S6E4 - The Cryonauts: Interview

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Jacob Cook: You know what? If we could meet people from the 17 hundreds or ancient Rome or whatever, even if they were just really average people, we would be fascinated by that. The ability to talk to people from the past. And so we'll never have that opportunity, but future generations might.

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Kayla: Welcome back to culture.

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Kayla: Just weird.

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Kayla: This is Kayla. I'm a tv writer and just all around expert on all things.

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Chris: Thanks for welcoming me back to my own show.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: Or were you talking to our audience?

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Kayla: I was.

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Chris: All right.

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Kayla: You can be our audience.

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

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Kayla: This is our fourth episode on Cryonics and specifically on our visit to a company called Alcor and our experiences with this field since.

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Chris: Do you know what Alcor means, by the way?

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Kayla: Isn't it a star?

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Chris: It's a star. It's the name of a star. It's a specific star with a specific meaning that I totally forget.

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Kayla: It's like an Orion or something.

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Chris: Something like that.

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Kayla: Look it up.

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Chris: But, like, they.

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Kayla: Somebody google it. You don't have to google it. Somebody listening google it right now.

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Chris: Google it. Just. You know what? Don't even listen to the show. Google it. I haven't made a don't listen to the show joke yet this season, so I want to get that in.

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Kayla: Okay. Chris, we've talked about our journey to Alcor. All the questions we had. We've talked about the tour we took, about Alcor as a company itself.

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Chris: Did we talk about how our air conditioning broke on the drive back when it was, like, 95 degrees and, like, 19 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic in Arizona?

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Kayla: It was horrible.

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Chris: The car broke. I feel like that's kind of ironic that went to a freezing place and then were cooking in our car.

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Kayla: Yeah. Yes. Trying to remember. Trying to. Oh, my God.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And it was like, while were recording the after, like, notes, too, were just, like, pouring sweat. It's not culture. Just weird. Unless you and I are pouring down sweat.

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Kayla: That's the heart of the show, baby. You said you wanted us to talk to a cryonicist firsthand.

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Chris: I think it's a good practice to talk to people that are involved in the thing.

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Kayla: Well, today we are going to talk to a cryonicist firsthand.

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Chris: Awesome.

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Kayla: An important thing we've learned as we've gone through this topic is how robust the community is. Even though the number of members at Alcor and I, cryonicists in general, at other companies and just in the world, like, those numbers remain fairly small in the thousands, but they're a very connected group. So keeping in touch via Reddit, Discord, mailing lists, in person, conferences, events and more. Because remember, if you're a cryonicist, you have hope that you'll arrive in the future one day and the only people you'll have with you that will understand what you've gone through are other cryonicists.

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Chris: Yeah. Like Imagine, maybe we'll talk about it.

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Kayla: Very powerful bonding experience.

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Chris: Yeah. Like Imagine waking up and it's hundreds of years from now, everybody, you know, all of your family and friends are gone.

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Kayla: Just you and Peter Thiel.

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Chris: It's just you and Peter Thiel in the year 23, 53 and, you know, surrounded by robots and lizard people, future.

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Kayla: Humans that are basically alien.

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Chris: Completely. Might as well be an alien planet.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And I'm sorry, but Peter Thiel's gonna be the only one that understands what you're going through. Him and Ray Kurzweil. So it's fine. The person we're about to talk and Ted Williams.

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Kayla: And Ted Williams.

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Chris: You could field a pretty good baseball team. Somebody should make a movie about unfreezing a baseball team, unfreezing people from the past, because they need to compete in a baseball competition. Like, like a.

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Kayla: So it's demolition man, but it's baseball, man.

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Chris: Yeah. Take demolition man and space jam. And I want that movie.

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Kayla: Yeah, I kind of do too. This whole time we've been doing this topic, I've been trying to figure out how to make a cryonics, like how to pitch a cryonics show.

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Chris: It's that. It's baseball, space jam, but also demolition. Base jam meets demolition.

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Kayla: Yeah. The person we're about to talk to is not on a baseball, an interdimensional baseball team yet. Yet they are still an important member of the community. Jacob Cook is very active on Reddit and Discord and even appeared on the how to with John Wilson show.

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Chris: Oh, cool, right?

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Kayla: As part of that. Yeah, cryonics segment, we've talked a little bit back and forth on Discord and a little bit on Reddit, but I was really excited to connect over Skype. And we get deep into everything cryonics related, not just Alcor. This is an overall cryonics conversation.

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Chris: So people still use Skype. I thought Zoom was the thing Zoom.

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Kayla: Starts charging you for.

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Chris: Oh, yeah.

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Kayla: Long conversations.

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Chris: I use Skype too, for interviews.

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Kayla: Yeah. I don't use them anymore.

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Chris: Yeah. And Skype, like auto Skype better.

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Kayla: Before we get to the Skype interview, I want to say one thing. This is a conversation between two laypeople while sure I've read, you know, a lot, I've read some for this episode, and Jacob is deeply informed and researched on the topic. This is still a conversation between two amateurs, essentially, and I don't use that term derogatorily.

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Chris: Two fans.

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Kayla: Two fans. This is not a conversation between two scientists about hard science. So please take facts and figures with a grain of salt and think of this as a discovery discussion. Yeah, like between two fandom members.

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Chris: Rather, a pseudo journalist talks to a pseudoscientist. It's perfect.

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Kayla: This is not a series of facts or scientific claims. This is a fun and interesting conversation. As we know, the jury is still out on the science behind cryonics, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of really cool stuff to talk about. With all that said, let's go.

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Kayla: Let's just jump into it. Can you introduce yourself to our audience?

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Jacob Cook: Hi, yes, I'm Jacob Cook and I live in Houston, Texas. I'm 32 years old, and I've been interested in cryonics since I was ten. Actually, when I saw the baseball player Ted Williams on the news in 2002, I remember I came home from school one day and there was just a very brief news segment about the cry preservation of Ted Williams. And I had never heard of cryonics before in real life. I'd seen Han Solo and carbonite, so I knew that the concept existed in fiction, but that was my first introduction to it as an actual practice. I immediately thought it was a really brilliant idea.

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Jacob Cook: Then I've spent probably thousands of hours reading about it and conversing about it online over the past 15 years or so, it's been a consistent interest of mine, simply because I think it's the only chance there is of seeing the distant future. A lot of people in the transhumanist and longevity movements believe in the concept of longevity escape velocity, which I believe in myself. The idea that we will eventually reach a point at which we're reversing aging faster than it's occurring, just that I and many other cryonicists don't believe that's going to happen in our lifetimes. So cryostasis is the only chance we have of seeing that longevity escape velocity. And so that's making it uniquely important for us.

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Kayla: Hopefully we've answered this question for our audience already. But what is cryonics? Just in case we have not sufficiently answered that question?

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Jacob Cook: Yes, well, very. Basically, it's using extremely cold temperature to stop decay at the moment of clinical death and transport people into the future, hopefully.

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Kayla: I love the way that you said, transport people into the future, because I think that's, I don't know, it's such an optimistic way of looking at it and does feel very, you know, Sci-Fi adjacent. And I know that's not necessarily every cryonicist's ultimate goal or doing it, but it just feels very optimistic.

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Jacob Cook: It is optimistic. I think of it as an ambulance into the future. That's the common metaphor. There's a word occasionally used, cryo transport. So instead of transporting someone through space to a hospital where they can be treated, we're attempting to transport them through time to a future era in which technology which does not yet exist, could potentially enable their reanimation. But, of course, there are no guarantees of ever arriving there.

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Kayla: I think the no guarantees thing is kind of a sticking point that maybe folks who are not into this or kind of anti cryonics will sometimes harp on. But some of the, like, the pro cryonic stance I've come across is more like, well, this is. It's not a guarantee, but it's more of a guarantee than being buried in the ground or being cremated or. It makes sense to me as having another alternative to end of life options. And this one has a little more, like I said, optimism to it. Do you have hope or. It can be really nihilistic time in some ways. So what is your level of hope for the future?

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Jacob Cook: Very high. Personally, it is a very nihilistic time. But no, I think that the future will be a better place, most likely, and I base that on 10,000 years of civilization. The overall trend line is overwhelmingly upward, and life is getting better on the longest scales. And if you see something in decline, well, that's not happening on a multimillennial period. That's happening in terms of years or decades.

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Kayla: I think it's, I don't know, healthy to have hope for the future even when it seems negative. And that's kind of what I'm seeing. Do you think overall, the cryonics community is a hopeful place? Is that kind of part of it, or is it a byproduct?

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Jacob Cook: I think we're just naturally optimistic people.

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Kayla: Are these the kinds of conversations that come up often in the cryonics community, or, like, what is the community like? What is a day to day kind of conversation? Like, if you're on Reddit or in the discord or, I don't know, do you have cryonics? A second question, I guess. But do you have cryonics friends in real life, or is this community largely Internet based in Houston?

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Jacob Cook: It's largely Internet based. There are possibly two other cryonicists in Houston, but there is a fairly large community in Austin of maybe 20 people. And the researcher, Peter Voss, who is one of the people who introduced the terminal artificial general intelligence, recently relocated from California to Austin. And so he's joined their community. And he for decades used to organize kratom gatherings, I think, in the nineties, where he would get up to 40 people on a regular basis, which is huge for cryonics. So there are communities, but yes, it does seem to be mostly online. And the discord, the cryosphere, which is about four years old, is definitely the largest nexus we've ever had, about 1100 people.

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Kayla: I mean, the amount of activity that I see going on in the discord is like, there's always conversation going. There's news articles being shared, like, this is something that I don't know. It seems like a lot of people who are involved are passionately involved. It doesn't seem like it's. And I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like a casual interest. It seems like something that not takes up a lot of time for people, but is something that people want to spend a lot of time talking about.

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Jacob Cook: That's accurate, yes. I mean, the people who are in the cryosphere and actively participating are the ones who are the most interested in it. And it ranges from people like that all the way down to those who just complete a contract and don't participate at all. And they may even choose to be cryopreserved anonymously. Many people do. And so they never have any interaction with the cryonics community. They're just interested in the possibility of reanimation for themselves, which is fine as well.

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Kayla: What is the demographic like? Are cryonicists young? Are they old? Are they rich? Are they poor or middle class? What makes up the community?

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Jacob Cook: My understanding is that the membership of the two main american organizations, which are also the two oldest organizations, Alcor and the Koranics Institute, skews older. But interestingly, tomorrow, biostasis in Europe, which is only three or four years old now, is skewing younger. Their average age is in the late thirties, and they've attracted 400 members in just their first few years.

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Kayla: That sounds like a big number. But then I also think about how many people there are. Kind of the burning question that I have is, why do you think cryonics as a practice has not really caught on? It's been around for many decades at this point. Why do you think it's not caught on in a bigger way. And like, I know some people will say, well, you know, toss the pseudoscience label around, and kind of in my head, I'm like, you know, I don't know where the science checks out on this. I'm more, I'm more inclined to refer to it as a speculative science. I know that some people will use the term pseudoscience, but it just seems like there's a lot of things that people do in the mainstream that are accepted and are also pseudoscience.

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Kayla: So I don't really see that as like a reason why it hasn't caught on. But I don't know. What do you think?

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Jacob Cook: I think it's just too much of a leap of faith for people. We're talking about technology that won't exist for centuries. And even if it does exist, there's still no guarantee that we've preserved you well enough for you to benefit from it. And it does take what for most people is not in significant amount of money, although it can be much cheaper than most people realize. And it does require some planning. You have to plan ahead proactively for your, as we say, de animation or clinical death in order to achieve an optimum crop preservation. And the reality is, most people, most of the 650 or so people who have been cryopreserved since 1966 have not received an optimal suspension.

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Jacob Cook: And that includes even people like the recently de animated Steve Harris, who was an advocate for chronics, and he was a medical doctor and worked for Alcor for decades, and he died alone and was not found for several days, I believe. And so he's one of the people you would have thought would have had one of the optimal suspensions. He was one of the most ardent advocates. And if even he's not being preserved, well, you know what's going on. And the answer is that people grow old and they live alone, and they don't expect to die when they do, and they just don't think rationally about it. And so, yes, the vast majority of people who have been cryopreserved have not been optimally preserved. So that makes the chance of reanimation even lower.

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Jacob Cook: Whereas if you are preserved under ideal conditions, you can have a much better suspension. You can be vitrified instead of frozen, which is a transition into a smooth, glass like state. And at least in one case, which is available online, the presentation Greg Fay gave at the 2022 conference about the suspension of Doctor L. Stephen Coles, who was a biogerontologist who studied supercentenarians. Stephen had a standby team in place, and he was preserved under extremely optimal conditions. He was not only vitrified, he was also placed intermediate temperature storage, which is an experimental form of cryostasis, in which you're stored not in liquid nitrogen itself, but in the liquid nitrogen vapor space above the liquid nitrogen. So the only reason we use liquid nitrogen is because it is so cheap. And, I mean, it can be made anywhere. Nitrogen is 78% of the atmosphere.

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Jacob Cook: You can literally make it out of thin air for as low as maybe a nickel per liter. And so he's not in liquid nitrogen because they decided to do an experiment in which they stored him closer to the glass transition. So the glass transition temperature of water, which is, I believe, -137 degrees celsius, is where you really need to because when you're below the glass transition, there is no degradation whatsoever for thousands upon thousands of years. So why go down to liquid nitrogen? There's no really reason to do that. It just introduces fracturing into the brain. And it's been done so far, again, because it's just cheap to do it that way. But in the future, Alcor and tomorrow, biostasis and perhaps other organizations plan to make its available to everyone.

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Jacob Cook: And so we'll be able to, as we're already doing in ideal cases, vitrify people so that they don't have ice crystals forming in their brains, which is the really big thing that was the big advance in chronics was introduced in 2000, and its could further improve preservation quality by not only eliminating ice crystals, but also eliminating fracturing in the brain. But to go back to your original question about why people aren't doing it's just even in an ideal case of suspension, were still waiting on technology, which we don't expect to exist for centuries. And that's just too much of a leap of faith for most people to take.

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Kayla: You're talking about having to do really meticulous planning around some of this stuff and making sure you have a standby team, things like that. Is that something? Even though we think of death as something, an occurrence in old age, it's also something that can happen any day. And I think that's maybe another reason why, kind of, to your point, why people maybe are not open to something like cryonics, it forces you to think about your own mortality, I think a little bit more than maybe established practices like burial or cremation. Those feel like there's such longstanding tradition there, and this feels new and scary. And again, the phrases like pseudoscience or quackery get thrown around. What do you think about terms like pseudoscience or speculative science when talking about cryonics?

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Jacob Cook: One term that some of use is protoscience. So we're on the path toward becoming a science, not pseudoscience, but perhaps not a science yet, but somewhere in between. So proto science, but I think that it is based on fundamentally sound scientific principles. And if you look at the people who have signed the scientist open letter on cryonics, for instance, you see MDs and PhDs and engineers and people who have backgrounds in cryobiology and neuroscience, I think that these people know what they're talking about. And, I mean, you can also cite a much larger body of people with the same amount of credentials, it's true, who say, well, this can never work.

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Jacob Cook: But I think the difference is that the majority who say that it never can work are not really addressing the fundamental premise of Quranics, which is that we could take advantage of technology which won't exist for centuries to come. And so when I find people who, whether they're experts or laymen who reject cryonics, they're not really engaging with what we're proposing, which is that it might be possible to reanimate people who are preserved today with the technology of today with technology which does not yet exist. And then, of course, people say, well, you don't know that technology will ever exist. And I, you know, we agree with that. We don't know that it will ever exist. But why not take the chance when you could be buried or cremated as your only other options?

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Kayla: I have also seen that those conversations among, you know, more, quote unquote, mainstream scientists or science communicators talking about cryonics without really engaging with what cryonics is proposing. And then the other, one of the other kind of like detractions, I will see, which also makes a lot of sense to me, is the instability of business. Like the cryonics companies were talking about, Alcor, and these places do function as businesses or corporations. And there is skepticism over whether a single corporation could survive long enough to be able to revive patients if and when the technology does exist. How do you kind of feel about the likelihood of corporations being able to withstand the challenges of time?

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Jacob Cook: Yes. Well, to be clear, they are nonprofit organizations, so theyre definitely not in this for money. And you really cant go into cryonics to make money because since 1966, when the first cryopreservation occurred, there have been about 650 human cryopreservations. Also several hundred non human cryopreservations, pet cryopreservations. So thats a very low volume. Thats an average of about one person a month. I mean, its happening more and more often now. But if you go back to 1966 and average it out, yeah, an average of about one person a month, thats an incredibly low volume. And thats not something that a scammer would be interested in. Also, the scammer wouldnt keep people in cryostasis for half a century. I mean, that's how long the earliest patients have been in stasis.

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Kayla: Now, you mentioned that there is obviously a price point to sign up to be cryopreserved. And you also said that it maybe is not as prohibitive as some people think. Can you kind of just explain how one pays for their own cryo preservation?

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Jacob Cook: Yeah, most people fund it through life insurance. And that can be anywhere from $25 a month if you're young and healthy, to, it can be hundreds of dollars a month if you're older or less healthy. Or you can pay upfront. And Alcor's upfront fees are the most expensive, 80,000 for head only and slightly less. They do brain only. And then if you want your whole body preserved, then it's 220,000 a Dalkor and slightly less, maybe €200,000 or so tomorrow. Or you can go with the Cryonics Institute and they charge about 30,000. But see, that doesn't include what we call SST, standby stabilization and transport. So with the Alcor and tomorrow fees, they're substantially more, in large part because they will transport you from anywhere in the country or potentially anywhere in the world and do standby.

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Jacob Cook: And that can be days or even weeks of standby. And that's all included in the fee. Whereas with the Chronics Institute and other organizations, yes, it's a much lower fee, but that covers only the cryopreservation. And you have to arrange for SST on your own, which you can contract for, say, $60,000 or so from a company called suspended animation. Or there's another one called Ice, international crime medicine experts. So it ends up being prohibitively expensive to pay upfront for most people, which is why they fund it through life insurance. Now, there's another organization, and this is the organization that I'm transitioning into right now. I had been an Alcor member. I had been paying $168 a month for my $200,000 life insurance policy. But I decided Im going to switch to Oregon brain preservation, because ive been talking to the CEO.

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Jacob Cook: His name is Jordan Sparks. He founded Oregon in 2005. And so they have a very different approach to cryonics. They have brain only and head only options for cryopreservation. So you can have your head preserved for 15,000 or your brain for 5000. And I think only the brain matters. So my plan is to switch to Oregon Chronics and just pay 5000 up front.

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Kayla: Why do you think only the brain matters?

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Jacob Cook: Yeah, that's a really controversial question amongst chronicists. There are many crownists who insist that you need the body, or at least parts of the nervous system. But I've had looked through what we're able to do with transplants and implants and resections, and every part of the body other than the brain and the spine can be removed. We've already done it. We've removed the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, arms, legs, even the stomach and the large intestine. And it's rare, but you can actually completely resection the small intestine as well. Any part of the body except for the brain and spine can be removed. And so people have had these organs removed, these body parts removed, and they haven't had any memory loss whatsoever. Their personalities haven't changed, and they're the same people.

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Jacob Cook: So I think that is conclusive proof that you don't actually need anything other than the brain, and you also don't need the spine, I don't think. Because although no one has survived having their spine removed, there are tetraplegics who have complete spinal injury at the c one vertebra. So the top of their spine, they have had a complete disconnect between the brain and the spine, so they're no longer in communication, and yet they still have all of their memories and cognition intact. So I think we've already done the experiment, essentially, with all of these transplant and implant recipients, people who have lost all sorts of body parts, had their brains cut off from their spines. It's already been done. We've already proven that there is no part of the body that contains memory or personality, except for the brain.

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Kayla: Is the hope that the brain can be uploaded to a matrix type thing, is the hope that the brain can be implanted into a new. Like, what is the, if we're going for brain only preservation, what is the speculation there of what we'll be able to do?

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Jacob Cook: Brain preservation actually goes back to 1976. There was. Oh, wow. Yeah, there was a woman, young girl, actually, named Patricia Luna. Wilson. She was 15 years old, and she was murdered in a clothing store in Berkeley, California, by a thief who hit her in the head. And she was the daughter of the immortalist writer Robert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlene. And they chose to have her cryopreserved. But because she was, I assumed because she was autopsied, because of the murder, the brain was removed. And so that ended up being the first brain only preservation in history. Other than that and a few other cases where there have been autopsies. And Alcor has never offered brain only preservation. And tomorrow is the first really major organization to do so.

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Jacob Cook: But there are smaller organizations like Oregon, which was established in 2005, which have offered that for decades now, and also Karaanics, Germany, which is a very small provider in Dresden. So the idea is that if you preserve the brain, since that contains, we believe, all of who you are, then you could be reanimated in a new body that could either be grown, you could clone a whole new body, or you could provide a cybernetic body. And some people also believe in mind uploading, which is another philosophical debate. I mean, people at the Quranics Institute are firmly in favor of whole body preservation, so they don't even offer head only or brain only. You have to be preserved with your whole body. There is at least one exception to that which I just recently discovered.

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Jacob Cook: There's a guy named Jerry White who was preserved with his head only in cryostasis, and he was kept at a facility which no longer exists. And when they closed down and had a proper transfer of patient care, so no one ended up thawing out, as happened in other cases. But all of their patients were transferred to the chronics institute. And since he had already been neuropreserved, they had to make an exception for him. But, yeah, other than that, the chronic Institute has only whole body patients because they're very vehemently opposed to not preserving the whole body because they believe that it's a, good to have the whole body's information, and b, that not preserving the whole body is bad for publicity.

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Kayla: Yeah, I have had conversations talking about how that's another thing that may turn off, quote unquote, mainstream people of, like, the idea of having your head removed from your body is like, that's too much. Too much to handle, too much to, like, wrap your mind around. How did you get comfortable with that?

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Jacob Cook: Well, just from looking at the arguments for body memory, the idea that there could be something in our bodies, outside of our brains, that contain memory or personality, and determining that which clearly cannot be true, because, as I mentioned, we can remove any part of the body, pretty much, but the spine. So I don't see how it can possibly be. How could you possibly need anything beyond the brain? We've already done the experiment, essentially. Also, if we're ever going to come back, we're going to need some really sophisticated technology that can repair damage to the brain at the microscopic level. So we have, we believe, around 86 billion neurons, 85 billion glia, which are the support cells for the neurons. And no one seems to really know how many synapses. I've seen estimates ranging from 100 trillion all the way up to 1 quadrillion.

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Jacob Cook: So that is an incredible amount of repair that will be required. Even someone who's preserved under ideal conditions is going to require microscopic repair. And so if you can do that, then a new body is trivial in comparison.

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Kayla: When you made the decision to kind of start transferring from Alcor to organ brain preservation, did that feel like, does that transition feel nerve wracking to you at all, or is it.

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Jacob Cook: No, not nerve wracking or dramatic. I mean, it's strictly a cost consideration for me at the present. I have no problem with Alcor. I mean, there are many criticisms that you can levy against Alcor, and really all of the organizations, I mean, they all could be doing more, and I think they've all made mistakes in their leadership over the course of the past half century. Certainly things could be much better than they are. People say there should be more research. Back in 2005, Greg Fay, who's a leading cryobiologist who's also been member of Alcor for decades, vitrified a rabbit kidney. And then he rewarmed it and successfully transplanted it, did sustain some damage, but it was functional, and he was able to transplant it into another rabbit.

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Jacob Cook: Apparently it took many attempts to get to that point, and I don't think that experiment has been replicated yet. So it's just one data point. Although in the past few years, rat kidneys have been repeatedly vitrified and reanimated with no damage, and they also use nanoparticles. So they infused the rat kidneys with nanoparticles and they were able to recover these organs without damage, but they haven't been able to scale it up to larger organs yet.

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Kayla: That's. I mean, just the fact that it's happened before and is happening. I don't think people know about this kind of stuff. What are some of the biggest misconceptions out there about cryonics?

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Jacob Cook: Do you think that it's always freezing. It was always freezing in the 20th century, but in 2000, a futurist named FM 2030 was cryopreserved, and he was the first person to be vitrified. And we can't vitrify completely an entire body, but it is possible to fully vitrify the brain, which is what really matters. Even if you believe in whole body preservation, people still acknowledge that, yeah, the brain is what's most important. So it is possible to, under ideal conditions, achieve complete vitrification of the brain. So you can prevent ice crystals from forming in the brain, in the very best cases, entirely. And so we call that vitrification. And then another misconception is that you can be frozen or vitrified while you're alive.

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Jacob Cook: So I've told people that I am going to these cryonics conferences, and they say, oh, do they let you just choose when you go into cryostasis? No, you can't do that. They're cryopreserved after clinical death, but before, well, ideally before biological death. So in an ideal scenario, clinical death is pronounced immediately after your heart stops and you stop breathing. So no cardiopulmonary activity. And then cardiopulmonary activity is reestablished. So you're still clinically dead, still legally dead. But an external device is used to start pumping the heart and lungs again, and you're transferred into an ice bath. And then cryoprotecting solution is perfused through your vasculature, and then you're gradually cooled over about 100 hours in liquid nitrogen vapor to prevent thermomechanical stress on the body or brain, and then transfer it into liquid nitrogenous.

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Jacob Cook: And then a third misconception is that it's only for wealthy people. As we've been discussing, you can fund your suspension with life insurance. And I wish I had taken out a life insurance policy when I was 20. I was thinking about doing that, but my family talked me out of it, and so I waited until I was 30, and so ended up being significantly more expensive. Still not prohibitively expensive, but more than I wanted to pay at the moment. But, yeah, I mean, I could have been paying, say, as low as $25 a month. So if you're 20 years old and you're thinking about being Cronog served, you can take out a life insurance policy now, and you don't even have to make the beneficiary the chronics provider. You don't even have to join a chronic organization.

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Jacob Cook: You can just take out that life insurance policy and have it you know, go to your family or a charity or whatever, and then if you decide to be crime preserved at some point in the future, then you can change it over to the organization. But the earlier you sign up, and this is really important, earlier you sign up, the more affordable it will be.

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Kayla: What would you say to somebody who might view that process, the life insurance process, who might view that as exploitative or taking advantage? Those are some conversations I had after watching the how to with John Wilson episode, which does touch on the life insurance process. I had conversations in real life of folks saying, oh, clearly that's exploitation.

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Jacob Cook: Well, you can see where the money goes on Alcor's website or on the Karanics Institute's website. They have their annual financial statements, and they have an itemized list of how they're spending the money. And you can see that no one is extracting money for their own personal benefit. Large nonprofit organizations like megachurches, for instance, are very good at creating slush funds because they're massive apparatus and you can hide money, but these are very small organizations and they dont have much money coming in. So it would be really very difficult to hide any inappropriate transactions. And theres really just not that much money to begin with. I think Alcor has maybe roughly $30 million in assets, I think. And it goes toward maintaining cryostasis. Thats the bulk of the cryopreservation fee.

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Jacob Cook: They put money into an irrevocable trust that goes into an index fund, which returns a consistent amount of money because it's spread across the entire economy. So the fund collapses only if the entire economy collapses. So it's a very robust investment. And the reason the fees are as high as they are is because in the early days of cronix, people could be preserved on an installment basis. So the idea was that after youre in cryostasis, your family would continue to make regular payments. And that was a completely insane idea that, unsurprisingly failed. And so you had people who had their families stopped paying. I mean, I honestly dont understand what they were thinking back then, because even if the families did continue to pay, they would eventually die.

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Jacob Cook: And so maybe even you could convince your grandchildren to keep paying, but then you would need your great grandchildren and great grandchildren, people who weren't even born when you went into cryosis. I don't understand that. So fortunately, that process was eliminated. And so now you have to pre fund. So the bulk of the fee goes into your indefinite maintenance. And so theres really very little money to be made in cryonics. Its run by people who truly believe in it. And for instance, Emil Kinseyora, whos the founder of Tomorrow Biostasis, sold two companies before he started tomorrow. And he could have gone on to create more companies for profit and could have made a lot more money. But he was always interested in life extension.

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Jacob Cook: And he realized quickly in his career as a medical doctor before he went into business that the science just wasn't advancing fast enough. So he decided to dedicate the next decades of his life to improving biostasis. And that's just not something that you would do if you were in it for the money, because this is a movement that really honestly loses money. It doesn't make money.

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Kayla: Yeah, I feel like I remember hearing that. I think it was for Alcor that 60% of the funding is donations and grants and things like that. Not patients necessarily. There's the reminder that this, especially Alcor and other places, are nonprofit. That's a good reminder. This is different than I think some people who get afraid of scams and exploitations, which is understandable. So many out there. And it feels like there's only scams and exploitation out there in the world these days. I think it gets difficult to accept or believe that this is a practice that is largely populated by people who really believe in it and want this for themselves and want this for other people.

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Kayla: And that's kind of what I've seen is that it just going back to that hope and optimism, it does feel unique in the cryonics field that it's interesting to me that this hasn't been exploited by Silicon Valley. Does that make sense? I know that there's individuals, Silicon Valley.

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Jacob Cook: Guys, but like, I agree, yeah, there are only two billionaires, at least publicly, who have expressed any interest whatsoever in karate. One, you've probably heard of Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley, and then the other you probably haven't. Robert Miller. Canadian tech billionaire Robert Miller has donated some what for him is very small amounts to Quranics research. And Peter Thiel, I don't think has donated anything. And actually I wrote a recent interview with Peter Thiel in which he was asked about his Quranics arrangement and he said, yeah, I'm signed up, but I don't even know where the paperwork is and I don't even have someone to call if I died. So they have a very casual interest in chronics, I would say.

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Jacob Cook: I mean, Robert Miller seems more interested than Peter Thiel, but yeah, I mean, no one has poured billions of dollars of their own money into chronics research. And that does surprise me, because you read all these news articles about Silicon Valley billionaires trying to live forever and Jeff Bezos investing in Altos labs. And actually the chronicist Charles Platt, who has worked in science fiction journalism for decades, had an encounter with Jeff Bezos some years ago in which he spent an hour talking to Jeff about chorionics. And he said Jeff was genuinely interested in the conversation as an intellectual exercise. He was asking Charles questions, how do you deal with this and how do you do that? What's the thought process on this? And then at the end of the conversation, Charles said, so how about you?

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Jacob Cook: And Jeff said, oh, no thanks, not for me. And he left. So it wasn't like he had some ideological opposition to it. He was actually interested in it, but it's just not something that he is interested in for himself, even though he's funding longevity research. And so there's a huge disconnect between the longevity industry and their advocates, which are much larger than chronics. So it's psychologically apparently a lot easier for people to think about the idea of curing aging. I mean, that's already a radical idea by mainstream standards, but it seems to be a lot easier for people to consider than the process of going into cryogenic suspended animation and then emerging 200 years later. It's just too strange, even for the Silicon Valley people, even for the transhumanists. It's just too radical of an idea, I guess.

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Kayla: Is there anything about the field that gives you pause or you feel skeptical about or unconvinced of?

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Jacob Cook: I think there's a lot of chronicists who are unrealistic about, for instance, the idea that any freeze is a good freeze, that as long as you're frozen or vitrified at all, then that's good enough. And that could be true. I mean, we could reanimate people as far back as James Bedford, who was just straight frozen in 1967 under the most primitive conditions. Maybe. Maybe we'll be able to, but we should really strive to do better than that. And that's what we've done with vitrification, and that's what we're starting to move toward with intermediate temperature storage. And we need to keep improving the process. And the more we improve the process, the better the odds will be. So, yeah, I disagree with the view that any freeze is a good freeze, and we don't need to do anything more than that.

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Jacob Cook: On the other hand, we are limited by the extreme lack of funds. I mean, there are only around 5000 people registered for crop preservation in the world right now. And so, yeah, there's just not nearly as much research as there could be.

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Kayla: Yeah, that's like, even as somebody who, like, I'm quite skeptical of what we're talking about, even though I think it's fascinating and like, there's so much here to explore and learn about. And even with that skepticism, hearing about the advances, it just makes this seem clearer as something that is worth spending money on. Like, if you were talking about 21st century medicine, which is, the scientists over there are cryobiologists, and I think that's the term for that. They literally have developed technologies that are used in, quote unquote, mainstream science, such as IVF. And you talked about the organ preservation. Even if you have skepticism, the overlap with established science is very clear.

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Jacob Cook: Yes. So the Society for Cryobiology, which is a mainstream scientific organization, used to ban cryona sister membership. And then several years ago, they rescinded that ban. And they hadn't actually officially enforced it for some time before that because Greg Fay had been a member, even though he was a chronicist and officially banned. He was such an excellent, and is such an excellent cryo logist that I think they just ignored that. But they officially rescinded that ban several years ago. And not only that, but for their 2022 presidency, they elected Greg Fay to be their president. Everyone knows he's a cryonicist, and they didn't have a problem with elevating him to lead them. And so I think that is a really substantial reversal of how cronics has been treated.

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Jacob Cook: I mean, they still don't officially endorse Cronix, but they're more open to working with people who are openly working in chronics. And there was another researcher I read recently saying that if you had asked me 20 years ago, I would have said it's science fiction. But now I think anything is possible. Support for it is slowly growing. I mean, it's still resolutely rejected by the vast majority of the scientific mainstream, but support for it is growing nonetheless.

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Kayla: It can become so confusing trying to figure out as a layperson what scientists and what doctors and what science communicators to trust and to listen to. We've talked a lot about folks who have many letters after their names, many mds, people who work at Harvard in places like this, who espouse ideas that end up being quite pseudoscientific. It's really hard to know who to trust, even when people have all of the credentials and qualifications. So how do you determine who's in your trust network in this field?

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Jacob Cook: Yeah, ultimately, you have to be an informed citizen. So if you're not a scientist, you have to be somewhat scientifically educated, and ultimately, you have to make your own judgment calls. And that's true in everything in life, not just in cryonics. And so, personally, I'm very much a scientific rationalist and a materialist or physicalist. I don't believe in any supernatural explanations. I don't believe that there is a soul or spirit or a ghost or an ectoplasm. I don't believe that the brain is just a receiver of consciousness. I believe that brain is consciousness, that the consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain. And, I mean, we all understand that brain damage is mind damage. So why wouldn't brain death be mind death? If the consciousness was just out there in the ether?

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Jacob Cook: Then when we suffer brain damage, we shouldn't have our subjective internal experience impacted. So you might lose the ability to communicate and control your body, but your internal experience should be unaffected if your consciousness is just out there in the ether. But obviously, thats not what happens. Brain damage results, and it can be profound subjective, internal damage to how you perceive the world. And so that means that damage to the brain is directly damaging your mind. So, logically, when your brain is completely destroyed, that must be the end of your consciousness. So I approach everything from a scientific, materialist perspective and go from there.

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Kayla: Do you feel like being a cryonicist helps? Kind of maybe fill not a void, but just, I don't know. I think we, as humans need to think about, we both, like, simultaneously really need to think about our mortality and really also need to ignore our mortality and religion kind of helps. Square that circle a little bit. Do you think cryonicists square that circle with thinking about cryopreservation and using that hope? Or is it a totally separate thing?

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Jacob Cook: Some do? Ive seen some cryonicists say that its pretty much a done deal, that were going to live forever no matter what, essentially. But I think thats a minority of you. I think most, nearly all chronicists understand that it was very uncertain and reanimation is not guaranteed, and that even if we are reanimated, we're not going to live literally forever. Because certainly we can cure aging, we can eliminate all disease, and we could even create extremely safe environments in which accidental death and murder never occur or almost never. But even if we do all of that, eventually the universe is going to run out of usable energy. And so I don't see any way in which we could live literally forever.

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Jacob Cook: I mean, some people speculate about traveling into parallel universes or creating what are called baby universes, and that's all very extremely speculative, but I expect that eventually, yeah, we're all going to die.

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Kayla: Has becoming a cryonicist affected your relationship to your own mortality in any way?

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Jacob Cook: Well, I mean, I used to believe that I was going to heaven, so I used to believe that I was already immortal. And so I've actually downgraded to believing immortal rather than upgraded to believing in immortality.

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Kayla: I would say I had not thought about that. But that is, there is. If you believe in the heat death of the universe. Yeah, there is a downgrade there. Wow. I'm going to be thinking on that one. That kind of brings us to the end of our established questions. And is there anything that we missed in this conversation that you'd like touch on or share?

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Jacob Cook: Well, there's lots of interesting history to go into. So many people think that the first crop preservation was James Bedford in 1967, and that's essentially true. James Bedford was the first person who was frozen immediately after his clinical death. However, there was a woman who was preserved the previous year, 1966, and we know very little about her. We think her name was Sarah Gilbert, and she was kept in a morgue freezer at just above freezing for, I think, a couple months. And then she was experimentally frozen, and she was thawed less than a year later. So sometimes we consider her cryoplasia number zero. And I've also written an article which I can link to called on Bedford Day, remembering the lost cryonauts, in which I did a little research into the crown knots who have died. They've come out of stasis, they've thawed.

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Jacob Cook: And I identified 26 people who were once in cryostasis but who were no longer in cryostasis. And so there have been some failures in the past. That was in the sixties and seventies, and fortunately, that ended in the early eighties, but that was really the wild west era of cryonics. And there's some interesting articles about the early days and how incredibly primitive it was and how it really is much more advanced today. I mean, people think that we're basically just doing the same thing that we've always been doing. No, actually, we have substantially better technology 50 years on.

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Kayla: This is a very random final question, but what is your favorite depiction of cryonics in media?

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Jacob Cook: Oh, I recently rewatched the neutral zone, which is the first season finale of star the next generation. And a lot of cryonicists like Max Moore hated that episode, actually. They thought that it depicted chronics is some silly experiments. And Doctor Crusher actually says chronics was a fad that died out in the 21st century in that episode. But I rewatched it recently and I actually enjoyed it because by the end of the episode, even though they begin being dismissive toward this hassle of finding these crown knots and bringing them back to life, they do treat them with respect. And Doctor Krusher does use 24th century medical technology to bring them back. And by the end of the episode, Commander Riker says, I wish we could have more time with them because they're a window onto the past.

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Jacob Cook: And I thought that was a great line because what if we could meet people from the 17 hundreds or ancient Rome or whatever, even if they were just really average people, we would be fascinated by that, the ability to talk to people from the past. And so we'll never have that opportunity. But future generations might, they might be able to learn from people firsthand what life was like then. And thatll be of interest to future historians, im sure. So, yeah, I thought overall, that was actually a fairly positive portrayal of Quranics.

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Kayla: That sounds like a good episode. Before we wrap up, would you like to plug any social media or where people can find you?

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Jacob Cook: Yeah. So for cryonics discussion, there's the Crownix subreddit r cryonics, and there is the cryosphere on Discord, which is the largest discussion community. And you can find a link to that from the subreddit. And my Reddit username is cryogenator. And so you can follow me if you'd like.

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Kayla: Jacob, thank you so much for this conversation. I just, I really appreciate you making the time and being so willing to talk like you're very obviously very informed and well researched on this stuff. So I feel better informed to do these episodes.

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Jacob Cook: Thank you. And just one more thing. There is a Crownix conference in Miami, Florida, July 20 and July 21 this year. So if anyone's interested in going, it is open to the public.

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Kayla: Awesome. Good to know.

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Chris: Oh, man. Kayla, what an interesting interview. I would love to chat with you about it.

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Kayla: Me too.

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Chris: Next week, next time.

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Kayla: Next week on Culture.

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Kayla: Just weird. We, we unpack that conversation a little bit.

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Chris: I mean, we're gonna talk about it right now. I mean, you guys are gonna have to wait. As always, check out our discord. There is a link in the show notes as well as on all of our social media places, locations, and go check us out on patreon. Patreon.com. Cult or just weird?

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Kayla: This is Kayla and this is Chris and this is Ben.

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Chris: Cult or just weird?