Cryonics: Hi, Frozen Body!

to it, even though it is free. Hi Frozen Body. Yeah, that was your idea, wasn't. It seemed like a no brainer for our Simpsons fans to call this cryonics episode high Frozen Body. Dr Nick That Um, that episode has one of my favorite Simpsons lines of all time. Uh, where the old guy Jasper a sidekick, he the frozen body. He comes out and he thaws out, and he goes over and picks up a moonpie and he goes moon pie.

What a time to be alive. I love that. He's great. Yes. So, um, if you haven't seen that episode of the Simpsons, we strongly recommend you do. Right. Yeah, he just gets stuck in the freezer right and freezes by accident or something in the who starts charging admission to see him? Or guess what the withsin the can that lost its label a long time ago. So, Um, the concept that you can freeze body and reanimate it is not just you know Simpsons lore No, it's not just cartoon TV. Lore No.

Actually there's a guy who um kind of came up with this. Uh, I guess in the nineteen four It's a guy named Robert Inger, and he just died a week or so ago. Chuck, that's right, like ten days ago. The man died, um, which is really weird that he did, because we had no idea that he was. That didn't spur the idea for the podcast. Yeah, you picked this one. And then it turns out the guy who created the field of cryonics, who coined the word cryonics, died a

week before. Yeah. I felt kind of bad because I picked this out last week, or maybe it was earlier this weekend. Maybe he tapped you on the shower. It's like. And then I always look at the news just to see, hey, if there's anything relevant, and I saw that he died. Hey, when you do. And I saw that he died today, and my first instant was oh, awesome, how relevant, And then I thought, well, that's kind of sad. Yeah, actually that was very nice of you to share his oh

bit with me, though. Is in intro? Yeah, he ninety two years old and he is now frozen per his wishes in Michigan. Yeah, so he Um. He not only established the field of cryonics, which is the UM basically the attempt to store human bodies at very low temperatures in order to eventually revive them. Yeah, they're technically not frozen, right, Yes, you're absolutely right. UM. To store human bodies at extremely low temperatures without freezing, that's called vitrification. Get into that.

But he came up with this whole prospect, this whole idea UM in a book called The Prospect of Immortality, which is why I just used the word prospect twice. UM, and he wrote it in and it had a pretty sweeping effect. In three years. Three years later, the first person UM entered cryogenic suspension. Yeah. That was pretty forward thinking, I would say back then, because this sounds like something

from the future now. And imagine in the sixth early sixties, I thought he's nuts, right, But within three years of him writing this book, there are they already started carrying out his procedures that he kind of came up with and described. He's a physics professor, UM. And he founded the Cryonics Institute, I believe is what it is called. And UM he joined two wives and his mother in

suspended animation in a nondescript building outside of Detroit. UM. And the other the guy, the first guy they froze. I keep I'm gonna say freeze this whole podcast. James Bedford. He was a seventy three year old psychologist and he is supposedly still frozen in good shape in Arizona. UM. Yeah, and we should probably listen to a disclaimer here, like when we say frozen or freeze or frozen, when we really screw up. UM, what we're we're not talking about freezing.

We're talking about, like we said, vitrification, which is a process of cooling the body down to extremely low temperatures without freezing. Freezing is the forming of um ice crystals, right, is good for the cells of your body. Know. But what they've found, supposedly, says groups like alk Core Life Extension UM. They they say that if you vitrify a cell or a group of cells, a k a tissue or a body or whatever, UM, you can preserve it.

Not indefinitely. There's actually a length of time. Do you know that the time link that they say you can preserve a body cry genically, I'm going to guess one thousand years. Do you know why they say that? Uh? No, Actually because just being on Earth for ten thousand years, the body is exposed to too much cosmic rays and it just destroys the cells on its own death literal death bite cosmic ray. Yeah, but it takes ten thousand years.

So they're hoping that UM, and this is the whole point of cryonics is is that the people that we freeze or vitrify now will be able to be reanimated and UM cured of any disease, whether it be age or heart attack or whatever whatever killed them UM in the future. So there's a lot of um stuff floating around about cryonics, cryogenics. Walt Disney was not frozen. He actually died a year before the first guy was. UM was frozen vitrified. Okay, UM, So that's a complete and

total rumor. But let's get to the let's let's let's talk about this, Chuck. There's a lot of people who are skeptics of this, you realize, but there's a lot of um rationality to it as well. Sure, okay, so go well, I think dead is where we should start off. Oddly enough, at the end is actually the beginning when you're talking about cryonics. Um, it's thank you. I just

made that up. Al core Is is one of the big companies in Arizon, and they have a quote dying as a process, not an event, and that I don't know if that's like they're huge terminator style quote when you walk in the lobby, but it should be because no, they don't have it like on a on a sign or anything. Some guy comes up to you wearing like nothing but a lab coat and cowboy boots and shakes you while he says it and then runs off. That's how you're greeted. That's good. He should get a job

at Walmart. Um. But that is the who. Their whole point in that is that when your heart stops speeding, you were legally dead, but there is still some cellular and brain function for a short time, and their goal is to nab you in that instant and get the process started in that instant and preserve what minimal function you still have left in your brain in that instant. And that's that's based on good science. UM science is starting to realize that death is a gradual process. It's

not like they said, an event. It's not just like one moment you're living, next man and you're dead. It's the whole thing. Remember we talked lot about organ donation, about UM brain death and UM cardiac death. And legally, in the United States, if your heart stop speeding, UM, you can you can be declared dead. But as far as al Core is concerned, your brain is still functioning UM. So therefore, if you can be preserved, you can be

eventually reanimated. Like I said, this is sound science. Hypothermia research has led to a new understanding of heart attacks, right, So a new technique of reviving a patient with a heart attack is to lower their body temperature to like ninety one degrees very gradually, and then UM revived them

by letting the body warm back up. And they've also found from this research that you can't just inundate it with oxygen because oxygen goes in and just kills all the cells, because there's this horrible caveat to resuscitating a heart attack victim is that when you resuscitate them successfully, you give them oxygen. It's just stay inter procedure at hospital and they're alive and happy and everything is good,

and then two days later they die. And so they started to look at why people died, and they found out that it was because they were their cells were perfused with too much oxygen too quickly. So they found that if you lower body temperature and then gradually reintroduce oxygen in its own you can bring a person back effectively from death. Well, it happens all the time, and I imagine, I mean that makes sense. It's probably a traumatic event to be brought back to life on your

body itself physiologically, So sure that makes sense. But like I just said, it happens all the time. People's hearts stop, people are trapped under ice and quote unquote dead and they're brought back to life and function normally. Sometimes they don't function normally. But this isn't so much different than that, No, it's not. It's and it's based on that, it's based

on the concept. It is um so Chuck you're saying that if you, let's say you are a member of al Core Life Extension Foundation, right, which apparently is not that expensive. They liken it to um a lifetime of smoking cigarettes or having cable TV or the like, which is pretty expensive. It is, but still, I mean it's not as much as you would think. I think I got the fees right here in front of me. Uh, if your first family member is you gotta see here's

the deal. You gotta sign up, and you gotta pay for life, and then you gotta pay I believe, for the process on top of that, right, because it's a membership club. And then yeah, you're you're there's going to be a spike and pay when you die. So a first family member is six hundred and twenty bucks a year. Each additional family member if you want them on your cell phone plan, is three hundred and ten dollars a year. Minor family member is a hundred and fifty five bucks

a year. Minor family just an aunt, I guess, not like not siblings or or nothing being a kid. Oh really no, because it said oh no, no, wait, you're right, says under eighteen, like an aunt, you don't that's like outside the nucle your family, all right, and if you're a student, good news. It's only three d and ten bucks a year. But I imagine you're right jumps up when you graduate, because you're not always screw you when

you graduate. So that's just the membership fees. The actual body freezing is up to article says to our course two hundred now and the in the brain is eighty. And there's search charges if you're in England a fifteen grand. Outside US, Canada and England it's grand. I wonder why. And then you can also get if you're not a member,

you can pay for a family member. Like let's say none of us are members, and you want to freeze your father, the herbal Elvis upon his expiration, you would have to pay fifty grand two D fifty grand because there weren't there weren't any membership dues. Yeah, so it's a fifty dollar surcharge if if you just want to say, hey, I want my dad frozen, and none of us were ever members, all right, I'll have to talk to at

about that, see what he thinks. Um. So uh, let's say you are remembering good standing, you you've got, you know, minor family members totally insured under this plan or as members as well. And we should also say we keep saying al Core. Al Core is the one of the it's far and away the most widely known cryonics group. But um, there's like at least two others, the one in Michigan. Let's just go to their websites if you want to compare them. The Alcore looks pretty, they're both legit.

But's website it looks sort of like in MySpace pace it does. My advice to in the Michigan Institute is to just pay some money to your website seriously if you want to, if you want to be taken seriously. But that's the one that was founded by um Robert Edinger. Well, and I think he did the website in Yeah, I think so too. He's like, someday there's going to be an Internet and this is gonna be the first thing

on it and it's never gonna change. Um. So, okay, let's say you're remembering good standing at any of the the the cryonics UH groups or foundations or labs and you're about to die, right yep, what happens to Chuck take us through the process. Well, the first thing that happens is they are literally at your deathbed. The team is waiting for you to expire. I want armies. And as soon as they do that, as soon as you die, rather,

they will, as the article says, spring into action. And also, Chuck, we should say they have to wait until you declare deatti to um to put someone into a cryonic suspension, or as the Michigan website says, right now, it's illegal. Okay. So I think they envision the future or where you're if you're on life support or something you could probably or if you're just fully healthy, they also envisioned a future or we reanimate dead people. Yeah, that's true. Uh

So what they do is they spring into action. They stabilize your body by getting blood flowing in oxygen, but I guess not too much oxygen, and they pack you an ice and pump in some heperin, which is an anti coagulant so your blood doesn't clot. And then they rush the opposite of Calf's stomach. Yeah exactly, and then they rush you to the facility where the real science begins. Right, And it's about here that things get a tad um

cutting edge, I would say, so. So Basically, what they have to do is remove the water from your body, right and not just like your p or your saliva. They gotta literally get the water out of your cells. Yeah. I read at least six of your cells, so it must be all the organ cells and and and they go after the brain in particular. Your brain is of

the utmost importance. UM. And you can actually have your brain alone cryonically suspended for something like fifty k K raised it in the past five Here is this article written. I don't think it's that long ago, but hey, it ain't cheap um. And they still stort in your head. By the way, it's not like futurama. Oh cool, they said it does too much damage and why bother. Their head is a great bowling ball case essentially, so here they just cut your head off and preserve the whole thing.

But it's really just your brain that's undergone the vitrification process. Yeah, that is neat ted. Williams's head is floating somewhere. His whole body wasn't. They removed the body there in two separate chambers. Oh, that's right ahead of at um. So uh. When you're on the table, they remove the water from your body, and how did they do that? I didn't understand how they remove water from your cells? You're asking me, Yeah, I don't know. Is it a pressing? I don't know, man,

I've had the doctor. I tried to find out the literal process of how they get the water from the cells and replace it with the anti freeze. But they do. They do replace it with anti freeze, a glycol based um basically a human anti freeze syro protectant is what they call it, a Cairo cry We got there eventually, croct Jerry's like, this is not their best day. Yeah, it's a cryo protective. So they pump you full of this stuff basically like embalming fluid that will never freeze UM.

And then they lay you on a bed of um dry ice. And here, this is astounding to me that you can even get any tissue down to this this um degree. But basically they freeze your body. They I'm sorry, they vitrify your body down to negative a hundred and thirty degrees celsius, which is negative two d and two degrees fahrenheight, negative two hundred degrees fahreheight. And they're like absolute zero. I don't know we've called on that before, right,

I will figure it out. No, we've been called out on whether forty degrees is negative forties the same in celsius or fahrenheight, which it is. Um. And then once your body reaches that temperature, you're vitrified, you're ready to go, You're ready to be stored for up to ten thousand years. And what they do is they put you in a tank. Right. Yeah, Well, first of all, that means that means that your molecules have slowed down to the point where the chemistry stops. Right,

there's no metabolism going on whatsoever. Nothing. It's called the glass transition temperature. And uh so it just everything kind of goes. That's suspended animation. It's a perfect example of it. That's great. So they stuff you in the tank, right, that's right, called a well, if if it's just your head, it's called a neuropod, right, and then if it's your body, it's called a um I think a cryopod. I'd call it a full body pod. Okay, But so and then they put you in a container that can hold maybe

four or five bodies because you're not by yourself. Yeah, that's a little a weird Yeah, I thought so too, UM, especially if somehow you're still cognizant, Like if that was possible and you just didn't really like the people around you, you're stuck would stink. UM. So there's a there's a pretty nice picture of an alk core container that holds UM four whole body pods and six neuropods. Right, UM, So it's like a freaky futuristic nursing home in there,

you know. UM. And there you go. You're you're on ice as it were for ten thousand years, and then every once in a while they have UM what are called UM profusion thresholds I believe, and then have software that measures that like the concentration of liquid nitrogen, because that's what you're in. You're in a bad of liquid nitrogen that's being cooled down ultimately, even even less than

two d and two degrees high, it's down. When you're in cold storage as it were, UM, you are stored in about negative three twenty degrees fahrenheit, and liquid nitrogen at that temperature will eventually evaporate, so they have to keep adding some and they have software that monitors this,

and there you go. You're officially in cryogenic suspension head head down, upside down, yeah, which I thought was pretty clever in fact to the podcast for me, if there's a leak, do you want your head down because you want your brain? I guess if it leaks, the bottom obviously will be the last bit too contain any of the liquid, so that's where they want your head. It's very clever. But again, if you're the least bit conscious or cognizant or anything like, you're you're dead. Yeah, but man,

can you imagine like that? That gives me a headache just thinking about being upside down? I'm sure it's awful. All the frozen blood brushes to your head, that's right, and one giant block ice I see blood, yeah, vitrified that's right. So, um, what's the deal with all this chuck?

I mean, as we said, it's a lot of people who criticize this stuff, and it seems like for good measure, they're saying, like, you know, you're just like this is a nice, fancy process that you guys have come up with, and we're sure that you know you're doing everything you're saying, and yes, it is based on real science, but you can base anything on real science. And it's still just

pseudo science. If it's not science, it's pseudoscience, it's trickery. Right. Well, they get a lot of heat obviously, places like al Core do, and they one of the problems, they say is that UM, first of all, it's it's based on three very different, uh scientific fields. So the reason why most scientists don't come out and say this can work is because they're scientists in a single given field and they don't understand that this involves three very different disciplines

like podiatrists. So yeah, exactly. Uh. One of the other problems is that they they one of the reasons that uh what they call cryobiologists or yes, cryo biologists, people who study UM low temperature biology. Yeah, they say that they don't come out and say it can work because they feel like it has been given the pseudoscience moniker and so it will overshadow the real work they've done, quote unquote real work that they've done with other kinds

of cryo freezing. So they're just like, I don't even want to talk about that stuff, right, I mean, your professional reputation is at stake. Yeah. Sure, But again that doesn't necessarily mean that just because UM skeptics have labeled this fraud that it doesn't necessarily work. The other big point as far as um crionic groups or boards or whatever, um, the the point that they tend to make usually is that we have no idea how to reanimate anybody. Yeah,

they're upfront about that. Yeah, they're saying, like, what we're doing, and um, this is what al core life extension is known for. Is basically they know how to vitrify tissue and then just keep it that way, um, indefinitely. And so that's what they're saying they're doing. And basically they're just the keepers of these bodies that are in suspended animation or dead depending on your view, um, until we come up with a way to revive them and repair

anything that might have been wrong with them. And the the great white hope, apparently is among cryogenic adherents is nanotechnology, which makes sense right, which is uh, I mean nanotechnology. They can get down to the single atom and and do mechanics work essentially right, repair work on the cells.

So they think that that is the future of being able to reanimate people like this, which again it's it's um, that's all well and good, but you can't just be like, oh, yeah, we heard about nanotechnology and that's probably where it will be. And how about this, Not only will it be the field of nanotechnology that reanimates people, but it will be in which is apparently the number that they throw out.

So um dubious there. But it seems like if they stick to the fact that no, we're putting people in suspended animation, and there's a good chance that if death is a process and we're getting to this process, we're interrupting this process, then we can reverse it. Yeah, they're not saying we're promising eternal life. We we're promising that we can bring you back from the dead. They're basically pretty upfront about saying we are a high tech storage facility. Period.

So when we when we talk about reanimating people, this is not new. Um. The idea of reanimating a corps is extremely old. Um. There's a there was this cool little movement in the nineteenth century called galvanic reanimation. What's that. Basically it amounted to um hooking recently killed executed criminals up to like huge batteries via cables and during public display like applying the electricity and making them like twitch and making their eyes open or making them grimace horribly.

And that was like how you reanimated a corpse, which by definition that is reanimating it, but you're not. It's the technical definition, you know. Um, it didn't imbue any life into it, but it did give Mary Shelley a

good idea for Frankenstein. Yeah there, you know, that was a whole idea for a very long time, that like, if you could, under the right circumstances, introduce an electrical current to life, you know, to a dead body, you can bring it back to life, which is pretty clever if you think about it, because this was before the time of neuroscience, or about the time it was nascent, right, and neuroscience, if anything, has given us the awareness that

everything is the result of like electro chemical conduction throughout the body. So it was pretty smart to think of electricity as a way to reanimate bodies, although it doesn't do anything. Yeah. Well, and that's also the reason why they obviously the brain is so important, and they say you can just opt for the eighty dollar head freeze because maybe in the future, I mean for far along, far enough along where we can reanimate a person from

cryogenic freezing. Then we should be at the point where we can clone you a body to go along with that head. Why not a hot body too? Oh yeah, sure, I would wear Daisy dukes all the time in my body. You don't even wear shorts now, Well, I don't have a hot cloned body. I've seen you in shorts once, actually, when when you came over to my house to bar the lot more. You hound shorts really and I saw your bare leg I've seen you in boxer shorts too.

When I think in one of our trips, like you changed clothes in front of me or something, I think should get a little more specific for the audience. Well, I mean we didn't have like a dress up party, but it was like, hey, I gotta you know, we're late for something and you were changing your clothes or something. I don't know. I mean, I didn't market on my Guatemala I'll bet in Guatemala Lake that one crazy day. So anyway, that was just happened there. That was possibly

the wildest tangent we've ever been on. You've seen me in my boxers and in shorts senior bare legs, and they're fine. I don't see why you don't like shorts. I'm just no, no, not for you. Um, but it could be for a cloned body, right right, Yeah, let's just get back to it, buddy. Um. And uh again back to the reanimation research there. I think we've talked

about before, Max Planck Institute, back in two thousand. There's just one thing on the web and I can't find any follow up stuff or any lead up stuff, but basically they're talking about what. Um, the arapeutic hypothermia research has shown that if you it's not death that injures cells and tissue and makes them unreanimateable. It's trying to reanimate them and doing it too quickly. And um, they

were working on reanimating dead bodies. Um. And apparently since then we have figured out how to reanimate some cryo preserved tissue like a rabbit kidney. Yeah, it worked. In two thousand five, apparently they vitrified a rabbit kidney. Um. They took it out of a rabbit, they said you wait here, vitrified the kidney, brought it back, put it back in the rabbit and said go urinate, and the rabbit did, and the kidney exploded. The and uh. They

have also reanimated a nematode worm. Um, big deal. But hey, it worked, but no other mammals. Yeah, they said, dogs and monkeys they've had their blood placed. Well remember that that supposed to Russian research film from head God, that's awful. But dogs and monkeys, they've had their blood replaced with the anti freeze essentially cooled it to below zero degrees and rewarmed it and revived them successfully. But that's zero

degrees is a long long way from negative three. Yes, but but they're pointing this to this and saying, hey, look, this is this could be possible. And it wasn't even vitrified. Was that it was just brought to a low temperature. No, no, no, it said their blood was replaced. Okay, Um, I don't know if all the cells were, but the blood was at least so Um. There are things to look for in the future when you are successfully reanimated, possibly given a cloned body that wears Daisy Dukes a lot um.

And there's gonna be some legal issues that people are already starting to think of about reanimating. Yes, for example, when you are taken off to the cryonic facility. As far as society and the court system and Social Security administration is you're illegally dead. You didn't think about that. What happens when you come back to life. You have to apply to be a new person again, I guess.

So they figured that probably if somebody who's presumed dead and wasn't right, but they were declared legally dead and they come back after that, there there nobody says well sorry, and nobody's gonna say that somebody who's reanimated. But one of the other propositions that they they're considering is a possibility is issuing you a new birth certificate? Really yeah, and they're cool that is, so you would be literally reborn as far as the law is concerns. Um. And

then also what happens, chuck. Has happened in the nineties seventies when there were I think six big cryogenic suspension companies and operation and that number dropped dramatically in the late seventies early eighty And what happened to those bodies? You know, I do know they were left to rot? Really yes they have. The company went bankrupt and said, we don't have any money to keep these things going.

And um, since it was a corporation, they could say that the person walked away, but the bodies were just left to thaw and rot, and that's what happened. Um our Core supposedly has a fund set aside to where if anything happens to the company, it will provide a bridge to continue care until they figure out what to do with these That's where a lot of goes supposedly. I think about half of that goes into that trust.

And I was researching them. Apparently they have a self perpetuating board, which they're frequently criticized for because it's just there's no new blood in there as it were. But the board is generally or has been very transparent about how much money is paid, like um in supposedly they announced that they were gonna slash their staffs pay across the board. By the average staff worker, they're made like

twenty grand. Board members don't get paid at all, right, right, UM, So it's supposedly these people are just into it, like two UM further cryonic research and and keep these bodies suspended. Right. That's what you'll see on their website at least, right. But I was reading some outside links. There's this blog called Depressed Metabolism, which is just about all that UM and they were going over a two thousand nine al Core report UM. But they seem very conservative but not

good at generating their own income. They rely a lot on donations. All the technology they use as licensed elsewhere, so there's like bleeding money, but they manage to stay aflow because of donations from like wealthy members, which is

kind of unfair. So, but they're very conservative to UM, whereas like the Cryonics Institute was always kind of UM criticized for being like a little reckless, a little cutting edge, but they were looking at cryonics is not necessarily a way to keep UM people in suspended animation, But how do we apply this medically and get these people reanimated again, right, not just indefinitely, you know, increasing animation well, and how do you get medical mainstream medical science behind this period

is one of their big battles. Uh I. Now that al cores in Arizona and then two thousand four there was a bill passed by the House there in Arizona that basically was going to put them under the regulation of the State Funeral Board, which would have effectively probably shut them down, and it was pulled from the floor, but they said it was a really nasty debate on the floor. And uh, because there's a lot of religious ethical ramifications here that that I guess we could talk about,

but they said that we don't know. This could come back and they could shut us down. You never know, and in Arizona at least, but the ethical concerns is alcor On their website again has addressed some of these because a lot of religious folks might say, this is not, you know, something you should be doing. You shouldn't be playing God, quote unquote, and they say that patients are theologically equivalent to unconscious patients in a hospital with an

uncertain prognosis theologically speaking. And they've had people right into like people in the Catholic Church and Protestant churches and even the Jesus Christ Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter day Saints. They've written essays supporting it. Some people have Yeah, it's like if you're on life support, you're playing God or somebody's playing God with you. But other people in religious circles have blasted it. So it's it depends on how you want to listen to. Yes, it does.

And they said it's not just for the rich. That's one of the myths. They say it's not an indulgence of the rich. They say most of the membership is middle class. Yeah, and paid for with insurance, Yeah, life insurance on don't Is that true? I have I didn't get a chance to research that one. Looking not for myself, but Paul Rud's making a movie about this. Did you see that? It's been done? No what Iceman? No? No, no, no no. Um ice Man to the Return of Iceman

ice Man three, The Iceman Jr. What else? Well, this one is bona fide uh Errol Morris, the awesome documentarian. He's making his first, uh, non documentary film since the early nineties. Fiction, I'm sure, but it's not fiction because it's a true story. So the first first feature film. Um wow, man, that's awesome. Yeah, it's because it came out with a new documentary recently, too, didn't he Yeah,

it's uh, it's about that. It's about the tabloid scandal when that woman kidnapped the those Mormon I don't know. I think it's a woman kidnapped some Mormon guy and like took her, took him away to some aven and forced sex upon him for like months and then came back and was a celebrity because of it in the seventies. Yeah, it looks really good. So his feature film, Sorry, that's

all right, it's uh. It's based on the memoir by Robert F. Nelson called Uh and taken from this American Life segment and Ira Glasses producing This isn't everything taken from any this American Life segment And the name of This American Lives was Your as Cold at You're Cold as Ice was the name of their show. Personally, I think high frozen body a little better, way better, Chuck, way to So Paul read one of my favorites. He's playing this dude. Yeah, good for him. Good. Oh we

need to talk about Ted Williams real quick. Oh yeah, good lord. That was close. Well, as you said, Walt Disney was not uh suspended and liquid nitrogen, but Ted Williams the famous hit her last hit her to hit four hundred in baseball is yeah. He's an Alcore member. Two thousand two, they put him on Vitrify and um, they said it to Vitrify and he was like, whoa

his there's There was a legal battle over it. Um. Apparently his daughter was accusing his son of having him uh vitrified put in cryonics animation or suspended animation um because he wanted to later sell his dad's d n A, which apparently his son was like, yeah, maybe, but dad still wanted to. We had a sign packed me and our other sister, but not you and so um. He didn't even know him till he was thirty, though he

was a half brother or half so okay. Well, Ted was running around telling people all sorts of different stuff. Apparently he told his daughter that he wanted to be um scattered his He wanted to be cremated and have his cremated remains scattered over the Florida Keys. The daughter the son said no, we had a packed a signed packed, which apparently he was a will to produce. So Judge said, okay, Ted's again his stay frozen. You can't sell his DNA bing bang boom by Jovi yeah and then banging a gable.

The sun got a he he was painted in an unfair light because of the Sports Illustrated article by Tom Verducci that basically slammed him as Hey, this kid didn't even know until he's thirty, He's gonna sell his DNA and it was apparently he got one version of the story and that's it and stopped his fact checking there.

So I've seen follow up reports where this guy was like that ain't what happened, and I did not want to sell his DNA and like we really got to be close after I met him later in life, and blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well you got anything else? Just if you want to know how popular this is um As of June of this year, Alcor has nine d and fifty members and a hundred and six quote unquote patients. Yeah, that's what. And Michigan at the Cryonics

Institute I believe has over a hundred. So there's a cup one hundred and change people current currently in the United States upside down like that of liquid nitrogen with other people, one of them my be Ted Williams. I wonder if they're like, hey, check it out. Yeah, the Yankee Clipper. No, that was Joe Di Maggio, Tied Williams was the boss. That was he He was the Red Sox. It was like the Monster. I always confused him with Johnny Bench. Didn't they play at the same time or

call your stremski? Uh? Maybe it may have overlapped. It was like the big hitter or the monster hitter. Well he was the last player to hit four hundred, so yeah, I can't remember. Anyway, Let you go, Ted Um. If you want to learn more about baseball, we encourage you to type that word into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. You can also type in cryonics C R Y O N I C s UM and

that will lead you to some cool articles. Also, uh, if you have not gotten around to reading HP Lovecraft's brilliant shorts story Herbert West re Animator, Oh yeah, check it out. Probably his best. Um And I said re animator, which means that it's time for a listener mail. That's right, boy, I'm gonna get hammered by Yankee fans and Red Sox fans for that. I'm back off of that one. Jody Maggio's a Yankee clipper. Ted Williams is the monster, well

the green monster is? Is that what you're thinking? I mean, that's influencing it. But there's something there all right. Today, Josh I got on Facebook I don't know if he saw, and I was like, I can't find any good listener mail, So some help tell me some stories, and I just got a few of those to read off. Nathan. I'm sorry. Nathaniel jerk jeriko Witz Jerkovitz got hit by a car while walking home from work earlier this week. As I was listening to one of your episodes cool which one

I don't know? He said. He rolled off the hood and checked to make sure nothing was broken, and then scrolled back to what I had missed. Nice and uh, yeah that was Nathan. Nathaniel, So I hope you're okay. Yeah, hanging there, Nathaniel, Billina Elena said. My doctor says I mispronounced letters when I speak, not because of a list, but because I have a heart shaped uvula, to be honest, until he pointed out, I didn't have any idea that everyone else's uvulop did not have a split in the center.

How about that? Yeah, split uvul Yeah, I've heard of that. And Angie Speken says, uh. When I was seven years old, my mom spotted a wood tick in my ear while eating in the subway. I screamed hysterically. My stepdad tried to remove it with a plastic variety of plastic cutlery, and then a seemingly toward tracked at the attention of a cop who tried his best with keys. I started to bleed from my ear and the subway told us to leave the subway. Did My mom sat me on

a bench outside, continued the quest. The man sitting next to it next to us asked about why I was screaming, and once my mom told him, he asked if he could try and produce a hook for a hand. What is going on with this story? I'm so confused. She had a chicken re ear and no one could get it out. They went outside and this dude the subway told him, dude, and then this dude with a hook on his hand said, can I give it a shot? Okay,

it's got to New York. I screamed even louder as my mother help me down, and the man plucked the tick from my ear. So I wanted to I thank him for saving my life. And it's still I still smile every time I encounter a person with a hook for a hand and they think that she's laughing at him. I don't know. And then finally, congratulations to our buddy Andy John Cox. Yeah with the mustache he got engaged. Oh hey, congratulations and she said yes, and uh, he's

getting married and and he's one of our boys. And way to go, dude, and it's fantastic. Way to go. I'm sure you shaved off the mustache and it said will you marry me underneath it? And Ben I think they do. Uh. Yeah, that was a great idea. Chuck Stories. You got a story you want to hear it? Wait until Chuck asks not forget it. Just go ahead and let us now go into our Facebook page. It's a Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know. You can also tweet us stories if they consist of a hundred

and forty characters or less, that'd be good. Um too, that's a great idea. You can We want your hundred and forty character story's on Twitter? Um, good idea. Chuck s y s K podcast is our Twitter handle, and then you can also send us email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by the

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