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One More Tab
What do a saturation diver, a political scandal, and a man who's never slept more than two hours have in common? Nothing, except that Avi, Saijal, and Anchita went down all three rabbit holes anyway. One More Tab is a weekly dive into whatever's open in their browser, unhinged tangents included.
One More Tab
Ep 1. Jobs You've Never Heard Of
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week's rabbit hole: jobs you didn't know existed. Volcano sulphur miners. Saturation divers who live underwater for weeks. Cryonics techs who prep bodies for the deep freeze. This episode, Avi, Saijal, and Anchita get into all three and ask the only real question, who signs up for this and why?
Check out our other episodes here: onemoretabpod.com
Podcast research references: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wWvEuGU_CNb82LP4hKz5fof7VE30cxmyRDztoIdekpY/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks for tuning into One More Tab! If you liked this one, leave us a rating, drop a comment, and tell us which rabbit hole to fall down next!
Intro
SPEAKER_06What do a saturation diver, the indigenous Paraha language, and someone who's never slept more than two hours straight have in common? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except that we went down all three rabbit holes just for you. I'm Uvi. I'm Sagel. I'm Unta. And this is one more tab.
SPEAKER_07Got a never-ending list of I've been meaning to look into that. Over 40 browser tabs. That's us every week. Chasing the whys, the wait, what? And the unhinged tangents that come with them.
SPEAKER_04Warning. One more tab is not for everyone. Do not listen while trying to focus, sleep, or maintain a normal conversation. Side effects include excessive tabboarding, oversharing facts nobody asks for, and a sudden urge to Google things mid-sentums.
SPEAKER_07Hi everyone, welcome to our podcast. One more tab.
unknownWoo!
SPEAKER_07This is our very first episode. So hi to our mom and dads. Probably the only people that are listening to us right now, if that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so we're inviting you into our cozy living room, which is where we have all of our late-night existential conversations. Um, so this is our space to talk about everything from everyday phenomenon to the supernatural, history, culture, and everything in between. Basically, this podcast is like the physical embodiment of the phrase I was today years old when. So, yeah, so the idea is that each week we will have some sort of theme, and then each of us will research a topic within that theme, and then we have the big reveal on the podcast on recording day, and yeah, hopefully the conversation is just gonna flow from there, just like it does when we the three of us usually hang out.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and for some context about us, so we're just three best friends who love to yap non-stop, but we're actually also happened to be related. So Anchala and Sage Lur are sisters, and I'm their cousin. Um, and one of our key ticks is that when we chat, all we like to do is also drink beverages. And Anchala, why don't you introduce your beverage? Because she's fighting her inner demons to try this drink right now.
SPEAKER_07So yeah, okay. Thank you for giving me the space to talk about this. So, as Avi said, we're we all have our own little fun beverages for this episode, and I've been dying to try mine. So I don't know, I think like all three of us saw this online, right? Like this whole like fridge sink phenomenon that was going on, and basically, like it is an ice cold dyed coke. To that, I added a shot of espresso, and because I am lactose intolerant, a little bit of hazelnut oat creamer. And now I'm finally getting to do a taste test because I was feeling told that I need to do this, like with everybody here, everybody as in the three of us.
SPEAKER_05Three of us, yeah. Let's get some ASMR.
SPEAKER_07Alright, this is me just sprawling my straw.
SPEAKER_06Okay, maybe let's not get some ASMR.
SPEAKER_07I don't know, maybe that could work for some people.
SPEAKER_05Okay, sustainability, glass straw. We love that.
SPEAKER_07Wait, wait, this is so good. Wait, really? It smells weird. Okay, describe how it tastes. It literally tastes, it tastes exactly like what it is. Like it tastes like a like a Diet Coke with like a whisper of coffee and it's just like like creamy. Okay, period.
SPEAKER_08Okay, okay, I have to I have to pass this around. Yeah, let's pass it around. Okay.
SPEAKER_07Not it's sitting in a dish. Yeah, this is like quite the concoction because like I put the Diet Coke in it, and then as soon as I pour it, isn't it so good? Oh my god. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Hmm.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and then there's no way to describe this.
SPEAKER_05It's literally a Diet Coke, yeah, like a creamy Diet Coke.
SPEAKER_07But I can I can foresee this being my fixation.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's kind of like those um Oh wow, I like it, right? It's called the soda, the ice cream, ice cream floats, yeah. Those like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have just your classic decaf latte, um, caffeine, and I do not mix well. I love I I love coffee, but you know, coffee doesn't love me. So um just a decaf for the longest time now, and yeah, it's a really standard decaf latte from our local coffee shop that I will refrain from naming because you know we need to win that sponsorship before we honestly give them so much business.
SPEAKER_06We will just say, Yeah, wait, do you do you guys have an account now?
SPEAKER_07Oh yeah, they recognize us, yeah. Like when I go in, like I didn't I didn't go for like a couple of weeks, and when I came in, they're like, hi, like how are you? It's been so long, and I'm like, Yeah, period. I really I really felt the connection.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, honestly, I get free coffee all the time. Like, not from the loyalty program. Yeah, let me clarify, not because you know they love me that much, but yeah, because I I go there enough that I win points. Um, but yeah.
SPEAKER_06Well, I'm really basic, I just have a Diet Coke, but I just realized that we're like the individual components, and you're like the mixture of the two. Anyways.
SPEAKER_05Wait, we didn't even talk about ourselves.
SPEAKER_06Oh, yes, we don't know who we are.
SPEAKER_05Okay, let's yeah, let's let's do that first. Let's like formalize this a bit. Okay, Avi.
SPEAKER_06Okay, I'll start. So my name's Avi, and um wait, what else should I share? So I work in uh medtech, basically. That's my profession, like my day job. But outside of my job, I try to also do other stuff. So recently I've been getting into skateboarding. Try try, yeah. Um, I've been getting into skateboarding, although I don't know how much I should claim that because basically I can stand on the board right now. So that's we're still working on that.
SPEAKER_05Everyone has to start somewhere.
SPEAKER_06Um, but yeah, I think like the reason that I wanted to do this whole podcast originally was because like when I was in school, you get hyper-fixated on a certain subject and you learn a lot about that subject, but I honestly didn't go out of my way to learn about everything else that was happening in the world, and then when I finished school, I realized like, oh my god, I don't know about anything. That's like the foundation of where like this interest for this podcast came up. Um, but yeah, this is a cool way to discover new things about the world, figure out what's going on, learn about niche things, and hopefully share it with you guys.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
unknownI love that.
SPEAKER_05I love it. Um, okay, I can go next. So my name is Sajel. Um Anchai and I are sisters.
SPEAKER_07Sorry, that was my saucer hitting my cab. Continue.
SPEAKER_05Um and yeah, so my background um is I was a software developer. Um, and then I always wanted to do something a little bit more creative, so I decided to switch careers. Um but yeah, I now work as a UX designer, and yeah, outside of uh my day job, I would like to consider myself a creative person. I really enjoy writing, that's something I've been getting back into recently. Um sketching, drawing, dance, anything that uh is creative, basically. Um and yeah, and in terms of this podcast, whenever the three of us are together, we never run out of things to talk about. And I'm definitely someone that tends to uh have hyper fixations. Like I'll be super obsessed with a topic and then just go down this rabbit hole of consuming all the content I possibly can about that topic. Um, and so yeah, I think like this podcast is a great opportunity to delve deeper into those those uh topics, and also I find that whenever I have an obsession like that, inevitably it's you guys that I come to, and I'm like, oh my god, guys, this is what I read up on, this random thing. Um and so I think this is like the perfect group, and yeah, I'm excited.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like Avi and I refer to Sejl as our encyclopedia. Oh yeah, she's yeah, we should we should mention that.
SPEAKER_06Like, yeah. So we're talking about like learning new things, but she's actually my main source, like not Google. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05But okay, unreliable source though. You guys should really should not roll it off.
SPEAKER_07No, yeah, we should be fact-checking, but she is pretty, yeah, pretty well versed. Yeah, no, like I like Sejl and I live together, so then anytime like a question pops into my head, I you know, I don't even read for Google. I'm just like, yeah, so Sajel, like what uh what is this? And she almost always has an answer, yeah. Um, so yeah, very fitting.
SPEAKER_05That's very kind.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, as for myself, my name is Anchata. Um, I work in finance currently. Similar to Uvi, I think like when I was in school, it was like a really structured program that I went to. Um, so I didn't explore so much outside of what I was learning for my exams or to like write my accounting exam. Um, so I'm really excited to go deeper. I'm also I have like this really bad habit where I have a lot of like questions. Like I'll be like walking down the street and I'll be like, oh, like like this happened to me a little while ago where I was looking at this car showroom and I was like, how on earth did they even get these cars so high into these showrooms? But I don't know why I have a tendency where like I ask the question to myself, but then I don't search it up. Maybe because I'm just so used to Saddle being there and giving me the answers to things, I don't know. But I think like having this like formal platform for me to actually research things and then talk about it is gonna be a really good incentive because I just have an endless list of questions in my head and I never explore them. Um so yeah, really looking forward to that. But aside from work, I guess I also love being creative. I like reading, drawing, painting. Aside from that, I'm also like super interested in sustainability and environmentalism, so I want to learn more about that and been trying to do that on the side. So again, like I said, hopefully this is a good forum for me to explore all those different interests and actually search things up that pop into my mind instead of just having multiple tabs open. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. See what I did there? See what I did there, guys.
SPEAKER_06No, I agree. I'm in a similar boat. Like, I for the past couple years I've been collecting this notes app list. My notes app is like my religious haven, anyways. So I have this list, it's called Get Educated, and it's just a ton of like questions that come up in my mind. And this list has I don't even know how many bullet points are on now, and I always tell myself, like, I'm gonna like I need to look up these things or learn about it, but I never get to it.
SPEAKER_07So I think this is like uh and another thing is also because of social media, I feel like I'm getting exposed to so many different topics and perspectives, or just like lifestyles people have, and because of that, I keep getting like bite-sized pieces of information about all these different things, yeah, and then like I keep saving these posts thinking that like, oh yeah, one day I'm gonna again look back at it and like research this or look into that or whatever, and I never get around to it. So yeah, for the millionth time, I just I think this is like a really good form for us to do it.
SPEAKER_05We just have like a shallow knowledge of random topics, yeah, and I think also the way we consume social media, like a lot of that doesn't stick, at least for me. Yeah, so yeah.
SPEAKER_07Okay, with that, should we really should we um talk about what our thing for today is?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Okay, so the topic that we're covering today is jobs that you've never heard of. Yeah, jobs that you've never heard of. So who wants to kick it off?
SPEAKER_06I mean, I can
Volcanic Sulphur Miners
SPEAKER_06start. Okay, go for it. Okay, so I actually I have this quote that's like relevant um that I found. So it was said by Booker T. Washington, who is this like renowned American author and political activist. Um, and he said, I am not prepared just now to say to what extent I believe in a physical hell in the next world, but a sulfur mine is about the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life. What? And so this he said after witnessing these um child miners in Sicily in 1910. And so this quotation is from 100 years ago, but the truth is that this scenario or this environment that he talks about in sulfur mines is a reality of people even today. And it's specifically in this mountain range in Indonesia, it's called the Inedge Mountain. Um, and so just to give some context, like what is sulfur? So, sulfur is a bright yellow element, it's one of the few elemental solids found in pure form in nature. Um, and it stinks, and it has that like distinct, like egg-like smell. And it turns out that actually it's um in its pure form, it's actually odorless, but it's um compound form, hydrogen sulfide is where you get that rotten egg smell. Um, and like in historical context, it had like a lot of um contradictory like analogies or like representations. So it was known as brimstone. Like, have you heard of like brimstone and like poetry and things like that?
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_06Okay, okay. Well, that's what it was called in the past. Um, and so like in the past it's been attributed to like purification, transformation. Um, but in today's day and world, it's used for you mean like consuming it, like it's as like a symbol of those kinds of things. Like maybe it was used in like ceremonies and things like that. Right, okay, but um, but in today's day and time it's used mostly for industrial processes and products. So, for example, sulfur is used for matches and fireworks, gunpowder, rubber, cosmetic products. Um, the reason our sugar is white is because of sulfur. Oh, um yeah, batteries, detergent and paper, winemaking, fertilizer. Wow. So purified sulfur is used in fertilizer.
SPEAKER_08Okay.
SPEAKER_06Basically, uh refined sulfur becomes sulfuric acid, which is the most um commonly utilized industrial chemical around the world. Um, so obviously, like that being said, it's an important chemical, it's an important resource. Um, and so right now, what's done is like through oil and gas refining processes, that's where most industries get their sulfur from. But there's this one mountain range um called the Agen Mountain or Egen volcano, sorry, um, where these miners specifically go and extract the sulfur. And this process is like, it's harrowing what they do. So these miners, it's in like a remote part of Indonesia. So these miners they'll wake up at 1 or 2 a.m. to begin this process. So they'll go to the volcanic site, which is around, I think, two miles walking distance from the actual site that drops down a thousand feet into volcan into the volcanic range where they go.
SPEAKER_05Two miles is three point two kilometers. Okay.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so they walk that distance with just like a crowbar and their baskets, like a cart, like a trolley. And then they go down to the volcan like the volcanic range and they'll take the crowbar, which is like the main tool that they use to extract the sulfur, and uh just these baskets. And so they'll go down and like this environment is so dangerous. Firstly, the temperature can go up to like I think 40 degrees Celsius.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god.
SPEAKER_06And then at night, sometimes like it's it's extreme temperature changes, so it can be like cold like two degrees or less, or things like that.
SPEAKER_07Um so they experience like both extremes of temperature, and like I think that's what I read.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, that it is extreme temperature ranges, and like the crater where they go down to is 300 meters deep or something. Um, and so they go down to this region, and basically the there's this mining company that set up like these pipes through the volcano that release sulfuric gas, and when it cools down, it produces this liquid material, and then once that cools down further, um, it becomes solid sulfur, which they extract. And now this is dangerous because there's two ways that they extract sulfur. There's like through the pipes, but then there's also like the lake water, which turns out to be so toxic and dangerous. Like, you know, um battery acid has a pH of like 0.8. This lake water has a pH of 0.2, so it's more acidic than battery acid. And they say that like if the miners ingest or get too close to it, like it can burn them firstly. If it gets in their mouth, they can lose their teeth. Like it's that acidic. And uh in this uh NATGEO like documentary video that I was watching, they said that like once the miners start to see like thin veils of white smoke, they're told to like evacuate immediately because like it can be immediately deadly, like it's lethal gas.
SPEAKER_07So sorry, maybe I'm dropping the gun here, but like so they go into the crater, and in the crater is the lake.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, okay, it's like a huge mountain range, and then in the middle is the water. Yeah, and so basically, I the whole time I was watching this, I was like, why hasn't this process been automated? Like, why are they still like why is this still happening? And unfortunately, this whole scenario is a classic case of cheap labor exploitation because that region is so remote that like the main occupations either farming or things like that, where they don't get paid as quickly or their pay is inconsistent. And so even the miners who like they're saying that their livelihood is interrupted, of course. Most of them who do this consistently as a primary occupation don't live beyond 50.
SPEAKER_01Wow. What?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, like it affects their lungs, it affects their entire physiology and like health. And um, so yeah, so like the miners themselves don't want this to be automated or like mechanized because then they'll lose their jobs, and they're like, this is the highest paying occupation in that area. And let me tell you, highest paying means between they earn between 12 and 17 dollars a day.
SPEAKER_01A day?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I think wait, let me just double check it. An hour or something. Wait, let me just double check that a day per day, yeah. USD.
SPEAKER_05Holy shit. Oh my god. I mean, I guess like well, I wonder what that like how the buying is.
SPEAKER_07But I mean, I don't think any it still amount is like worth for the risk to their life. Like their life expectancy being 50 years old.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and like uh basically what it is is there's this mining company that has a license to operate and like run this mine, but all of these miners are essentially private contractors that sign on to do this work. So they don't have a lot of them can't afford like the safety equipment that's required, like gas masks, so they just carry like cloths, like handkerchiefs and things and put water on them so as to make sure that the sulfur doesn't stick.
SPEAKER_07But you know what, okay, you know what my thought is? Yeah, is like as a company, wouldn't it be wouldn't it be beneficial for them to give those designers proper PPE? Because then that probably means I'll have a longer life expectancy, and then that way your churn is less. Like it's a very morbid way to, I guess, like put it, right? But like even from a business sense, it would just make sense if you had a little bit more protection and like equipment and tools to like support these people because then you don't have to hire as frequently.
SPEAKER_06I think what the article I read was saying is that sometimes they even take the ones who do can't afford gas masks or have them, they take them off because you're climbing 200 or whatever that distance up the volcano is. Um, yeah, like they can't breathe with the gas mask on if they're going up. So they take them off anyways. So um, and the other thing is like in terms of tools to like collect it, it's not as like yes, that environment is toxic and unhealthy and whatever. Um, but then the physical labor aspect of it, like all they have is these two baskets, and they can carry up to 70 kg or more than that if they can on their shoulders. It's like these kg. Yeah, it's these two like cane-based baskets that I saw in the video. It's like carried on their shoulders, um, and they climb up the volcano. And it's like it's the same as saying like uh I I can't remember the exact weight, but the one who was in the documentary was saying he can carry like that's his max, and he was kind of like in his 40s or something. And um he was like, Yeah, like it's basically the same as you know, two full-size suitcases when you travel with them. Yeah, imagine carrying that on your shoulders twice up a mountain.
SPEAKER_07I cannot hear it when I have to pick up my like carrion suitcase and put it in the overhead department. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I can't imagine doing a fraction of this.
SPEAKER_05Well, 70 kg is more than that. Because it is up there, it's more, yeah. It's like it's closer to three.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah, you're right. Also, I think it's like 23.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I also did quickly Google the buying power in Indonesia for 17 USD per day. And actually, you do have significant buying power with that amount. Like maybe that's an incentive, then it's higher than minimum wage.
SPEAKER_06That's the thing. That's for them, it's like relatively it's more compensation. Most of them are quoted saying, you know, like we dare to die because we're afraid of hunger. Like, what other option do they have? But um, another aspect of this is it's become kind of like a tourist spot, also. So people will go down like at night because the sulfuric gas it creates this like blue light, um, and it looks like flames, like blue flames. So it's become like a form of poverty tourism where like a volcano tour costs tourists around 20 to 25 dollars. The mining company is making a ton of money, and um, now some of these like miners have also tried to convert into becoming guides in the area and like selling these like souvenirs of sulfur-made products so that they can make a bit of extra cash. But um, yeah, and it's it's kind of like dystopian. Like, these tourists will hike up wearing proper gas masks and watch the miners who are struggling and fighting for their life. Yeah, it's it's uh yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I mean, I just searched pictures of like the blue flame thing that you're talking about. Obviously, it's like insane to see, but the the juxtaposition of like it's oh I get to see this cool thing while people are people are literally dying or like working in like hell-like conditions.
SPEAKER_06And I think I read somewhere where it's like so ironic and contradictory that like purified sulfur contributes a lot to fertilizer, right? So these miners are essentially at the bottom of the global supply chain. Like, and then this fertilizer goes and grows your crops for farmland and things like that. Yeah, that's uh anyways, this mountain or this volcano is basically the only place on earth where m people still mine sulfur this way, but it's uh yeah, very niche, very but it's it's just weak, yeah. So, anyways, next time I go complain about my temperature protected office, I will think twice. But yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's crazy to think that people live like such different lives where you would put yourself through so much risk just to get through the day, make make a living.
SPEAKER_07Honestly, yeah, like I was making my food just like and I was like, yeah, I'm like nervous. Like, what's it gonna taste like? Like bro, yeah, get over get over yourself and just a beverage. You know what I mean though? Like to your point, like it does it's nothing perspective. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And it's crazy how much of your life is decided the day you're born.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Right? Like if you're just born into into a family where this is what they've been doing for generations, or even just in like to in that area, that city. Where this is like the only way to make a living, it's very difficult to like break out of that cycle.
SPEAKER_07I don't know. Like, obviously, like this is like a super naive me to say given that I haven't done research on it, but I feel like there has to be some like protective gear that they can use to make this a little easier on their body. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_06I don't know. I I think that is one thing that the company could provide.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. I yeah. Like, how do you see people like actively suffering and just they're like, what can I do?
SPEAKER_05I mean that's the thing with corporations, right? Like everyone thinks it's not their business. The corporation is like faceless. So like if you're just an employee, you're like, well, I'm just trying to do my job, I'm just trying to make my ends meet. And I'm no single person in an organization feels fully responsible.
SPEAKER_06That is insane. Well I think we have two more uh maybe they're not as bleak as this one, but um I think they're cool.
SPEAKER_05Actually, mine mine might not be that mine's not mine's dangerous, but mine is not. I don't think it's as bleak. Mine is just super like random.
SPEAKER_07So do you want to do yours first?
SPEAKER_05Okay, sure, I can go. Okay. Um I'm gonna
Saturation Diving
SPEAKER_05try to keep it contained because I definitely did go down quite a major rabbit hole, and so I do have a lot of material, but I'll try to summarize. Um but okay, to start, well, first let me just tell you what I'm gonna be talking about. I will be talking about saturation diving.
unknownWhoa.
SPEAKER_01And that sounded so forced. Whoa.
SPEAKER_05No, I mean I knew I knew crap about this. No, no, no. I've we've kind of delved into this. We have to surface, yes, surface level. Um, essentially a little bit of a preamble, but I think it was last year. Um we watched this documentary. Yeah, and I watched this documentary called The Deepest Breath, I think is what it was called. Have you watched it, Abby? No, I think you guys. You have to watch it.
SPEAKER_07It is like sorry, I want to go here for a second. Not only is like the topic interesting, but they the way they made the documentary, it like kind of like plays like a movie where like you're actually on edge about what's gonna happen, and not because it's like a thriller, like you know what I mean, like true crime things, like you're on edge because well, it's true crime, but I I don't know. I just I love the documentary, it's just very well made, it's such an interesting topic.
SPEAKER_05It's the pacing was really everyone everyone should watch it. Yeah, um, yeah, but just like a quick summary. Basically, the documentary is about free diving, and it talks about the sport of free diving and what that's like. And so obviously, once we finished watching it, I was like really uh fascinated by the whole thing, and I was like, okay, I have to research more about this, so I started looking into it. Fell down a rabbit hole, and I happened to discover saturation diving, which is also diving but quite different. Um, so yeah, so that's what I'm gonna kind of cover today. Um, so I'm just gonna start off a little bit dramatic. I just want you guys to imagine this. Okay. Okay. Take me there. You seal yourself inside a pressurized metal cylinder. Immediately, no roughly the size, roughly the diameter of a queen-sized bed, maybe five meters long.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_07And now you will I mean that's bigger than the bed that I have right now.
SPEAKER_02I was just gonna say, I was just gonna say, sounds like that should be that part sounds a little roomy.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, you know?
SPEAKER_05Let me make it worse. Let me make it worse. Okay, you have to live there for the next 28 days. You cannot leave, you cannot get fresh air, you cannot surface quickly if something goes wrong. Great. What about washrooms? I was thinking the same thing. Okay, they they do have washrooms, but in the queen bed? Not in the queen bed, in the facility in the facility that you can access.
SPEAKER_07Um, were you like lying to me then? Like so it can go out to pee.
SPEAKER_05Go into the ocean.
SPEAKER_01No, but like I don't get it. Is this change? You know what? You can take it. Just wait. You can do the reveal.
SPEAKER_05Wait for the reveal. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Your office is 300 meters below the ship, in complete darkness, in near-freezing water, and the pressure around you is equivalent to 30 atmospheres, which is 400 pounds per square inch pressing on every surface of your body. That is saturation diving.
SPEAKER_02Yep, yep. Okay, so let's get into it. Wait, so can I go to the washroom? Like, you didn't answer the question, though. You can't go to the washroom, okay?
SPEAKER_05Like, do I exit the chamber to go? No, no, no. They it there's like a whole quarters, like a sleeping quarters, and like you can like access that.
SPEAKER_07But you said I'm in a queen size chamber.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so you are in the queen size chamber at certain parts when you have to get pressurized. I'll I'll get into it. I'll get into it.
SPEAKER_09Okay, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so essentially, um when you breathe, when you breathe compressed gas at a depth, so when you're like diving, um, inert gas like nitrogen or helium, which is gas that doesn't react with any other like Yeah, I went to high school, I know. Okay, okay. Uh dissolves into your blood and tissues under pressure. And so the deeper that you go, the more of that gas dissolves into your lungs. And once your tissues are fully saturated, kind of like a sponge, then they can't absorb anymore. And so at that point, the decompression time plateaus. So deeper compression time is essentially the amount of time that you need to surface from uh diving really deep so that your the pressure doesn't like collapse your lungs, essentially. It's like what they call the bends.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05And so it doesn't so once you've like been you've absorbed all of that gas, it's like a sponge that's full. And so at that point, it actually doesn't matter how long you stay underwater, the amount of time that it will take you to decompress coming upwards is like the same, essentially.
SPEAKER_07So I don't understand what that means.
SPEAKER_05Okay, like wait.
SPEAKER_06So we and I just look at each other like, what? Wait, so you're saying like let's say I spend 20 minutes in that deep saturation zone. Is that the correct word? Yeah, we can call it that.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_06The deep saturation zone, whatever, the danger zone, right? Yes. Okay. So you're saying that the time it takes to go up outside of that zone. It keeps increasing. Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_07Well, yeah, like if I'm going deeper, I have more distance to travel up.
SPEAKER_05Yes, up until the point that you reach that point where your lungs are fully saturated. Yeah. And so at that point you can stay down for as regardless of how long you stay down, it's still gonna take you the same amount of time to come back up.
SPEAKER_07Okay, but that's because typically one when you're so deep and you're coming back up, you need to take breaks along the way.
SPEAKER_05Yes. Yeah. Yeah. If you have to spend five days decompressing, anyways, you might as well stay down there for like a month to do a month worth month's worth of work. So that's saturation diving. One decompression at the end after weeks of continuous operation at that depth. The North Sea, which is a sea between uh like the UK, Norway, Denmark, and the rest of Europe, that little section, uh, is called the North Sea. And so the North Sea actually sits over one of the largest oil and gas reserves ever discovered. And so when exploration began in the 1960s, the reserves were found at depths where like no conventional diving was possible, which is what I was talking about, 150 to 300 meters. And so, for reference, the Great Pyramid of Giza is 139 meters. So we're already talking like deeper pyramid. Deeper than the pyramid of Giza. Niagara Falls drops about 57 meters. So three Niagara Falls is where we're starting. That's like the the 150 meters.
SPEAKER_06Can I just say like this is like my worst nightmare situation because openless, endless bot not obviously truly endless, but like really deep bodies of water terrifying scare me and like this is uh terrifying.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, the definition of the you know what you know what like really uh like stupid what is it called comparison that's really not a comparison, it is when we were kids, we went to Disneyland, yeah, and I think it was in was it in Disneyland? I'm not sure. Somewhere else we went to in the States, some amusement park, and like it had No, it was SeaWorld! It makes more sense. I think it was SeaWorld.
SPEAKER_05I don't think we've ever been to SeaWorld.
SPEAKER_07Is that in the States?
SPEAKER_05It is, yeah.
SPEAKER_07I think we've done that.
SPEAKER_05No, we went to Marineland.
SPEAKER_07No, no, okay.
SPEAKER_05I don't know.
SPEAKER_07We were in some of those places. Some amusement What?
SPEAKER_05I said don't go to those places. We were kids, we didn't know any better.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. So like it was like some type of amusement park or something, whatever, and they had like this like like submarine that you had to go into.
SPEAKER_05It was Disneyland. Disneylor. Disney World.
SPEAKER_07We did not go to Disneylor. Disneyland.
SPEAKER_05It wasn't Disneyland.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, okay. It wasn't Disney.
SPEAKER_05It's like a Flying Nemo thing.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and I remember like this was obviously not legit. It was meant for kids, but I was like, Loki's so nervous, even as a kid, to do that. And like, this is like that. I have no idea why I brought this up. Honestly, this is not terrible, but like what I'm trying to say is like I was so nervous as a kid going into that little cartoon-ass like submarine. It was a submersible.
SPEAKER_05It's kind of a structure. I think it was like in a kitty pool. Yeah, but they we did go like it under the water. Yeah. And it was like, I know what you're talking about. It was a little claustrophobic.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Yeah. And also like this other um, speaking of claustrophobia, because like I genuinely think I have claustrophobia. And we went to this random haunted, what is it called? Haunted houses? Yeah. Like a haunted house in Niagara Falls. Oh yeah. And there was, oh my god. So there was this like one portion of it where like you're walking through, but then the walls, they're like foam walls, but they started closing in on you. What? Bro, that I I think I like You were screaming. I was screaming where?
SPEAKER_05It's in Niagara Falls.
SPEAKER_07Like, you know, Clifton Hills, like that area by Niagara Falls that has those like okay, all those different things and activities and stuff. They have like a bunch of like haunted houses. So yeah, we did it once, and I lost my shit in there, man.
SPEAKER_05Like, yeah. She wanted to end the I wanted to exit. Yeah, I wanted to exit. I was so I can't finish this. Because I think they give you a safe word you can say. And remember telling you, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, don't say, don't say it. We can you can make it through. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06Can we huss on this? I was actually that was I cuss a little. I wasn't trying not to, but what I was trying to say, that's scary. Like, I was but then I was like, I don't know.
SPEAKER_05Let's just this is just like we're in our in our living room.
SPEAKER_07I mean, we do not have a production company behind us, yeah, guys.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, also this isn't like a a kid's show.
SPEAKER_03It's not not a kid's show, but like, you know.
SPEAKER_07Okay, I think we're veering off of where our initial concern. But yeah, all of this to say, yeah, it's also my nightmare. Shit.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_05You say you do. Okay, but yeah, anyways, coming back to the story, but yes, it is uh very, very deep. Um, another comparison, the Burge Khalifa is 828 meters. So they're diving at depths that are just over halfway up the world's tallest building. At those depths of like 150 to 300 meters, the physics of bounce diving doesn't work. Now, bounce diving is just the general type of diving that you think of when you think of diving, which is you you dive down into the water and you can be at a certain depth for a certain amount of time before you have to start coming up. And when you start coming up, you have to come up slowly so you don't get the bends, which essentially means that you have to keep stopping at specific depths for set periods so that it lets that gas that's in your that's dissolved in your lungs get released, essentially, so that it doesn't um So you don't explode. So you don't explode, yes, essentially. Um so for example, at 200 meters, a bounce diver might get 15 to 20 minutes of actual time before they have to start ascending.
SPEAKER_04Oh.
SPEAKER_05And so this decompression obligation for the dive is then like you need six to eight hours of stops on the way up. Crazy. So for every 20 minutes of work, you're basically spending half a day just hanging in there waiting to come back up. Floating in the open ocean to surf the side.
SPEAKER_07But like you're in a submersible.
SPEAKER_05No, no, no. I'm talking about this is if you don't, like if you are just diving normally.
SPEAKER_07We are too stupid for this. No, this is if you are diving normally. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're like Abid's right. Yeah. You're just you're just there.
SPEAKER_05Yes. So, and this, so like this is if you're just like scuba diving, normal scuba diving. Yeah, the deeper the longer the dive, the more stops required, and the longer each step takes. Um, and so that means that if you are diving so deep into the ocean, the amount of time that it takes to decompress and like do this whole process, it just means that you barely get any work done. So that is kind of what like resulted in the need for something like saturation diving. And so the pipelines and infrastructure that they had to build on the North Sea floor needed to be like, you know, installed, it needed to be uh welded, inspected, repaired, maintained. All that had to happen with by human hands because the remote um vehicles or remote vessels were not able to do such detailed work. So they need like human hands. And so that created that commercial incentive. But at the time, the safety infrastructure didn't exist. So that didn't stop people, though. They went anyways, and over time they developed this whole like infrastructure and like process around it. So just going back a little bit to the history of it, the story of like saturation diving actually started with this US Navy physician named Albert Ben Benke Benke. I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah. Uh but in 1942 he proposed.
SPEAKER_01Sorry, man.
SPEAKER_05Um he proposed purely theoretically that a diver's decompression time would stop increasing once the tissues were fully saturated, which is what I was mentioning in the beginning, where like the sponge analogy. And so he first tried it with rats, and so then he tried it with goats and monkeys. That's okay. Yeah, it's it's a little we don't love that. We don't love that, but you know, we had to Okay, you know, the the scientific experimentation. Yes, the the scientists in the room. Okay. Um, so basically he builds these pressurized chambers and then he watched what happened when the animals were slowly saturated with a helium-oxygen mix and then brought back up. And they actually survived. So the theory held. And then in 1962, uh he got why I feel so bad.
SPEAKER_01I'll move on from this, but like the animals, man. They just they were just like, I don't know, they were just fucking shut down, like really deep depths.
SPEAKER_05Just no, I think this was my understanding is that he didn't he uh what he did is he actually built these chambers and like saturated them slowly with the these mix oh no, yes, he did, he did.
SPEAKER_01Well, you have to put them down.
SPEAKER_05They did, they did, yes, they did put them down there. Yeah, it's kind of sad. It's hard. But they they survived. They survived, dude.
SPEAKER_07You know what? Okay, I can just go for it, go for it. I don't okay. My huge caveat is like I have no understanding of like science. Okay, no, I mean like this is like like academia, like scientific academia, right? But like, you know what? I think I think they should give credit to the animals that they like use in these studies and like say their name or something.
SPEAKER_06Like, I think the animals doesn't care, but like honestly, in a publications acknowledgments, they never say the animals. Yeah, and I feel like they should, man. I mean, I think researchers should go and name each okay, but it's like we work with like 40 rats. Like, am I gonna name every rat?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like rat one, two, three, four.
SPEAKER_06Oh, yeah, they have number designations, but like at least my first name last name, like Wilbur the second or something.
SPEAKER_07I mean, that'd be great, but then I like that's a lot. That's asking a lot of to do when you publish your next fourth.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, yeah, I never acknowledge the pigs, anyways.
SPEAKER_07I feel like we could do that, but then it's like, is it performative? Because I mean, like, like the animal's family's not reading it, like we feel you know.
SPEAKER_06Wait, that's so true. It's just for our mental piece, yeah.
SPEAKER_07So then it then again, is it just like selfish? Like you're just saying that's you can feel like, oh, I'm like a good person. I like acknowledge rat 393.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think you're a little bit of a good person for doing that.
SPEAKER_06I don't know. I just feel like yeah, anyways. If it's any consolation, modern science is leaning towards alternative testing mechanisms. Yeah, but they're quite underdeveloped, so okay. It's not much consolation.
SPEAKER_05So thank you for giving me no. For our two listeners out there for context. Oh, four. Oh, four, yes. Well, both as parents, man. True, true, true. Um works in a in a la in a lab, so she knows what she's talking about. She has partaken in some animal testing.
SPEAKER_06What? Okay, wow, that just makes me sound like freaking filler. Yeah, I sound like a Okay, you know what? You don't let her explain. Yeah, yeah, explaining you do the damage control here. Um, well, I was involved in some preclinical research and preclinical models, rats, pigs, things like that. And you did it as ethically as you could. Yeah. We did what we could. Yeah.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_06To be fair, I was not directly involved, but anyways. Any operations.
SPEAKER_05Sorry. Anyways, the theory held. And so in 1962, Bond got congressional approval to try it on humans. And so three Navy volunteers then spent six days in a pressurized chamber breathing a heliox, that mixture of helium and oxygen, and they were able to decompress successfully. So this was the first true human saturation exposure. And that kind of started everything. And so um, yeah, so his lab results brought a lot of confidence. And then what came next was that the US Navy actually developed uh dropped an actual habitat, that's what they called it, is essentially a steel cylinder about the size of a school bus onto the ocean floor, pressurized it to match the depth, and then put people inside it to live. So yeah, there continued to be these kind of experiments, and then eventually it became more commercial. Um, and so the first commercial saturation dive happened in 1965, where um contractors had to replace components of um a hydroelectric dam in Virginia, and then within five years, a bunch of different companies came up and uh yeah, they started operating saturation system systems on vessels all over the North Sea, and then the industry just grew faster and faster. Uh, it definitely grew faster than its safety protocols, as we will soon come to find out. But yeah, that's kind of the basics of how it started. Um, okay, so now I'm gonna kind of delve into like how it actually works. So basically, imagine a Russian nesting doll, right? We know what those are. Like the dolls that are inside each other. So the diver is the innermost layer. Okay. The diving bell is a pressurized steel capsule that's about the size of a phone booth, and that's the next layer. And that is what carries the divers from the ship to the work site. Okay. Um, the saturation habitat is the outermost shell, which is a pressurized home that is bolted to the hull of the support vessel. And all of these must stay at exactly the same pressure at all times. The moment that they don't, someone dies.
SPEAKER_01So where's the bed? What thing? Why did you tell me about the queen size bed in the beginning? Like, what is that size?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05It's a pressurized home. No, the you know what? This is the queen size. Which Russian doll is the bed in the bottom? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I believe it's the it's the home that's bolted to the hull of the support vessel.
SPEAKER_07Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Like, I can see a phone booth being able to fit on my if I my hypothetical queen size bed.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05So sure. Okay, so yeah, all of these have to be pressurized at the same have to be exactly the same pressure at all times. So when you're going from one section to another, it has to be pressured. The pressure has to be the same. Um, okay, so we have the living chambers, which is the pressurized quarters where the divers sleep, eat, and wait between shifts. Also, where they use the bathroom. Okay, good to know. Oh, wait, oh my god. Um this is where three to six people um will live in this space that is smaller than most studio apartments. And why'd you look at me when you said that?
SPEAKER_02She's a studio apartment direct contact. Ivy lives in a studio apartment. But it's a good sized studio apartment. It's not a saturated diver apartment.
SPEAKER_07Um I'm gonna ask something about that, but okay, okay.
SPEAKER_05Um and then food comes through a sealed medical lock hatch, which is pressurized on both sides, so that opening it doesn't like blow the entire chamber.
SPEAKER_09Okay.
SPEAKER_05The diving bell is where uh is what transfers the divers from the vessel to the work site. It locks to it locks onto the habitat under pressure, and then both spaces are equalized, and then it detaches and it descends.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_07Um there's a lot like going on with the contraption.
SPEAKER_05Imagine what the diver is doing came zero. Um and then you have the umb umbilical, which is the one that the part that scares me the most most. So when they're on their work site, there's a cable connect, multiple cables connected to them, kind of like you know, when in space. Yeah, it's like an astronaut, similar kind of idea. And those hoses and cables have like breathing gas, hot water for thermal protection, communications, video, all of that stuff. That they need. And if that gets severed, then the diver just has whatever gas that's already in their bailout bottles, which is essentially like their emergency um reserve. And usually at 200 meters, that will last you five to ten minutes. Yeah. And then the last part of this whole situation is the life support control, which is a team on the surface that monitors everything, the pressure, temperature, communications, and they are working 24 hours a day. So yeah. Um nitrogen becomes really poisonous in uh at a very like at that depth, and it can cause something called nitrogen narcosis, an intoxication that like it clouds your judgment and slows your reaction time. And yeah, it starts around 30 to 40 meters and it like gets worse. And can you get a hangover?
SPEAKER_07Like, should we switch to that? Is it allxicating?
SPEAKER_05Do you want to try it? To each their own. Yeah, to each their own. Okay. Um, but yeah, at saturation depths, it would be incapacitating. So helium solves these problems. Yeah. So helium solves these problems because it's inert, and an inert gas is a gas, again, that doesn't undergo any chemical reactions. Um, also because it's far less dense than nitrogen, also dramatically reduces the work of breathing, which at 300 meters, it already feels like sucking air through a wet cloth. Um because it's very dense.
SPEAKER_06Thank you for all these like really vivid analogies.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I need you to really get into the like head space of it. Oh, I'm getting um okay. But the trade-off, guys, have any of you guys ever inhaled helium?
SPEAKER_07Oh, see, I was going to not ask about this because I'm like, I feel like this is a dumb question, but are their voices always high-pitched? Yes.
SPEAKER_05That's so divers in SAT speak like cartoon characters. Oh my god, that's like Yeah, surface teams use electronic voice on scramblers to translate. Because sometimes it's like really difficult to understand what they're saying. That is so funny. So, I have a treat for you guys.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_05A couple YouTube videos where you can hear what they sound like. I mean, there's not that much in terms of like visuals, it's literally just listen to the voice. Hopefully, like this gets caught in our.
SPEAKER_07Alright, Money God, listen up.
SPEAKER_00Remember what it used to just be books? Yeah, like these oiled sack drivers now. Oh my god. It sounds so cute. Wow. Yeah, I can't read.
SPEAKER_05Um, but anyways, now getting into like the dangerous things. Why is this dangerous?
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay, we didn't hit that button yet.
SPEAKER_05Um okay, so um, first one, dense gas. So every diver feels this, whether you're like a free diver, you're like a bounce diver, any type of diver, uh, but sat divers feel it the hardest. So they're at an extreme depth for weeks doing physical labor, and under pressure, gas gets heavier and thicker. So at 300 meters, it's 31 times denser than normal air. So again, it's like breathing through a wet towel all day. And sat divers use helium, which is far lighter than nitrogen, so it makes it a little bit manageable, but it's still like imagine like your entire body feels like cement when you're like doing all of your tasks, like whatever you have to do.
SPEAKER_07Like you have a little blood.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, I guess. I guess you heard it. No, I think like for me that is more like high blood sugar.
SPEAKER_07Damn it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it was a higher low, with a higher low. Yeah. For the nation, I'm a type 1 diabetic. So, yes. Anyways, yeah, it's basically like that heavy feeling. Um, yeah, another thing is um blood flooding into the lungs. So this happens to all divers. The moment they hit the water, um, the pressure squeezes blood from your limbs into your chest. Yes, and that can lead to up to 700 milliliters extra blood pooling in your lungs. And now if you add cold water, 700 milliliters? Yes, that's a lot. That's more than like a water bottle. Yeah, that is a lot. Yeah. Now add cold water and hard exertion, and then the vessels start to leak fluid into the air sacs. So, what can happen is you can actually just drown from the inside while still breathing. Yes. Okay. So the way that saturation divers manage this is with hot water suits. So they have suits that are like thermally heating them so that it prevents that from happening and it reduces the amount of like blood coming out of their extremities. So, yeah. The next thing is oxygen toxicity. So both bounce and sat divers face this but differently. So a bounce diver hits it briefly on a single deep dive. So a sat but a sat diver that lives in contin with continuous oxygen exposure for 28 days straight. So what happens is that too much oxygen can also damage your lung tissue and cause seizures. So sat divers hold oxygen at a very precisely controlled level inside the habitat, which is high enough to breathe, but low enough to not poison over a month-long stay. But it is very precarious. So yeah, those are some of the dangers. There are other dangers too, but just some of the dangers. Um also we have something called high pressure nervous syndrome, which below roughly 150 meters, helium itself also begins to cause problems. So it can cause helium can cause things like tremors, tremors, visual disturbances, nausea, cognitive fog. And the faster the compression, the worse it gets. So this is managed by descending really slowly, like once they're done their the their repair or whatever they're working on. Sometimes this will take hours to reach completely to the top, and it has to be done very carefully with like different compression rates. But even with optimal protocol, some divers still experience um high pressure nervous syndrome. And the symptoms can be severe enough to like abort the dive sometimes. Now you might ask, why do people want to do this? Well, it turns out the pay is pretty damn good. Your annual uh amount that you would make on a high activity year is between 300 to 500k.
SPEAKER_06Can I just say that's still potentially less than someone who makes a tech like a tech job?
SPEAKER_05I think 500k is pretty compared. This is a pretty comparable to tech. As someone that works in tech, this is pretty competitive. Yeah, yeah, but like to like being top, top, top, you be you be getting paid back? I do not be getting paid back. I I don't know what getting. But what does it take to get anyways? We don't have so their schedule generally is that they would spend 28 days in a chamber at one one stretch, plus five to seven days decompressing, so closer to 35 days away before you see your front door. Then after that you get 28 days off, like genuinely off, no on call, no slack messages.
SPEAKER_06Um slack messages.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And if you're deployed twice in a year, you've been away from home for about 70 days, but you've made more than most people earn in like three years.
SPEAKER_06Okay, so like if today I decided I'm gonna become a saturation diver, what do I need to do physically to get to that point? First of all, be able to do a bob.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_06Wow, that is a crazy statement. Um, I can do a bob. I can swim and tread water and survive in water. Sorry, I had to do that. Okay, when was the last time you saw? I had to do that to you.
SPEAKER_05For listeners, when Uvi was, you know.
SPEAKER_07Like three years old.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, like three, three, four years old.
SPEAKER_07She was like, oh my god. I cannot talk about Sable, sorry, I cannot talk about Uvi being a kid without saying that she was like literally like an angel descended upon Earth. Okay.
SPEAKER_05She was like, oh my god, she was the cutest thing ever. But, anyways, she was the cutest thing ever, but she was also terrified of everything ever. And um, yeah, we would go swimming, and I remember for the longest time trying to just get her to do a bob, just get her to do a bob. She would have her hands above her head, ready to go. We'd count down, she just couldn't go. And sometimes she'd close her eyes and go down to the point where like the water was past her chin, and then she and then she'd jump back up and be like, Yeah, I did it. She just convinced that she went around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01She was convinced.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. You were like the OG gas later, but like you would do it, but you were like doing it to yourself. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_06I was three.
SPEAKER_07I was three. Okay. But anyway, sorry, continue. Yeah. If you wanted to become a saturation diver.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so like hit the gym.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05They also go through a lot of like training, like for their like heart, right? They have to like do a bunch of um assessments to make sure that their heart is healthy enough. Anyways, let's not go into like some of the other factors. The first one, the darkness. Below 200 meters, sunlight is completely gone. Not dim, gone. The only light that exists is whatever the diver brings with them, which is usually a helmet lamp with a beam that goes maybe five to ten meters out before it's just disappears into nothing. So everything beyond this radius just doesn't exist until you turn towards it. There's literally no shapes in the distance, no faint outlines, no sense of space. Sometimes they can't even tell if they're facing upwards or down. Kind of like in space, I guess, is the closest comparison. But there's light in space. True. There is light here too. Just the light that you have like brought with you, like on your helmet. I think there might be a lot more light in space in this. Yeah, probably. There's a freaking sun, bro. There's definitely more light in the space. Now we've gone to the thing that we were talking about, the wildlife. The deep ocean is not empty, and what lives there does not steer clear of the darkness.
SPEAKER_06So like great white shark eyes.
SPEAKER_07Yes. Wait, no, they're not sandy. There are sharks, yes. Sadie? Okay, why did I say it was the confidence of like come in? Like, I don't know anything about sharks and their operations.
SPEAKER_05So one diver actually described being bumped by large seals in the pitch black water. Also, divers working in the Gulf of Mexico have reported large sharks circling the work area, staying at the edge of the light, tracking the divers' movements without approaching. In the North Sea, lion's main jellyfish with tentacles trailing up to five meters behind them, um, and capable through stinging, capable of stinging through a sweatsuit, also drifts silently through work areas with no warning.
SPEAKER_06Yes. So I just looked up lion's main jellyfish, and you know, like the craziest version of a jellyfish you could think of? That's what it is. It's humongous and it looks terrifying. And it's huge, like there's this comparison picture between a diver and the jellyfish, and it's like bigger than a diver.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, this diver said that a diver standing next to one of these structures is a physical equivalent of a mouse on a kitchen counter.
SPEAKER_07Oh, this is humongous.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Okay, so to wrap things up, I have a few stories of some true stories of some incidents that, you know, didn't go down so well. Okay. Should I start? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sorry if I mispronounced the names on this, I have no idea how to pronounce them. But we start in the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, November 1978, at a depth of 104 meters. Lothar, Lothar? Lothar? Sorry. Um, Ward was 25. Tony Prangli was 28. They had sealed themselves into the diving belt of the MS Star canopis for what was logged as a routine maintenance dive beside the Barrel Alpha platform, which is a concrete production structure anchored to the floor of the North Sea, 130 miles northeast of Aberdeen. The job was to inspect the base structure, which is pretty standard, and both men had done this kind of work before. What neither man could see, however, as he descended through the 104 meters of gray North Sea water, was what was happening at the surface above them. The semi-submersible Haken Magnus, a large drilling rig, was repositioning nearby. Its anchor chains, each link being the size of a large dog, were dragging across a seabed. One of them caught the star canopis deployment system. In a single sequence that took seconds, the anchor chain severed three things simultaneously. The bell's main lift wire, which is a steel cable that would raise it back to the ship. Its life support umbilical, which carried breathing gas, communications, and hot water from the surface, and its guide wires, which are the secondary tethers that kept the bell oriented correctly during the descent and the ascent. All three of them at once were severed. So the bell fell, not a controlled descent, a free fall through 104 meters of water until it hit the seabed. But at this point, Ward and Prangli were still alive. The bell's internal gas supply was intact, and they could breathe, and they could feel the bell on the bottom, but they could not reach the drop weight release, which is a mechanism that would have shed the bell's ballast and set it sent it floating upwards to the surface. They couldn't feel for it. So they couldn't like reach for it to release it. They were sealed in a steel capsule on the floor of the North Sea with no connection to the surface and no way to get themselves up. So fortunately, the crew realized what had happened like almost immediately. And three rescue vessels were sent out, and they converged on the position and then they sent down divers. But the problem was that reaching the bell, like knowing where the bell had landed without the guide wires, was like impossible. So they didn't know exactly where it was. They knew the general area. And so, um, so because of the poor visibility at that depth, and they had no umbilical, because that cord had severed to follow as a guide rope, it took them a lot of time to find them. And obviously, they didn't have time because they have a limited amount of like breathing gas and like everything at that depth. And so they didn't know from the beginning how much gas the bell actually held at that point in time. Um, and but they knew that it wasn't going to be enough for like 13 hours, and because standard emergency gas supplies in a diving bell of that era were not calculated for that long of a wait, they were calculated for a short emergency, and the bell's internal heaters couldn't maintain temperature without the umbilical cord's hot water supply. So, and also keep in mind the North Sea in this time of year is about seven to eight degrees Celsius at that depth. And so inside the bell, the temperature definitely dropped. And it took 13 hours and 20 minutes to recover the bell, and when the hatch was finally cut open, and when the rescue divers got inside, unfortunately both men were dead. Uh, the postmortem found hypothermia and drowning as the um the cause of their death. And even though they had survived the fall, they ran out of warmth and air while the three ships were looking for them on the surface. So that actually that incident actually forced the industry to confront like a very specific like gap that they have, which is that the diving bells did not have enough uh emergency gas for an extended rescue like that. And there was no standard protocol for actually like recovering the bell if it does uh get lost that way. Um so yeah, that was that was a tragic incident. I imagine it's just so terrifying that you're just down there and all of a sudden you're just cut off from everything, you're just a floating blob in like in the at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be rescued.
SPEAKER_06To be honest, it's so insane. I can't even fully like conceptualize it, but yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yep. And then the last second story, second and last story that I have is actually a story that was um actually turned into a movie as well. And it was called The Last Breath, and it's a dog. That's what we watched. No, we watched the deepest breath. That's for free diving. Oh I didn't get a chance to watch this documentary, but I actually really want to. But quick summary of what happened. Again, this happened in the North Sea. This happened in 2012. Um, and essentially what happened is that we have this diver, Chris Lemons. Uh, Chris Lemons was 34. He was a Scottish saturation diver with more than a decade of offshore experience working from the Bibby Topaz, which is a 100-meter diving support vessel that is operated in the North Sea. And he was on a pipeline repair contract. And it was late in the evening. Lemons had locked out of the diving bell and was working alone at 91 meters depth. His umbilical was connecting him to the bell that hung over him in the water column, which then connected to the um baby topaz, which was the vessel that was on the surface. And the job was a technical subsea work on a section of the pipe. And so it was approximately 30 minutes into this excursion. And usually dynamically positioned uh vessels like Baby Topaz use a network of onboard computers, GPS receivers, all these different like thruster controls, um, all of this stuff to stay exactly where they're supposed to be. So, regardless of the current, the wind, waves, they like maintain that location. And when the system is running, it makes it makes thousands of small corrections per second to make sure that the vessel doesn't move. But this system on the baby topaz failed. And it wasn't a gradual degradation. All of a sudden, the entire system just crashed. And so, without that control, it became subject to the current, and the North Sea has a very strong, powerful current. I've seen those videos. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, yeah, yeah, without use those ones. So the vessel began to drift slowly at first, then faster, and it was being pulled northwest by the tide. And the dive team on the surface immediately understood what was happening, so they began like their emergency procedures to recover lemons and the bell. But the umbilical, which was running from the bell down to where lemons was working, had already become taut. And so as the vessel moved, the umbilical was dragged across the steel structure of the pipeline below. And at approximately 190 meters of drift from the position they were supposed to be in, the umbilical snapped. In that moment, Chris Lemons lost everything that was keeping him alive. His breathing gas supply cut, his hot water heating cut, communications cut, video feed cut, light cut. So the only illumination he had was whatever was mounted on his helmet, which was running on the helmet's own like battery.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And he was 91 meters underwater in the dark in four degrees Celsius water, alone, with no way to communicate with the surface and no way to ascend quickly. Because also he can't surface immediately, like he needs to depressurize, or that would kill him. So what he did have was his bailout system, which is like two small cylinders of breathing gas that are mounted on his equipment, and it's for this kind of emergency. But the gas supply in those cylinders at 91 meters depth, where gas consumption is significantly higher than at the surface, gave him an estimated five minutes of breathing time. He is just there at the bottom of the ocean, pitch black, five minutes to live, no idea what we're gonna say.
SPEAKER_06I think that's the worst one of the worst ways to go. You know, like when you know that your time is limited and you're just waiting for that last breath.
SPEAKER_07Like you're just waiting for death. Yeah. I mean at that point I feel like I already know about that.
unknownIt's done.
SPEAKER_06Like, I don't, but it's still like a I I don't think it's interesting, like the psychology that they have maybe going into this. Like, do every time they go for a dive, do they think this is gonna be my last? I don't know. I think you have to.
SPEAKER_05Like, I wonder if they just assume that they're gonna die doing this one day. Yeah. I I feel like you have to come. Yeah, they definitely have like more safety protocols now, but this happened in 2012. But yeah, so on the surface, obviously the engineers were working hard like as quickly as they can to restore the computer control, and the other two divers that were in the bell um were already in the process of um in the process of the bell being recovered. And um they obviously had also received the emergency call, so everyone was like working to get this, you know, everything sorted, and um they were trying to um, you know, do multiple things at once. So vessel recovery, bell recovery, trying to connect to lemons on the on the communication that was like completely dead, and no one on the surface knew if Lemons was alive at this point. Like you can't see him, the video is gone, radio is gone. Um, but then eventually the baby topaz regained partial dynamic position and control. So the vessel started to move back towards that position that they were initially in. And obviously it's fighting the current to like move back to where he was originally located. And then the bell was lowered again, and the two other divers, they actually went back down, like in the bell. And eventually, 33 minutes after the umbilical was severed, the diving bell found Chris Lemon on the seabed. He was unconscious but intact with no visible injuries. He was pulled into the bell through a bottom hatch, the bell ascended, the SAT system medical team met them at the transfer trunk, and Chris Lemons was alive. What?
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_05Yes. No way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god.
SPEAKER_05Not just alive, he was neurologically intact with no significant long term injury.
SPEAKER_06What?
SPEAKER_05Yep. Yeah. And people don't understand like how? Because five minutes of five minutes of gas across 30 minutes of survival has no clean psychological explanation. And Lemons himself said that he had no memory of most of it. The leading hypothesis is that the extreme cold, like the near-freezing water, induced a rapid lowering of his metabot metabolic rate.
SPEAKER_07This is a very good segue into mine.
SPEAKER_05And so he that dramatically reduces oxygen consumption. And in essence, the same mechanism that like allows cold water drowning victims to survive, which is like it like calms down your nerve. Not calm. Okay, I don't know if you can be calm, but like it slows down your nervous system. Um so that's the only like hypothesis they have of like why that could have happened. And that's how he was able to like stretch that amount of gas that he had, like over 30 minutes, 33 minutes. Um, and guess what? Not only was he alive and neurologically intact and no long-term injury, but he's doing it. He returned to saturation diving within the year.
SPEAKER_07I mean, it's also one of those things, like at that point, you have such a specialized career, like what else will you do? Yeah, imagine going from that to just working a day job in an office.
SPEAKER_05Like and a lot of divers go back to it because it just you make good money and you have a majority of the year to yourself, you don't even have to work all year.
SPEAKER_07Or it's also kind of like when I've watched videos of people that do like mountaineering, for instance. Yeah, they do a lot of um, like I guess like what we would think like as dangerous activities to do in nature, primarily around climbing, I guess. And they talk about how it kind of kicks your body into a type of survival instinct that they find is more primal, yeah, and like in their words, kind of like superior. It's kind of like I'm going also all over the place, but I think people that do a lot of extreme type of like careers or hobbies, I feel like it might be rooted in that somewhere too. Or even like Alex MacDonald that um the free soloist, like he talks about how like once you experience that level of risk or like fear or like living on edge, then your day-to-day you become much more calmer. Because it's like right, it's like the example that he gave was like when he was at the airport, for instance, and like I think his like flight was like getting delayed or something like that. Like his friends, or was it his wife? I don't know, they were kind of like freaking out because like, oh you know, like that sucks, right? But he was just like there's bigger fish to fry, right? Literally, yeah, you know, so I don't know. All of this to say, like, I wonder if a part of it is like it gives you this perspective and you get to do something exciting, and like that's unknown. Yeah, all right, on to the last one. Um Grand finale. Okay, that's a lot of pressure and pressure. Okay, I don't really know what to say about that. So the profession
Cryonics Technician
SPEAKER_07that I'm gonna be talking about is a cryonic technician.
SPEAKER_05Oh do either of you know anything about it? No, I've never is this similar to cryogenics?
SPEAKER_06Hold on.
SPEAKER_07Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_08I think the answer is yes.
SPEAKER_07All right, okay. So to start off, cryonics technicians are different than cryogenic technicians.
SPEAKER_00Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_07So, like they're similar, but they're different. So, cryogenic technicians are typically involved with working with like cold temperatures, um, but it's the usual application is like in the industrial aerospace, like medical fields, versus a cryonics technician is specifically responsible for preserving a human body that has been confirmed as legally dead for future reanimation or revival. Oh, what? Yes, so this is something yeah, so this is something that like I have kind of heard of, but I just assume that like nobody's actually doing this, right?
SPEAKER_05Because it sounds like science fiction, yeah.
SPEAKER_07It doesn't sound real. It was giving like Avatar the last airbender when he like comes out of an ice cube or something, right?
SPEAKER_06How would you know that you haven't seen it?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I haven't. I watched the first episode of Okay, let me just call that out. Yeah, I have not seen it.
SPEAKER_05Some animosity.
SPEAKER_07So, right. So, like when I first came across this, I was like, what do you mean? Like, what do you mean that this is like an actual job? But it exists, although very few people and very few companies do it. So, to just like reiterate, essentially what cryonics is, is when somebody's considered, once somebody's considered legally dead, um, their body is preserved by essentially freezing it. I'm obviously like overly simplifying this process, I'm gonna get into it. And then the idea or the hope is that, you know, as the years progress, science is going to become more sophisticated so that at some point they can be like defrosted, and essentially, like whatever ailment they they had that kind of caused their death can be cured, and then they can henceforth go on living their life.
SPEAKER_05I cannot believe this is real. Like, there's a perpetual that does this.
SPEAKER_06This is like someone's been declared like been diagnosed terminally ill or something.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, terminally ill or they actually died.
SPEAKER_06No, they died. But then what do you mean revive them to continue on with their life? Like if they please explain further.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so the way this works is that okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna start from the way beginning, okay? So essentially people that believe in cryonics, like this is something that I read through articles online. So this is a dark quote. Cryonics supporters typically believe that death is a death is a process of deterioration and not the moment the heart stops. So if you continue with that like same line of thinking, once your heart stops, they don't think you're dead. You're only dead when your physical form starts like decaying and like well disintegrating, right? So if you freeze like a body, yeah, the idea is that at certain like decades down the road, when people are able to like do enough of research, they'll be able to reanimate the human body and yeah, keep keep on living.
SPEAKER_05I mean, I I can get this in theory. I guess what they're saying is like if someone dies from like a blocked artery that caused like a whatever, then maybe in the future they'll come up with some sort of way to like open that artery up and allow circulation that you can.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and get the whole thing moving. Oh, wait, but the uncertainty and the questions that you guys have around it, I mean, everyone does. Like people that even believe in cryonics, they're fully aware that there is not like a solution anytime soon.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_07And there, again, as I was reading articles, like people talk about how it's kind of funny, even though, like, you know, I work in cryonics, I'm pretty confident that the solution or like the ability to revive a human body is not gonna happen in my lifetime. Right. So, like, they're fully aware that this is not something that's going to be achievable anytime soon. But people that opt in for their bodies to be preserved cryonically, that's what I'm gonna call it. Yeah, like cryo preservation, believe that at some point that this could be a thing. Okay.
SPEAKER_05I mean, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense, right? Because what kills, what actually kills you is that your heart stops pumping or like you lose brain function. It's like that moment, right? But in that moment, if you could find a way to keep pumping the blood while you work on treating the part of your body that's causing that to happen, then technically it could work, right? If someone dies from like blump force trauma, right? They bled out, let's say, from like the bleeding from the trauma. If we could somehow like keep their blood circulating and then heal that actual wound, then maybe they wouldn't have died. It's just that split instance where they didn't get enough blood and they died. So it's almost like if you could freeze that time, like freeze that moment and then heal the thing causing the issue. Like people that die of septic shock, right? Like if you could just make it so that their yeah, prolong like their heart pumping, like all the the main functions that keep someone alive while they determine what the infection is and cure the infection, in theory, I can see it. Yeah, it's like freezing that moment.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I just think I see so many like logistical things come up, but yeah, I get the principle of what they're trying tooretically.
SPEAKER_07I was like, okay, I'm with you. Yeah, but it's like so out of pocket, in my opinion. So essentially, there are about like four major cryonics facilities in the world. Um, I believe one is in Russia, one is in China, and the two of them are in the States. And one of those I didn't know these even existed.
SPEAKER_05Like, this seems like entirely theoretical to me. I mean it is, it is, it doesn't like mentionable people putting money into the people put money into anything though.
SPEAKER_06Okay, fair on that note, I yeah. I went to this conference once and I was talking to this girl, and she was like, What's and I asked her, like, what's the craziest thing you've heard someone invest in? And she said, One time some PC was telling me that someone proposed like a cryo preservation technique, but for animals who pass away, like pets, they do it this way, yeah. Yeah, and like that, and he gave like millions of dollars for that.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And I mean, as I'm gonna like keep talking about it, um, yeah, a lot of people have their pets cryonically preserved.
unknownInteresting.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, so, anyways, as I mentioned, there's about there's about four like major facilities across the world. Um, and the most popular one goes by the name of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they're based out of Scotstool, Arizona, in the States. And so, like a lot of the like information that I've like brought together is based off of like what their process are processes are. However, I'm pretty sure they're like largely the same across the board because like frankly, there's only so many ways that you can squeeze a body and you know do so in a way that doesn't like ruin their organs. Um, so essentially, this the the way this process works is that in an ideal in an ideal path, I'm somebody who believes in wanting to preserve my body cryonically, right? And I reach out to El Core, I sign some type of contract or agreement, and my family obviously knows that this is something that I want to do. And when I, you know, do just whatever unfortunate events end up in the hospital, and I'm reaching the point of like, okay, like things are looking downwards for me. I'm getting into like a critical state with my health, Alcore is notified. Okay, so Alcore is notified. By the the person. The person, yeah, yeah, their their family, the person, whatever. Um, and then essentially they tell them, like, hey, I'm I'm about to touch death here, right? And so, in certain areas in the state, specifically Florida and Southern California, um, there are medical staff that are permanently stationed in those areas from Alcor that respond to these calls. And so they rush to the hospital and then they're basically on standby waiting for you to die.
SPEAKER_06And there's These are like licensed physicians or like yes.
SPEAKER_07So the people that are like the transporters, um, from what I gathered, most of them are like nurses or paramedics because like you need to know how to like deal with these scenarios. However, um, I did also find that like there's no like certification that you can get to become like a cryotic technician per se, right? Like it's it's a skill set you develop along the way, but typically people that are involved, like in the transportation, for instance, they're doctors, nurses, paramedics, which I also found interesting because like in theory, this is something I feel is almost, dare I say, like pseudoscience to me. And I would typically expect somebody that is in the healthcare field to like not believe in those things. Like, obviously, I'm making generalizations here, but like that's kind of what I assumed. But yeah, no, a lot of people that are involved come from healthcare backgrounds, but then of course, you also have like engineers and people that work in like bio, biotech, biomed.
SPEAKER_05Anyways, so then these people may or may not actually believe in it as much as they just like this is a good job.
SPEAKER_07No, honestly, money's not an incentive here. Oh, okay. For instance, like Alcor, um, they're a nonprofit. And not to say that nonprofits don't pay people out. Yeah, but it's not however it's not a very lucrative career. I also think that this is one of those things that, in my opinion, is so out of pocket that I I just I'm hard pressed to believe that the average person would do this unless they also believe in it themselves.
SPEAKER_05It depends on the monetary incentive. I think people would do a lot of crazy things for money.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, but yeah, if there isn't a monetary incentive, then like based on what I researched, like there also isn't like any hard evidence on like how much these people are paid because it's so niche and so random. Like you have people that are cryogenic technicians, right? And like if you use that as a base, they don't really they don't make like exuberant amounts of money. I think I saw around like 65k. Um, so I would assume that maybe this is in the ballpark. Or point is like I I genuinely just don't think money is an incentive here. I think it's people that find this work interesting or like find this as like a viable path. Um, but yeah, anyways, going back to the process. When somebody's pronounced legally dead, this medical staff from Alcor have to react very quickly because ischemia can settle. And ischemia is essentially when due to a lack of blood flow and oxygen, your cells and your organs begin to decay. And so we all kind of experience that to some degree in our day-to-day lives, like right now, actually. Like literally, I was gonna say, Yeah, yeah, like my foot is getting like tingling kind of numb, and it's because like there's not enough like blood flow going to it, right? But if I move it, I'll be okay. Yeah, and so all of this to say is like experiencing this for smaller periods of time, you're gonna be fine, but obviously the stakes are much higher when all of the oxygen is like gone from your body, or excuse me, I'm not using medically correct terms, I know, but I'm trying. And like your blood is not circulating, it's going to cause problems. So your body is then taken and put into like this. It honestly kind of looked like a like a narrow bathtub chamber thing.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_07Um, and it's filled with like ice and cold water, and that icy cold water mixture is getting circulated and pumped throughout that chamber, and that way your body's able to cool down really quickly and uh essentially uh delay the process of it decaying. And at the same time, um they need to like circulate enough of blood and give you like enough of oxygen to be able to give you this like certain medications or certain like substances to preserve your body. So to do that, they attach like a like a mechanical CPR machine and a respirator. And so once they do that, they're able to give you like a um anticoagulant, which is essentially preventing your blood, your blood from clotting during the whole transportation process.
SPEAKER_05Interesting. So at this point, like you're you're dead.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah. Your your death certificate is signed, the doctor is like, you're done, thank you, whatever. And now Alcor is like, it's my time to shine. Okay, yeah. So now your body is being like transported to the next location. Okay.
SPEAKER_06Can I just add that did a little a little shoulder shimmy when she transported? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Transportation gets me excited, guys. Okay. Um sorry, where was I? Yes. So then you get to the facility. Okay. So I at least nicely thought, like, okay, Slay, now just put this person in their like freezer and you're good to go. But you can't do that, right? Because like the human body has a lot of water. And if you just put the body into a freezer, you're going to develop like ice crystals like all across your organs and your body.
SPEAKER_05So it's gonna expand.
SPEAKER_07I don't know about that, but it's not gonna be good. Like you're not preserving, you're not preserving it.
SPEAKER_06Oh, water expands when it freezes. Yeah, yeah, there probably would be swelling.
unknownYeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Honestly, yeah, that would make a lot of sense. Maybe that is what it is. So, to basically prevent that from happening, you have to take out all the body, all the body, what is going on in me? All the water from the body and replace it with a chemical that's glycerol-based, and it's called cryoprotectant.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. So we use this in the lab. Oh, really? What capacity do you use? Freeze our cells for long-term storage.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so in fact, a common combination is like uh when you use like growth media for your cells, you use uh fetal bovine serum. So you when we freeze it, we combine like that serum with the dimethyl sulf oxide, and that's your freezing agent. Maybe there's no idea what that means. You can store your cells basically in like liquid nitrogen for months, years.
SPEAKER_07Okay, well, thanks for blowing up my entire story because that's exactly how this works. Okay, you can cut that out. Thanks a lot. No, keep that in. It was that I don't understand.
SPEAKER_06Very basic stuff.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
SPEAKER_07Well, you know what? For someone who's in this not a safe environment for me anymore. Oh gosh.
SPEAKER_02Anyways, good.
SPEAKER_07So yeah, I mean, I mean, I've explained it, but essentially, yeah, the cryoprotectant is like an anti-freeze, but for your human body. Um, and this whole process is called vitrification.
SPEAKER_05So then I can I just interject. I actually did a quick search, and yeah, it says the water content within the human body, which is over 60% water, uh, expands by about 9% upon freezing, which is a primary reason why direct unassisted freezing of a human body is currently fatal and not used in cryonics. When this water turns into sharp ice crystals, it expands and rips apart cellular membranes, destroying tissues from the inside. That's disturbing. And that explains it.
SPEAKER_07Continue. Um but yeah, so then at this point, you're kind of like prepped and ready to go. And so then you are put into dry ice until you have cooled to a negative 130 degrees Celsius.
SPEAKER_06This is crazy because we do this at the cellular level. Yeah, but they've just escalated to the whole body. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07In theory, like why not? Well, like why like why do you why do you guys like freeze yourself?
SPEAKER_06Just like for long-term storage when you don't need them immediately, which is the principle. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And then when you like defrosted, they just it just works.
SPEAKER_06There's some there's cell death, so it's not like they don't grow as rapidly or as frequently as before, but yeah, they recovered.
SPEAKER_07Maybe this isn't a pseudo science, and maybe this is like a legitimate.
SPEAKER_06Well, I think on like a smaller level it works. This is a one-cell type experiment I'm talking about. This is a full composite human being.
SPEAKER_05So Well, what you're talking about is also like human cells. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07So then eventually you're put into like a tank of liquid nitrogen, and that is maintained at 196 degrees Celsius. And yeah.
SPEAKER_05196 degrees Celsius? Negative. Negative, okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_07I feel like I was implied. We're freezing people here. In liquid nitrogen.
SPEAKER_03I got really confused for something.
SPEAKER_07Okay, sorry. In a negative 190. Oh. What? No, no, speak your truth. Freezing or boiling, but yeah, freezing. Freezing. Guys, this whole thing has to do with freezing people. Okay. Um, but yeah, and then you're kind of kept in your chamber and you're held in perpetuity until they figure out a solution for this. And every so often, you know, the liquid nitrogen needs to be like replenished because like small amounts of it evaporate. So at that point, people have to crack your little chamber open, I guess, and deal with that.
SPEAKER_06Who's paying the maintenance fees for this facility for these services?
SPEAKER_05I mean, I think it's like when you freeze your eggs. Like, I think the the customers or the clients have to pay the fee to maintain maintain it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, so most of Alcor's members fund their cryonic preservation through life insurance policies. And so Alcor is deemed as a beneficiary, and that's how that's gonna pay for. Like it's definitely a very expensive undertaking. Um, and it can cost like between like I think what I saw is if you want to get your whole body preserved, it could be around like 120 to 150k.
SPEAKER_06So what like annual?
SPEAKER_07I I think it's like that's the fee.
SPEAKER_05Oh, it's like a one-time fee? I think so. Oh how is that possible? Like, how are they keeping maintenance fees? That's so interesting.
SPEAKER_07So they have like um they have like a trust that they basically like invest this money through. Yeah. It's from what I understood. Yeah, I mean it says indefinitely when I looked it up. Yeah. And then if you you also have the option of where you just preserve your head and your brain. And that is for eighty thousand dollars. And so the idea with that is not only are you hoping Yeah, of course, it's not the whole body, lesser cells, lesser space. And so the idea is that not only do you have faith that someday there's gonna be enough of modern medicine and technology to reanimate a human being successfully, but on top of that to also reclone your body or be able to like connect your head and brain onto another human body.
SPEAKER_06Have you seen the three-body problem?
SPEAKER_07Or just AI. You're just like a head and you're connected to some sort of like maybe I'll check it out now.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_07Um but yeah, that's essentially what happens. And not only yeah, so what I was going back to what I was saying earlier, so you can either preserve like your body, your whole body, your head, or what No offense. I thought it was kind of crazy. People preserve their pets.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And so But then, like, your pet is gonna be alive in the potential future without you if they do succeed in this. Unless they also plan on also doing that to themselves as well.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like I had so many questions about this. And I think the reason why like this profession was really interesting to me is not even so much about what it is that the people are doing, but all the implications of it. Yeah. Because my thing is that, like, not only do you have faith that this is something that can be dealt with at some point, but then what is your game plan? Like, for instance, if I wanted to have my body preserved like this, right? And then there's enough science now that I can be thawed and like, you know, fixed or whatever, and I can continue living my life, but who am I living my life with?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Like, I mean, immortality argument too.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Like, I would need to like freeze, make sure all my friends, all my family are freezing themselves too. Otherwise, like 70, 50, like 100 years from now, who am I hanging out with? Like, what the hell am I gonna do?
SPEAKER_05But you know what's even more another another layer is at what age do you freeze yourself, right? You're freezing yourself after natural death, which could be very when you're very old. Yeah. So let's say you're like in your 80s and you freeze yourself, and they find a way to unfreeze you. As soon as you're unfrozen and you're alive again, your cells start to decay. Like you age naturally the way we all age. Yeah. So then what you are revived for another 10 years, maybe.
SPEAKER_07But I do think people that believe in this, like you have to be pretty hardcore with it. And I I I think a large amount of them also believe in reversing aging. So they believe that they'll be brought back to life, and then they can be their age can be reversed so they can live a full life, or at least like extended beyond just like the what the 20 additional years that you might get, or 10 additional years you might get.
SPEAKER_05That's because in my mind, I'm like, okay, I die at 80, and then 100 years down the line, I'm back again for like two weeks, and then then what? Right?
SPEAKER_07Two weeks of misery just living alone, and you don't know anyone. But not only that, like the acclimatization process. Like, great. Now I just felt like I woke, I woke up from like a 30-minute nap.
SPEAKER_06But it's say you wake up a century later.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like how do I even reintegrate it to society?
SPEAKER_06It is Avatar the Last Urban.
SPEAKER_07There you go. Like, what am I supposed to do?
SPEAKER_05What I wouldn't know.
SPEAKER_07I know neither of us have watched it, but like within my like our lifetimes, for instance, there's so much change, there's so much growth that has happened. Now take that, and it's only going like faster.
unknownExponentially.
SPEAKER_07How do you even catch up? Like, what is the meaning of your life at that point? Like, great, now what? And like I was watching a video where with the former CEO of Al Alcor, um, like he mentioned this off-handedly, but like one of the youngest patients that they have preserved as such, I believe was like two or three years old. And she had brain cancer. Um, and so and her family was based in Thailand and essentially like their parents wanted to preserve her body with the idea that hopefully, I guess, in the future she would be interested. Like helped. Yeah. And what I also thought was interesting is that both of her parents were doctors.
SPEAKER_06Wow.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Oh. So I I I do think there's a lot of, I don't know, I think there's a lot of factors into it. I think people that do that for their like kids or people that are minors, I think it's like a really warped way of grieving, or I guess like not grieving, because in your mind it's like they will be okay in the future. And I'm still holding on to them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I think it's a definition of what is it, what is okay, you know what I mean? And what people what do people consider to be a good life, right? Like, are you really alive if you're just here completely alone and like isolated? I mean, I guess the idea is that a two-year-old could still have a full life where they grow up without their family that they like had at birth, but they could still build a full life with a family that like a new family.
SPEAKER_06But it's having faith on this well, essentially unestablished protocol or concept. So yeah.
SPEAKER_05I mean, I think if you think that on the other the what's gonna happen to them on the other side when they're revived is positive, then I guess the thinking is that there is no harm. If they're gonna sit in a grave site, they could just be frozen. And if there's a possibility, then they could like I think I can see it more for like a minor.
SPEAKER_09Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Because they could still have a whole life, they can build their own family, they can yeah, in theory. Whereas someone that's like a fully like conscientious adult that has already lived a life, it feels weird. And I also wonder, like, I mean, I'm sure there's like we don't really know how this would go, but like do you still preserve your memories?
SPEAKER_07That was my other question, like thought as well. But I think they're again like what I've like seen online, like the idea is yes, because like if I'm keeping my the brain intact and I'm preserving it in a way where it's not been decayed or whatever it might be, you would have your memories.
SPEAKER_05And then I was saying, but I'm but if you have like like even people in general, like if you have a lack of oxygen to your brain for a period of time, you lose your memories from that time, not definitively, but it does matter.
SPEAKER_07But that's why they're trying to like act quickly.
SPEAKER_06Uh I'm sure they're uh they've modeled this on a cellular level, but of course that can't replicate the whole brain.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and and the way I was thinking about it too is like, you know, we do obviously hear stories about people that like die, but then they come back to life, right? And like it's within like a very short period of time, and I mean they still have their memories. By and large, by and large, a lot of them still have their memories. I think that's like the same idea.
SPEAKER_05I will say, like, the science behind it isn't does not feel unattainable to me. Yeah, I think it's more so like just the I mean I guess ethical isn't the right word, but the dilemma of like, is that a life worth preserving? Where you wake up and you don't know you like everyone that you loved and care about is no longer there.
SPEAKER_07Um, but anyways, go back to like Alcort. So they have about 250 patients to date that are preserved. And they have about 1,500 members that are committed to future preservation. So like when they have to take care of it.
SPEAKER_05A lot of celebrities, I think.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, so obviously it's gonna be high-paying clients and people that are celebrities that are like have access to this, or if I'm being blunt, I feel like it's also you need to have a certain level of ego, no offense, or like this desire to continue your legacy on that you would want to do something like this. So all the billionaires, yeah. Cause like in my head, I'm like, man, like it's fine. What the hell am I gonna do? Like, yeah, once I'm done, I'm done. But another another interesting thing is that like I've said interesting thing like a million times, but anyhow, um, obviously there's a lot of like legal concerns around this, and one of them being, as you said, it can make sense if I'm like still young and like relatively healthily able-bodied-ish, and then I for whatever reason pass and then I do this, right? Um, but but then obviously there's like this desire where you want to have that setup, or like, sorry, what I'm trying to say is like, let's say I'm somebody at the age of 26, right? I know I have like a terminal health condition that's only gonna get worse, and I believe in cryonics, right? I would want to ideally freeze my body before it becomes completely consumed by whatever this disease is, but you can't do that because then that's considered murder. So you have to legally wait for someone to die before you do this.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. But I'm sure that there will be people eventually that will believe so heavily and strongly in this idea that they would want to like preserve themselves before they actually are ill in any way.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And there have been some controversies as well.
SPEAKER_08Okay, let's hear it.
SPEAKER_07So basically, um there's a board member's mother by the name of Dora Kent, and when they there was a controversy around the fact that apparently she was murdered with barbiturates before her head was removed for preservation. Alcor contended that the drug was administered after her death. Um, but the judge ultimately ruled that Kent was already deceased at the time of preservation and no foul play was involved. Um, but then Alcor essentially sued the county for like false arrests and like illegal seizure and whatnot. Um, and they won both suits. And surprisingly though, like, yes, they were considered they didn't do any harmful, like they didn't have any harmful play in that. Um, but personally I would still be a little nervous. I hear this whole thing on the news. I wouldn't think that, like, yeah, let me go, let me go freeze my body. But no, it kind of acted as like a marketing thing for them, and membership grew as a result.
SPEAKER_06Interesting.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um wait, it got it acted as positive marketing because they weren't convicted.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and then people are now starting to hear about this that this is even a thing that could happen. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Maybe that was the initial intent.
SPEAKER_07Maybe. Maybe. And then yeah, so there's also like other like athletes and celebrities that want to be preserved at like who? So there is this. Um, so right now the one of the stored patients is Dick Clare, an Emmy Award-winning TV writer and producer, um, Hall of Fame baseball legend Ted Williams, and his son John Henry Williams.
unknownOh my god.
SPEAKER_07And the last thing I'm gonna talk about is actually the origin story of Alcor, which I found really fascinating.
SPEAKER_05Oh, Steve Ayoki. Oh, yeah. He has arranged for cryopreservation. Oh wait. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder.
SPEAKER_06Oh, that one makes sense.
SPEAKER_05Um Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um who else? There was a bunch of others, but those were the ones that I know of. But yeah, interesting.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, anyways, so just wrap it up. The reason why all of this began is when Fred Chamberlain's father he suffered from like a stroke in like the mid-1960s. So this has been going around for some time. I mean, anyways, I was known from like that other case that I was mentioning. And so Fred and Linda Chamberlain were like husband and wife, and they just could not essentially like cope with the fact that um, you know, the father, like Fred's father has passed. And so that's when they incorporated Elk for Life Extension Foundation. Um and like he was kind of the reason for why they wanted to explore this food and like look into how to preserve like his body. And um Fred is now actually chiropreserved at Alcorr. And he was like the first preserved person.
SPEAKER_06Crazy like first preserved human in history.
SPEAKER_07I don't think he's the first human because like I think they've they were trying to do that anyways, but he was the first like Alcor, and that was like by Alcor, and that's kind of their origin story. Interesting. Would would you guys preserve your bodies crap?
SPEAKER_05No, no, if that wasn't already clear for my entire ramble about the my body is not doing so great at the moment, anyways.
SPEAKER_07So that's why people would want to preserve that in hopes that it can be fixed in the future.
SPEAKER_05I'm good. I'm unless like every single person I love and care about decides to also we need to sign like a pact.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, like if everyone's gonna sign up for it, maybe I would consider it. Okay, so like what if I signed up for this? Would you guys do it in solidarity? No. I'm gonna need more than one person. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_06I'm gonna need like I'm sorry. I I have no interest in waking up potentially a century later.
SPEAKER_07But like it'd be the three of us together and we could continue our podcast. True. One more tab, defrosted. I don't know. Maybe I'll be a convert, you know. Catch me wanting to freeze my body in a couple years. Also, like I'm out here concerned if I can ever afford to buy a house. Where the hell am I gonna produce $150,000 to freeze my body? Like, please, let me go.
SPEAKER_06Imagine registering a savings account for this purpose. Let me go to Scotiabank.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's like what are you what are your investment horizons? Forever. Just keep it going.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Thank you guys for joining us. A few people that actually listened to our entire podcast. Yeah, you're the actual day one. Yeah. Um, but yeah, just a quick disclaimer. Obviously, um we will leave our sources that we use to research all these topics, but you know, we are not experts. We're not even in the neighborhood of experts. So that wasn't already clear. Yes, we're just crazy things said. Yes. So yeah, don't quote anything we've said, but hopefully this could be like a good starting point if you want to like learn more about these topics and just hang out with us and you know, hopefully have a good time. Yeah. Okay, so until next time.
SPEAKER_02One more tab out.