S6E1 - The Cryonauts: Expedition

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Kayla: So, Chris, Kayla, what, Where are we going right now?

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Chris: Are we.

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Kayla: What are we doing right now? Are we.

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Chris: So what's. Are we gonna, like. Are we doing the. I'm Chris. I'm Kayla. Like, intro the podcast and everything here? Are we gonna do a separate recording in studio for that?

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Kayla: I think separate?

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Chris: Separate. Okay. Well, we're headed to Scottsdale, Arizona, because as we all know, in Arizona, it gets very cold.

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Kayla: So we are currently driving. It'll probably be about an eight hour drive all in by the time we get there to go and visit a facility. A cold storage facility. Do you think that's enough?

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Chris: A cold storage facility?

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Kayla: No, no. Cold storage. We are headed to Scottsdale to visit a cryonics organization called Alcor.

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Kayla: Hey, Chris.

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Chris: Hey, Kayla.

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Kayla: Welcome to cult or just weird. Season six.

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Chris: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

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Kayla: How did we make it all the way to season six?

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Chris: I don't know. I think it's because we make a good show.

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Kayla: We make fantastic content for all of our listeners. I'm Kayla. I am a television writer and Internet aficionado.

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Chris: I'm Chris. I am a game designer and data scientist.

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Kayla: Listeners, you just heard a snippet from a road trip we took last year to visit today's topic. What was supposed to be an episode for season five quickly snowballed into something much bigger, and we essentially ended up framing this entire season six, around what we discovered. But before we get back to that conversation in the car, and there is so much more to get back to, we want to, I don't know, welcome you back to the podcast. Update you a little bit on the structure of this season. We're doing things kind of a little bit different.

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Chris: So, yeah, we keep changing how we do things.

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Chris: I like to do.

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Kayla: There's one thing I know about successful podcasting, it's inconsistency.

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Chris: I like to think that we're continuously seeking a better way of presenting the material.

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Kayla: I like that. I like that.

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Chris: That is how I'm sticking to it.

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Kayla: We have so much to bring you this season of culture. Just weird. And so we're actually going to be now delivering weekly episodes this season. So you can expect to find us in your podcast feed every Tuesday. With this new structure, of course, each episode is going to be 6 hours long apiece, so make sure you catch up on each episode. Oh, my God. Each episode? No. Finally, we're gonna finally do it. Each episode is actually gonna be shorter than what we've traditionally done. So, like, don't worry, you're not gonna listen to us 7 hours every week.

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Chris: Well, I mean, don't you want that, though?

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Kayla: While we wax poetic about God knows what each week, we're gonna get right to the good stuff. You don't have to listen to us yap for 7 hours on esoteric philosophy. Each topic we're gonna cover is going to span several episodes. So we don't.

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Chris: Video games and.

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Kayla: Video games and pop culture. Each topic is going to span several episodes, so we don't miss anything. So there's going to be, again, like, a lot of content on each topic, but we're splitting up the episodes into hopefully more digestible pieces.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Chris: And this, like, last season, we sort of did the opposite. So we. The first four seasons of the show, we did every two weeks. And then last season, were like, let's do every month. And it'll be roughly the same amount of content. They'll just be longer episodes. This is essentially the opposite of that. It'll be roughly the same amount of content, but more episodes.

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Kayla: More episodes.

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Chris: Shorter episodes, more shorter episodes. The amount of content per topic will also kind of remain constant.

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Chris: Right.

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Chris: Because we'll be doing multiple episodes per topic. We'll just be chopping it up into little bites so that it's easier to swallow.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And then we'll do the little airplane thing where we go, vroom.

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Kayla: Definitely gonna do that.

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Chris: Eat up. Eat your content.

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Kayla: If you wanna support the show, you can eat your airplane content. You can also find us on Patreon if you want to talk about cults with other weirdos. You can also find us on Discord. Everything is linked in our show notes. Thank you to everyone already on our platforms. We love you. We're so happy to be able to talk to you all the time. And, yeah, check us out over there and see what else is going on behind the scenes of culture. Just weird.

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Chris: We have a game night in the discord. It's pretty cool.

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Kayla: We do. Chris, do you have any other business before we dive back into this conversation?

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Chris: Well, we have one thing. We're finally on TikTok.

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Kayla: Yeah, we have one TikTok up.

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Chris: We have one TikTok. We have an official culture.

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Chris: Just weird.

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Chris: TikTok account. I've heard that's, like, the thing now is TikTok is popular with the youths.

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Kayla: I think the youths enjoy talkin'yeah. T o k I n. Right.

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Chris: I think it has Riz.

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Kayla: It's definitely got Riz. So go follow us there and then continue listening to this episode, which we are doing now.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: So to start this topic, we actually, like I said, we have to travel back in time to last year to where it all started with us doing something very exciting.

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Chris: So is this like, which style time travel is. This is like Bill and Ted style where you can just kind of make things happen magically? Or is it like a back to the future style or like time crimes? What are we talking?

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Kayla: It's. Man. How do I answer that cleverly without spoiling the episode? However you wish, whichever style you need to suit your druthers. Bill and Ted is my favorite because we're not really. It's not really that exciting what were going back in time to watch ourselves do. We were. We were watching television. Like, were sitting on our asses with our eyes on the tv. That's what we're traveling in time to.

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Chris: How would you even know that's back in time? Because that's what we currently.

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Kayla: That's every day. We were last year watching a show on HBO called how to with John Wilson, which is.

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Chris: Kayla, please. It's Max.

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Kayla: Is that also X. X, like Twitter?

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Chris: Oh, no. I mean, yes. I don't know.

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Kayla: I don't know anymore.

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Chris: Who knows?

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Kayla: And also, this was last year. It could have been HBO. I don't know. I don't know. The show was called how to with John Wilson, which was a reality style, pseudo documentary comedy show that usually visited one or more interesting communities, fandoms, or groups in each episode. So you can understand why we liked it. And this particular episode ended up at a cryonics convention. And that is when I had to pause the television because I had no idea that was a thing.

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Chris: Conventions. Yeah. So it's a gathering of people that are interested in a particular.

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Kayla: Of like minded people. Did you know cryonics was an existent practice?

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Chris: I knew that. I don't know if I knew the vocab word, but I definitely knew that people were freezing bodies to. I mean, like, I had seen vanilla sky.

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Kayla: I know, but, like, that's like I knew about cryonics, but I thought it was just like a fictional idea, like time travel. I thought it was a concept. I thought it was something that was in our Sci-Fi stories. But I did, like subspace communication or like, artificial gravity that you'll see in, like, space movies. I thought it was like that.

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Chris: I did know that it was real. I mean, I had seen the. The 1990s documentary Demolition man.

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Kayla: Right. Which you showed me. Which I showed as research for this episode.

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Chris: Important research. No, but I did actually know that people were attempting to freeze bodies. Freeze people, freeze dead guys for later?

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Kayla: No, that this was an active practice. And I will be very interested to know how many of our listeners knew or did not know that this was an active practice.

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Chris: Ooh, Twitter poll.

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Kayla: I did not know how big and wide and deep this topic was. I'm sorry.

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Chris: That's what she said.

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Kayla: When I started diving into the reading about it, I immediately became overwhelmed, and it became very clear very quickly that the show we had just watched, honestly had done a piss poor job of covering it. How to. Don Wilson presented cryonics and cryonicists. It's a very surface reading. There's definitely a lot. There's a lot of implication that there are scam artists involved, that there's quackery afoot, that there are people that are involved or maybe a little strange or offbeat.

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Chris: We typically liked that show because it feels like he's laughing with people, but this one definitely felt like he was laughing at them more. The intent was to scrutinize rather than empathize. I don't know.

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Kayla: And that's also a reading that I'm bringing to it. I know that's not the reading that everybody's bringing to it, including some cryonicists. So I hope that cryonicists were happy with their portrayal in this episode. Either way, the show's a half hour long. It's not getting into the extensive details of something like this. And we didn't want to trip into the same pitfall of only giving this a surface reading. And so that's why we needed to.

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Chris: So were like, let's podcast about it. Famously non surface.

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Kayla: Hey, that's why we didn't do a single episode about it.

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Chris: That's true.

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Kayla: That's why we waited until. Right now, there's a lot more to cryonics than the assumptions made by those of us brought up on urban legends of Walt Disney's head on ice.

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Chris: Yeah, I think that's my biggest takeaway, is that's not actually true.

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Kayla: I know. It's such a bummer.

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Chris: His head is not on ice, in fact.

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Kayla: So first, what is cryonics? So, cryonics is the low temperature, freezing and storage of human remains, either generally either full body or the head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future. Cryonics.

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Chris: Sorry, you say resurrection and remains.

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Kayla: There's a lot of, like, do they.

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Kayla: Consider it lingo here?

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Kayla: I'm not using necessarily correct lingo. It depends on who you talk to. And. And I'm sure that this is going to come up time and time again as we talk about this.

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Chris: But let's just say we'll get to that.

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Kayla: We'll get to that. Generally, cryonicists believe that it's not necessarily a resurrection, but simply, it's more akin to very, very long term.

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Chris: How many periods was that?

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Kayla: That was like seven.

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Chris: Varies.

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Kayla: Very, very.

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Chris: You know, those varies.

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Kayla: Very long term CPR. In cryonics, the bodies are referred to as patients rather than dead bodies rather than remains. These are patients that are going to be healed in the future, essentially. But I think for our layperson purposes, it's okay to use terms like revive. I think some cryonicists don't even use the term dead. They don't like to say, oh, that cryonicist died. They say de animated.

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Chris: I've also seen the word I like, too, is stasis. They consider these people in stasis not dead, even though they are legally dead.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Which we will get medically dead as well. They're medically considered dead, but to the cryonasis, they are a patient that is in stasis.

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Kayla: Cryonics is different than cryogenics, which I think we kind of grew up having those words interchangeable. But cryogenics is actually a branch of physics that relates to the production of and behavior of materials at very low temperatures.

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Chris: So that's like superconductors and stuff.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Kayla: You can see why the two get used interchangeably, but that's wrong. Some other important words for us to know. Cryobiology, which is a branch of biology that studies the effects of low temperature on living things.

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Chris: So, basically, if you just throw the word cryo in front of them, it means super cold. So it's like, the Buffalo Bills are a cryo football team. They're cold the season in buff. Do you remember that?

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Kayla: Because they were all the whole.

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Chris: They got totally snowed in, and they had the fans help them. Yeah.

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Kayla: The stadium was cryopreserved, and cryo preservation is another word that we should know. And this is the process of freezing biological materials such as cells, tissues, and organs to preserve for extended periods of time. And to be right up front with you, cryonics is considered by the mainstream as a pseudoscience. And there's a lot of reasons to agree with that stance and maybe some reasons to look at that stance a little bit more sharply, but we will get to all of that.

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Chris: Okay. Cause I was gonna ask, does the mainstream consider freezing tissue to be pseudoscience, or do they consider the potential future revival to just be, like, fanciful thinking that part.

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Kayla: Cause we do currently freeze and revive tissue. Like that is what IVF is.

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Chris: Right. That's why it's a little bit confusing to hear it called pseudoscience, because it's like there's kind of these two parts to it, and one part is actually pretty well studied and pretty normal, actually. Right, okay, so it's the other part. Can these humans be revived as themselves? Is the part they consider pseudo.

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Kayla: It's one thing to freeze and thaw a six celled embryo, or however, a very small cell amount of celled embryo.

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Chris: Blastocyst.

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Kayla: Blastocyst.

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Chris: Blasty.

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Kayla: Versus an extremely complicated, fully formed human. Particularly as complicated a structure as the brain, which can be damaged during this process. And some scientists believe, like, it is pie in the sky to believe we will ever be able to have technology that can reverse that kind of damage.

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Chris: And we also just, like, don't. So we still know how the brain works. So to be able to say we're going to bring this person back as the same with, you know, with a consistent identity as who they were before, we just don't know how the brain works enough to be able to say that again.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Except for me, I only have, like, three or four brain cells, so I'm.

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Chris: Pretty sure I could do that.

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Kayla: Oh, your brain could be revived like that? Yeah, the crowd. Preservation of humans was first scientifically proposed in Robert Ettinger's 1962 the prospect of immortality. And the first person to be frozen in liquid nitrogen with the intent of being brought back in the future was James Bedford in 1967. His body has remained preserved ever since, and it is currently stored at a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, called Alcor. And Alcor is considered the gold standard in the cryonics community. Like the cadillac of having your body preserved.

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Chris: The cold standard.

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Kayla: The cold standard.

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Chris: Hey, I just came up with that.

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Chris: That's pretty good, right?

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Kayla: Very cute.

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Chris: You're welcome.

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Kayla: Founded in 1972, Alcor is a nonprofit cryonics company that still exists today. There are just a handful of other cryonics companies and nonprofits around the world, and I think Alcor, I think its full name is Alcor Life Extension foundation is probably the best known. Founded by cryonics enthusiasts Fred and Linda Chamberlain, Alcor was designed as a rational, science and technology oriented company with careful, conservative fiscal management. They froze their first patient in 1976 and had 50 members by 1985, according to Alcor. And this is again according to Alcor. Their researchers and scientists have had a direct hand in developing the technology used in cryopreservation in both cryonics and mainstream science today, such as the process of vitrification, which is used both in things like IVF and organ storage, as well as preparing bodies for liquid nitrogen storage.

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Kayla: I will say that I cannot find any independent verification that Alcor researchers developed technologies that eventually led to things like ivF. But as a long stand. So I am skeptical of that claim. That claim is made directly by Alcor. So, again, because I couldn't independently verify, I have a little bit of skepticism. I have some skepticism, but the claims that Alcor's years long research has shaped the cryonics industry and the work around cryonics, that's definitely, absolutely true.

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Chris: Right? And cryopreservation of organ tissue. Yep.

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Kayla: The company has grown modestly since those early days, but has always maintained its science first nonprofit status. Alcor currently has around 1927 members, people who have signed up to be cryopreserved upon death, and 222 patients who have legally died and are now stored in liquid nitrogen at the facility. I was shocked to learn this. I have said it before, and I will say it again. I just had absolutely no idea that people had actually been frozen in the hopes of coming back to life one day.

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Chris: There are frozen bodies.

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Kayla: I am so excited.

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Chris: It's wild.

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Kayla: It's the best thing I've ever heard.

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Kayla: I still don't know how to feel about it.

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Kayla: It's so exciting to me. I have a lot of feelings about it.

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Chris: Since you guys aren't here in the studio, you can't see Kayla's bulging vein on her head. And her fist isn't even a fist. It's contorted fingers.

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Kayla: I am pretty contorted right now.

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Chris: I'm excited about this.

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Kayla: So I had no idea this was a thing. And I also had absolutely no idea that you could go visit alcortainous and take a tour of the very facility where these people are currently housed. Chris and I knew we needed to tackle this topic directly at the source, so we booked a tour, got in the car, and drove to Arizona with a lot of questions.

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Chris: So what do you mean when you.

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Chris: Say this is really happening?

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Chris: What do you mean?

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Kayla: There are currently people who have elected to have their bodies placed into cryostasis upon legal death. And so there are facilities that house these. They're called patients that house these patients as they are suspended in cryostasis, awaiting a future in which the technology becomes advanced enough that we can not only revive patients who are suspended, but cure whatever killed them. So if the idea is if you are somebody who died of old age, if you are somebody who died from a cancer diagnosis and you have gone into cryostasis, the belief, the hope, the trust, the faith in science is that one day the technology will be able to bring you out of cryostasis and fixed whatever it is that ended your life.

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Chris: Okay? So when you're saying it's really happening, the freezing process is really happening, but the unfreezing is still something that is hopeful but not a reality yet.

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Kayla: And there are, the people who work in cryonics refer to their work as science, and there are detractors who refer to their work as pseudoscience.

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Chris: So you can judge that.

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Kayla: I don't know if I can be the judge of that. Like, honestly, it also feels like when you start to talk about the thing that makes cryonics different than something like, I don't know, neuroscience, general standard neuroscience today, the thing that makes it different is that it is specifically thinking about the technology we will have in the future. It's specifically like, okay, we can. We can bank on a technology we will have in the future and do work now that will ideally bring about that future. Like, that's. That's where it starts to maybe for some people, break down as to what makes it a science versus what makes it a pseudoscience.

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Kayla: And, like, I do want to be very careful about how we talk about this, because it does seem like the community has been and can be harmed by misconceptions from folks who make assumptions and don't take the time to learn about it and then speak off the cuff. And there are reasons why mainstream scientists or science communicators might have questions or concerns about what they're doing. Like, when I came across a video, a YouTube video, in which Doctor Michio Kaku is. He's speaking on, I believe, a variety of, you know, quote, unquote, science topics on YouTube. And for those who may not know, Michio Kaku is a well known science communicator, prolific science communicator. He's basically a. He's a Neil degrasse Tyson type, where he's got a very science heavy background.

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Kayla: He is very studied and also has a way of communicating science and sciencey topics and has come to be an authority on a variety or be seen as an authority on a variety of different subjects that maybe have something to do with what he has degrees in and that are more generally just science. So maybe not related to his academic background. And this particular video, which we'll share a link to. It's a few years old. So I can't say that he hasn't changed his tune on this, but he is asked about the science and the reality behind cryonics and cryopreservation.

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Kayla: And unfortunately, he delves into dismissing cryonics as a practice, as a science, as a field of study, basically by saying, well, the reason why it wouldn't work is because when you freeze a body, ice crystals are formed, and ice crystals damage the delicate tissues, etcetera, of the body.

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Chris: Yeah, I've definitely heard that, too. I've seen people talk about, yeah, when ice is frozen, it forms crystals, and that damages cells.

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Kayla: Totally valid. If that had anything to do with what cryonics is. Cryonics doesn't have anything to do within its current iteration. Absolutely does not have anything to do with freezing the body like an ice cube. It's. Its process isn't anything like that. And, in fact, cryonicists. And again, I'm speaking as a lay person, so, you know, take it from that understanding. Cryonicists work to develop a process that doesn't have ice crystals form. So that is why they use a process called vitrification, in which the body is frozen, quote, unquote, in a way that ice crystals are not formed the same way that an embryo cannot be frozen like an ice cube. It has to be frozen in a way in which the tissues are not damaged.

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Kayla: And so for Michio Kaku to get on camera and say, well, this is why cryonics can't work, and he has a complete and total misunderstanding of the work that they're doing that is damaging. I can't say that it's whether or not the science, quote unquote, works, but to just get up and say, well, it doesn't work because of something that is totally unrelated does feel really shitty.

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Chris: Okay, Kayla, then explain encinoman or unfrozen caveman lawyer.

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Kayla: It cannot be explained. Brendan Fraser is just that perfect. He can survive a million years in an ice chamber.

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Chris: It's a specific Brendan Fraser thing. Okay, I'll also just say for myself, I could. I can change my tune on this depending on what we learn. But it doesn't seem like pseudoscience applies here, because pseudoscience, to me is when you're using the, you know, the trappings, the. The dressings, the lab coating of science to legitimize or justify something that you're doing that isn't quite science. It doesn't. This seems like if, at best, I would call this maybe like speculative science, right? Like, I don't think that they are, and like I said, could change my tune. But from what I've seen, it doesn't look like, you know, they're lab coding here, that they're just using vocabulary that they shouldn't be. Seems like they are talking about hard science, but some of it is in a speculative way.

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Kayla: This seems far closer to the mainstream standard definition of science than the other, quote unquote lab coders we've encountered on this show, such as the self realization fellowship, which simply. Yeah. Appropriated the term science and applied it to a meditative process. Anything like Ramtha and teal Swan and all of those who co optained, who co opt quantum physics and the study of quantum physics in order to support their bullshit theories and ideas.

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Chris: Wait, I forget who the guy's name is. The SRF guy. The self realization fellowship.

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Kayla: Paramahansa Yogananda.

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Chris: Yeah, that's the one. Didn't he claim that he could meditate his way into like a stasis state?

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Kayla: Yeah, that was the whole thing that we learned about their meditation practice was that eventually you would be able to completely still the body. You would no longer need to breathe. You would no longer need to do the circulative processes that make life happen. You could just simply, like, exist on meditative vibes.

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Chris: I mean, that. Isn't that exactly what cryofreezing is? You're stopping all the. Pulling everything out and stopping all of the bodily metabolism processes.

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Kayla: Yes, but one says, I can do this based on the will of mind alone. And one says, I can do this based on existing or speculative scientific practices. Interesting that you're saying this, because I'm going to speculate on something. I hope to be able to ask the folks we talk to specifically about this. But one of the things I learned is that at times, cryonics workers, cryonics researchers, cryonicists have been conflated in media and elsewhere with other kinds of people who are definitely not practicing science. So I'm talking about a group called, I believe they go by people unlimited now. And if you go on their Wikipedia, they are explicitly referred to as a new religious movement. So take that as you will.

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Chris: That means cult.

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Kayla: That's the academic term. The group over at people Unlimited, their charismatic leaders, which I believe was a trifecta for a long time, were promoting the idea that human immortality was possible simply based on thoughts. Simply based on will alone.

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Chris: Simply single thought.

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Kayla: Simply based on a single thought. Simply based on believing hard enough.

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Chris: I feel like actually that's isn't that kind of, like, most of the issue with, like, new agey types? You know, stuff like paramahansa, yogananda, or ramtha? Like, all of this stuff is possible. It's just not possible by thinking about it. Like, it's. You know what I mean? Like, I can bend a spoon. I just need to use my hands. You know, it's like, all this stuff, like, I can slow my body down. I just need to use, like, vitrification processes instead of my thoughts. It kind of feels like most of these grifters, most of these, like, spiritualist type grifters, like, that's the issue, is this. They're. They're saying you can do this with thoughts alone, whereas everybody else is like, nah, you got to work. Work at it.

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Kayla: Yeah, I think it's a lot easier to sell to people the hope of, like, you can just do it. Do this at home. You don't have to spend any money on it except for all the money that you're gonna send to me as your charismatic leader. But, yeah, this. This specific group that was their whole thing is, like, immortality is right around the corner. We can just believe our way into it. I believe what has. What is currently happening with them. One of their founders died in 2014, which is often a problem for groups that tout immortality.

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Chris: And I think some goal posts, baby.

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Kayla: I think for them, the remaining founders have slowly been pivoting their belief system towards including cryonics as part of the path towards immortality. And so, unfortunately, I think that this group, which is, you know, pretty clearly as close to a cult as you're gonna get if it's getting called a new religious movement by the article writers on Wikipedia, and if it's just, you know, folks being like, hey, give us money, and we'll teach you how to live forever. It's unfortunate that they had those really faulty, fake, not even pseudoscience beliefs and are now being associated with cryonics because they've had to, like, pivot in order to keep people in their cult.

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Chris: Okay, so they didn't start off being cryonics, guys. The cryonics was the moving of the goalposts. Where they moved it to was cryonics.

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Kayla: Correct?

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Chris: Got it. Okay. Yeah, I can see where, like. I mean, that's the thing, though, like, with. With this type of work where you're talking about something so fundamentally, like, spiritual and impenetrable to humanity's attempts to understand it. Something like death. Like, yeah, you're gonna. You're gonna have you're gonna have groups that are like that. I think that makes sense to me.

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Kayla: Unfortunately, I think these groups and I think misunderstandings being communicated by folks like Michio Kaku and, you know, probably the pop culture depictions of cryonics. It makes it much more difficult for folks like you and I who are not scientists, who have, you know, a basic understanding of, like, what is good science versus bad science, but, you know, don't necessarily know all the specifics fix of, like, the physics of cryonics. It makes it much more difficult for you and I to figure out, is this or is this not pseudoscience? And that's part of why we wanted to go here and talk to somebody and have this in person experience. Because if there's actual science going on here, I want to know. I don't want to just continue resting on the assumptions that, like, hahaha. This is like some weird fringe, like, joke on futurama.

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Kayla: Hahaha. I grew up hearing about the cryogenically frozen head of Walt Disney. I don't want to be resting on the assumptions that I have if there is real, actual hard science going on here. And as somebody who has benefited from science around tissue preservation, I want to know. I want to know what the reality is. And I think that there's, in the small amount of research that we've been able to do so far, I've really noticed a lot of, like, the immediate reaction from a lot of people who are not into cryonics, who are not cryonicists themselves, immediately is, this is a scam. This is fake. This is taking advantage of people. This is exploitative. There's no way this can ever work. You can't freeze people. I've seen, oh, man. Like, it's, it's a lot of. There's no way that this is real.

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Kayla: And I feel like I have personally, I have been harmed by that assumption because I'm just now learning that there are people actually working on this in maybe a substantive manner.

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Chris: Yeah. And again, I keep going back to, like, the speculative science thing. Like, there's definitely a lot of speculativeness, speculation, whatever to it. Right? Like, there's. There's absolutely a leap of faith involved in saying, like, I'm going to cryopreserve myself for my loved ones. And I assume that one day there will be technology that, you know, that will be able to revive these folks. Like, you know, I get it. I get where that to people that are very skeptical by nature. Like, I'm skeptical by nature. So I understand being skeptical that, like, something like that will ever happen. But then I also kind of get the arguments, like you were saying to me about how, like, you know, the.

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Chris: The.

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Chris: We've expanded our definition of what it means to die already. So, like, isn't that what these guys are doing?

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Kayla: That is an argument that I have seen written by pro cryonics folks, is that being cryo preserved is nothing about dying and then being resurrected. It is about pausing or suspending the process of dying. And what Chris means in that we've expanded our definition of death, you know, kind of anecdotally, to put it into digestible terms, 150 years ago, if you keeled over and passed out on the street and stopped breathing, you were dead. That was it. You're dead.

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Kayla: You're.

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Kayla: You're going in the ground. Once we advance technology to include things even as simple as CPR, that changed the definition of death. That extended our definition of death. If somebody passes out on the street and stops breathing, well, now they are not dead until well after CPR methods have been induced. And I think that we've even continued to expand the legal definition of death to now include brain death. So you're not dead until. Until you have not had enough respiratory activity going on past the point of what would be sustainable for bringing your brain back online, essentially. And so what cryonicists believe, to my understanding, is that they think that eventually technology will exist that can bring back people or can reverse the process of dying to a greater degree than we currently have now.

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Kayla: So they believe that our current definition of death is not the absolute definition of death. And people that are in cryostasis, people that are cryopreserved, are not dead. They are dying. And that process has been paused.

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Chris: That. Yeah, I mean, that analogy definitely makes sense to me. Like, I do see the. Yeah, like, death has moved from a very, like, binary, obvious thing to, like, a much more, you know, spectrum y, like, not obvious type thing. And there's even, you know, there's people who have, like, oh, yeah, he was, like, brain dead for two minutes, but then he came back. So, like, you know, there's examples of people being, you know, what. What some might call resurrected. Other people might be saying, like, well, they never actually died. So, like, that's something that already exists. But I do get that. Like, there is something that does feel, and this is the thing that I think I'm most curious about. There definitely feels like it's a spiritual component to it. Like, we're talking about some really fundamental stuff.

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Chris: And, like, to me, there's a lot. There's a lot of parallels between this and belief. This is literally, like, using the words literally, it's an afterlife. It isn't. It's your life after your life. Now, granted, they're saying, like, okay, you're not dead. You're just suspended. So I, you know, it depends on the semantics, of course, but this seems very much to me like a belief in the afterlife. And there's. There's other people in your organization that have a similar belief in the afterlife, and they believe in the afterlife, all based on a similar set of beliefs. Like, the same way that, like, a bunch of Catholics might say, you know, well, Jesus told us there was an afterlife, so there is one.

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Chris: You know, people that do cryonics might say, like, you know, we are all going to be revived at some point from our cryostasis, and we believe that, you know, based on this science of cryonics. Now, maybe that makes it more valid because it's science. But I think the parallels are definitely.

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Kayla: There, and it's entirely possible that we continue our research and talk to more people and go and visit this facility and come away with, oh, shit. Oh, this is a. This is totally bombarded. This is. This is a pseudoscience, or this is exploiting people, or, this isn't what I thought it was.

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Chris: Yeah, I mean, we might just get on the road tomorrow and do our follow up here and be like, all right, guys, never mind. This place is really fucked up. So, you know, let's take everything with a grain of salt until we report back.

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Kayla: But either way, we have. We're getting more information on this now rather than just assuming that this was just a silly thing depicted on futurama. And going back to what you were just saying about, like, the parallels, the faith aspect of it, I do think that there is a difference between having faith that a technology will exist or having faith that the current trajectory of technology will continue or having faith that science will prevail versus having faith that there is a supreme spiritual entity that is judging your soul, that is having faith that a soul even exists at all, that is having faith that there will be some sort of afterlife when bodily death occurs. I do think that there is something different there. That said, the parallel is pretty obvious, but it does feel different.

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Kayla: It makes me think about how when you and I first started dating, which was, like, 15 years ago at this point.

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Chris: I'm sorry.

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Kayla: You should be sorry. You should be very sorry. Mostly, you should be sorry because you were the one who introduced me to the concept of the technological singularity in which futurists at the time, and futurists now, particularly people like Ray Kurzweil, believed that technology would accelerate exponentially at a certain point, and it would reach a point in which, I don't know, you explain it. I don't know.

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Chris: Yeah, yeah. The technological singularity refers to the point in time where technology accelerates to the point where there's, like, essentially like a phase change, and society becomes sort of like a. Like a different. Not just different a little bit, but like, different on some sort of fundamental level. And where the, you know, where the rubber meets the road on that is like, usually they talk about things like the metaverse, right? Like the matrix, like being able to, like, live forever by putting your brain in a van or by downloading your consciousness, or, you know, super intelligent AI taking care of our every need.

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Kayla: You and I both, for a while, really liked that philosophy, really liked that belief system. And a big reason was the promise of immortality, or at least choosing when to die of. Not, of. Of removing the process of, like, oh, you might get run over by a truck, or, oh, you might die of old age, or, oh, you're only going to live to be 80, of removing that from our lives. And that was really comforting to you and I think it was comforting to a lot of people, because eventually the technological singularity and the belief in it became referred to as the rapture for nerds.

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Kayla: And I think that tendency that we have towards, oh, science and technology can prevent us from this terrifying, this insurmountable obstacle that is constantly at the back of our head that we are always terrified of, that I cannot even, like, comport with how this is possible because it's so terrifying. I could. I could see that being motivating for somebody who may decide to become a cryonics patient. That is absolutely the same motivation for me now that I'm learning about chronics and going like, should I do this? Should I do this? Is there a chance here? Is there a possibility here? Does this give me choice and control? And do I get to escape death by doing this? And I don't really subscribe to the technological singularity idea anymore.

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Kayla: I unfortunately think that it's probably going to look different than I fantasized about in my head. But I understand that desire.

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Chris: I mean, even if all it provides you is hope, right? Like, it may not provide you choice or agency, like, those things may not actually come to pass, but you're still buying hope if you did something like this. Right. And that unfortunately means a. A lot of what we talk about with cults on this show is they provide hope, but that also doesn't mean that it's, like, a bad thing. Right?

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Kayla: Like, we also talk about how hope is necessary, and that's why high control groups are maybe able to prey on it, but that's also why, like, good groups are necessary. Like, I'm hopeful that something like the sunrise movement exists, and that doesn't make them a cult.

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Chris: Right, yeah, exactly. Like, hope can be something that a nefarious organization uses as bait, or it can be something that, you know, good organization or good people, you know, provide as a service or a boon to others. But this definitely feels like it's in that category of, like, what is being sold here is hope. Right, right. And you were saying, like, selling the hope or the selling the idea that, like, you might be able to have some control or conquer death, even, like, we might say that's fringe, but in reality, that's, like, half of the US marketing machine. I mean, like, that's every single makeup commercial you see is this has anti aging properties, and, like, half of all the food you buy is, like, this has antioxidants, which will prevent you from aging.

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Chris: So, like, you know, yes, it's fringe, but also, it's very much not fringe.

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Kayla: It's also why medicine exists as a thing. Like a detractor might say, like, oh, this is unnatural. Like, death. Death is natural. How far does that go? How far does that extend? Somebody who detracts from pursuing cryonics by saying it's unnatural or, like, you can't beat death, or blah, blah. That person probably still is glad that CPR is around, probably believes in CPR as a practice, probably would not try and dissuade a, somebody with a cancer diagnosis from going to chemotherapy, probably would not tell somebody not to get a heart transplant. Like those, all of those medical technologies that exist, medical technology advances in order to cure people, heal people, lengthen life, all of those things are real areas of research and real applied science. So I don't think it is a fair criticism to say that, like, oh, well, like, death is inevitable.

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Kayla: Death is necessary. No one's saying it's not. It's just saying maybe we can treat it differently.

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Chris: Yeah, I mean, what's more unnatural than, like, pumping your body full of poison to try to kill the cancer cells that are, you know, I mean, like, that's. That's extremely unnatural, but I don't think anybody would say that, like, chemo patients are doing anything wrong or dumb.

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Kayla: I also just want to make it.

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Kayla: Clear, and I feel like I have.

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Kayla: To say this again, that we at culture just weird, have absolutely no idea if the science behind cryonics, cryopreservation is legitimate science that is part of this journey, part of this exploration is hopefully we can answer that question when we emerge on the other side. But we are entertaining the idea as such because it seems far closer to actual, quote unquote, science than what I thought. And I want to continue pulling at that thread because this is so fascinating and because I really feel akinship to a lot of folks who decide upon choosing cryonics for themselves. Because the way I've seen it explained is, you know, to tractor might say something like, oh, the technology will never exist. This is never going to be possible. It's a scam because we're never going to be able to come back from death.

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Kayla: It's just, it's not going to be possible. It's not going to be possible. It's not going to be possible. And somebody who believes in cryonics might say, or who has faith that the technology will one day exist might say, well, the chances are better than if I'm rotting in the ground. The chances are better than if I am cremated. The chances are better than if I'm buried at sea. I know that chance is zero.

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Chris: But this, isn't this a little bit of like Pascal's dilemma, though, right?

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Isn't this the same thing as, like, well, you might as well believe in God because, you know, if you do the little decision matrix there, you know, there's no reason not to. This kind of feels like, well, you might as well freeze yourself because if you do the decision matrix, there's no reason not to.

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Kayla: It absolutely feels like that. And in Pascal's dilemma, that would be like if there were six different kinds of, like, life extension technologies being experimented upon. And were like, well, you got to go all in with cryonics, with Pascal's limits. It's like, well, you might as well believe in God because what's to lose? Well, what's to lose is if I'm starting to entertain the idea that God exists, why am I not entertaining the idea that like a different kind of religions, God exists? Like, you know what I mean? We've talked about, we talked about that way. We talked about Pascal's dilemma. If you go like, well, might as well believe in God. Well, what if you pick the wrong God? And this feels. I'm getting shrill. This feels like, what if you picked the wrong technology?

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Kayla: But we don't have the other technology options currently. If at some point somebody figures out, like, oh, there's a different style of, like, life extension or, like, preservation of the human body that could potentially result in the either their reversal of death or their resurrection from death, yada, yada, then it might be closer to a Pascal's dilemma discussion. But right now, the Pascal's dilemma discussion is we know there's only one God possible to believe in. So should you believe in him or not?

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Chris: I think it's pascal adjacent.

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Kayla: I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that it is. I'm just pointing out the differences.

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Chris: All right, Kayla, as much as I'd love to continue ruminating on all this stuff with you, we are pulling up to Scottsdale here. So let's go actually learn about this stuff, shall we?

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Kayla: Let's go get our questions answered.

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Kayla: Next time on cult are just weird. What happened after our visit to Alcor, and how have things changed since? This is Chris, this is Kayla, and.

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Chris: This has been cult or just cold or just weird?

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Kayla: Cold or just weird? Season six. Welcome back, you guys.