medical infrastructure), Alcor will deploy Alcor’s international organization and now with the technology of field cryoprotection, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a difference in quality if you are far away or close.

After a person dies, especially for more or less non-old people like 30 or 40 or 50 years old, it sometimes happens very rapidly and there is a short window. And I witnessed in Ukraine when I signed up with KrioRus, that they called up the local H+ community to help even before the representative of KrioRus arrives. And this actually saved some time. So my question is whether you are planning to establish connections with the local communities in different European cities so that the reaction time is shorter?

• Emil: So our model in that regard is that there are parts that need to be done fast, and there are parts that are complex and need to be done professionally. So it’s not realistic at least currently that local teams can do the whole procedure. But as I said before, cooling is the most important part – cooling initially can be relatively simple, you just need ice and a chest thumper, it’s relatively doable with a local team. So the idea definitely is that if there are local teams with some level of organizational structure, we can then collaborate with them especially for regions that are further away from where we are – you know like the north of Nordics and south of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on. In these regions we’re in contact and talking to organizations and supporting local organizations, so that is always part of the story. And then of course later on we plan to have local teams there – once they become well logistically viable – when you have a certain number of members in these regions.

It’s impressive that the signup on your website is such a smooth process. There are a few forms and it guides you along pretty well, which is really appreciated. Could you talk a little bit more about the practicalities of signing up? You know, the timelines, details about life insurance? Is there an app?

• Emil: So from my previous anecdotal experience, I knew that signing up with the existing organizations is a tedious thing to do. Cryopreservation is a best example of a thing that is important but not urgent, so you might as well do it a month or a year later. So we wanted to make the sign up process as simple and streamlined as possible – it only takes 20 to 25 min and there are three main steps. You give us your contact details – your email address, telephone number, address, age and your credit card, paypal, or direct debit number. After that you become a member and we send you documents for digital signing. We send you a buyer’s license contract that you can sign – this includes a body donation contract and a body donation agreement – all of the parts that make your cryopreservation contract. And if you choose our insurance partner, which is optional, then we send you an insurance questionnaire to fill, which is the typical medical questions for term life insurance. After you sign that, then the insurance approves you after a couple of days. The only thing we require afterwards is that you put everything in your last will and we advise you to add a patient advanced directive. People usually finish in 20 minutes or so.

Soon you will also be able to do it via an app, but the app will be primarily there initially for fast emergency detection – so that we know faster when something is wrong with you.

With our insurance, we’re the policy holder. The reason for that is because historically there have been a couple of cases, where the next of kin tried to get the money off the insurance. In our case, there would be no way to do that since we hold the insurance and they are the insured person. So you don’t have this problem that anybody has any incentive to not have a person cryopreserved, but rather have the insurance paid out as part of the inheritance.

So how is it that there are so few people signed up for cryonics, even from the longevity community? Why do you think that is and if someone is now skeptical and inherently feels opposed to this whole process still? How can you kind of take them by the hand and within just give them a little bit more security and that this may actually be a good thing to consider.

• Emil: I think the biggest problem is unfortunately that most humans do care about the urgent things and delay things that they might do in 10 years. This is a thing that you might put out for years if you feel healthy. That’s why my ideal cryopreservation organization is like this Amazon one-click-buy. You just click and then you’re signed up. Of course that’s not really possible, so we can at least take as much pain out of the process and try to get people to jump over this last hurdle and just take the next Saturday morning to sign up with our streamlined 20-min process.
• Emil: Regarding some security or assurement, anything we say about whether this will work is speculation. But if fundamentally the proposition of living longer or living in the future is interesting to you, then the only consideration you have is whether the bit of money now and potentially more money in the future is worth it. Hopefully at that time we’ll already bring down the cost significantly.

• Aschwin: One remarkable thing I’ve seen in our community is that you would think you want people to get to a point where there is interest. But the gap between people being interested and actually doing it is formidable often. You can find online some very strong pro-cryonics articles by people saying that this is the most sensible thing to do – but if you ask them whether they did their cryonics arrangement, they always have some excuses. So that gap between interest and execution of the arrangement is enigmatic. Max Moore even introduced a word “cryocrastination” for this phenomenon.

I had this idea about bundling – what if you bundle cryopreservation with a type of insurance that could cover longevity therapeutics that may come out in somebody’s lifetime. One of the concerns that is frequently brought up is “this could be for billionaires only, and most people won’t be able to afford these”. So what if you framed this as an insurance that actually pays for the therapeutics that may come out so you can definitely afford them no matter what, oh and by the way, you can also cryopreserve yourself, if the former course fails.

• Emil: Currently unfortunately you can’t do that – we use standard term or whole life life insurance. So it’s not a specific cryopreservation insurance. But later on, it is on our long term roadmap, to find reinsurance and build our own insurance when we have 5 to 6 figures of members. At that point we can build these potentially more complex products, if of course you can convince the reinsurance with some risk model of how expensive these longevity treatments will be in the future.

Do you do any kind of bundling with different services for example when people do their will or something like that?

• Emil: Not yet, but this is the idea long term, that some stuff you can add-on.

How do you guys put organ vitrification in with your strategy? At all does that fit in with what you guys are trying to do?

• Emil: Yes, something might come out later on, but our focus is always on the brain. So all the other organs if you need a slightly different cryoprotective agent, or you don’t have the blood brain barrier to take care of, we will always focus on the brain. But if something comes about from research that can be done for organ preservation, with regards to biobanking for example, that might be a subsidiary or a spinoff or something like that. But the focus is not on organs.

I think you guys have come a long long way in terms of how to do cryopreservation and the marketing side here is very effective. But I wouldn’t downplay the gap in understanding where memories are stored, how they are encoded, where our cognitive functions are stored and encoded, emotions, personality, etc. I think it would help the marketing story to have this state-of-the-art discussion, because those questions are still unanswered.

• Emil: You’re not wrong, there’s a tremendous amount of research that still needs to be done. We decided that the path forward is to fund this research. You can either rely on some very wealthy people to donate money for the research or you sell a product being well aware you cannot say with what probability or how likely it is it will work. But as long as you can ensure informed consent – and we have a personal call with everybody to make sure they fully understand that they are buying a chance – we can then use that money to fund the research that you need to do to increase the understanding better how memory, etc. is encoded and how to preserve it better.

As I’ve talked with people about why they have been cryoprocrastinating, one of the thing that has come up – with people who have family – is the fact that they now have to get insurance policies on three four five six people – and since they can’t insure everybody, they will insure noone. The odds that you’re going to lose a family of four or five at once are relatively low. Are you doing anything both from the insurance perspective but also the marketing and business perspective of taking some kind of a family or group orientation? The Chinese cryonics organization is basically saying “this is a family doer”, which also alleviates the anxiety about the future you are potentially stepping into, since you already have a group, you are reuniting with your family. And it also helps with the question of whether you want to spend dollars on yourself today for my insurance policy, or whether to insure my other family members because I need to be looking after them? Do you think about any of these personal and family insurance?

• Emil: We do family packages for our membership fee – so for the part that goes to us, not the insurance. For the insurance since we’re using these standard providers, at least with the insurers we are working with, family deals just do not exist. You can’t sign up multiple people at the same time and get a discount deal. Of course with term life insurance, which most people at least in Europe use, that indeed is also quite difficult. With whole life, which is basically a savings plan, that’s significantly easier. You can just say that we’re all saving money and whoever dies first will get a certain amount of money out of that pocket.
• Emil: The core of this whole endeavor is to get the cost down significantly by scale and with that solve it so it is easier for a family of five for example to sign up even without going to seven figure amounts. So it makes sense to bring the cost down and on the other hand try to later on have products that you design to be tailor-made life insurances for the topic of cryopreservation.

One more question, which goes back to your earlier mention of the survey that you ran – what were the demographics? What were the selected communities? Was it the general public or were you looking at people who are already reading about cryonics or life extension?

• Emil: There are two parts – a US part and a Germany part of the survey. The Germany part is representative – we used a market research organization, the survey size was a couple of hundred people. Whereas in the US we have 3500 people and that is an internet population we’ve recruited online. It’s not a purely representative sample – we have an over-representation of urban cities, age is relatively representative as is income, but also over-representation of people who have high internet affinity. Here is the link to the study with all information on the demographics.

What’s the one thing that you want people to take away from this? What’s the one myth about cryonics that’s unhelpful and you want to bust?

• Aschwin: It’s much easier to put life insurance in place if you’re younger and you’re healthy. So if you’re reading this, and even if you have concerns and don’t know which organization, at least put life insurance in place. Or craft a document that says that you want to be cryopreserved if you’re critically ill. Because if the moment arises, then you can make that decision, don’t delay these things – we’ve seen this happening over and over again at Alcor. If you want to do this, no matter your reservations, at least put a sort of structure in place in advance that allows you to take advantage when the time comes.

• Emil: One of the biggest myths is that it’s unaffordable for a lot of people. People think you need to wire $200,000 tomorrow and you would not be able to afford that, or don’t want to afford that. We don’t want anybody to pass us $10,000 because we need to hold it in trusted accounts, everything is just annoying. Doing it through life insurance I think is whether it is worth it to themselves to pay $50 a month. It is not unaffordable, of course being well aware this is the term life insurance, but then again most people when they are older, they have significantly more net worth at that point and hopefully we will also make it cheaper. So it’s not something that only the millionaires and billionaires can afford, it is indeed to a degree accessible to almost everyone.

• Aschwin: One big myth actually is that people who really want to be preserved in the end don’t have money for it. What we’ve seen in our field – and I’ve studied this issue quite carefully actually – is that if someone really wants to be cryopreserved and there is no funding, the community usually organizes a public fundraiser and from what I’ve seen these are almost invariably favorable. You may not end up with the organization that you want or it might be a brain only cryopreservation, but there are options. Which of course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make any arrangements, this is more of a last resort. The community usually steps up in these cases, some anti-aging researchers were even offered a cryopreservation, some of them turned the offer down, but this happens quite often.

What can this group do to help your current efforts along? So what’s next for both of your individual efforts and the next months to years? And also what could this group possibly do to help out?

• Aschwin: A year ago I would have put this really strong emphasis on the development acceleration of molecular medicine and nanomedicine, because I think we need some kind of molecular technologies to revive people. As I said earlier the good news is we will have a very comprehensive work coming out later this year about molecular repair of cryonic patients. But one thing that is going to be important and is this kind of sneak peek of that work, is that there will be like 250 pages of specific research questions that will need to be addressed to make this happen. It would be really interesting to focus on some of these research questions. And then we can see if small funds can be raised for these specific investigation areas that need to be resolved to make this thing really happen.

• Emil: For Tomorrow Biosciences it’s mostly about getting up to speed so we can start with the research, so if you are or you know anybody who is interested in the space and would like to collaborate, do not hesitate to contact. Also if anybody is interested to either donate to research in that field, or signup to the organization itself for future cryopreservation, keep in contact with Tomorrow Biostasis.