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Ted Williams was born in 1918. He played\h
baseball for 19 years, won two triple crowns,\h\h

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retired, hosted a TV show about fishing, and\h
then died… maybe. Because despite his wishes\h\h

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to be fully cremated, his family decided to\h
save a piece for later: his head. Right now,\h\h

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Ted Williams’ head is frozen in a lab in Arizona,\h
with a contract to bring him back to life if\h\h

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the technology to do so is ever invented, at\h
which point he could, I don’t know, be really,\h\h

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really bad at baseball. This process of preserving\h
and reviving human bodies is called cryonics,\h\h

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and right now, there are four major companies in\h
the world that do it; you could, today, pay to\h\h

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have your body preserved and be revived several\h
centuries later. The only problem is, none of\h\h

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these companies actually know how to bring people\h
back to life yet—so how do they actually work?\h

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Well, here are the four companies: there’s\h
KrioRus in Russia, who have 92 bodies in storage,\h\h

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Yinfeng with about a dozen in China, the Cryonics\h
Institute with 240, and then there’s the US-based\h\h

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Alcor—with 208 in storage but another 1,600\h
customers on their roster, they’re basically the\h\h

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Michael Jordan of scamming people into dipping\h
their heads in liquid nitrogen. Among their\h\h

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patients is this guy: James Bedford, the very\h
first person to be cryopreserved. He died in 1967,\h\h

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and he’s been chilling in a liquid nitrogen-cooled\h
thermos for the last 56 years. With no established\h\h

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cryonics companies to take on the job after he\h
was frozen, his thermos was passed around for a\h\h

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few decades, before finally ending up at Alcor in\h
the 90s, where they apparently got a real kick out\h\h

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of dragging him out of his thermos and staring\h
at him. Now, unfortunately for James, it turns\h\h

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out that successfully cryopreserving a human being\h
requires a slightly more involved procedure than\h\h

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treating a corpse like one giant dippin’ dot,\h
so James is probably never going to get to come\h\h

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back and experience the wonders of climate change.
But for those of whom were frozen more recently,\h\h

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it might be a different story—modern cryonics\h
companies have sorted out the surprisingly\h\h

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complex logistics of freezing a human body without\h
damaging it, and getting the process underway\h\h

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within seconds of their death. For the sake of\h
this video we’re going to look at Alcor’s process,\h\h

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given that they’re by far the largest and most\h
well-established of the four cryonics companies,\h\h

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and also because they’re not afraid to write\h
blog posts about how they take their corpses\h\h

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out of storage and stare at them. Now, companies\h
like Alcor have a bit of a legal hurdle right\h\h

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from the outset, because freezing a living person\h
is considered, in most countries, to be murder,\h\h

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and murder is considered, in most countries,\h
to be frowned upon. They’re not allowed to\h\h

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begin their procedures until the patient has been\h
legally pronounced dead, but after that happens,\h\h

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there’s a pretty limited window before the\h
brain and vital organs just become useless\h\h

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piles of mush. In order to respond within seconds\h
of someone’s death, Alcor has cryonics vehicles\h\h

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stationed permanently in Florida and Southern\h
California, and temporarily anywhere else with a\h\h

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high concentration of not-yet-dead customers. Once\h
one of their customers is in critical condition,\h\h

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a 4-person stabilization team will be dispatched\h
to their location, and then presumably wait around\h\h

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awkwardly while they hurry up and die. Once that’s\h
been taken care of, the body is submerged in an\h\h

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ice bath and pumped with the following chemicals,\h
before being transported—either by one of Alcor’s\h\h

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ground vehicles or just, like, a normal cargo\h
airline—to Alcor’s operating room in Scottsdale,\h\h

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Arizona. Before the body arrives in Scottsdale\h
to be frozen, it needs to be kept cold, but not\h\h

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too cold; if the body drops below 32 fahrenheit,\h
ice crystals will form in the blood and organs,\h\h

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and you know what they say about ice crystals\h
forming in the blood and organs: it’s not good\h\h

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when ice crystals form in the blood and organs.\h
Once in the lab, the patient’s blood is replaced\h\h

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with a substance called M22, which is basically\h
antifreeze, and this allows for a process called\h\h

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“vitrification”—basically, the whole body\h
can be frozen without any actual ice forming,\h\h

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which is bad for previously mentioned reasons,\h
and then the body gets cooled down to a brisk\h\h

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-196 celsius and shoved into one of these until,\h
well… that’s where we run into a bit of a problem.\h

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Because, you see, now we’ve arrived at the part\h
of this process where this whole business model\h\h

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starts to feel a little sketchy—what do these\h
companies do after they freeze you? Presumably\h\h

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the exciting part about all of this isn’t\h
that you die and your corpse is frozen for all\h\h

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eternity—you can do that just by moving to\h
Minnesota—the exciting part is that they’ll\h\h

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bring you back to life one day. But as far as\h
we know, they can’t. Because not only would\h\h

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they need the technology to thaw you out without\h
damaging any of your vital organs, they would\h\h

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also need the technology to reverse whatever it\h
was that killed you, because you know… you still\h\h

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died. But if that technology doesn’t exist, and\h
none of these companies know when it will exist,\h\h

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then how do they operate a business that intends\h
to keep a human freezer running without fail for,\h\h

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potentially, centuries? Well, let’s take a look at\h
their contracts. Yes, my writer Ben got his hands\h\h

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on a human cryopreservation contract, and no, he\h
won’t tell me where he got it. But basically, it\h\h

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works like this: high end companies like Alcor and\h
Yinfeng charge about $200,000 upfront if you want\h\h

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your full body frozen, or $80,000 for just your\h
head. The Cryonics Institute will go as low as\h\h

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$28,000, and Kriorus will freeze your brain\h
for just $15,000. At least in Alcor’s case,\h\h

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they’ll take $115,000 of that money and\h
invest it in this Patient Care Trust,\h\h

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which is managed by Morgan Stanley, and assuming\h
that the stock market doesn’t self-immolate,\h\h

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should grow at a rate that would be able to keep\h
the liquid nitrogen flowing indefinitely. To make\h\h

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sure that their investment board doesn’t\h
screw around with the money, the majority\h\h

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of board members are contractually obligated\h
to put their family in the tubes, because to\h\h

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keep a highly-effective cult in line, you need to\h
start at the top. I mean, I can’t legally say that\h\h

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Alcor is a cult, but let’s just call them a “small\h
group of people characterized by a great devotion\h\h

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to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.”
So what happens if none of this actually works?\h\h

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Well, Alcor’s website sure has you believe that\h
their contract obligates them to revive their\h\h

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patients, because that’s, like, whole point of\h
this procedure, but if you actually read the\h\h

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contract, that sentence that they put on their\h
website is preceded by a much longer paragraph\h\h

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about how they have no idea if they can do that,\h
if it’s even legal, and that if they don’t end\h\h

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up reviving you you don’t actually have any\h
legal recourse. So to answer the question of\h\h

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how these businesses work, the answer is that\h
you give them hundreds of thousands of dollars,\h\h

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they put you in a freezer, and if you don’t\h
magically come back to life, you can go to hell.\h

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So is freezing your brain a worthwhile\h
proposition? Who’s to say. But fortunately\h\h

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for you, I have a much better investment\h
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