Companion to Silicon Valley Insider, Episode 166.

What if death is optional?

That’s the question I sat down to explore at the BOLD Awards in Barcelona with Jose Luis Cordeiro — MIT-trained engineer, a student of Marvin Minsky, a longtime collaborator of Ray Kurzweil, former Singularity University faculty, and author of The Death of Death, now published in 15 languages. Cordeiro doesn’t treat longevity as science fiction. He treats it as an engineering timeline.

Plan A and Plan B

Cordeiro’s framing is simple. Plan A is biological rejuvenation by 2045 — Kurzweil’s forecast for when humanity reaches the technological singularity and aging itself becomes treatable. Plan B, for anyone who doesn’t make it that far, is cryonics: preserving the body, or just the brain, until the science of reanimation catches up. He projects the 2050s as the window when reanimating cryonically suspended people could become possible. In his words, cryonics is “an ambulance into the future.”

What the science actually is

The conversation clears up a lot of confusion, starting with vocabulary. Cryonics, cryogenics, and cryopreservation are not the same thing, and the differences matter. The real enemy in preservation isn’t cold — it’s ice. Ice crystals damage tissue, which is why the field depends on cryoprotectants that prevent crystals from forming in the first place.

The progress is further along than most people assume. Sperm, eggs, embryos, ovaries, corneas, tracheas, and small-animal kidneys have all been successfully cryopreserved. Full brain reanimation is the piece still waiting on nanotechnology mature enough to repair at the cellular level.

A few myths get corrected along the way. Walt Disney’s head is not in cold storage — that story is fiction. The first human ever cryopreserved was James Bedford, on January 12, 1967, one month after Disney died. And the cost is nothing like the million-dollar figure most people cite: preserving a brain runs roughly $20,000 to $80,000.

Why serious money is moving in

This isn’t a fringe interest anymore. The longevity race is being funded at a scale that’s hard to ignore: Altos Labs raised about $3 billion from Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner; Calico drew roughly $3 billion from Sergey Brin and Larry Page; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is in the field as well. And some of the quiet leaders in longevity research are academic — UC Davis among them.

Cordeiro’s ethical case rests on a single number: roughly 110,000 people die every day from age-related disease — more, he notes, than any war in history. If aging is a solvable problem, he argues, then working to solve it is a moral undertaking, not a vanity project.

The harder questions — the faith, meaning, and ethics of trying to make death optional — deserve their own conversation, and they get one. The companion episode on Ten Talents Media takes up exactly those questions this week. The two episodes belong together.

Listen to the full conversation in Episode 166 of Silicon Valley Insider, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More at keithkoo.com and svin.biz.

Jose Luis Cordeiro’s The Death of Death is available on Amazon in 15 languages. Keith Koo is Founder and Host of Silicon Valley Insider®.