The Alcor Podcast
Get a behind-the-scenes look at what's really happening at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to advancing cryopreservation science and technology. Through candid monthly conversations with our researchers, medical team, and staff, we share the stories and science driving the world's leading cryonics organization forward.
The Alcor Podcast
Big Changes at Alcor
In this inaugural episode of The Alcor Podcast, I sit down with Alcor CEO James Arrowood to discuss the organization's largest expansion in its history. From a growing research team to international development, we explore the significant changes happening at Alcor and what they mean for the future of the organization.
Episode Highlights:
- The story behind Alcor's largest team expansion, bringing on eight new team members
- Introduction of new research initiatives
- Improvements in emergency response capabilities and record-breaking response times
- Details about Alcor's international expansion into Canada and future European plans
- Discussion of new member services and communication initiatives
- Inside look at how Alcor is funding and managing this growth
Support Alcor with Directed Donations:
- Power-up Alcor's Deployment and Recovery Team (DART)
- Help us Bring Alcor to Europe
- Alcors Engineering Equipment Wishlist
- Build Out Alcor's Science Lab
Stay Connected:
- Follow Alcor on Facebook, Reddit, Discord
- Learn more about Alcor at www.alcor.org (and subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom)
Welcome to the very first episode of the official Alcor podcast. I am Daniel Walters and I'll be your host. I am the community outreach coordinator here at Alcor and today I will be joined by Alcor CEO James Arrowood. My goal with this podcast is to give Alcor members and prospective members a window into Alcor's operations and all the cool stuff that goes on behind the scenes. So to give the listeners some background. I have personally been part of the Chronix community for some time now, but mostly on the outside looking in. However, by joining the Alcor team very recently, I've been given a chance to view Alcor from a very different perspective than my normal perspective. And since starting there, I've been meeting a lot of different team members, trying to get a good lay of the land. And to be honest, from the Inside, there's a lot more going on than I had realized from the outside. And something that specifically surprised me is that Alcor is currently in the midst of their largest expansion ever, but I don't think this has sufficiently been highlighted to the Alcor membership. So my first priority since starting has been to get a handle on all the areas where Alcor is expanding and make sure that this information gets disseminated more efficiently. In the November newsletter, I highlighted a lot of the big items in terms of expansion, and today I'd like to go over those in some additional detail. To help me with this, I would like to welcome Alcor CEO James Arrowood to the podcast. James, thank you for joining me on this very special inaugural episode of the Alcor podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you, Daniel, and thank you for all the great work you're doing. We love your objectivity, which we really do value. And we want people to understand and see kind of from the inside, but from somebody who's a trusted voice, which I know you are and Max, you guys both have put a lot of work in prior to your association with Alcor. So we do appreciate that. And we want you to be honest with people. I mean, not everything is roses and easy at all. I mean, we're trying to do something nobody's ever done before. And there are a number of challenges in some areas some things that are external, some things that are internal. And it's probably one of the most challenging things I've ever done. And I've worked on some really amazing emerging technology, but Alcor definitely presented some unique challenges and we're working through them But we're not perfect. We're going to make mistakes and we're going to have to improve from them. And frankly, that's what science is. I mean, nobody just does their first science experiment and solves the world's scientific problems. It takes sometimes decades or centuries even to figure out some of these really complex but tiny things, ultimately. Molecular biology, right? It's tiny. Biochemistry, tiny stuff. But it's incredibly complex when you really drill down. So anyhow, thank you. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_02:There's been a lot of changes, and that was the name of the newsletter, Big Changes at Alcor. And Alcor has been relatively quiet about the changes until now. So aside from me coming on, why now to start communicating more openly at this specific point in Alcor's history?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. And my response ties back to something I did and presented on when I first started. I think we were only about four months into my being at Alcor. And I presented at the conference in Colorado at the Stanley Hotel. And one of the things I said, which often gets overlooked, but it's kind of something I really hold on to, is I don't like to talk about things that are kind of half-baked. Because you build up anticipation and having been around a while, both in emerging tech and law and business, many, many times you have the best intentions and you put your biggest effort into something But for reasons outside your control, it just kind of falls away or something takes a greater priority. And so I tend not to like to talk about things until they're done, meaning until the ink is dry and people are in place. Now, what that had the reverse effect, I think, at Alcor and a problematic effect perhaps was that people are really hungry for information. This is really personally very important to them. as it should be, but in the transition at Alcor with leadership over the last probably five years or so, I know there's been a kind of a void of information and people had concerns about that because when things go silent, they often assume or worry that there might be problems. Well, look, as we were advancing into kind of emerging tech being more commonplace and some of the, what was considered science fiction being more common, I mean, you look at electric vehicles or flying cars, you know, Alcor's kind of had to navigate that. And navigating it hasn't been necessarily easy at times. And the board, I think, finally recognized that. And then, frankly, that's why they brought me in. They brought me in to kind of help make these transitions. But just being the kind of person I am and from my background, there's a lot of things you work on in emerging tech that, frankly, you can't talk about. You know, there are trade secrets or there are, implications to some of the technology that are challenging. And so I come from a very private, don't talk about things background. And frankly, I've had to grow into this role and transition into it and learn, hey, give people something to be hopeful about, give them something to be excited about, to really sink their teeth in, especially as a nonprofit, because that, frankly, that's part of our operating revenue, right? The donations, the passion projects that people get excited about. And so we're going to be more open. And frankly, hiring you, bringing you on at Alcor was a big effort to do that. And it's already paying dividends. So we're seeing that. So if I can't do it myself, I need to hire people like you that can do a better job of it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's definitely upsides to the under-promise and over-deliver kind of style of things. And to be fair, a lot of the communication issues kind of proceed your being CEO at Alcor. So I do appreciate that you're putting it front and center and making it a priority. In terms of the general expansion, just to kind of put it in perspective, I think total about eight new people, which is a pretty big jump. What were the specific problems, not even specific, but the larger problems that you were trying to address with this, dare I say, hiring spree?
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of the things I do is when I start and am hired for any project or in the past, one of the rules that I live by is you always go to the scene. So For some of you who, if you're listening to this podcast, we might have met and you know that I was on the road. In fact, I had hundreds of thousands of miles of flight miles traveling in my first year and a half. And one of the things that people told me was they were concerned about our capacity to come get them in their time of need. Well, we were reliant upon outside contractors and there was a lot of movement in that space. And so part of the hiring has been the DART team. Now, When you hired the Dart team, they were kind of part-time and on call, as it were. But internally, the people you're talking about, let's address that. One of the other things I heard from members directly, one of the biggest criticisms is that Alcor has not been serving members quickly enough, right? And you have questions about dues or you have a question about your contracts or something else. And frankly, we were grossly understaffed. And of course, this all coincides with the business relationship of having to pay people and having salaries and things. And now that I've hired people, it's ironic, right? Because I addressed the need, but then it created a different issue, which was people were saying, well, how is Alcor paying for all these people?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that has been something that was my first question and kind of the first question when I talk to people about this is, you know, how does Alcor pay for this? And then, you know, I put these to rest immediately. But even because it's so different from– it's a very big departure from– the status quo for Alcor. People immediately assume, oh, Alcor is using patient money somehow for this, which is obviously not the case. So quickly dispel that, and then let's go over the ways in which Alcor has been able to afford this.
SPEAKER_00:Well, with regards to the patient money issue, let me just go to the beginning, which is Alcor, I think, has never done a good job previously. We're trying to do this now. has never done a good job educating membership on how money is broken up and spent or saved, okay? So patient money, for those who don't know, about 55% of the actual fee, the 220,000 or the 80,000 goes away immediately. Meaning I don't get to spend a dime of it for a pay per click or anything. And I really don't. I mean, there's some give back in the sense of there's something called the patient care trust that gets the corpus and the majority of our money, which I actually think we need to adjust now because the patient care trust is incredibly well endowed. It has tens of millions of dollars. And for the patient care portion of what Alcor does, you don't need tens of millions of dollars spinning off interest to pay for just a caretaker, for instance. That's like a one or two person job to make sure that the liquid nitrogen is in the tank and the alarms are working. That's a fairly simple operation. And so on the one hand, yes, you're saving money by not hiring people, but on the other hand, you're costing more money than you're saving because membership has an expectation, a service level expectation. So once you're a patient, you're in a doer, you're not requiring kind of a constant interaction, but when you're a member and when you're an organization that's reliant upon membership dues to operate and donations, Well, guess what? You need to have a robust infrastructure to support that membership. Because membership support, what does it do? It converts into greater donations. So Alcor's funding is actually 60% approximately operational side donations. And if you're not doing a good job and you're not out there advancing the science and educating people and promoting this in the general sphere, you're not signing enough new members. And you're not getting the donations because donors, the ultra wealthy donors that have donated to Alcor, they want to see positive movement. They want to see positive cultural acceptance. And then they then they start to think, well, OK, I'm going. First of all, if people became ultra wealthy, very typically they know business. You're right. And they want to invest in the sense of it's a nonprofit, but they want to donate to something that they're seeing a return on. And their return that they want to see is they want to see cultural acceptance, adoption. They want to see us in the news in a positive light. They want to have membership, call them back when they have a problem, right? Well, think about it. When Alcor was developing, you maybe had five to eight people that were running a high-tech science org, a foundation, that had to also deal with 1,500 members. Well, 1500 members, that's a lot of phone calls in a year. There's 365 days in a year. You're getting at least three or four phone calls a day on complex contractual stuff, payment stuff. There's just a lot that goes into it. And I don't think the membership has been educated. So what I did is I identified a bunch of problems and I triage them. And I say, where do we need to apply resources quickly? And then where can we save on resources?
SPEAKER_02:And quickly, in terms of savings, I've talked with people, I've talked with you, and I've identified some of the places where it seems like there's been the most savings. Because regardless of all that, it's like a chicken and egg problem. We need to jumpstart more services, hire more people, but we still need to come up with the money for it. So I guess one of the major areas that I identified was the price increase for members, I believe it was last year. So I imagine that was not popular for a handful of people. As far as I was concerned, it was inevitable at some point given the rising costs and inflation. So would you say that was one of the big areas where Alcor brought in money?
SPEAKER_00:Well, really, no, because like you mentioned, the rising costs absorbed any increase. And frankly, I'm a believer that emerging technology should go down in price eventually, not up. And we're actually working on that. So I actually fight pretty aggressively against price increases to the overall cost. And yet we have a board. And for those who don't know, Alcor had not raised its prices for over 10 years. And we've seen historical levels of cost increases, frankly, as a but just other inflationary concerns. And so we held off on doing that. And then when we did it, it was much to my chagrin. I actually want to save money on some of the long-term care costs, which I think we're actually in the process of modeling right now. And that is a goal of mine is not to increase costs, but we had to do it. What we've actually saved money on is the contractual structure of the hires, right? So we actually have donors that are essentially sponsoring. It's almost like an endowed chair at a university where somebody puts money in a pot and that pot is solely to pay for that professorship. While at Alcor, a couple of the people that we've brought on are fully or mostly funded by specific donors or donations, I should say. Frankly, outside contracting deals that we had that were, I mean, it's like anything. If you're a handyman and know how to fix the door yourself,
SPEAKER_01:It's
SPEAKER_00:going to cost you a lot less. A better one is electricians. Electricians, they're really expensive these days, right, to go get your light bulbs fixed. Well, if you have an electrician in-house, it's going to be a lot cheaper on the average. So it's identifying need and then saying, okay, this was costing us X amount externally. We'll pay half that cost to bring somebody in-house. but then you have a greater administrative burden to administer. I
SPEAKER_02:don't know if everybody, I know you've been yelling it from the rooftops, but communication is hard and still people get left out. For those who don't know, James is referring to the DART team, which stands for the Deployment and Recovery Team.
SPEAKER_00:Well, let me clarify, because I know people will bust us on this and get upset if I'm not very clear. DART came at an initial cost because of the training and the setup to structure DART. Now that was born by a donor. So we had somebody who hadn't been a donor before that stepped up in 2023 and frankly contributed a substantial amount of money that went towards the development of the system, because you have to develop the system and that's your kind of front-loaded cost, okay? It's like, paying for somebody to go get a degree in engineering or something. That's your front load cost. So that was absorbed by a specific donor. It wasn't a general operations expense. Once that's absorbed and you have the system in place, then those employees become part of the general operating expense, which actually comes out of the insurance proceeds at death. So it's not even a cost in the sense of, yes, Alcor has kind of a minimum cost for them on the monthly retainer amount. But it had to do with the way the model was set up. And the way the model is set up, the majority of that cost is born out of the insurance. And it saved us, I mean, substantial amounts of money on the recoveries. And so we're actually even fine tuning that this year. So Dart's first year was 2023. Now it's in 2024. And in 2025, we're actually fine tuning that whole model. So it's going to get even better. It's a model of efficiencies. So that's what we call it, efficiency modeling. And then it's applied to Alcor. It just was never done in the past at Alcor. So, yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we'll jump at the dart a little bit more later. I want to go over some of these kind of key hires.
SPEAKER_01:And there's more to come,
SPEAKER_02:by the way. Yeah. Actually, I wanted to ask, are there more positions you're looking to fill aside from the ones we're going to discuss?
SPEAKER_00:Well, not only are we looking to fill them, but we're actually open to membership opportunities. you know, putting in names in the hat of people who might be interested because we do like people that are cryonics affiliated or adjacent being involved. You can't always find that for the skill sets that you need. You know, there's a small contingent of people in the universe right now who are signed up. And so one of the things I've brought to Alcor is I brought in people that were not cryonicists initially, but are at least very, very useful for the skill sets we need. But yeah, we are bringing in, so membership is still an area we need help in. For those who know Diane, because she's the primary source of membership help, Diane works her butt off and she's one person and there's 1,500 people to deal with. In fairness to her, we absolutely need somebody. We also need them for succession planning because what you don't want to have is an organization that's supposed to last for 100 or 200 or 300 years and not have somebody who's prepared to step up and fill a role if something happens to somebody in that role. And that's been overlooked in the past because Alcor was a small kind of what I call garage band. And now it has to transition into a fully professional organization. So we're looking for somebody in membership to be a membership coordinator is the role in 2025. And we're gonna be actively soliciting for that role in a few weeks. And then we're actually gonna be looking for an engineer So for those who don't know, Jacob and Steve handle our engineering in-house, which actually bleeds into the recovery part because they do a lot of the cool-down process for the patient part, when the patient's brought in. The problem with that is that's often at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, on Christmas or whatever. And so you can really burn people out If you don't, especially that's a hard role because you're dealing with people who have died and their families are there and you're trying to do your best on a time sensitive matter. And so we are actively like the next two big hires are in membership and in engineering. So we're looking for people with a scientific engineering background to step in. And then also for development of new devices, whole body perfusion in the field is a major area that members care about. And so we need somebody that can kind of help develop that faster. And that's another big hire for 2025. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:I think the membership stuff is going to make a lot of people happy. That's one of the most common complaints I know you got when you started. And since I started soliciting feedback from people, that is also one of the most common complaints I'm getting. And people really want work on that. And we're listening. Yeah, yeah. People should know this is on Alcor's radar, and it is something that is being worked on. So do not
SPEAKER_00:expect- Let me say something, too, because I think this is really important for context for members. It is very, very hard to hire people with the right aptitude for this job, meaning I'll give you an example. I recently went through a hiring process and there were five finalists that were highly qualified, excellent choices. And ultimately, every one of them turned it down because you're at a for-profit. They're at a for-profit, but we're a nonprofit. So we don't have equity. We don't have the things that would make you competitive. We can't pay them oodles of money, even though we need these really strong skill sets. And then Alcor and cryonics, as everybody knows, it's a fringe thing in most of mainstream society. So they hear this and then they talk to their family or their friends and they're like, well, we're going to Arizona to work at this place that freezes dead bodies. I mean, that's kind of the line, right? So it's not like you can just recruit the best people overnight. It's really like with Nick, our scientist that we hired this year, fantastic candidate, but it took kind of the stars all aligning and the money falling into place in order to capture that resource, that person. And he's been amazing. But see, we need somebody like that for membership and we have to be able to afford them and we have to find the right attitude and aptitude. It is very hard and you can spend six months easily trying to find the right fit because the worst thing to do is hire somebody who's not a good fit And then it spills into the media or it turns into something that's a negative. And so you don't want to make that mistake if you can help it. You're going to do it once or twice, but you really want to avoid that. So that's the challenge. That's the challenge operation.
SPEAKER_02:So let's start there with Nick Llewellyn and Juan Jin Cho. So Nick Llewellyn has joined Alcor as the Director of Research and Development. So if you can briefly let us know a little bit about Nick and how you and he became connected.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so Nick Llewellyn is a PhD from University of Michigan. I went to Notre Dame, so I kind of generally dislike Michigan. So this was a major step out for me to hire him. That's a football rivalry issue, which I try not to bleed into actual hires, but it did make me think twice. But no, Michigan's a fantastic school. We all know that, right? It's a great school. I can't knock him on that. So he's got his PhD from there in molecular and cellular biology. and he was working at a lab at university of southern california and it was a lab with a preeminent researcher that specifically is working on glial cells and the adaptation of real cells using viruses and things but the reason that's of interest and the reason that's important and people are like well that's not exactly cryobiology he's not a cryobiologist that's okay you can teach cryobiology that's that's you know there's some some limited scope on cryobiology but But when you're talking about repairing cells, because remember the aspirational goal is you preserve these people, but we all know that the ice formation in terms of the state of the art right now, you're going to need to know how to repair cells and bring them back to a state where they can be revived. Well, guess what that is? That is the glial cell stuff. Glial cells are the cells that can go in and kind of repair or become other cells. And of course, don't let the scientists get mad at me. I know I'm not a scientist. I'm just talking generally. But he's an expert on it. And he's an expert on using, frankly, I think they were using viruses as a vehicle to implant the glial cells and get them to fix things. But in any event, it was really, I think a lot of this is just a stroke of luck. I mean, Nick had an interest in Alcor and he came for a tour at some point. And I identified, when people come for tours, if I'm present and I'm not traveling, I ask what they do. And I want to know their background.
SPEAKER_01:Because
SPEAKER_00:that's probably one of my skill sets is just identifying and capturing people based upon their backgrounds and skill sets. So when I heard he was a Michigan PhD, he was at USC. I'm from Southern California. I'm familiar with that. I was able to talk to him and we kind of hit it off. And then the attitude, the mental attitude. He'd heard about cryonics. He wasn't signed up. He wasn't a member or anything. But he was interested. And I think it was the intellectual curiosity and interest. And frankly, he's a nice guy. And he's a nicer guy than I am in some ways. And he was really able to bond and bridge the scientists, which are kind of one end of this spectrum of people and how they think and communicate. And kind of my style and more of the business style where I'm constantly moving. So the dark people and I were able to connect in terms of being results oriented. The scientists are process oriented. Nick, in speaking with him, was able to kind of bridge that gap. And that's incredibly valuable and useful for Alcor because I think there's been a big problem in communication with bridging the gap between the Joe Schmoes like myself and these really, really ultra smart people who tend to be really focused and can't necessarily communicate. So I identified that and then we had to figure out how to pay him, right? Because he's a PhD, he's not inexpensive. And he was willing to come to terms and move to Arizona and what have you, and it took a few months. But from what I can tell, he's really happy. And we're trying to outfit his lab now. That's what he really cares about too, by the way. He wants to do the cool experiments that at a university setting, they can't just wake up tomorrow and do this experiment. They have to go through internal review boards. It could take two years. Well, at Alcor, I said, look, at Alcor, you're gonna be the boss. So if you want to try something, you want to do something crazy that's within the realm that we can work on, then you get to do it. And so the freedom was a big sell for him. Now, Wanjin, Wanjin's a little different. So Wanjin is like many cryonicists in that he read a book in high school, I think it was, okay, or in their grammar school, middle school slash high school. And we hear this a lot. In fact, many of
SPEAKER_02:the world... Well, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just want to quickly... For people who don't know, Wonjin is also joining Nick in the lab as Alcor's new neurobiology researcher. He's another one of the new hires, and he's very talented. Quickly, how did you get him? He's from South Korea. How did you convince him to move all the way to Arizona for this?
SPEAKER_00:Well, fortunately, again, the stars align. Let's just say that Wanjin was highly motivated to come to Arizona because he met somebody who I think is his great love in life. And she happened to be here in Phoenix, Arizona. And he was a student at their version of MIT. And he was number, I think, number two in his class. And he's what I call a rock star neurobiologist. And he came in to be a research coordinator underneath Nick, who's got his PhD. So Wanjin has his master's. in neurobiology and was working at a lab doing specifically brain cell research, just postgraduate research. And I happen to be a lawyer and that's my skillset, right? So getting him a green card, which is of course we know is incredibly valuable. There's a special category for people that are highly specialized. And I happen to know a lawyer who's very, very good at getting that green card. And it was wild because we had about a week to get him into the lottery that then assigns these green cards, but we pulled it off. And, you know, again, I don't know how much is luck or hard work, but we were able to get him admitted to the US as a specialized researcher. And he's, I mean, the guy's a genius. I mean, you know, I mean, he's much smarter than I am. And he sits there and he researches. In fact, he's already added to, to the development of cryonics in a few months. He's only been here since October, but he's already putting together a master database of patient cases where they're actually lining it up so that they can start doing the CT scans and actually start doing the cellular kind of biopsy level look at how cells vitrified over the years. And that's been a gross, important need in cryonics, and there just wasn't the bandwidth for anybody to do it. And now... Wanjin just picked it up and was like, okay, I can do this. And he's already working on it. So when I identified needs at Alcor, the first thing was recovery because people want to make sure they're recovered well. Well, we covered that with DART in 2023. The next thing was, well, Alcor is supposed to be doing the research here as a nonprofit. That's what makes Alcor unique and special. We didn't have in-house research. We were funding research. Alcor was spending money as a foundation to fund external research. And we did some monster things in that space, but we never were getting credit for it. And I said, well, we need to get credit for it. So my next hires were going to be research. And that's what we did. So it's a triage. I'm prioritizing what members have told me. I'm prioritizing what Alcor is supposed to be doing. And then in 2025, it shifts to the next priority, which is the membership we talked about. And then engineering.
SPEAKER_02:What people should know is if you want to help outfit the research lab, we have a directed donation platform. I'm going to include that in the show notes. So if you want to contribute a directed donation to build up a lab, there will be an opportunity for you to do that. Moving on a little bit to emergency response and the DART team. And again, I'll say for those who don't know, DART team stands for Deployment and Recovery Team, which is Alcor's in-house SST team. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:because when I really looked at it, SST was kind of standby and stabilization transport type thing. Really what it was logistically was deploying. It's a logistics issue. And so what I identified at Alcor in cryonics generally is that you really have three legs to the stool. Okay. It's a three-legged stool. And if you're missing any one of them, the stool doesn't work very well. It folds on itself. And it's chemical, it's mechanical, and it's logistical. To make this thing a success, we're going to need all three of those things working in conjunction at the highest level. And so I looked at SST and I thought it's really about deploying and recovering and getting them back to Alcoa or starting the stabilization in the field. but then getting them back. And so that's deployment and recovering somebody. And of course it sounds cool. And you look for those cool names, but yeah. So that's how DART was created, was really out of members expressing the fear and need for a high quality people to be out there doing this. And we found.
SPEAKER_02:And keeping onto the expansion. So paramedic fire captain Shelby Fox is one of the new hires who joined. Unreal. Alcord to our team. Yes. So I, from what I understand, she's very accomplished. Tell us a little bit about how, about her and how, how you, you two met.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Shelby was brought in, you know, look, good people know good people. And so when these people are coming in and Nick, I think, you know, heard about us from somebody and our staff helped, you know, a lot. So Shelby Calkins was really helpful, but good people know good people. Shelby Fox, for those who don't know her, Just an outstanding citizen, person, you know, she's, I guess, well, I have to be cautious a little bit, but let's just say that she's somebody that she works in one of the largest fire departments in the country. And she's slated to be one of their really up and coming rising stars, you know, expected to do great things and is already doing great things as a captain level firefighter paramedic. And she, you know, the way the firefighters work is they kind of work two or three days on and then they have three or four days off. And they're the type of people that are constantly wanting to do something. So it really works well for our model. Where are those days off that she had? She's able to pick up some extra income, but she's also just really passionate about doing the job and the intellectual curiosity of doing the job. And so she joined our team. And again, I couldn't be more thrilled because you have to remember these people are out in the broader community. She's not a cryonisist per se, but she's out there interacting with VIP people all the time in terms of government, local government. And we need the support of the community to be here because it was such a fringe thing that in the past, people were concerned about what is this organization doing? Is it doing weird stuff? So when you have these very credible people that are not cryonicists, but they're in the community and they're working with us, then that rubs off on us in terms of cryonics and the organization in that, hey, these people are okay. They've been vetted. She's on the inside and she sees that they're doing things appropriately are they're getting people in to do things appropriately. And that's why it's so important to bring these outsiders in and we're not hiding what we're doing. We're being open about what we're doing. And obviously as a firefighter, people have a lot of respect for firefighters. I know just in terms of gender, she's one of the fastest, I think rising in terms of promotions and things, females in the fire department and just incredibly well regarded. But, but that's, I mean, we have Lisa Ventrone, we have Cheyenne Malstrom, you know, we have some of our Navy SEALs who a lot of them like to be low profile, but these are just outstanding people independently of DART. I mean, they're just incredibly accomplished and people don't understand how we can afford that. So let me address that because everybody's like, well, gosh, how are you, how can you pay these people? Look, if we had to pay everybody what they're worth, we couldn't afford them. Okay. But fortunately, because we're a nonprofit, these people are at least aligned with some of the other uses of the technology, including the Oregon banking and Oregon storage goals. And so that's attractive to them. And they're willing to do a lot of this on kind of a, it's an employee relationship, but it's got a contractual kind of independent contractor component to it. So it was really the design of the compensation model that frankly, I guess was pretty clever and has made it work now. And so now we need to build upon that and strengthen that. But the donations, we couldn't do it without some of these donors coming in and really helping out. So members get a lot of credit for that.
SPEAKER_02:In the previous board meeting, you had mentioned the average response times have gone down significantly, specifically the standard measure ischemic exposure, which is referred to as the S-mix times, have decreased from about three hours and 50 minutes to two hours and 30 minutes. What do you think accounts for this acceleration and these changes?
SPEAKER_00:I think the primary thing that accounts for it is the quality of the training the individuals on the DART team have. prior to coming into cryonics. I mean, one of the reasons we, we like seals and people just say, oh, you just like the seals because it's, it's Razzie and sounds good. No, it's because they're actually in receipt of millions of dollars of government funded training on how to move bodies quickly, you know, in, in the field in combat, in, in movement, whether it's hostage rescue or other things, you know, they are trained to have this muscle memory. That's, That's hard to explain. I've seen it in action, but when you see it, it's almost hard to believe. And I liken it to ballet, right? Even, even though they're not ballerinas by any stretch, but, but when they move, when you, when you tell them to recover a patient, you know, a member that's become a patient, they just move so, so cleanly and so fast. But of course, fast is not always good. Because if you're moving fast, but you're not doing an accurate or correct job, that's bad. But because they've been trained to move so quickly and do the mission set. So what we had to do is we had to train them in the mission set, which is the specialized procedures. But they've already been weeded out by the government in terms of people that have an aptitude to pick up new procedures quickly. So again, what we did is we shifted the cost and identifying the people that are capable of moving quickly to the government by virtue of prior training. And then we tried to capture those individuals by giving them a position that was attractive enough for them. And frankly, it's not the money and the money helps, but again, we can't pay them huge dollars. It's they love that they're doing something that uses their prior skills and they're not sitting at a desk. So what you don't wanna do is you don't wanna get the firefighters or the SEALs and sit them at a desk, okay? That's a mistake. That's not gonna work out well for anybody. So you have to compartmentalize their job to the recovery part where the adrenaline's flowing. And then they're at their best. And then I don't expect them, they have to do some reports after for the case reports. but I don't expect them to be sitting there doing a bunch of paperwork after.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and definitely plan to have Shelby Calkins on the podcast many times in the future so we can give Alcor members a better understanding of what that looks on the ground and get really into the weeds with it. But quickly on that, just because I've already gotten some confusion from people. So Shelby Fox is the... is the new hire, the paramedic fair captain. Shelby Calkins is Alcor's medical director who's been around for a while and she's great. But having two Shelbys in the SST field has been confusing for some people. Shelby number one, Shelby number
SPEAKER_00:two.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:And by order of how they came to Alcor, that's how I, not priority, but how they came to Alcor. So Shelby number one is our medical response director and she is a trauma nurse. So her training, again, it's aptitude. What I look for in people isn't necessarily the things that check the box on the resume. I'm looking for aptitude. It's how people are gonna behave under time-sensitive stressful circumstances and hold it together and complete the mission accurately. So there's something very specific that I'm good at identifying and finding those people and then making them an offer that's something that's hard for them to turn down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's a great thing to look for because it leaves a lot of room for people to grow into a role.
SPEAKER_00:Or be trained. They're smart people, right? So yeah, they have to have what I call base level intellect. But they're going to have that base level intellect if they've already made it through fire training or nursing school or SEAL training. That's kind of a presumed thing. The next question is, do they have the aptitude to do this in the cryonics environment? Can they handle the naysayers? Can they handle the hospital that's never heard of cryonics and is trying to tell you to get lost, right? That's a challenge.
SPEAKER_02:How do you maintain consistent quality with the DART teams? Are they spread out in a certain way that helps them be relatively close to all the important locations?
SPEAKER_00:So the question is, are the dark teams spread out? And the answer is yes. We identify people throughout the country and also in Canada. And then we bring them in for training and for selection and what have you. This is after they've been talked to and made sure they're a good fit for the model. And then they get trained and then they go back home. So right now we have people in New York, Texas, Florida, Ottawa area, Montreal, Toronto area. We have people in Colorado because Denver is a big, it has a lot to do again with logistics and where we have concentrations of members. So if somebody were in North Dakota and there's not a big airport and there's not a big concentration of members, even if they're highly skilled, they're probably not going to be able to get into transport in time the way we need them to. So Those are factors. There's actually a model that's been created to identify kind of the ideal scenarios. Now, that being said, mind you, we can still do better. There's always room for improvement. Yes, we've historically cut times by record amounts, okay, across the industry. But the biggest issue we have, I think, in recoveries generally, which lead to straight freezes, which is not the outcome we hope for, is post-mortem notification. So you can have the best people you know, in the same city, but if we don't hear about a member's death until hours later or worst case days later, it doesn't matter. And so again, in terms of triaging, identifying issues, DART is one part of that. And DART, if they can get to you in time, will absolutely do a fantastic job. But that's a big if, because we have members all over the place. And so there is this kind of membership accountability or member issue. And again, we're trying to provide support for that with the check-in service. And we're looking at the wearables because everybody asks about wearables. And strangely enough, the wearables are easier external to the U.S. than they are in the U.S. because of our litigation culture in the U.S. So a lot of the wearable companies wouldn't work with us or the medical alert, medical monitoring companies wouldn't work with us because they're worried about liability. And so those are different realities. And I've talked about this in the past, but I know you're talking about DART. I want to say yes, but even having DART located all over the place doesn't solve all the problems.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I can actually contribute to the answer. I mean, just like you said, this is not, a few things have to come together properly for people to get good preservations. And I actually think there's a lot of member services and communications that can contribute to that, keeping people in the community, keeping people aware of what's going on, especially if they're having health problems or they're getting up there in age. These are things that have multifaceted issues that DART can't be the only one responsible for. There's a lot that we can talk about there in the future in terms of how we can improve members' odds and help them be more responsible for making good choices there. But we won't get into that now because that's a three-hour conversation in itself. Moving on to something that I think a lot of people have heard about, but there hasn't been a lot of elaboration on it yet, is Alcor Canada. First of all, what exactly is Alcor Canada and what was the incentive to form it?
SPEAKER_00:Well, Alport Canada was in part the result, again, of my coming in and triaging and checking with member interests and everything else. Like anything at a nonprofit, there had to be funding in place. I couldn't just pop it open. And so there were Canadian members that were substantially interested in at least having a presence there, and they were willing to help fund it, much like with what we're trying to do in Europe. You know, it's one thing when you have a bunch of members in the U.S., and of course, naturally, human nature being what it is, they're going to say, well, why are we paying for something in Europe? We're all over here. Well, there's a huge market and opportunity in Europe. We're a nonprofit, but nonetheless, we want to service people all over because if it's good for us, it's good for them. And in Canada, it just came, again, the stars aligned. And look, I say that, and I don't want to be flippant about it. I understand that It's not that I'm just always that lucky, right? I've only been here two years. There's been a hell of a lot of hard work behind all this. And what I do is I look for opportunities that also come with resources. And if there's an opportunity with resources, then it makes sense to expand. I mean, Alcor's been around over 50 years. So cryonics conceptually has been in existence for over 50 years just by virtue of Alcor. Why hasn't it really taken root elsewhere? If it's really the logical choice and what I call the third way, then it really falls on Alcor as the leading entity in the space to promote it and to promote it with our neighbors to the north. They have the capacity. In fact, what's really exciting is I just had a call this week with one of the top universities in Canada. So in the U.S., you get these kind of cultural differences where maybe some places, you know, for quasi-religious reasons or cultural reasons don't want to be associated with cryonics and they feel that it's a conflict. You know, in certain secular, more secular cultures like Canada, they don't have that issue. Same thing in Europe. And so the gating, the gating boundaries and gating issues don't exist because And all of a sudden, we're talking to mainstream credible universities that in the US, we may already work with some of those universities, but I'm not allowed to talk about it because they feel like it would be a negative, right? So it's an image. It's a perception issue. And other countries, they don't have that. And so what you can do is once you start aligning with the credible places in Canada or Europe, well, then it starts to soften what's going on in the US. So there's a number of reasons to do it. Now, A reason not to do it is that there's not enough members in Canada right now. I mean, we only have about 100 people that are signed up in Canada. And even the other Kionix organizations collectively, maybe you double that number, 200 people. That's not enough to support an organization and an operation. And so what we've done is we've limited it to a presence in Canada. So people who are worried about the money, the funding is coming from Canadian donors. for the most part. Now, don't get me wrong, Alcor US, I travel up to Canada and even that's been largely covered, but yeah, there's some expense, but it's de minimis relative to the value of trying to get into spaces that in the US we're not allowed in yet, at least not publicly allowed in.
SPEAKER_02:And for Alcor Canada, there's not a facility there at the moment. Is there any plans to eventually build a storage facility in Canada?
SPEAKER_00:There is the possibility that there would be a cryonic storage facility either in the Northeast United States, so somewhere near the border of Canada, or in Canada. Now, when people get at me about this and they say, well, open one here, open one there, it's not that simple because it could be, you can even give me all the money in the world, but if you're going to open it near a fault line in California where there's earthquakes, well, you've got 4 000 gallons of liquid nitrogen it's just not going to work it's not a good idea and so where we locate remote headquarters labs storage facilities is going to depend on the number of circumstances but yes we are open to uh something in canada but i actually think alcor europe will result in an actual headquarters storage facility lab probably sooner than Canada, just because from Canada, logistically, we have that model to get people down to Arizona quickly. Europe, there's just logistics, there's just geography. And so it would make more sense to focus on remote storage in Europe first.
SPEAKER_02:And so I don't want, I'm going to do a whole newsletter and a podcast on Alcor's expansion to Europe. So I don't want you to ruin the surprise just yet, but do you feel like there's been a lot of lessons learned from establishing Alcor Canada that will be applicable in expanding internationally elsewhere?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think one of the lessons is that having local Alcor members involved is really important. And that's something that would seem obvious. But again, you have to find the right people. You can have people that are incredibly enthusiastic, but just don't have the skill sets or don't have the energy or the bandwidth. And so we were very fortunate. with Jeremy Wiggins in Canada, who has been part of our DART team. So he knows firsthand what's involved in recoveries and that's just invaluable, right? But he also has the personality and the bandwidth, he has the availability. Again, we have funding from Canadian members to support that. And so he really comes at essentially no cost to the US membership. So all of those things aligned and now we have a great person.
SPEAKER_02:Let's quickly jump on that because Jeremy straddles the Alcor Canada and Alcor Europe. I've had a chance to spend some time with him. For those who don't know, he is one of the Alcor Canada board members and he's also heading up Alcor's international expansion. So let's start there. How did you come to know Jeremy?
SPEAKER_00:So Jeremy Wiggins, he's on the Alcor Canada board. And again, I talked about local member involvement. So what happened was when I heard from a donor, a couple donors in Canada, that there was interest in at least establishing a presence, I went up to Canada myself. And this is what I told you. I'm a strong believer in going to places and meeting members and hearing firsthand. So I wanted to make sure that these people were credible, that they were able to help fund this. And so I went up. And in those meetings, I met with Jeremy and Jeremy had been involved kind of on a volunteer basis with deployment and recovery or SST at the time. And Jeremy comes from a medical background. He's a respiratory technologist. And so we got to know each other. And again, I'm looking for aptitude. I'm looking for there's personality traits I'm looking for. And so I was looking for board members and I wanted a range. And I was able to meet with JF and Benicius who are on the board. And they gave me kind of a range of personalities to have on the board. And then Jeremy kind of stepped up and he had flexibility with his work and knew some of the important donors and things that were in place. And then he had firsthand experience with deployment recovery. All of those kind of came together and I got to know him and travel a little bit with him and said, okay, I think you'd be a great choice. to kind of front things in terms of be the lead person. And he's very enthusiastic, very interested, and very involved. And so I brought him on board with Alcor. He has a title for Alcor. And again, this isn't, see, when everybody's worried about the money, you should be, right? You're members and you wanna know how the money's spent. Jeremy doesn't cost Alcor's operational budget hardly anything. Again, we found directed donations, specific donors, that are interested in a local capacity and they wanted that access. And so I say, okay, if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, Alcor will organize it and put the work in. So yeah, there's costs for me traveling, but those are good investments because by the way, we did Canada national television interviews. We've been Canadian media and it's been positive because one of the big negatives in the past has been the media coverage has been And so by doing these things and engaging and traveling, we are getting massive positive exposure that Chronix didn't have in the past.
SPEAKER_02:For listeners, if this is your first exposure to James, James is very good at stretching a budget and taking a small amount of money and turning it into a big project. But it's a pretty unique talent that I'm coming to respect a lot. I was seeing you kind of crisscrossing around the country that we met in that way when you first came on and you were just visiting everybody and kind of sizing up the whole community to figure out where the resources were. And so I'm starting to see some of that effort really come to fruition now with all this expansion and all these projects that have been kind of under wraps for the last couple of years, so to speak.
SPEAKER_00:I call it simmering, you know, planting seeds. And to your point, for those who don't know my background, you know, it's a long story, but I was on my own as a teenager. So I was what they call an orphan or ward of the court and ended up putting myself through college and law school at Notre Dame. And I did all of that without really any family support or help. But what it did is it honed my skills in finding resources from nothing. You know, you're literally just thrown out in the street one day and say, figure it out. And you have to put a roof over your head. You have to feed yourself and you have to pay for your education. And I frankly, it's weird because the Alcor job is kind of a perfect scenario for my background and skill sets. It's like, here's not a lot of resources, but take what little resources you have and turn it into something much bigger. And to your point, I think that was a fruit of adversity in my youth. And yeah, I'm stretching it as far as I can. Now, mind you, it can only go so far. And one of the big jobs I have now is engaging with some donors. And now, for those who don't know, the cryonics community has a population of some of the world's wealthiest people. And I've been able to meet with some of them. And what they've told me is that they were concerned about cryonics generally to the degree that they weren't comfortable giving large donations necessarily. Now we've had some, and some organizations have had investors, I think, and what have you, but some of the ultra wealthy people were still really skeptical and they didn't want to put their money because they weren't sure exactly how it would be used and what have you. So a big part of my job, even just recently, I met with some ultra wealthy people, a big part of my job is just kind of, you know, Relating to them that we're credible, meaning when we say we're going to do something, whether it's open Canada, you know, or open Europe or something else, they they're smart business people. They're very smart with money and they're watching all of these little things. And even those who haven't given yet, I can see that they're starting to get engaged and they're starting to get to the point where their ears are perking up and they're thinking about it. So now I just need to get them the specific things like the science equipment for the lab, an electron microscope. Okay, well, that's$30,000,$40,000. And there are people out there who are starting to say, you know what? I could use that tax break this year. Here's your electron microscope. And it makes all the difference in the world for us because then it doesn't come out of the operations budget, which means then I have that money to then pay the salary of somebody that we desperately need to hire. And So that's kind of the circle of how this works. And for those who don't understand, that's in my skillset because frankly, I came from nothing and I had to learn to ask for things, to ask for help and hopefully be humble in accepting help. And that's a big part of the job.
SPEAKER_02:And so let's continue on this theme of fundraising. So something that I've been working with you to help produce is a better online fundraising platform. for directed donations, something where members can choose what area of Alcor's operations they want their money to support. So this is an idea that you brought to my attention almost immediately when you brought me onto the team. What was the thinking behind these directed donation campaigns?
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of the things I want to clarify for everybody is everybody in the past, from my experience, has been really concerned about the patient money. And you said that at the start of our conversation where people were saying, oh, well, are they spending patient money to do this? No, and the patient money is incredibly well-funded. You know what's not well-funded? Is operations, administrative costs. And so it occurred to me that if people aren't told where the money really needs to go, If they're not told, it's like in medicine, you have to know where the medicine needs to go in the body in order to heal the body. Well, in this case, people tended to give the big donations and much of the donations tended to go into kind of, there were two buckets in people's minds. One was the operations budget, which they assumed the dues paid for. Well, dues only cover about 40% of our expenses. They didn't know that because we didn't tell them. Well, the patient expenses are fully covered by a huge endowment. But you know what was happening? People were donating all the money to the patient care fund, the PCT. It doesn't need the money. I mean, don't get me wrong. You can always use more money, but it's self-perpetuating now. The interest it makes every year pays for itself and a lot more. But the way it's designated, that money can't really come back to general admin or operations. So you had one part of the organization that was fat and happy, and you have the other part that's starving. But the fat and happy part can't give the starving part a bunch of money. So what I came in was to change the communication, and that's what we're doing here with the podcast, to let people know that, look, if you want to give money, these are the areas that we really needed it. Now, once research gets the equipment it needs... then I'm not gonna be asking for a bunch more money for research, right? Once admin hires everybody we need to hire, well, we have to keep paying them salaries. We have to keep paying them wages. And so the admin part has been traditionally very neglected because it was volunteers and hobbyists, but we're not anymore. And if you want professional level services, then we need the donors to step up. And what I would really like to do, my dream at Alcor, if I leave Alcor someday, from being Alcor's CEO, I will feel really, really good if I figured out a way to endow, meaning get enough money in a fund, and people say there is an endowment. Yeah, there's an endowment, but it's not well-funded enough. And I want to endow the operations component of Alcor similarly to how the patient care is endowed. Because if we do that, then the operating expenses every year will be covered from the burn-off, the interest made on the endowment. And guess what? We can start reducing the prices. We can start reducing all of the things that we have to charge. So crowd preservation, I could see that dramatically decreasing in cost because everything's paid for with the interest on all these different funds, right?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, the endowment for the patient Care Trust and that whole kind of breakdown of that doing well and needing in operations, I think that's going to be relatively surprising to a lot of people. I didn't know that breakdown personally. And I think that breakdown explains a lot of the complaints that people have had in the past with the operations not being up to snuff with what they expect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, if you think about it, and I don't know about you, but I've been hungry in my life. And if you're hungry, all you're thinking about is how to feed yourself. You're not thinking about how to present yourself well and how to give good services externally to other people. You're just worried about where your meal's coming from. And so, you know, if operations is starving, well, it's really hard to think about the external kind of member calling up and saying this when we're sitting there going, okay, well, we have to figure out how we need to pay everybody's... Now, don't get me wrong. We have money. And frankly, there was a donation that came in that really helped, I think, in 2023 and set us up. And that's one of the things that allowed us to kind of have some of this growth in the last year or two. But that's not indefinite, right? It's not endowment level money. I'm really hopeful that one of these billionaires, there are billionaires that are involved. And so far, they've been pretty quiet. And I'm really hopeful that one of them will hear me talking someday and say, you know what, here's 10 million bucks. Because you start talking about$10 million at 5% interest, that's half a million dollars a year without ever depleting the principle. And that's assuming you're just making the CD rates at a bank, right? Well, half a million dollars is five highly compensated employees that could be doing incredible things every year.
SPEAKER_02:So let's kind of big picture looking into the future. What excites you most about where Alcor is headed?
SPEAKER_00:What excites me most about where Alcor is headed is that we're seeing positive movement on the science. And by that, I mean the scientists are already internally testing all the procedures and processes. We're seeing positive movement on the engineering side, which means the tools that we have in the field could get to a place where we could do whole body, if not cryopreservation, but stabilization in the field, which in turn opens up the rest of the world. Because if you can stabilize somebody and they're in India or they're in China or somewhere else, in Australia, for instance, and they're remote, and then you can hold them at temperature long enough, well, then the logistics component gets solved really quickly. And I think that that will greatly reduce the incidences of straight freezes. That's kind of my major right now thing. But yeah, also the public perception. I've heard from the largest publications in the world now, the most credible ones, the New York Times, Washington Post level of media, and they're not necessarily positive, but they're no longer negative. They're willing to hear us out. And that could be a sea change because that tends to snowball. Once you get one, then you get another. Next thing you know, it's becoming more common. And of course, when it becomes more common, you get more members. When you get more members, you get more dues, more revenues, and then you can do more on the science. At the end of the day, it's all about the science and getting this problem solved, which is the cellular preservation and then thawing problem.
SPEAKER_02:And to close it out here, I know you've given us a lot of your time. What should members be paying attention to the most in 2025?
SPEAKER_00:Members should be paying the most attention to positive growth, positive media, and then really member interrelationships. Something you mentioned earlier, which was kind of the post-mortem, so after death notice issue, having networks with other cryonicists in a friendly collegial way will frankly attract more people to the science. And so people who aren't necessarily interested, never heard of it. I'd never heard of it before Alcor was a legal client of mine. I'd never heard of this stuff. And so meeting people that are credible, that are friendly and kind of legitimizing it, I think is something that everybody can do and it doesn't require you to send a check. It's just talking. It's just presenting. I think people should hear the messaging that I'm reorienting and mimic that. Because rather than going to people and say, hey, do you want to be immortal or do you want to live forever? Don't lead the conversation with that at all. Lead the conversation with, hey, there's legitimate cryobiology and thermodynamic engineering that can be done that can help extend lives. Now, we all hopefully want to extend the life of our brain ultimately, right? We know that. That's kind of what cryonicists are. But it also has other applications. And those other applications are much more understandable by the average person, whether it's just medicine or whether it's organ banking or anything like that. And it's not disingenuous to do that. Those are legitimate uses of the science and technology. And we're on the forefront of that because again, to ever do the brain, you have to do the pinky. And I don't think there's anything wrong in saying that. And I feel like there was a lot of people when I first started that felt that that was selling us short.
SPEAKER_01:And
SPEAKER_00:that's not selling it short. That's just communicating in a way that most people can accept and understand. And that's desperately needed.
SPEAKER_02:No, and I think on that specific subject, I'd like to have a follow-up podcast at some point specifically on discussing that issue because I think there's a lot to be said there and some confusion within the community. So I think there's a lot of light to shed. But we'll wrap it up there. James, I really appreciate you talking with me and joining me on this first episode. I hope everyone found our discussion informative. I'm looking forward to many more of these types of discussions in the future on the Alcor podcast. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to the podcast. Join us on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and feel free to let Let us know what you think. Ask questions. We'll get those questions answered on future episodes. There'll be links in the show notes to all our social media. Looking forward to the next one. Thank you, James. And thank you, everybody, for listening.