S6E3 - The Cryonauts: Guide

1
00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:24,810
Kayla: I'm just saying this literally was, like, one of the coolest things I've ever done. And I don't mean, like, coolest things I've ever done for the show. I mean, this is one of the coolest things I have ever done. And I know that I am risking sounding like I am gushing again. I'm not saying, like, you're not risking. I'm gushing. I'm saying that this facility was just dope as hell. It was just really fun to visit and learn, and it was cool.

2
00:00:37,850 --> 00:01:00,600
Chris: Welcome back to Cult of just weird. Oh, wait. Previously on Cult or just weird. Who shot Junior? Nobody will get that. Nobody's gonna get that reference. I just made a reference from the seventies. Yeah, I shouldn't even get that. I am sorry. I'm Chris. I'm a game designer. I'm a data scientist, and I decreed anachronism.

3
00:01:01,260 --> 00:01:08,164
Kayla: I'm Kayla. I am a tv writer. You know, I'm a lot of things. Honestly, you'll get the who shot junior.

4
00:01:08,212 --> 00:01:09,644
Chris: If you're a tv, right? Tv.

5
00:01:09,732 --> 00:01:18,796
Kayla: I understand who shot junior. I am also an elderly woman. I am also a young woman. I am a bitch. I'm a lover. I'm a child.

6
00:01:18,948 --> 00:01:21,124
Chris: That's also anachronistic reference.

7
00:01:21,172 --> 00:01:24,216
Kayla: Please. The nineties are back, baby.

8
00:01:24,388 --> 00:01:38,540
Chris: Okay. No, but for real, last time on culture, just weird. We discussed the first part of our tour, our trip to Alcor, and we left you right in. We left you in a science lab.

9
00:01:38,920 --> 00:01:40,528
Kayla: We left you in stasis.

10
00:01:40,584 --> 00:02:04,588
Chris: We left you in stasis, much like the frozen patients at Alcor and who walked into the science lab, but co CEO James Arrowood. And here's what happened next. So maybe first question is, like, hold on. Like, why is, why did he take over the tour from the tour guide? And also, like, why did. Why did he spend 2 hours with us?

11
00:02:04,684 --> 00:02:05,644
Kayla: It's because we're great.

12
00:02:05,732 --> 00:02:28,678
Chris: Yes. I mean, obvious reason is that we're awesome and very fun to spend time with. But also, we actually emailed them ahead of time about the fact that were producing a podcast episode about Alcor, and he was, understandably, he replied and was very worried about making sure that we portray Alcor correctly, which.

13
00:02:28,734 --> 00:02:34,262
Kayla: Yeah, like, after watching the John Wilson episode, I absolutely get.

14
00:02:34,446 --> 00:03:03,234
Chris: Yeah. So I would say some of the worry is driven by, like, typical CEO stuff of wanting to protect the company and its mission, but some of it was also driven by what you just mentioned. Like, they recently had some media about them, and they didn't really care for how they were portrayed. I know you said some cryonicists thought the episode was good, but I think the company, Alcor didn't. There were things, and we might actually get into this in a bonus episode, like what the actual discrepancies were.

15
00:03:03,322 --> 00:03:05,810
Kayla: Oh, we're gonna do a takedown of a takedown.

16
00:03:05,890 --> 00:03:33,948
Chris: John Wilson. But, yeah, so that was part of it. And then part of it was also the fact that Mister Arrowood is relatively new as Alcor's co CEO. He was their legal counsel before that, and he's driving a repositioning of Alcor to be less Sci-Fi speculative, transhumanist futurist, and more about moving the cryonics ball forward with supporting and doing present day practical science.

17
00:03:34,044 --> 00:03:56,556
Kayla: It's like kind of getting back to the roots of Alcor was started. I'm sorry if you say all of this and I'm jumping the gun, but Alcor was started as very science and research focused. And I get the sense that kind of over the years, it took a turn for a little more, like you said, the speculative futurism stuff, and now they're kind of returning back to those roots.

18
00:03:56,668 --> 00:04:41,430
Chris: And I understand both sides, right? I understand something that is in the space that Alcor is in, getting to be a little more speculative transhumanist, what some people might consider weird, because, I mean, they're dealing with death and life extension and something that is fundamentally a little bit weird. And so I get drifting in that direction. I don't think that's necessarily bad. They are now wanting to move in another direction and sort of like, the more science y, more hard facts and like, let's move the ball forward on the ground with what we know now. And I also understand that direction because that's, you know, it. We can sit here and talk all day about, like, whether nano robots are going to be able to repair my brain tissue and will I still be Chris?

19
00:04:42,170 --> 00:05:35,518
Chris: But what are we doing today with our donor money to advance this science? As an example, when were just saying hard science. Like, they have a bunch of frozen humans that they are constantly needing to monitor anyway, so why not use those bodies for study? And in fact, you sign a waiver when you're becoming an alcor member to consent to your brain and body being studied while you're frozen. And as we mentioned last episode, supposedly contributing to medical research is one of the main reasons that some folks cite wanting to have themselves frozen in the first place, which is kind of an amazing thing. Also, cryopreservation of transplant organs, in vitro fertilization of embryos, both of those things might be considered like, practical endeavors that Alcor contributes science to. That is what we're talking about when we talk about or think of organ transplants.

20
00:05:35,574 --> 00:05:39,982
Chris: If you have to picture something, picture organ transplants is like the practical science that they want to move towards, right?

21
00:05:40,006 --> 00:06:06,798
Kayla: Because there are other companies that are developing technologies where it's like, ooh, we can freeze a kidney and then unfreeze a kidney. And Alcor is in that kind of bucket. And there's one not to go back, but there is one other thing that I think also makes it a little difficult to want to hop into an interview with us or immediately be like, hello, yes, talk about my company on your show, something we ran into a.

22
00:06:06,814 --> 00:06:08,518
Chris: Couple times last season as well.

23
00:06:08,574 --> 00:06:14,182
Kayla: When you're reaching out to somebody and the name of your podcast is cult or just weird raises some heckles, obviously.

24
00:06:14,246 --> 00:06:19,830
Chris: And so are you the bad thing or are you the other thing that's also bad?

25
00:06:19,950 --> 00:06:57,994
Kayla: The unfortunate reality that we've learned as we've been doing this research is that getting compared to cults has been damaging to companies like Alcor in the past. Because unfortunately, in this arena, there have been scams and there have been like, literal new religious movements that pop up and position themselves as, you know, related to cryonics when they absolutely are not, that are doing true, like, culty shit. And so it makes sense that a company like Alcor that is focusing on the hard science of cryo preservation brand.

26
00:06:58,042 --> 00:06:59,162
Chris: Wise, you'd want to dissociate.

27
00:06:59,226 --> 00:07:08,070
Kayla: Yeah. If you've been harmed by people calling you a cult in the past, I can totally understand being like, why are you contacting me if your podcast is called cult? Or just weird?

28
00:07:08,730 --> 00:07:11,378
Chris: That being said, we're not changing the title. I'm sorry.

29
00:07:11,434 --> 00:07:13,314
Kayla: No, we're in season six.

30
00:07:13,442 --> 00:07:40,676
Chris: It's too late. We are committed. Speaking of branding, back to the tour, though, now we're on the extended version of the tour. The next thing we got to see was a, now we're still in the science lab, a bag of the vitrification fluid, which you pull out of like a freezer for us, basically. And it was like pretty wild and like, very like, incongruous to look at because it was super cold, but it was still in liquid form. It wasn't frozen solid.

31
00:07:40,748 --> 00:07:42,388
Kayla: Anything else would be ice at that point.

32
00:07:42,444 --> 00:08:17,642
Chris: Right. And that's exactly the point, actually, is that by pumping a patient's body with this stuff, replacing their normal bodily fluids, which are water based. With this vitrification fluid, they can keep the body at stasis temperatures, at the -320 temperatures without them freezing solid, which is one of the main problems as to why a normal freezing process damages tissue beyond repair. When ice forms out of the water in your bodily fluid, it forms these crystals, and the resulting pressures from these crystals ruptures cells and tissues.

33
00:08:17,786 --> 00:08:52,752
Kayla: The thing that I thought was so interesting about learning about this was Mister Arrowwood mentioned that there's a misconception that the ice crystals that form in the freezing process explode the cell walls because ice expands, obviously. And so there's this misconception that, oh, the ice expands and then blows out your cell walls. But actually, what happens, according to what we learned in this tour, is that when the body freezes, it collapses the cell walls. And that does feel very counter intuitive. But it was just. I don't know, I thought that was cool to, like, learn something that I was not gonna learn anywhere else.

34
00:08:52,856 --> 00:09:39,968
Chris: Yeah, it's still damage, but it just damages it in a way that's, like, a little bit counterintuitive. And the vitrification fluid is there to solve this, which is kind of why I mentioned before, the main problem with freezing humans now seems to be a lot less about just, like, tissue damage, because that's not really an issue for companies like Alcor and more about advancing neurological research to understand what would need to be preserved in a human brain to preserve the person it got frozen as, and also the unfreezing and the curing of the underlying disease or old age. But they'll get to that. By the way, cry necists have a word to differentiate the legally declared death of a person to what they consider actually really for real super dead.

35
00:09:40,104 --> 00:09:41,448
Kayla: You ain't coming back from it.

36
00:09:41,504 --> 00:09:48,608
Chris: Not even freezing would help them. Like, for example, if the brain was damaged too much, or if you were incinerated by jumping into a volcano, if.

37
00:09:48,624 --> 00:09:51,232
Kayla: A steamroller went over your head and.

38
00:09:51,256 --> 00:10:16,724
Chris: You just, like, pancake and, like, floated down, like on a Looney tunes. They call that information theoretic death, which I think is an interesting term. And I understand that if you believe that the patients are still alive, just in stasis, then you would need a different term to, like, mean, like, for real dead, unretrievable. After the lab, we got to see the operating room where they prepare bodies or lopped off heads for the doers.

39
00:10:16,772 --> 00:10:19,780
Kayla: This was so cool.

40
00:10:19,900 --> 00:10:55,670
Chris: So they have this metal operating table that facilitates the introduction of the aforementioned vitrification fluid into the body. And this table is also where they start the freezing process, which, by the way, has to happen very slowly in order to minimize damage. The rate we recited was roughly one degree Fahrenheit every ten minutes. So if you're a balmy 98.6 and you need to get yourself to a refreshing negative 320 degrees, doing the math there means it takes about 69 hours to fully and safely freeze a human body. This is where you laugh at 69.

41
00:10:55,790 --> 00:11:18,980
Kayla: There's also. Okay, we forgot to mention that they have a whole contraption set up for the transport to get here that they showed us. Like, they have a whole gurney set up, essentially, where the body is put in ice. And there's a cool mask that you get that super cools the face as well to get you nice and cold before you get to this room, where they properly bring in your temperature.

42
00:11:19,020 --> 00:11:54,412
Chris: The sooner they can start doing all that stuff, the better. And it's also important, by the way, to keep oxygen flowing inside the body to prevent a cell metabolism from fucking up, basically. It's interesting because there's, like, a ton of urgency around getting the legally dead body to get started with the vitrification, as you just mentioned. But then after that, it needs to proceed really methodically and slowly. It's too much to go into here. But they actually have a crack team that's specifically trained and tasked with retrieving their legally dead patients and bringing them to Alcor, which I found fascinating that they didn't have a strike team.

43
00:11:54,506 --> 00:11:56,904
Kayla: I've heard it referred to as dart team.

44
00:11:57,032 --> 00:11:57,512
Chris: Dart.

45
00:11:57,616 --> 00:12:04,000
Kayla: D a r t. It might be a different thing, but I've seen they play darts. I've seen that term thrown around online.

46
00:12:04,080 --> 00:12:07,816
Chris: Thrown around like a dart. Well, what is that? Is that, like, an acronym? What is that?

47
00:12:07,928 --> 00:12:13,376
Kayla: I don't know. I did not see it as, like, here's what dart means. I've just seen people talking about Alcor's dart team.

48
00:12:13,448 --> 00:12:29,492
Chris: Huh. After that, we got to go check out their workshop, which was so cool. Yeah. Like, the overall, the whole facility was cool, because literally, it's like one third size science lab, one third hospital, and one third engineering shop.

49
00:12:29,556 --> 00:12:29,820
Kayla: Yeah.

50
00:12:29,860 --> 00:12:32,388
Chris: It's like this interesting mix of stuff.

51
00:12:32,484 --> 00:12:33,684
Kayla: Father son team.

52
00:12:33,812 --> 00:12:41,348
Chris: Yeah, the workshop is a father son team, and that's where they make the toys out of the 3d printed stuff that were talking about.

53
00:12:41,404 --> 00:12:43,396
Kayla: They built their own 3d printer there.

54
00:12:43,508 --> 00:13:18,148
Chris: That's right. And they also basically just used this workshop for them to tinker on devices. And it was explained to us that a lot of this tinkering involves figuring out how to take existing medical technology, which can be extremely bulky. And you know what I mean? If you've ever had an MRI or an x ray or something and making it portable so that aforementioned, like, strike team that goes out to retrieve the illegally dead patients can take stuff with them that they need. After that, we got to see the inner sanctum, the place where the magic happens. The doer room itself.

55
00:13:18,284 --> 00:13:22,170
Kayla: It was so cool.

56
00:13:22,990 --> 00:13:24,838
Chris: Are you trying to work on, like, a new catchphrase?

57
00:13:24,894 --> 00:13:49,288
Kayla: I'm just saying, this literally was, like, one of the coolest things I've ever done. And I don't mean, like, coolest things I've ever done for the show. I mean, this is one of the coolest things I have ever done. And I know that I am at, like, risking sounding like I am gushing again. I'm not saying, like, you're not risking. I'm gushing. I'm saying that this facility was just dope as hell. It was just really fun to visit and learn, and it was cool.

58
00:13:49,344 --> 00:13:55,736
Chris: Well, you described the physical look of the doers for our audience. Can you paint a really quick picture of the room in which they were contained?

59
00:13:55,928 --> 00:14:23,372
Kayla: This is another profound place. Like, there was a lot of reverence in this spot. So you walk in, and the area of this room that a visitor is able to occupy is quite small compared to the rest of the room. It's like a viewing area where the doers are. It is behind glass. It is behind a very secure door, because, obviously, this is the most important room in the entire facility. There were. How many doers do you think were there? A dozen.

60
00:14:23,556 --> 00:14:26,620
Chris: No more than a dozen. Yeah, at least 20.

61
00:14:26,700 --> 00:14:32,404
Kayla: There were probably about 20 doers behind this glass in kind of, like, lined up around the room. There was also a.

62
00:14:32,452 --> 00:14:36,340
Chris: It kind of did look like a brewery if you've ever done in, like, a brewery tour.

63
00:14:36,460 --> 00:14:37,628
Kayla: Yeah, it kind of looks like a.

64
00:14:37,644 --> 00:14:47,080
Chris: Brewery if instead of having, like, big, fat vats of, like, wort and beer and whatever, if instead, like, the. The vats were skinny. Yeah, it kind of looked like that.

65
00:14:47,580 --> 00:15:03,580
Kayla: And then sprinkler system on top, we saw all the, like, oh, there's the computer that's monitoring it. There was also, I believe, like, almost as if on a museum display. There was that. There was a very early cryopreservation chamber that had been from, I think, like.

66
00:15:03,620 --> 00:15:04,596
Chris: It'S like a capsule.

67
00:15:04,668 --> 00:15:11,216
Kayla: I think it was the. James, I could be wrong. I apologize, Alcor, if I'm getting this wrong, but I believe this was the James Bedford.

68
00:15:11,348 --> 00:15:12,744
Chris: So the first guy that got, I.

69
00:15:12,752 --> 00:15:14,208
Kayla: Think so, the first cryopreservation, I'm pretty.

70
00:15:14,224 --> 00:15:15,368
Chris: Sure they told us that, because I.

71
00:15:15,384 --> 00:15:56,100
Kayla: Believe that they took his body from that original cryo preservation chamber and have since placed into one of their doers. So there was like. It was like part museum, part medical facility, and then also part, like, chapel, because, again, this is like, these are where people are arresting post legal death. And it was very quiet in there, and the lighting was low in the area where were in. And it just felt like, you know, you wanted to be very respectful of these choices that people had made and of the work that's going into this. It was just. I don't have a similar experience to really, anywhere as this room.

72
00:15:56,880 --> 00:16:24,444
Chris: Yeah, I agree with all that. And I think Mister Arrowhead himself also mentioned that. He described that room as a. As a reverent place. And I agree. At minimum. At minimum, it's a cemetery and a monument to our collective human struggle with death and dying. And it could be much more. So I definitely felt the heaviness of meaning that was present in that room. And so, yeah, they have about, as we said, it looked like 20 doers.

73
00:16:24,492 --> 00:16:29,164
Kayla: Which means we could probably do the math because you said there's 227 patients, 20 times four.

74
00:16:29,292 --> 00:16:31,020
Chris: Yeah, we could do the math, but we're not going to.

75
00:16:31,060 --> 00:16:32,956
Kayla: Yeah, because this is a podcast and there's heads.

76
00:16:32,988 --> 00:17:03,892
Chris: Instead, I'm going to tell you about some interesting vip's that are there. The stuff you really want to know, the juicy stuff. Alcor is correctly very concerned. Shaquille O'Neal, about patient confidentiality. No, he is still alive. But, yeah, so Alcor didn't tell us about anyone that was actually in there, which, again, that's a good thing. But there's some information out there about people that are. So I'm gonna tell you about some people that are patients currently alive. Members and also patients that are in the doer room.

77
00:17:03,956 --> 00:17:04,996
Kayla: These are publicly known.

78
00:17:05,068 --> 00:17:05,652
Chris: These are publicly known.

79
00:17:05,675 --> 00:17:06,665
Kayla: Publicly declared.

80
00:17:06,828 --> 00:17:19,054
Chris: So if you guys know Ray Kurzweil, he's still alive. He's a famous futurist and natural language researcher. He wrote the singularity is near. He's like the high priest of singletarianism.

81
00:17:19,142 --> 00:17:23,130
Kayla: He's, like, employed at Google as their chief futurist or something.

82
00:17:23,670 --> 00:17:26,654
Chris: He's one of those. I still like Ray Kurzweil.

83
00:17:26,662 --> 00:17:27,810
Kayla: I love Rakerswell.

84
00:17:28,230 --> 00:17:28,990
Chris: So he's a member.

85
00:17:29,030 --> 00:17:30,238
Kayla: He's got some problems that. I love him.

86
00:17:30,294 --> 00:17:35,838
Chris: He's got some problems, but I love him. He is a member at Alcord. Nick Bostrom.

87
00:17:35,934 --> 00:17:37,046
Kayla: He's an Alcor member.

88
00:17:37,118 --> 00:17:37,910
Chris: Nick Bostrom. Yeah.

89
00:17:37,950 --> 00:17:38,406
Kayla: Damn.

90
00:17:38,478 --> 00:17:53,702
Chris: Yeah. And also Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley financier and esteemed supervillain. He is also a member and maybe the most famous, at least like, to lay people who aren't into, like, futurism.

91
00:17:53,806 --> 00:17:56,494
Kayla: To people who got that, who shot junior reference.

92
00:17:56,582 --> 00:18:23,616
Chris: Yes. Yeah. To our older, actually. So the person we're talking about, it might even be older than that because he played baseball in the forties. So Ted Williams is also frozen there. This ended up becoming public information via some, like, court documents back there was actually a little bit of a controversy that, like, things didn't go super great with this, but, like, it is public knowledge now that Ted Williams is also frozen there.

93
00:18:23,688 --> 00:18:24,460
Kayla: All right.

94
00:18:24,980 --> 00:18:45,956
Chris: If we ever become members, we're gonna wake up in the future with a bunch of friends that include Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Peter Thiel, and Ted Williams and probably some other celebrities who we just don't know. Who we just don't know. There was a few that there's rumor, but I couldn't quite verify, so I'm not saying them.

95
00:18:46,028 --> 00:19:01,552
Kayla: And there's a lot of people who also publicly signed up and then were like, actually, I changed my mind. And I wonder, like, Timothy Leary was a huge cryonics guy, and he was signed up, and then supposedly he changed his mind at the last second. And I'm kind of like,

96
00:19:01,656 --> 00:19:02,472
Chris: Did he, though?

97
00:19:02,576 --> 00:19:05,216
Kayla: Yeah. Larry King also changed his mind, supposedly.

98
00:19:05,368 --> 00:19:08,048
Chris: Oh, man, I don't know if. All right, I know.

99
00:19:08,064 --> 00:19:09,344
Kayla: It's an interesting.

100
00:19:09,472 --> 00:19:11,020
Chris: It's an interesting bunch.

101
00:19:11,480 --> 00:19:13,784
Kayla: But there's also a bunch of regular degulars.

102
00:19:13,832 --> 00:19:37,314
Chris: Right? Of course. Just like us. We're totally regular. Nothing wrong with us if you can't tell. We were like, I kind of want to sign up. The rest of the tour was sort of a wind down from where were. We saw a few of the less interesting, like, business y places. Like, saw a conference room. We got to see the CEO's office, and then we chatted with him for, like, another 30 or so minutes in.

103
00:19:37,322 --> 00:19:38,178
Kayla: The really nice lobby.

104
00:19:38,234 --> 00:20:25,192
Chris: Warming up in the really nice lobby kind of where exactly where he was talking to the doctors earlier. At this point, it was mostly him talking about his work there and the new direction. We talked about that they're trying to go with Alcor. And again, I think it's the right direction. I think, you know, it's certainly, it's important to think about possible speculative future science to revive people. But when it comes to, like, well, how are we gonna get there? I think it makes sense to focus on that more. All right, Kayla, our audience may be wondering at this point, wow, cryonics sure sounds neat, but is it right for me? And it's pretty much out of reach financially for most people. Right. This is like. This is only something that, like, crazy ass rich people do.

105
00:20:25,376 --> 00:20:30,376
Kayla: I feel like I asked you at one point, like, how much do you think this costs? And you said, like, some crazy numbers you did.

106
00:20:30,528 --> 00:20:37,048
Chris: I think I said something like my guess. And actually, I want our audience to guess right now how much it costs. Before we talk about it, sit in.

107
00:20:37,064 --> 00:20:41,432
Kayla: Your mind and think how much your body frozen with, like, cutting edge technology.

108
00:20:41,536 --> 00:20:43,096
Chris: Indefinitely in perpetuity.

109
00:20:43,168 --> 00:20:44,736
Kayla: Yeah. How much do you think that costs?

110
00:20:44,808 --> 00:20:51,072
Chris: I think my number was, like, over a million. And I thought I was being. I thought that would be, like, cheap.

111
00:20:51,176 --> 00:21:10,434
Kayla: So for Alcor, and again, this is. We're talking about, like, the gold standard. We're talking about a number that encompasses both your stay at the facility as well as the transport to get there, because some other cryonics companies will charge you a number, but that doesn't include the transport. You have to arrange your own transport, and that's a separate fee.

112
00:21:10,552 --> 00:21:12,238
Chris: So we're talking about, like, all expense.

113
00:21:12,294 --> 00:21:23,342
Kayla: Paid trip to the afterlife thing. At the time of this recording, or at least the time of the visit, for a full body, it was $200,000.

114
00:21:23,526 --> 00:21:24,870
Chris: Incredibly cheap.

115
00:21:24,990 --> 00:21:28,886
Kayla: And for a neuro patient, it is $80,000.

116
00:21:28,958 --> 00:21:30,450
Chris: Insanely cheap.

117
00:21:30,870 --> 00:21:36,926
Kayla: And those are big numbers. I am poor, so those are big numbers.

118
00:21:37,038 --> 00:21:40,418
Chris: Cheap in terms of, like, what you're buying.

119
00:21:40,474 --> 00:21:40,826
Kayla: Yes.

120
00:21:40,898 --> 00:21:43,866
Chris: Not necessarily accessible, except.

121
00:21:44,058 --> 00:21:56,266
Kayla: Except one of the craziest things that I learned, and I'm just. I'm still wrapping my head around it, is how most people pay for cryonics, how most people pay to be cryo preserved.

122
00:21:56,418 --> 00:21:57,090
Chris: Lotto.

123
00:21:57,210 --> 00:21:57,674
Kayla: It's a lot.

124
00:21:57,722 --> 00:21:59,410
Chris: Shout out to the lottery episode.

125
00:21:59,530 --> 00:22:04,682
Kayla: You play the lottery if you're Peter Thiel, if you're Ray Kurzweil, probably you can.

126
00:22:04,706 --> 00:22:10,148
Chris: If you're Peter Thiele, fuck you. If you're somebody else, like Rick Kurzweil, maybe you can afford it.

127
00:22:10,244 --> 00:22:23,188
Kayla: You can probably pay upfront. Most of the people don't have 200 grand sitting around at home. And so the way that most people pay for this, the way that most people fund their stay at Alcor, is.

128
00:22:23,284 --> 00:22:30,732
Chris: Through life insurance, which is really interesting because it feels like it's the only time life insurance is actually literally true.

129
00:22:30,836 --> 00:22:32,116
Kayla: Yeah, yeah.

130
00:22:32,148 --> 00:22:33,412
Chris: You're actually ensuring your life.

131
00:22:33,476 --> 00:22:33,676
Kayla: We.

132
00:22:33,708 --> 00:22:41,516
Chris: We talked about this a little bit with them when were there, because, like, that, you know, this isn't like, no secret. Like, this is actually a thing that they put forward.

133
00:22:41,628 --> 00:22:45,236
Kayla: There are cryonics friendly advertise about life insurance companies now.

134
00:22:45,308 --> 00:23:24,106
Chris: Yeah. So they actually have relationships with insurance companies that know how to do this, like that, do this all the time with them. And one of the concerns I think that I had before went there was like, okay, what if I take my life insurance and spend it on Alcor, and then, like, I die when I'm, you know, 45 and leave my wife and kids behind and they get screwed, which, you know, fine, fuck em, right? I'm dead. Who cares? But that kind of feels mean. Yeah, you know, it kind of feels unethical. But they explained that, like, for the most part, this is in addition to people's, like, quote unquote regular life insurance. Not instead of.

135
00:23:24,198 --> 00:23:43,394
Kayla: So, yeah, you people's regular life insurance, signing up for life insurance. Alcor is the beneficiary. You overfund, quote unquote overfund your life insurance. So, like, if you're a full body patient, maybe you'll get a $250,000 life insurance policy. So you're paying on that policy monthly. Obviously, the younger and quote unquote healthier you are, the cheaper it's gonna be.

136
00:23:43,562 --> 00:23:44,522
Chris: It's life insurance.

137
00:23:44,586 --> 00:24:36,554
Kayla: Yeah. The older and maybe more illnesses you have, more expensive it's gonna be. So the accessibility can still very greatly, but a life insurance policy is far more accessible than I expected cryonics to be. And there's also, because, again, there's so much room for, like, financial scamming in our world. And especially for something like this where you might set up a fund and then you're dead and you don't know what the hell's going on with it. It's very important to a company like Alcor to make sure people's money is protected. And so they have, like, the. I don't. I'm not good at numbers and maths and monies, so I still don't fully understand this. But the fund, like, the money that comes from patients is complete, is a separate entity from, like, alcoholism, patient trust.

138
00:24:36,682 --> 00:25:09,338
Kayla: So there's at least some protections in place so that people aren't just like, it's good procedure, getting their monies taken away and then having their bodies thought out. But the whole insurance thing, there's a whole, like, if you go online, you will see people talking about, like, how to do this. Like, there are, I mean, Alcor has, like, a to do list of, like, here's how to do this because it's a very in depth, detailed, like, detail oriented process. So, like, I don't know, I was just so surprised by this wrinkle as well. I thought it was very interesting.

139
00:25:09,474 --> 00:26:02,360
Chris: And there's another reason, actually, why it's a cheaper than you might expect, and that's that only about 40% of the costs of caring for a patient are covered by the payment that the patient themselves make through this, either through upfront if you're mega wealthy, or through this patient trust insurance thing. Only about four. It only covers about 40% of the costs. The other 60% is funded by donations. So, like, not the individual. Alcor has like, a pool of donor money that they use to cover the rest of the costs involved for keeping patients in stasis. Pardon the interruption here. I just wanted to issue a correction, additional context on this bit that we're talking about regarding how Alcor patients are funded throughout their stay there.

140
00:26:03,260 --> 00:26:57,898
Chris: So I was a little confused about whether the funding entirely for a patient comes entirely from that patient's insurance and their payments and what goes into the Alcor patient trust and how much of it comes from donors. So my understanding now, based on some conversations had in the cryonics discord between some of the cryonics folks there and aforementioned James Arrowood. So the way that it seems to work is that the patient trust funds the entirety of a patient's stay at Alcor. So there's no risk of, like, oh, if donors stop paying money, the patients will thaw. That doesn't seem to be a risk. What the donor money seems to be is for basically everything else that Alcor does. So we talk about how they do research and things like that. That's what the donor money seems to be for.

141
00:26:58,044 --> 00:27:13,050
Chris: I still don't know if there's like an overlap between, like, well, I don't know if there's, like, overhead costs they can't pay for. That seems bad for the patients, but it seems like they're entirely compartmentalized such that if all the donor money dried up, the patient trust would still pay for the maintenance of the doers.

142
00:27:15,310 --> 00:27:18,366
Kayla: One more thing I will say is one of the first things I did.

143
00:27:18,398 --> 00:27:21,942
Chris: You need to stop saying one more thing, because it's like, on your 75th thing.

144
00:27:22,046 --> 00:28:04,386
Kayla: Another thing I will say about the money aspect of this is one of the first things I did when we decided to do this topic and when it had been presented, especially this part had been presented as kind of like a scam on how to with John Wilson is I wanted to go look at the financials of the company. And again, I'm not the IR's. I know that people have money in the Caymans. I don't know what the fuck. But if you do go look at the financials, which are publicly available, you can go look at companies tax returns or whatever. It checks out. This is not the kind of company where the CEO is making like, $500 million and the employees are making two, and no money is actually going into the research.

145
00:28:04,538 --> 00:28:09,562
Kayla: The financials actually do what they say that they're doing according to.

146
00:28:09,586 --> 00:28:44,098
Chris: And in terms of the patience, in terms of the cost to the patient, I think accessibility also makes a huge difference in how I view it, because it would seem like if it was something that you could only. If it was $2 million and they didn't have this insurance thing and they didn't have the donor money and blah, blah, then it would definitely seem like, okay, this is a thing for freaky rich people. Weirdos. They go to their bohemian grove meeting in the afternoon, and then at night they're spending money on their Alcor brain freezing or whatever. The fact that it's more accessible makes it feel more normal.

147
00:28:44,194 --> 00:28:58,586
Kayla: This is a practice that's by cryonicists, for other cryonicists. And it does seem legitimately like it's a community that wants to make sure that this is a thing for their community and not just the Peter Thiels of the world.

148
00:28:58,658 --> 00:29:11,458
Chris: Right. And the fact that it's funded so much by donations kind of also ties back to wanting to protect the branding and not be associated with, like, cult like behavior.

149
00:29:11,514 --> 00:29:12,042
Kayla: Right.

150
00:29:12,186 --> 00:29:36,758
Chris: Because, like, that makes a material difference to these people that, like, are in their care. Right, right. Like, if their funding dries up, then, like, what? What do you do? We talked about business risk being one of the risks to the long term preservation of these people. So, like, that's part of why they're so protective of. Of their brand and. Yeah, I guess actually it is just rich people paying for it. After all, since it's 60% of it is donations.

151
00:29:36,934 --> 00:29:39,558
Kayla: Well, you have to be rich to make a donation.

152
00:29:39,614 --> 00:29:43,110
Chris: Other people. Yeah, I know, but, like, a lot of it is, like, rich donors.

153
00:29:43,150 --> 00:29:43,398
Kayla: Sure.

154
00:29:43,454 --> 00:29:44,690
Chris: Yeah, I'm sure.

155
00:29:45,110 --> 00:29:48,050
Kayla: It's not like me chucking $5 in the Gofundme.

156
00:29:49,630 --> 00:30:09,238
Chris: Well, as we know, GoFundMe is the primary way that we pay for medical expenses in America. Speaking of the people involved, were we speaking of that? I said rich people. Rich people are people too. Speaking of the people involved in cryonics, I think it's probably a good idea to actually talk to one of them.

157
00:30:09,294 --> 00:30:09,678
Kayla: What?

158
00:30:09,774 --> 00:30:17,872
Chris: Can we do that? Oh, can we get a producer to sit in the corner so I can ask them things like, can we do that, Steve? Can we get that clip? I want one of those.

159
00:30:17,896 --> 00:30:23,696
Kayla: Do those guys actually exist? Like, I've seen Joe Rogan talking to, like, Steve. Pull that clip up or whatever. Yeah, but I've never seen.

160
00:30:23,768 --> 00:30:24,632
Chris: You've never seen Steve?

161
00:30:24,696 --> 00:30:26,000
Kayla: No. Is he real?

162
00:30:26,120 --> 00:30:30,296
Chris: It's like the guy wasn't there, like, a producer on, like, Regis. Oh, my God. You know what?

163
00:30:30,368 --> 00:30:31,384
Kayla: Don't make a Regis.

164
00:30:31,472 --> 00:30:33,128
Chris: I was gonna make a Regis and Kathy Lee.

165
00:30:33,184 --> 00:30:33,640
Kayla: No.

166
00:30:33,760 --> 00:30:35,576
Chris: Morning show. Oh, God, no.

167
00:30:35,648 --> 00:30:35,952
Kayla: No.

168
00:30:36,016 --> 00:30:39,502
Chris: Oh, my God. I'm making just the worst of oldest references today.

169
00:30:39,566 --> 00:30:45,654
Kayla: This is bad. But to answer your question, as a producer. Oh, yeah. You better believe we can talk to someone.

170
00:30:45,742 --> 00:30:48,566
Chris: Oh, all right. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Steve from off camera.

171
00:30:48,638 --> 00:30:54,094
Kayla: Steve from off camera lined up an interview, and we will get to that.

172
00:30:54,262 --> 00:31:02,886
Chris: In our next time on culture. Just weird. This is Kayla, and this is Chris. Thank you for going on this journey with.