Who Gets to Solve Death?

Hey! Today I’ve got something for you that’s not the usual Divinations fare, but I think you’ll love it :) It’s an essay that identifies two types of “death tech” businesses, and asks why one type is taken more seriously than the other by capital allocators. The author is Taylor Majewski, a talented entrepreneur and writer, who also happens to be a fellow member of the Product Hunt alumni mafia with me. Enjoy!

—Nathan

“When I was fundraising for the first time, I had not one but multiple venture capitalists ask me what’s going to happen to my business when death isn’t a problem anymore,” Liz Eddy, the founder and CEO of the end of life planning website Lantern, told me on the phone. I had to laugh. 

“There is no signal or sign that there’s going to be any massive or even accessible change to the end of life,” Eddy explained. “Maybe there will be an opportunity for the one percent of the one percent in the future, but if there will ever be an opportunity for the masses is a very different story.” 

Eddy was referring to the subset of Silicon Valley elites who moonlight as immortalists. In a piece for The New Yorker, Tad Friend divided these folks into two camps: the “Meat Puppets,” who believe we can hack our biology and stay in our bodies; and the “RoboCops,” who believe we’ll merge with technology in order to live forever. These folks find common ground in pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-aging research, claiming that the purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality, and even creating companies with lofty missions that orbit around the same sentiment: “solve death.” 

But with the advent of initiatives that aim to extend life, comes a parallel force; startups rethinking the existing funeral and end-of-life planning industries. If the former group is made up of immortalists, then let’s call the latter group realists. 

The realists are solving for death in its current iteration; they want to leverage technology to improve the quality of end-of-life care. Realists tend to be more oriented around action versus fascination; they’re talking about death openly, making funeral planning more affordable, and leading online grieving groups. Immortalists err on the side of solving for death due to the frustration that life is too short. They see technology as a means to cheat aging. 

Graph: Realists want to move the needle on the y axis, while immortalists focus on extending the x axis. 

The notion that death is optional has long been a particular obsession for the ultra-rich, most recently taking hold of those who have made their fortunes from technology. Jeff Bezos put millions into backing solutions to potentially halt, slow or reverse age-related diseases. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, is a sort of guru for immortalist types, perpetuating the idea that humans will eventually merge with AI to live forever. Peter Thiel’s reported interest in the blood of the young has been written about ad nauseum. Former Coinbase CTO and investor Balaji Srinivasan’s Twitter bio simply reads “it may be possible to reverse aging.” 

Honestly, I get it! Not wanting to die isn’t that eccentric — it’s instinctual. The aforementioned cohort spent their careers banking on technology and science as a vehicle to solve the world’s problems — why should they stop at death? If good fortune brings access to the best things that life has to offer, why not continue living? 

The immortalist viewpoint inherently lends itself to extreme affluence. The current cost of the idea of life extension is expensive; you can be cryonically preserved for about $80,000 (a whole-body preservation costs $200,000), or for $8,000, you can fill your veins with the blood of young donors. For the vast majority of people, these prices are inaccessible. Immortalist can easily be interchanged with exceptionalist. 

It’s worth acknowledging that while life extension may only be accessible to those in the uppermost echelon of wealth at first, it’s assumed that those costs would go down over time and become available to the masses. But, in theory, how long would that take? And are those cost cuts actually inevitable? Not everything adheres to Moore’s law, and it’s plausible that life extension won’t become accessible to everyone anytime soon, if ever. 

In a year like 2020, where at least 216,000 more people have died than usual in the U.S., the idea of life extension has been opposed by the severe reality of death. So I’m curious: Who is best equipped to “solve” death, given that — at the time of writing — we’re still all going to die? 

More Accessible Deaths 

Let’s circle back to the realists. If the immortalist mentality brings resources, prestige and investment to the premise of radical life extension, the realists are solving for death now. This largely entails rethinking the funeral industry, from virtual memorials to diamonds made from cremated ashes to final tweets.