One of the more unsettling things I've read lately

I have the impression of Patri Friedman as the third-generation product of a libertarian cult. In multi-generational cults the adherents adopt certain beliefs which may make sense within the context of the cult's world view, but which sound weird when outsiders hear about them. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has become the butt of jokes about the magic Mormon underwear he might wear, for example.

For another example, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the second-generation product of libertarian cultism, has complained recently about the government's tyranny in favoring low-flush toilets and fluorescent light bulbs, two products which generate grievances in libertarian literature. Yet when Senator Paul said this at a public hearing in the Senate, he met with ridicule from people with more mainstream views.

So Patri Friedman has announced that he has made arrangements for cryonic suspension for both himself and his family. I don't consider that necessarily cultish, of course. (When someone gets cryonics to work, as in the first successful revival of a functional person, people will stop calling cryonics "denial," "false hope," and the other familiar dismissals, and call it something more like "extreme trauma medicine" instead.) For some reason high-school dropout and work-avoider Eliezer Yudkowsky got involved, and Friedman recounts the following conversation between his 5-year-old son Tovar and Yudkowsky:

Patri: Hey Tovar, I'm signing you up for cryonics.
Tovar: What's that?
Patri: What that means is, if you die in a car accident, we're going to freeze you until someday in the future hopefully someone will bring you back AS A TRANSFORMER!
Tovar: Yay, AWESOME! Who will bring me back?
Eliezer: Ahem. Me. Well, indirectly.
Tovar: You? How?
Eliezer: Who makes Transformers?
Tovar: Primus!
Eliezer: Well, who made Primus?
Tovar: I don't know.
Eliezer: I'm like whoever made Primus to make the Transformers.
Tovar: oh.

I laughed at this, but something about the exchange also made me uneasy. If the Friedmans celebrate christmas (I wouldn't assume that, of course), would Patri have Yudkowsky put on a Santa suit and tell Tovar that he owns the workshop at the North Pole which makes the toys Tovar gets for christmas?

This exchange also sheds some light on Yudkowsky's delusions of grandeur. Wikipedia describes the character Primus from the Transformers franchise as:

the "benevolent" godlike entity in the fictional Transformers comic universe who fought against the Chaos-Bringer Unicron. The Lord of the Light, Primus is the being who created the Transformers to help him defeat Unicron.

Yudkowsky thinks he can create a "godlike entity"? And Friedman goes along with this? What other weird beliefs does Friedman plan to indoctrinate into Tovar as he creates yet another generation of libertarian cultists?