The Alcor Podcast

Bringing DART to Your Doorstep

• Episode 3

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In this episode of The Alcor Podcast, we take a look at how the newly formed Alcor Canada is making cryonics more accessible. Their donor-supported model isn’t just for Canada—it’s an approach that could work anywhere, bringing cryonics resources closer to those who want them. No matter where you are, this episode offers valuable insights into setting up local cryonics resources - worth your time!

Highlights:

  • The Birth of Alcor Canada – Why the need for a dedicated Canadian entity became clear and how it took shape.
  • How the Canadian DART Team Works – A deep dive into how the team is structured, how they respond to cases, and why their model can be replicated anywhere.
  • Training for Cryonics Deployments – The essential skills and specialized knowledge that make DART teams effective
  • Funding Local Expansion – How donor-supported initiatives are creating local cryonics resources and what it takes to bring a team to your doorstep.
  • Whats Next - The future ambitions for Alcor Canada 

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to another episode of the Alcor podcast, wherein each episode will take you behind the scenes here at Alcor. My name is Daniel Walters, and I'm Alcor's Community Outreach Coordinator. Today, we will be exploring the story behind the newly formed Alcor Canada, and joining me here today to do this is Jeremy Wiggins. So Jeremy is Alcor's International Development Coordinator, one of the three board members of Alcor Canada, and also a critical member of the DART team. If you're unfamiliar with the acronym, the DART team is Alcor's deployment and recovery team. So these are the teams that in an emergency will wait by your bedside and recover your body for cryopreservation. So Jeremy, thank you for joining. I really appreciate you sitting down with me today.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you very much, Daniel. I love this opportunity to be able to talk about this stuff. This is a really great avenue to be able to reach a lot of people, I find.

SPEAKER_00:

Before we jump into any of the serious stuff, let's give the listeners a chance to kind of get to know you a little bit. If you could give... a broad overview of kind of where are you situated on the map, your lifestyle, your family, your hobbies. Essentially, how would you describe yourself to someone who's never met you?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. I'm not a middle-aged. I'm in my mid-40s. I've been working in the healthcare field for about 21 years. I live in a small town outside of Ottawa, Ontario, which is in Canada. And I have three kids and a wife. My oldest one is 19. She's in university. And then I have a 16 and 13-year-old who are both very, very involved in their sports and makes it very busy for family life, for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

You and I only recently met in Sweden, right? where I was there for a Nordic Chronics conference, and you were there to scout out some locations for Alcor's Alcor Europe facility. We had met for dinner. We had met up at a restaurant, and I didn't know what you looked like. And while I was waiting to be seated, you came up behind me, grabbed me, and jump-scared me half to death.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, for people who know me, Well, they know that I love to jump scare people at work, like at my hospital work. I jump scare people all the time. I jump scare my manager every chance I can. Like it's a it's a pleasurable thing for me, although, you know, some people get, you know. Kind of jumpy from it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the record, I am not a fan. And I was thinking to myself, who the hell introduces themselves like that? What gives? So even with that rough start, we had a lot of fun hanging out in Sweden. And aside from your ill-advised greeting style, you are the poster child for Canadian politeness. So it was kind of... It's kind of hard to hold anything against you for very long. But yeah, let's jump into some of your relevant medical background. So you have a pretty solid medical background. Can you kind of break that down for us? How did you get into the field? What kind of work have you done? I know you've worked in both critical care and patient transport. Could you enlighten us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01:

So I graduated in 2004 in respiratory therapy. And since then, I've worked in the field for 21 years. I've worked in two adult hospitals in Ottawa and one pediatric hospital in Ottawa again. And I've worked also as a professor of respiratory therapy in two different colleges. But I've always come back to patient care and bedside. And I've always... loved the teamwork that I have when I work with other people and with my patients also. So mostly what I've worked in is critical care and emergency care. So at our hospital that I work presently, I work in the pediatric one. I'm part of this critical care transport team that transports neonates and pediatric patients from all over the province of Ontario back to ICUs and NICUs. And so the surface area of the province that we cover is the size of Sweden, actually. And we travel by plane, helicopter, ambulance, and we go all over the place. We resuscitate, stabilize sick babies and sick children, and then bring them back to good health in the ICU. So that's what I've been passionate for the first part of my career, for sure. I've been doing this, and even though it does entail a lot of overtime and nights and days and probably not good for my circadian rhythm, I've just loved to do that job. It's always exciting. There's always something new. You'll always meet somebody new, and you feel like you make a difference. So I was working with a nurse practitioner on this team, on the critical care transport team. And this nurse practitioner, she was headhunted from a donor who is an Alcor member. And he wanted a nurse practitioner, but also to be able to start up kind of like a cryonics team here in Canada. And when she told me about this, I was actually flabbergasted. I had no idea that this was something that you can have or that it's actually happening in our timeline. Like my, my biggest movie, like the movies that I love the most are kind of like those sci-fi movies, kind of like, you know, my personal favorite is the alien movies. So the, you know, they wake up from their cryo sleep because they get a distress signal from a colony down from a little planet. And you see them waking up from their cryostasis or, you know, whatever definition you want, but they, they wake up from this. And then I was just always fascinated and always made sense to me. Yeah. He, there's no way that you could travel through space and you could be alive by the time you get you know, a few light years away from here. So for me, it just made sense. And I was just completely fascinated when she told me that this is something that they're working on, that it's not completely there yet, but that people are being preserved in liquid nitrogen to be woken up eventually, you know, at another time. And so for me, this whole fascination, and I just told her like, Are you looking for people? Are you interviewing people? I just want to be part of this team. I want to learn everything about it. And the fun thing is that a lot of the SST that we do is very similar to critical care. We put in needles and bones, which is something we do in critical care. And then we put them on, we put an artificial airway mechanical respirator, we start compressions, we circulate the blood. The goal is to have like a return of spontaneous circulation in critical care. But, you know, in here, in SST, what we're looking for is just spontaneous, like we're just looking for circulation, you know, of our medicine. So, Everything that I was doing and that I learned as a respiratory therapist in a critical care setting, I was able to put it into doing this SST, which felt very familiar, very safe for me. But I was doing it for something that was actually like super fascinating.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I guess what aspects of chronic procedures were new experiences were harder, which didn't translate, which had a kind of a strong learning curve for you to get on board with?

SPEAKER_01:

What was new to me was mostly the perfusion and the surgical part. And so doing like a carotid cut down to be able to cannulate their carotids, that was very different for me. I'd never done that before. It's not something we do in practice. And then doing, you know, doing the surgical part, like we do in the role that I have, we do a little bit of surgical interventions when we're putting in like let's say chest tubes and stuff like that. So that's surgical in nature, but it's not actually using a scalpel to cut the skin. So this was very different doing like a cutting the skin and being able to like go through bone and fascia, not, not bone and fascia, but fascia skin muscle to be able to access the carotids. And then actually like for neural cases, separating the cephalon from the body, that was very, that was very new and different for sure. Yeah. And yeah, that was probably like the first times, you know, you, you, you see this and you have this imagery of like, okay, I, this is what's happening. And it gets, you know, you kind of remember it through the years, your first time that you've actually experienced that for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's interesting. There's been kind of in the past that I remember some debates about whether it's, harder for someone without a medical background or for someone with a medical background to kind of learn cryonics procedures because in both cases you have to learn something in the medical background portion you have kind of this other relevant experience but there's also some aspects you have to kind of unlearn so i always think people in the medical field who who are kind of then then joining cryonics usually have like good like flex like mental flexibility in which they're kind of able to kind of unlearn the habits that aren't relevant anymore. So I find that to be like a useful skill for, and I imagine many people on the DART team have that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. I think like the skills themselves, like I wouldn't call it a learning curve. It's more like a learning horizontal line. Like it's just translating one thing to a different patient population. Yeah. But yeah, when it comes to surgery, that's definitely different. And when you're in a cold, like a cold blue, and you're intubating, bagging your patient, doing compressions, your metrics are like... spontaneous circulation or you're looking at your vital signs and you're looking for a heart rate to pick up or for your oxygen saturation to be giving you a reading so you know that you're getting somewhat of a pulse and you're stopping every two minutes to check the pulse. So you don't get these things out of SST. You're doing everything from A to Z and then cooling down your patients so you could do surgery on them. And so in many ways, you're not looking at the ECG and then analyzing it and deciding, okay, do I defibrillate or do I cardiovert or, you know, do we need pacing or anything like that? I don't, I don't need to worry about those things. So in that sense, it makes it a little bit easier to do SST than it is to actually take care of a patient that's that's coding. That's a, you know, in cardiac arrest. So, uh, I think like having a healthcare background or having some healthcare, whether it's like field trauma for our dart team or, you know, some of our dart team actually have like in hospital care, they, you know, the, the Delta team, uh, in the military, they, they spend a lot of time in the hospital. And so, um, yeah, I think having some health care really makes a difference in somebody's learning. Otherwise, it's just a very steep learning curve. And so I think having health care is an essential part, but it's not everything. You have to be a good leader. You have to be able to talk to people. You have to be able to work in a team. Somebody who's very individualistic will have difficulty working with one or two partners and having a good flow in your SST because you'll just be either butting heads or when something goes wrong, the other people will have difficulty speaking up because this person will be hard-headed. And so it's really a fine balance of having good skills, good leadership, and good teamwork. If you're missing on one of those three, it still works, but it makes it more difficult for sure. I

SPEAKER_00:

want to talk a little bit about the kind of origins development story of Alcor Canada. So could you take us back to the early days, you know, early conversations for Alcor Canada? How does this whole thing kind of get proposed? How did it get started?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I had to ask a few questions, because for myself, I didn't know all the answers for like, kind of like, what's the history behind Alcor Canada. But What I've been told is that Ralph Merkle, he was seeing kind of like a boom in Canada of nanotechnology and signups for Alcor. And he thought that having an entity within Canada would be an asset to Alcor. So the early days, this donor, and they want to remain anonymous. That's why I'm referring to them as either the donors or them. But they they actually they wanted a team in Canada. And this kind of happened around COVID. So the actual like actual. for the donor to come up with a team within Canada came before COVID because he had a family member that was dying and that family member was a member of Alcor. And so at that time, Alcor was using mostly contract companies. So they were using like for instance, like SAA, or they were using ICE, two very prominent companies who have a lot of cases under their belt. And Alcor was using mostly these companies to be able to do their field prior preservations. But there was this worry from the donor that should there be a case here in Canada where they were worried that there wouldn't be timely response to a patient's passing. And so they developed this team where they hired this nurse practitioner that I was working with. And then she hired myself. She hired an anesthetist who's a physician in anesthesia. And they hired also a paramedic. And so the four of us, we were this team that was created to be able to provide cryonics here locally. And it was mostly at that time meant for the actual donor. So in the initial phases, really, it was mostly reading up on cryonics. What's the procedure? The protocols that Alcor has, but it took some time before we actually had a formal training where we were sent to Arizona and then taken on to learn the surgery and the SSG. So that was the early phase. And Alcor Canada had not been formed yet. And Dart Team had not been formed either. Like this was before the time of James and Shelby. They were... It was still Max Moore as the... I don't want to butcher this, but I think he was like the CEO emeritus and Margie. So... At that time, it was all contract work and little teams here and there, but we were mostly made for Ottawa for our donor. That was the intent of this creation here in Canada.

SPEAKER_00:

Since those kind of smaller, more local early days, Alcor Canada has checked off some pretty big milestones here. Could you walk us through kind of those highlights and, you know, the first Canadian cryopreservation cases to, you know, the formation of the board and kind of all those kinds of details?

SPEAKER_01:

So the first case that we had was actually the brother of the donor and he was having a a type of cancer that he was not able to get cured from. And so we had learned, like we were formed in, you know, 2021, in January 2021. And then we learned in October that he was in palliative care and he was going to be cryopreserved. And so the donor had his brother in a cottage outside of Ottawa, and they had rented out the cottage next to his for us to be able to stand by. So that was really the point where we got a chance to become a team. We were set up in a remote cottage somewhere. We... learned of each other's lives and we practiced and made up our equipment and talked about the protocols, but we hadn't actually been through formal training or we hadn't had surgery training yet. So at that time, the donor had decided to contract ICE and who is going to be with us to be able to do this cryopreservation of this member. And so Aaron Drake was with us to be able to do this cryopreservation. And the member passed away somewhere around, you know, two or three o'clock in the morning, like most people do. And so we were woken up from our beds. We had already pre-assembled everything. Considering we're all healthcare practitioners, we had a sense of when this patient was going to pass away. And we kind of knew, okay, it would probably be within the next 24 hours. So everything was ready, our medications, our ice baths. And so when we got the call to say he passed away, we just went from one college to the next. We placed him in the ice bath and started all the medications and the procedures for the SST. And so I had an amazing chance to be right next to Aaron Drake. And he's kind of like, as he's doing it, he's explaining what he's doing and kind of like telling us, you know, how to do the cuts, how to do the surgery, how to find their carotid artery, and then what it looks like, and then how to introduce the catheter that we are using. that we had. And then, and then just like explaining us, okay, well, you know, how do we, how do we perfuse the M22 and then, you know, putting it on the teeter totter, measuring the distance between the patient and the, and the bags and, and then just going through all of the procedures. And it was kind of like a very nice introduction to everything that we do in SSTN surgery. And so it was nice to have somebody who was mentoring us and coaching us and to be able to do this kind of like we were his assistants on that procedure. So we were there to help him and to be able to bring things and move the patient. But in the end, he was ultimately the point person who was leading the case. So After that, then this patient was successfully cryopreserved, was sent to Alcor and Aaron followed with him. And then we came back, we did the usual debriefs and all that. But then we saw an opportunity where we thought it would be useful for us to be able to get more training, more hands-on, and to be able to go on cases. And we identified those needs. And so when we did our debrief with ourselves and then with Alcor, it was voiced to say that we would like to do this and to be able to be more independent and eventually just for us to be able to go and And to be able to take care of the cases, let's say, locally, but also a little bit more internationally. So we wanted to be an independent group who'd be able to do cryonics. And we were eager to be able to learn and to be able to do things. But the fact is, in Canada... the number of cases that happen are pretty low. So we ended up doing cases internationally and that's how we were able to get more hands-on and more practice. So with that, then with time we, you know, have gone to many countries and you know, Alcor Canada itself has been a participant in cases throughout North America. And then they have gone to Thailand also to do a case there, which was a straight freeze for them. But still, it's something impressive under their belt to be able to do. And so how the rest form is James came into the picture He formed the DART team. And under the DART team, we got umbrellaed into that. And so we received the same training as the American DART team. We were there for all the trainings that they had and all the hirings. They had cadavers for us to be able to practice, and we practiced under the supervision of the Alcor surgeon. And then we practiced the SSTs procedure out of station-based practicing and then simulation-based. And then probably in November 2022, James came up with an idea to actually create an entity in Canada that That is today like the Alcor Cryobiology Research Foundation. And so it's a foundation that has been built from this idea that James had to be able to have a footprint in Canada. So the basis of it is really to fund research. That's what we're looking forward to do. But having an office in Canada means that You know, there's office space, so we could store things. And the storage, well, it could be kits, for instance. It could be M22. It could be everything that we need to be able to provide care for a patient within Canada. And so with time, we actually have now three kits to be able to take care of patients. And, you know, if a patient dies, passes away tomorrow, we have all the equipment within Canada to be able to help that person. And so by creating an entity, we legally had to make it where it was a nonprofit organization at first. And so this organization has three board members, which is Jean-Francois de Montigny and Vinnie Vanella. Vanella. I have trouble saying his name because it's Portuguese.

SPEAKER_00:

I practice that. Vinicius Villella.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Yes. Yes, it's always Vinny for us. But between the three of us, we became the board member for Alcor Canada. And so within Alcor Canada, we share the decision-making power. We meet up every month and discuss issues that are concerning Alcor Canada. And, you know, It gives us a really good premise to be able to fund research. And I'm really happy about that because I think it is the key to be able to make cryonics a much more valued thing in the modern society right now. Nick and Wanjin, I know the research that they're doing. And I know that some of the funding that we receive to Alcor Canada is going directly to them to be able to help with their research.

SPEAKER_00:

So you did mention kind of that research was a priority as well. I heard that you recently partnership with a pretty large Canadian university. I don't know how much you can or can't say about that until it's kind of fully in motion. But could you expand on the goals there and how you think that will help?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah, so I can't really say the university yet because nothing has been officially approved yet. But what we've been told by the medical director of this university, he has said with his staff, coordinator for the cadaveric services, they have told us that we can use their anatomy laboratory to be able to practice our surgical procedures that we do during our SST procedure, which is super important because that is probably the highest learning curve for anybody, whether you're healthcare or you're military or whatever your background. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. The surgical part is probably the most difficult part. And then the fact that it's a university and Alcor is a research foundation, we've actually made some plans to be able to do some research together. And so Wan Jin, one of the researchers at Alcor, he has proposed to actually put a research project together to validate the S-Mix formula. So the S-Mix, you know, is a formula that gives us kind of like an index of what the warm ischemia is for the patient. And so he really wanted to find a research project to be able to actually say, yes, you know what, the S-Mix formula does actually correspond to this amount of ischemia is equal to this amount of time. Because he said, you know, maybe if somebody's cooled down rapidly enough after death, maybe the ischemia is not that bad. Maybe we don't have like a really good understanding of how ischemia works because, you know, you have patients who fall through ice water and they're able to get resuscitated with, you know, limited sequelae after. So, I think it's a very valuable piece of knowledge that we could gain at Alcor. And it might change the way that we think, where right now we think time is brain. But there's a possibility that we actually have more time, that we can have more time and we don't have to be... There is a point where after a certain many hours, we're thinking, okay, maybe this patient won't be able to get the full SST. Maybe this patient will have to, unfortunately, be a straight freeze. After 18, 24 hours a day, these patients, as much as you would want and you can cannulate the carotid artery, right? the blood has started to clot at that point, and it's hard to be able to push anything through. But maybe I really value his idea because there might be a different barometer for the ischemia that we think is actually happening to a patient. So he came up with this idea. So What we need right now is all the papers, all the applications have been filled in. And the next step is they have put all these papers together, including their approval from the university and sent it to the coroner's office of Ontario. And so once the coroner tells us, yes, we could have it as a continuing education session to be able to practice this surgical procedure, then it will open the door for us to say yes but we also would like to do some research and they were very open for us to be able to do some research for them but one of the hurdles of doing research with a university like this is people donate their bodies but there is this law where after the person has passed away for an educational facility facility facility like a university, the patient has to be not touched for two weeks because it gives a chance for the family to change their mind. If ever the family wants him or her to be buried or incinerated, then in that case, they have two weeks to decide their mind before the body is actually donated to the university for their students and for continuing education purposes. So I think that His mind is like, okay, well, what's two weeks worth of ischemia? Can we monitor the temperature of this patient and make a valid research article? And then it might bring other ideas after. Maybe the answer will be no. There's actually complete ischemia. It's not worth anything. But maybe it'll bring us a different idea of what ischemia is for a patient who, you know, could be sent to the morgue and then is cooled down in their fridge or freezer. You

SPEAKER_00:

did mention the funeral homes before. Probably it's obvious to some, but for those who don't know, what role do the funeral homes play in this process?

SPEAKER_01:

For patients who are whole bodies, we do need a transit permit to be able to move the patient from one province or one country or one state to another. When it's just a neural, they're considered as tissues. So a lot of states don't actually need a transit permit. Often when I'm on a case, I actually ask for it anyways, just to have it in case I get asked any questions. But they... They play an integral part because in a situation where it's field cryopreservation, so we're not at the Alcor building in their surgical suite doing surgery. We're actually in some little town or a big town, but far away from Scottsdale. Those are considered field cryopreservation, even though we're not physically in a field where we could be in a big city like New York or Toronto or wherever, but we're still considered a field cryopreservation. And so we rely on funeral homes to be able to do our surgical procedure because we need a space where we could actually cut through skin. And there is, you know, unfortunately there's blood and there's, you know, bodily fluids sometimes involved too. And we need a place where we could evacuate these things, where we can you know, be able to do our work. And, and at Alcor, like they're very fortunate to have their mobile van to be able to do this. And we would like to have mobile vans throughout the, you know, North America and throughout the world. But the reality is you can't have a mobile van in every city and moving those vans from one place to the next, it gets really hard, you know, because in the mobile van at Alcor, they actually have like a surgical van where it's like a surgical mobile unit and so there's cases happening where you know funeral homes are very hard to either there's no funeral homes nearby or they don't actually approve of us performing our cryopreservation there so we're we're stuck with trying to find a place that will actually accept us or using the surgical mobile van to do it so Doing the surgery in the place where the person resides is not an optimal thing. There's usually family. You don't necessarily have a sink, running water, a drain for all these things. It makes a mess. You just need a space to be able to carry on with the surgery and And the funeral home business is kind of like what is the closest link to what Alcor is doing. Sometimes when I talk to public people or to people in general, when the first introduction I tell them, I just say it's an alternate method of disposing the remains of the person. Yeah. When you normalize it that way, then they're like, oh, yeah, you have all these different methods that are not burial and not incinerating. But cryopreservation is one of them. It's a choice where people decide that actually, yeah, this is the method that I want my body to be treated after. So funeral homes is really the closest link to what we have, even though what we're doing for the purpose of what we're wanting to do is actually coming back to life. That is the end goal. If we could actually produce that with the organs that we store, that would be excellent, which is not burial and non-insidering for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Now, I remember you saying, telling me when we were in Sweden about a kind of wake up to cryonics moment that you had when you were interacting with a funeral home during an embalming. Can you talk about that? That was pretty impactful to me, and I still remember that story and think it's an interesting avenue for how someone who wasn't a cryonicist personally realized it's something that they're interested in for themselves.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, of course. I came into this thinking I was the provider of the service. I never thought really that I would be the one who would want to receive it one day. And that realization came when I was on my first case. And we were at a funeral home. And we were fortunate to be in an isolated room, but it had this large window that you could see everything. You could see the whole area that was next to it. And that's where they were treating deceased patients and they were embalming them. And I'm going to spare the listeners all the gruesome things that I saw. But it was very broad. It was very mechanical. And it was in the goal of just, you know, taking the internal organs and making the body pretty. And when I came to that realization where, oh, my God, like. I don't want my body to be treated that way. I want it to be preserved for the quirky personality that I have, for the knowledge and all the things that I have accumulated in my persona. And I thought that it was much more of a respectful way to be treating a body for the goal that we're doing. We're trying to preserve the body and to preserve the brain mostly and everything that is inside the brain, all the memories, the thoughts, the personality of a person. That's what we're trying to preserve. And to me, it doesn't matter the way it looks. I don't really care how I look in the future as long as my thoughts, my memories are preserved. And I feel like we're the closest thing in cryonics to be able to provide this. It's not by taking out all my internal organs and removing them and making my body pretty that you'll be able to accumulate this. And I thought, you know, if we want to be respectful to the person who's next to us, that is the way to go. It's to be able to preserve them in the most you know, the quickest fashion to be able to get that M22 in as soon as they're cold. And that is the best thing I could do for that patient. That patient really wanted, you know, those people that I have preserved, it was their dying wish. They, you know, signed a 60-some page contract for me to be able to do this to them. And this is the last thing that they wanted done. to be done while they were on this planet in the form that they are until they wake up eventually. But when that happens, I'm hoping that they'll be thankful for what they've lived and that they made this choice. That I made this choice for myself and Daniel, you made this choice for yourself. Hopefully that time will come And, uh, you know, there is no guarantees, but, uh, I think that that will be, uh, the time when they will be thankful for, for what I've done to them, you know, what I've been able to give them as a gift.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's, it's such a, that's so interesting to me because so many chronicists come to chronics through very kind of cerebral logical, like understanding of it. you know, I like living, I don't want to die, right? It's very straightforward. It's very interesting to hear kind of that story because as someone who wasn't yet a chronicist, it's almost like you came to it more emotionally, like seeing that contrast between this, I guess, what would be considered essentially superficial treatment of a body and, you know, uh, you know, just for show and the contrast of your experience and your experience, you know, on the dart team, um, actually treating someone who's died as a patient and, and not writing them off, um, and, and, you know, respecting what they, you know, still could be in the future. So I don't know. I, I find that kind of, uh, uh, inspiring i i i don't see that as often um kind of that that method of of of the light going off in people's brains about cryonics um probably because it's you know there's so few people who have you know the the relevant experiences that you know yourself and people in the dart team have in any case i i wanted to make sure we you shared that here because i i I think it really is something that would stick in people's minds. And I guess kind of on that front, if you have to kind of go back to that first cryopreservation case, what do you feel stuck with you in the long term? What surprised you when you're thinking about it? What pops into your brain today? I

SPEAKER_01:

don't know. That's a good question. Like long-term, I wanted more of a plan of how we can accomplish this and not have somebody helping us, but we're the people taking care of the case. I think that was mostly what I had voiced in the debrief after that. Like we... I felt like I was, even though all the things that I had done, I was quite comfortable with and I was adequately prepared from the experience that I had, I felt like really there was an opportunity to be able to make this better and to be able to get more practical experience under my belt to be able to provide this independently. I felt like I want to be the one who is able to provide this and not to rely on somebody to be able to show me. I could be the one teaching it. I feel comfortable today that if I'm out with somebody and maybe they have less experience than I do, I feel like I've seen enough people that I could be the one teaching it and showing. And that's where I wanted to be today when I had done my first case. I wanted to be in a spot where I could be comfortable doing it myself and doing it in an efficient manner. That's good.

SPEAKER_00:

I guess, right, to some extent, you are, you know, a teacher at heart, right? Because you were saying you had been a professor of, what was it, respiratory therapy? And so this is, that's interesting that that was kind of your takeaway, which makes a lot of sense that you want to improve and be able to kind of pay it forward in that way. That seems like a personality trait that's excellent for something like this.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. And absolutely. You think like, if we would be able to form many teams throughout the country, throughout North America, throughout the world, it would be such a valued thing to be able to teach this to people and then to be able to do it themselves. You know, it's kind of like you could teach people, you know, you could teach one person and they, they could be good at it, but if you're teaching the masses, then they all become good at it. And it, I would be, I think it would, feel very valued for me to be able to do that. And hopefully with this international development coordinator position that I have, eventually it will happen. That is the hope at least, to be able to provide teams throughout Europe, Asia, and maybe South America, maybe too. There's little cryonics organizations here and there that, uh, are advocacy advocacy groups. Uh, they are, you know, societies and they, they might represent all of the companies that do cryonics, but, you know, to be able to teach Alcor's way to groups of people so they can provide the service. I think it would just be a, a way to better humanity, you know?

SPEAKER_00:

Now I want to touch on cryonics. one very important aspect that I, kind of when I was preparing for this, that I was like, oh, this is like a super important takeaway that might kind of get lost in the fray here, which was how this donor in Ottawa had played such a integral role in getting Alcor Canada onto its feet and kind of pushing it forward. This idea of wealthy donors who want to make direct donations to essentially have new Dart teams being trained and located right on their doorstep is something I think all Alcor members should be aware of, that this is a possibility. This is something you can reach out to. and talk to Alcor about to have done. And I don't think even many of the wealthy donors realize that this is something that Alcor is working to make more common. And for the Alcor members who are not wealthy and who are thinking, well, how does that benefit me? It actually benefits everybody in the long term. And so They might start off very local, but just like Alcohol Canada, they expand out, they have more training, they train new people in closer areas, and this actually makes a difference for everybody long-term.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that it was formed here in Ottawa, I think it's very reproducible. People in healthcare... Retired military, they are looking for little projects, let's say. Something that could add a little bit of money to their well-being, to their family. And going the route of volunteers, I find a little bit difficult. Because volunteers, everybody has to make a... an earning in their life. They have to be able to make ends meet. And when you volunteer for something, it is very, how do you say that? It's very heartwarming or very valued. But in the end, everybody needs to be able to pay their mortgage. They need to pay their car payment and whatnot. So healthcare people often either work shift work Uh, they, they work 12 hour shifts and then they might have a few days off here and there. Uh, so they're the perfect people to be able to source this, uh, because they have the knowledge, they have the experience. Uh, you could get like an ER nurse who works, you know, she works three or four 12 hour shifts and then she has four or five days off after. Well, you know, often, uh, Most of the people that I talk to in the hospital, they all have little projects or hobbies where they try to make a little bit of money here and there. And so if you have somebody who has the right experience, you could hire them on. And in healthcare, the people that I've talked about cryonics openly about, it's either they're completely fascinated and they... They deep dive and ask me questions for hours and hours, or they're completely disgusted. And they're repulsed by the fact that we're having neuropatients and all that. So for the ones who are fascinated and asking questions, the follow-up question I get is always... When could you hire me? Can you give me a job in this? How do I apply? How do I become this dark person that you're part of? How do I get my foot in the door to be able to do this? And I get that constantly. So the actual interest is out there. And if you're looking to build a team, I think it would be very easy to make it. And so the benefit of having that is, well, how do you get your team to be proficient and to be efficient and to be like a really solid cryonics team is to give them experience. It's not by reading a binder. It's not by looking at PowerPoint presentations. It's actually to be in the field or to be at Scottsdale getting training and seeing patients and doing the deeds, that is how they become a really good cryonics teamwork person. And so by having to do that, well, you're going to be sending your team to different places in the world to be able to do cryopreservation of patients. And, you know, at first, it might be just watching, watching one, asking questions afterwards. But after you're kind of assisting, and then you're, you know, eventually you have your hands right in there, and you're doing the deeds, you're doing the surgery. And that makes you proficient to be able to do it after and so then you have a team that's close to you who's able to provide the service and it's as if they live in Scottsdale you know like it's it's you can't get any better than that and if you want to you know I see myself maybe in the future maybe you know I might I pass away in Scottsdale, maybe, you know, I, I think of these things sometimes and it keeps me up at night and like, you know, do I want to pass away here or do I want to pass away in Scottsdale? And Scottsdale is a pretty nice and beautiful place. But I think most people, if you ask them, they would probably say, yeah, I would probably want to pass away at home with my families and friends and surrounded by people who love me. And how can you have that and have cryonics at the same time? Well, you need to have a team nearby. And I think that having the financial means to be able to build a team, I mean, why not? You're going to have the best of both worlds.

SPEAKER_00:

So just on that front, if you're listening to this now or in the future, just if this is something... that seems interesting to you, and if you have the means, it should be interesting to you, then reach out, reach out to Jeremy, reach out to James, let them discuss with you about, about making this actually happen. Okay. So let's, let's close it out here a little bit. Final thoughts. What's next for Alcor Canada? Any big goals on the horizon?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, There's two goals that I've been tasked with. So one is membership basis. So we're trying to expand our membership base. And to be able to do that is really to be able to find people, which the longevity community is probably the low-hanging fruit of it, and be able to find these people and tell them, listen, we believe in longevity too. But if longevity doesn't work, there's a plan B and it's cryonics. So we're trying to find these people, these little communities of longevitists who are interested in signing up. And so that is one thing that I'm trying to do and to go also to conferences and conventions where there's funeral homes. So for instance, like there's a big one in Halifax coming up soon. And we're hoping to just provide information about Alcor because members, they could ask for a preferred funeral home if they have one. And it would be very helpful to have that established for us because then if the member themselves communicate with the funeral home that they desire to be serviced at but it's much easier when it's coming from the member who has maybe like they maybe have signed a contract with the funeral home or something like that to be able to work with the funeral home after because us coming in and then explaining everything about cryonics and what we do and how we're going to proceed and all that it makes it like it makes it a little bit harder and some people actually get kind of like off-standish about it. So if we're able to provide information for funeral homes for members to go and to be able to communicate. So I'm doing this part where I'm trying to advocate for our cryonics members, increase our member base. And then I'm also communicating with the different associations throughout Canada and throughout the world And so I've been communicating a lot with a BC association. There's a Quebec association that I've started to communicate with. And just seeing where our members are. and trying to see what kind of resources they could share with us and what can we share with them and creating partnerships throughout Canada, but throughout the world also, outside of the US. The US is pretty contained with everything that is Alcor US, but outside of the US, there's a lot of cryonics communities and advocacy groups, and I'm trying to put them all together and in this big spider web of different associations and put them all like, okay, these are all the ones that have something to do with Alcor.

SPEAKER_00:

Awesome. For anybody who wants to reach out to you to contact you, could you give them your contact information?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Um, so I, um, my, my email is jeremy.wiggins at alcor.org. Uh, feel free to send me an email about that. Um, I'm also, um, I'm also on Facebook. So I, you know, I participate in different, uh, cryonics groups that are on Facebook. Um, and, uh, that's the extent of my social media experience and, uh, faculties right now but uh uh really like and once we establish a first communication then i i'm fine with having like uh teams meetings and then you know if there's something more pressing like i reach out to members by phone and i i talk them directly or i've actually met members or potential members too who who have wanted to become alcor members and so uh i you know i i I go to their place of living or we go to a common place where they decide. And we talk about cryonics and what it is to sign up. And I'm really open to expanding what we do here in Alcor. And this turnkey model that we have, which is, I think it's essential for our members for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Jeremy, this was a great conversation and I look forward to many more.