S6E2 - The Cryonauts: Tour

0:01 Kayla: So do you want to describe what the inside looks like? Chris: The inside is full of bodies. Kayla. So are we doing a previous. Leon? Are we doing that? Kayla: Are we doing. Chris: Previously on Cult are just weird. Kayla: Do you want him? Chris: We discussed Alcor and the history and what is cryonics and the history of cryonics, and we also heard from us on our way to. We'll get to that later in this episode. First, I want to introduce ourselves. I'm Chris. I am a data scientist and game designer.

0:48 Kayla: I'm Kayla. I am a television writer and Internet addict. Chris: Kayla, you know what makes a really good cocktail party story? Taking a trip. Kayla: I was gonna answer, and I do. Chris: Have a good question. I'm sorry, it sounded like you were. Kayla: No. Just looked at you from the side of my eye. Chris: I thought you were gonna answer, too. And then I looked at you, and it looked like you were just being like. Kayla: I'm a really good co host. You guys hire me for all your co host needs. No. Chris, what makes a really good cocktail story? Cocktail party story. Tell me how to make a good cocktail. Chris: So what you do is you get a piece of ice from a frozen body. No. Taking a trip to a facility in Arizona where they freeze dead bodies to be revived at a later date, hopefully. Maybe it's like, remember went to, like, two or three because it was, like, last. It was at the end of last year where were doing, like, there was a frasier watch party, and then there were, like, holiday parties, and, you know, you're at, like, one of those parties, and it's like, what do you talk about?

1:48 Kayla: Right? Chris: And then you say, well, we took this trip to Arizona, girl, this is. Kayla: The only thing I have talked about since I went back to work. And I was like, hello, everyone. Shut up. Listen to this. Chris: You don't even need to tell them shut up. Because, like, you hold court, people start, like, people start glomming on. They're like, wait, what? Kayla: Right? Chris: It's just really. It's very interesting. And what is culture? Just weird. But our own little audio cocktail party. Kayla: I wish I had some ice to. Chris: Clink after last week's episode. I think we owe you all a good story, too, about visiting a place. So we took this trip last September in 2023, and it was intended to be part of our experiential season. Go do stuff. So went to do stuff, and as you explained last week, we wound up shelving this until. Let me check my notes right now. Because it inspired this culture. Just weird seasonal theme. How do survival oriented beings that are conscious of their own non survivability cope with that paradox. That's humans, by the way. That's us.

2:52 Kayla: Do you remember how season one, were talking about the city of Irvine? Chris: Now we're talking. Kayla: Now we're. Chris: This is like a JRPG where you start off just like roaming around your town doing stuff and at the end it's like kill God. Yeah, yeah. But basically, what's up with the whole death thing? There are myriad ways people think about this and one of those ways is, hey, what if we could make it so death wasn't inevitable? What if we could use science and technology to slow the process of dying so much that it actually freezes in place indefinitely, awaiting some future time to cure whatever ailed you in the first place, whether that be injury, disease, or even old age. Such as thesis of the folks at Alcor, the world's leading nonprofit cryonics organization. You mentioned this last week, but it was founded in 1972 by Fred and Linda Chamberlain. Linda still works there today and Fred is also still there.

3:59 Chris: Guess how he's putting his money where his mouth is? He's frozen. I will call him a frozen patient there because as we mentioned, that's the terminology that they use. I want to be respectful of that. And I also don't totally disbelieve it myself, but yeah, they refer to themselves as Alcor Life Extension foundation. So it's not like Alcor life revival. Relife, come back to life. Life again. The reliefening. Kayla: Yeah, life too. Chris: It's life extension. So I think that again kind of hits on that point of like, they think of it as a pause. They talk about their patients being in stasis. That's kind of the conceit for this whole thing. Not like they're dead. We bring them back. And here I'm just going to read you their mission statement directly from their website just to kind of like level set with you guys what they're about. So their mission statement reads as follows, to save lives through the following prioritized principles. Number one, maintain the current patients in biostasis. Number two, place current and future members into biostasis when and if needed. Number three, eventually restore to health and reintegrate into society all patients in Alcor's care. Number four, fund research into developing more cost effective and reliable means for the previously mentioned one through three.

5:23 Chris: And number five, provide public education as a means of fostering growth to support the goals of 1234 above. I kind of feel like we're covering number five for them. Right now, and they owe us a check. Kayla: I mean, that's why we're doing this show. Where are the sponsorships? Sponsor me, Alcor. Chris: Sponsor me, Alcor and Casper. And much to our surprise and delight, they offer tours. Kayla: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Chris: So we arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona, last September. Actually, first of all, why Scottsdale? Kayla: Yeah. What the hell's in Scottsdale?

6:03 Chris: Isn't it hot in Arizona and you want to freeze people there? Kayla: Seems counterintuitive. Chris: Yeah. Okay. So it comes down to multiple factors. First of all, the heat outside actually is, like, not as big a concern. Kayla: I don't think liquid nitrogen. I don't think it matters to liquid nitrogen if it's 100 degrees outside or 97. Chris: Right. They use liquid nitrogen to keep their patients in stasis, so it kind of doesn't matter. The heat outside is more like an air conditioning cost, which they say is like. Compared to the other costs, it's pretty minimal. So why Arizona, though? They actually started their own life. Alcor started its own life in Riverside, California. And when it was determined that any California facility would be too vulnerable to earthquake damage in 1994, Alcor froze itself, moved, and successfully began life anew in Scottsdale, Arizona. Scottsdale is a place that has very little exposure to natural disaster. As we said, it's not prone to earthquakes like California is. And they typically don't deal with hurricanes there, tornadoes or flooding.

7:12 Chris: Also importantly, Scottsdale has facilities that produce liquid nitrogen, which, as we just mentioned, that's a crucial ingredient that Alcor needs a convenient and consistent supply of to keep its patients in cryostasis. There's also world class airport facilities in the Scottsdale Phoenix area, which, by the way, if you're trying to picture this in your brain map, Scottsdale is basically like inside Phoenix. Kayla: It's like they're the same city, part of Phoenix. Chris: Yeah. Airport access is important because Alcor patients, once they have been declared legally dead, have a very short time to get vitrified and frozen up, times of the essence to prevent tissue damage and lack of oxygen to critical tissue, including brain tissue, etcetera. Scottsdale also has nice year round climate, so you probably won't have to delay your final flight to the freezer due to inclement weather, which, again, if you take too long, that could be damaging. So that's all why they're in Scottsdale, and that's why were there, too.

8:10 Kayla: Have we explained what vitrification is at any point? Chris: No, we haven't yet. I mean, it basically just means, like, freezing, right? Kayla: It means freezing. But it's the reason why vitrification is used in this process is because it is, like, way less damaging than just shoving, turning somebody into an ice cube. It's like you're essentially putting fluid into the body that turns the body into glass. And so that way, you're not dealing with things like ice crystals. The problem with freezing is that ice crystals. Chris: So it's like stained glass. Like, could you put me in a cathedral window? Kayla: Beautiful. That'd be gorgeous. Freezing a body causes ice crystals to form, which damages the cells, the tissues, the whatever. But vitrification is a freezing process that does not result in ice crystals.

8:54 Chris: And it's thanks to the vitrification fluid, which we will get to that. So picture, if you will, office park in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, a nondescript, gray building with the word Alcor on the side, appropriately enough. Kayla and I walk in, and the first thing we see in their pretty nice lobby. It looks kind of med tech like, as far as lobbies go, was their co CEO, James Arrowood, who, he'll come back to the story in a minute, speaking with a group of local doctors. While that was happening, Kayla and I began our facility tour with one of Alcor's employees. The tour started off pretty basic. She showed us the obligatory timeline wall. That's like, on every tour of everything.

9:37 Kayla: I loved the timeline wall. Chris: You gotta have a timeline wall. Kayla: I really liked the timeline. Like, we honestly, we took up way too much of her time asking questions about the timeline wall. Chris: I mean, that's why they're popular, is cause it's like, it's just a good visualization to be like, oh, you could look at here is when this happened to. But, yeah, a lot of those are the same talking points that we've mentioned on the show already last week. And here today, we also saw some cool toys that they had made, little 3d printed models of their doers, which is not a bottle of whiskey. Kayla: Chris, what's a doers? Chris: But it is a bottle of human beings. We'd later see the room in which all of these doers are housed. But this is a good time to talk about what they are, because the science and engineering of these things is like, it's one of the more interesting things that we actually learned on this trip.

10:25 Kayla: The dewars are so cool. Chris: Can you, Kayla, can you describe them, what they look like on the outside? Physically? Kayla: Yes. A dewar is a huge, I don't know, eight to ten foot cylinder with wheels on the bottom. Chris: It's like if Paul Bunyan had a Coke can. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: With no labeling. It was just like, a metal coke paint. Kayla: Paul Bunyan's Alcor Coke can. And they are free standing. They are not connected to any sort of electricity source or whatever. They just can roll around wherever you need them to roll. Chris: And they have a little alcor logo on the side. Kayla: So do you want to describe what the inside looks like? Chris: The inside is full of bodies, Kayla. Kayla: Yeah, but actually. Cause in my head, when I saw these doers, I was like, oh, yeah, they just shove. I don't know why I thought this. I was just like, oh, there's just, like, a pile of liquid.

11:15 Chris: They just jam people in there with their limbs all akimbo. Kayla: Yes. All explayed. I I just kind of pictured more like. I don't know what you see in demolition, man. Chris: Oh. Like a chunk of ice with. Kayla: How am I supposed to. Chris: With Sylvester Stallone's what? Kayla: This. Look, I expected Sylvester Stallone in every single doer. Chris: Okay. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. But the doers know, so they're surprisingly efficient with their space. So, like, don't think of, like, a big vat cylinder. I mean, they're, like, skinny ish cylinders for their height, and they contain each of them for full bodies and eight noggins of patients. So this might be a good time to talk about whole body versus neuro patient.

11:56 Kayla: Right. Chris: There's two different things that you can do when you become a member at Alcor. I'm not sure if this works this way at other cryopreservation facilities, but some. Kayla: Places only do full body. Chris: Okay. And some places only do head. I don't know. Kayla: I'm not sure. Chris: I'm not sure about that. But at alcor, there's. You can. It's a or b. You can choose to. And so there's four bodies vertically placed in the doers upside down, which we'll talk about why in a second. And each one also contains eight heads of the neuro patients. Now, that's cheaper. Kayla: Wait, how are the heads in the chamber? Chris: Aren't they just in the center of it, just, like, stacked up? Kayla: They're stuck in their own chambers in the middle, like. Again, the efficiency of these doers is beautiful. Beautiful.

12:38 Chris: So when you're in your stasis, you have for how many other friends? No, 1211. You have eleven friends. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: You're the 12th. You are the 12th friend, so you better. And it could be for, like, a hundred years or a thousand years. You better really like the people that are in the doers with you. But, yeah. So the neuro patient thing, you know, when. When were at cocktail parties, that's one of the things that people react to and go, like, what? How did. Like. So they chop your head off? Yes. They chop your head off. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: The thought is that once we. If. If we find ourselves in a future where medical technology exists to revive people from cryostasis, that means that we're also well past a future where we can build somebody, like a new body or a maybe, like, you know, cyborg body parts or whatever it is. We don't actually need your body parts. What we need to preserve you and yourself, your sense of identity and self is your brain. The brain is the important thing. That's kind of the thought behind that. You can always give somebody a terminator body.

13:44 Kayla: You can always give someone a terminator body. Chris: Yeah. Come on. I've seen ghosts in the shell. You can replace somebody's whole ass body. Okay, so as far as the whole bodies. The whole bodies are actually stored in these, like, full body, sleeping bag type things? Kayla: We got to see one. Chris: We got to see. Well, we got to see a sleeping bag. Not with a body. Kayla: Not with the body. Chris: Because the dewars are made of titanium. You cannot see through them. What are the. I don't even remember what actually, what the sleeping bags are for. Is it so they can be cozy? Kayla: I don't remember. I think probably there was a good reason. Protection. Chris: Just protect. Kayla: Because, again, the bodies are vitrified. The bodies are turned into glass. They're delicate things. I'm assuming it's for some sort of protection.

14:29 Chris: We should follow up on that. Yeah, maybe we'll follow up on it. Could also be, like, it's easier to, like, raise and lower a body into a dewar when it's contained within, like, a little cocoon like that. I don't know. But I did mention they are stored upside down. The bodies are. The reason for that is that in the event of some sort of disaster where they cannot top off the doers with liquid nitrogen, the liquid nitrogen burns off. Kayla: So, literally, there is somebody whose entire job is to just top off the liquid nitrogen periodically because it does. It, like, evaporates. Chris: It evaporates because it's so cold that you can't avoid the evaporation even if the dewar is sealed tight, which it is. So if you're an emergency situation where for whatever reason, you're unable top off the liquid nitrogen in these dewers and you need to, like, maybe go to a new facility or get a new supplier of liquid nitrogen or whatever it is. If the person starts unfreezing, then you want them to lose their feet and their knees and their waist before they lose their head. That's why they're stored upside down.

15:32 Kayla: Smart. Clever. Chris: But as you mentioned. Yeah. Liquid nitrogen is what actually keeps them at a brisk negative 320 Fahrenheit, which, for our non Americans, that is negative 195 celsius. Not that any of us has any context for either of those numbers. Although, actually, I did watch a football game live once at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, and I think that hit liquid nitrogen temperatures that were. Kayla: You froze? Chris: I think I froze and had to be revived. I thought that the fact that it was topped off manually was very fascinating. Like, you brought that up. Like, there's actually an employee that physically. I'm picturing it.

16:14 Kayla: They had a sprinkler system. Right. Chris: I don't know exactly how he does it. Like, they. I think they showed us some of the tools, but, like, I don't know. I'm just, like, picturing, like, him, like, walking up a little ladder with, like, a pitcher. Kayla: Me too. Chris: With, like, a pitcher of liquid nitrogen and just kind of, like, pouring it in like you'd water plants. I know that's not what he does. Kayla: I think they had, like, kind of a sprinkler system. And also the guy who maintains and cares for these bodies is also an Alcor member, and he's, like, one of their OG members. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I don't know. I'd feel comfortable in his hands. Chris: Yeah, for sure. It's just, like, you don't picture anything manually anymore. And with the stuff that we're talking about here with these doers, a lot of it is manual. A lot of it is analog, for lack of a better word. And it's for good reason. It's for safety and redundancy reasons that automation actually is not necessarily good for. It's just, like, an interesting contrast. So there's extensive monitoring of the frozen bodies by computer systems, but the doers themselves are not electronic in any way because they want to eliminate the risk of power loss causing patient loss. So there are no electronics in the doers. Again, going totally analog to, like, prevent.

17:32 Kayla: You could literally take them from this facility and, like, roll them to another facility. Chris: Yeah, that's part of why they have the wheels on the bottom. Kayla: I still don't know whether, like, I still don't know how you feel about the science behind all of this, but God damn, is this shit cool yeah, the anti. Chris: It's cool. Yeah. The engineering is just crazy. Like, and then one of the. Just a semi tangent here, you know, because we're talking about, like, well, mitigate this risk and that risk. One of the things that I find most interesting is, like, how much thought has to go into, like, a million different things that a normal business doesn't have to think about because of two critical factors. One very sensitive product, like hospitals do have to think of, that they have similarly sensitive products. But the other thing that almost no other business has to think about is how very long term it can be.

18:27 Kayla: Yeah. Chris: So Alcor has to think about things like, what if the power goes out? And you can't be like, well, no, the power plant's good. You can't say, like, well, just make sure that we are in a place with power. You have to do that. But you also have to think of, yeah, but what if, like, what if. Kayla: There'S a world war? Chris: You have to play. You have to play safety engineer to, like, an insane degree. Kayla: Right? Chris: Yeah. Safety about weather risk, climate risk, power grid risk, crime risk, business and financial failure risk, natural disaster risk. Yeah. What if there's a world war? Like, you have to think about these, like, really crazy things that most businesses don't have to think about. Kayla: Oh, there's one more thing they, that other businesses don't know necessarily have to think about. But it was also mentioned to us that patient safety is also very important because most people that are involved are just regular guys. But if a high profile person decides to become a cryonicist. If Shaquille O'Neal went and became a cryonicist, we probably shouldn't broadcast to the world where his body is stored. You know what I mean?

19:28 Chris: Famously, a lot of people do want to kill Shaquille. Actually, I might be the only one. Kayla: I just mean more like you think. Chris: About, to be fair, I do want to kill Shaquille. Shaquille O'Neal, because he went to the Lakers. Kayla: I did not know in the nineties. Chris: When I was a child, and that is the single worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. Kayla: I meant, think about how famous graves are often, like, visited, desecrated things are left behind. Like, yeah, you don't know. You don't know what kind of crazy person is like, oh, I gotta go get Shaq. That's what I'm saying. Most businesses aren't having to think about. Chris: Like, I think they should let people put flowers. Kayla: Someone comes and tries to get one of our patients. Chris: Yeah. And that's, again, not something that you normally have to think about as a business or even. Even as a hospital. And like we said, not being plugged in makes them mobile. That's why they're on wheels. So, like, if there is some sort of, like, unforeseen, unmitigated, despite the fact that we tried to think of world wars and climate and business failure, there's some disaster that's unmitigatable. We can always wheel those puppies out of there to a new facility. Maybe they'd come back to California, which is very famous for not having many natural disasters.

20:30 Kayla: Come on over. Come on over. Chris: And I mentioned they're made of titanium. The reason they use that material is because the extreme temperature gradient between the inside and the outside. The outside is basically like a very cold room and the inside is cryo temperatures. Kayla: Can you touch a dewar? Like, if you touch one, is it going to be cold on your hand? Chris: I imagine so. I don't think we asked that question. Kayla: Like, you imagine that it's cold to the touch or you imagine that, like. Chris: Extraordinarily cold to the touch, like going to hurt you. Maybe I don't work there. Kayla: Somebody from Alcor who works there tell us. Chris: But the reason. Yeah, but the reason they're made of titanium is because that extreme temperature differential creates a pressure differential. Because physics and that calls for needing very strong structural material so it doesn't either collapse or explode. I forget which one it would be. So that's the doers. Which again, is like the bread and butter of their operation. That's where all their patients, 227 of them as of the time of this writing, are kept in stasis. After that initial room with the timeline and the toys, we got to see a few offices and then walked through a hall that had some photos of the facility, including the photo of the duo room. And we'll share those on Instagram since they are publicly available photos.

21:50 Chris: And there was also a photo wall of patients because as the tour guide explained, it's important to be reminded constantly that these are real people who, as they believe, are not just frozen corpses, they are patients under their care. Each patient's photo had a little blurb underneath, just like kind of about who they were. And this is where were also told that patients have what they take with them or they're intended to take with them when they, you know, go to their freezing memory boxes. So, like, they'll prepare a box of like, you know, mementos and things that the intent is. Again, if and when they are ever able to be revived, that might assist in the process of, like, reintegrating them and into, I don't know, stretching. Stretching the old brain meat out and remembering, like, oh, yeah, that's right. I would.

22:45 Chris: My favorite sandwich was tuna fish. I don't know. I don't think you should put a tuna fish sandwich. Kayla: So you're gonna put in your memory box. Chris: Yeah. Like, an actual tuna fish sandwich. Kayla: This is the thing that I found. Just like, I found this whole portions of tour extremely profound. Just the wall. It was the tuna fish sandwich, the wall of photos and the variety of kinds of people, and it just really brings it home that, yeah, we're talking about science and technology and Sci-Fi and speculative whatever, and we're also talking about people's end of life choices. Chris: Right. Kayla: And this is. It's never easy to decide, like, what do I want to have happen when I die? But we have traditional paths in our societies, and, like, you know, thinking of american society, you're gonna get buried, you're gonna get cremated. Maybe you'll have some sort of ecofuneral. Like, there's established pathways, and this is not. This is not an established pathway. This is, like, making such an unorthodox decision. And, like, that feels very profound to me to, like, take. To take that kind of control over. This is what I want to have happen when I die or when I legally die. I don't know. I just found it very profound.

23:59 Chris: Oh, yeah. And it's. I totally agree. And it was profound on multiple levels, too, because, first of all, there's the profundity of each individual person there with that choice that binds us all. How do we want our end of life to go, how do we want that to be, and how do we cope with it and deal with it, and blah, blah. The most profound thing any of us will ever think of for each individual there. And then on top of that, it forces you to think about questions like persistent self. Kayla: Right. Chris: That's fascinating to me. And it turns out that, like, a lot of the preservation process isn't even really about protecting tissue anymore, because we'll get to this. But the protection of tissue and vitrification process is actually fairly well established now. It's more about how to figure out how to preserve the stuff in your brain that makes you. So it's like that persistent self that feels like such an existential question is actually kind of like a medical question for alcortain, which is just a fascinating thing to think about. I also want to just call out here because he said there's a variety of patients. Yeah, there's a wide variety of patients from all walks of life across the religious spectrum, which surprised me. Most of the patients are older, but there are some that skew younger.

25:21 Chris: The youngest patient they have, there is actually a two year old that members wanted to have cryopreserved after their. What was it? Daughter. Yeah, it was her parents after their daughter died of a terminal illness at age of two. So there's just. Yeah, there's a. There's a variety of folks that are currently patients at Alcor. After we spent some time in our existential ennui and stew of thoughts about dying, it was also. Kayla: Okay, there's one more thing. Can I say one more thing? Can I say one more thing? Chris: It wasn't all ennui, by the way. It was. It was. I mean, it was nice in a way. Kayla: It was nice. Like, literally, there was. The last thing I'll say about how moved I was by this portion was were told that some patients loved ones, were able to, like, kind of come and visit. Like, there was one person who.

26:13 Chris: It's kind of like visiting a cemetery, but also its own thing. Kayla: There was one person who had, I believe, died from AIDS, and, you know, that they were a younger person, and their mother was able to come and visit, and it's just. Yeah, I don't know. And I have another thing to say because I am not brief. Chris: One more. One more. And then one more after that. Kayla: The other thing about the profundity is that a lot of these people believe that they are essentially donating their bodies to a scientific endeavor. I think there is almost nothing more, like, noble than donating your body to science.

26:56 Chris: Yeah. It was explained to us that, like. Yeah, that is even maybe the primary motivation for some of the patients there, that it's like, you know what? I don't know if this shit's gonna work. That's speculative, but what is definitely going to happen is you are going to ct scan my brain while I'm frozen, and that may move science forward. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: So one more thing. Speaking of science. Kayla: Oh, my God. Chris: Speaking of science, though, after we had our. Our moment there, we next went into one of their science labs, which was very cool looking. You can kind of just, like, picture, like, a high school science lab, but if it was, like, a really nice. Kayla: High school, a college one. Chris: Like a. Like a. Yeah, like a nice thing.

27:37 Kayla: Is what, like, real science labs look like, but I've never seen them. I only have the frame of reference of high school, college, and now Alcor. Chris: Right. But, yeah, it sort of has, like, a similar structure. You have, like, the flat surfaces with instruments on them, you know, cabinets for other instruments, few computers, blah, blah. Kayla: And at this point, I was kind of assuming that were getting close to the end of our tour. You know, we'd been on this for about 40 minutes. I assumed we would be finishing the tour up with the initial employee who had started the tour with us. But then all of a sudden, the door opens, and somebody walks into the research lab. Chris: Oh, my God. Was it the thing and it. Was it a monster? Kayla: A mon. No. Chris: Was it. They made zombies by freezing people.

28:20 Kayla: That's what happens. It was clones. No, it was the co CEO of Alcor, James Arrowwood, who we had passed earlier in the lobby, and he took over the tour from there, and were in his hands from then on. Chris: 2 hours. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: And we will get to that next time on cult or just weird. Kayla: If you'd like to support the show, you can find us on patreon@patreon.com. Culturejisweird. And if you want to talk to other weirdos about cults in your life, find us on discord. Both of those will be linked in the show notes, and you can find it also on all of our social media. This is Kayla. Chris: This is Chris.

29:00 Kayla: Thanks for listening.