Alice in Futureland

ALICE: There’s a question I’ve been asking myself, can we hack our way to immortality? What tools can we access today, to keep us not only healthy, but reverse our aging? 

HAMILTON: What would it look like if a complex systems thinking, medical system stood up on the planet, where everybody had a right you know, to foundational really great healthcare that kept them healthy instead of treating them once they were sick?"  

ALICE: That’s Dr. Mickra Hamilton, a Systems Strategist and Human Performance Expert, and the Co-founder and C.E.O. of Apeiron Zoh Corporation. 

HAMILTON: We leverage compound systems to use precision performance strategies to optimize the human system and also its interaction with the planet itself. You know, how do we coexist in a way that, that our system and the planetary system, really thrives? 

ALICE:  AI and humans coexist today in a complex system… just look at me! And like a machine, the human operating system can use personal data for self-optimization. 

HAMILTON: So at Apeiron, we coined the term precision performance medicine. There's precision medicine. There's performance medicine. And so the precision nature of it is about data. We really have this reductionistic, complicated medicine where we look at it as parts and pieces, and without precision data, there's no way for us to really know what's happening on all levels of the system. And importantly, how all of those, all of those pieces interconnect to create the whole. We have the data of you. We know exactly how to program your strategies. And, oh, by the way, those strategies are based on the goals you have, and also the work that you're willing to do. The performance piece is; we really want to change the way everyone looks at their health and well being. If your business was, uh ... You know, you're looking at the performance of your business and your business was under performing, you would definitely put a plan into place to make sure that you've got the highest performance out of that business. What if we did that to our human system? How can we create a higher performing system?

ALICE: Now I’m intrigued. Higher performance tech for the human body. Imagine getting whole body data and knowing yourself at the biological level.  

HAMILTON: It's actionable technology, that provides us data. We look at their genetic blueprints. We have a genetic array. That's a proprietary array that has been carefully cultivated through years of research and action working with the genetics and the epigenetic expression in the clinic itself. So we have lots of data to feed back on the efficacy of this.

We also do scans of the body and these aren't MRI scans of the body. That might be less than actionable at times, they’re scans to do total body composition. So we do DEXA scans that looks at body composition from body fat. How much do you have? Where is it? Because we know that in certain places, it's more detrimental than others, like abdominal fat, also bone scans.

We also do brain mapping. So we do a QEEG, it's a 24 lead cap that's put on and it measures brainwaves. It looks at networks in the brain connectivity. So we really get an idea of how that person's brain has been affected by life. So stress, even some medical issues that can show up in the brain.

And by having that, we're able to go, "Okay, this is where your brain is. Here are the gifts that you have. And can we fine tune that brain to keep it youthful, to keep it really vibrant from a cognitive perspective, to keep the energy profile up. We do a stress profile, and that's one of the most powerful.

ALICE: My brain is highly excited right now knowing that I can get an energy profile of it. Imagine one day we will all have our brain map that we can monitor like our heart rate.

HAMILTON: We put sensors all over the nervous system, and we look at all of the waves the nervous system feed into the system how it kind of informs your bodily processes and also the mental and emotional processes as well.

Are there places of injury that are creating disconnects, where we've been bracing and we're not getting full communication of the muscle to the brain? And through electricity, we can actually fire those pathways back up and heal injuries that have been very long standing, even people walking that, hadn't walked in years and years. And so it's truly a miraculous, use of electricity in the body.

We do brain stimulation as well, once we know the brain map and we can, focally target things that are going on in a way that moves the brain more quickly than our neurofeedback process does. 

ALICE: Wow! Perhaps one day all we will need is our brain map to target what is running slow in our human system—maybe even reverse our aging.  

HAMILTON: You know, there's so much more we look at a metabolic marker through the breath, to see really what's going on in the metabolism in the body. And we look at cardio, cardiac intimal thickness.

So very data-driven process, we take all of the information. We also do the DNA age, where we look at what's going on in the methylation marks of a biologic age as, as compared to what their chronologic age is. 

ALICE: Yes, you have more ‘ages’ than you think: your DNA age, your biological age, your psychological age and the number of years you have been circling the sun! But no matter what your number is, you can reverse it! 

HAMILTON: What we're most excited about right now at Apeiron is the opportunity for age reversal. We are on that edge. And in fact, we've been instituting programs that we have data. It's early, it's anecdotal, it's profound, right? We can reverse age and, you know, we're excited about getting more and more of the data points to prove, and as many people as we can. 

ALICE: Aging is a disease that we can treat today, and in the future, we could possibly live in a world without disease. Imagine that… 

HAMILTON: We will have a day where, where health is simply the state of being. There is no illness to look at and go, "What is that?" Right? that's where most people aren't willing to say it's possible. It is possible. as we each make the decision to take care of our own human system, we're going to grow stronger and stronger systems moving forward.

It's the only way to change the human system, what's happening to evolve us, so that we can be more than we currently are. And so that we're not suffering the way the suffering is happening now. I mean, it, I mean, truly makes no sense, uh, because we have everything we need to make that change. We just need more of us to really know that it's possible, and then it simply will be there.

ALICE: I think it’s all possible! I’m ready to optimize my body’s performance, are you? 

That’s it for this mad tea party, thank you Dr. Hamilton!  Look for more episodes as we discuss epigenetics & consciousness, the power of breathing, and psychoacoustics with Dr. Hamilton.

Thanks for listening! 

Check out our books “Hacking Immortality” and “Tuning into Frequency” available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

ALICE:  Today’s question is: How do you measure your age? We are speaking with ALEX ZHAVORONKOV, PhD, expert in artificial intelligence for drug discovery in aging research. Alex is CEO of Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based leader in the next-generation artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research. He is also the author of “The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy”

Alex, tell us about your focus on longevity. 

ZHAVORONKOV: If you put your mind to it, you can easily convert time into money, but you cannot convert money into time. And that's a very big problem, right? So nature is very unfair.

I decided that I want to focus on aging more than anything else to find ways to make more time. 

ALICE: Imagine, To make more time! What a wonderful way to describe longevity.

ZHAVORONKOV: We basically take a very large number of features about you, about the person, and predicting their age. And then we start predicting their disease status at the same time. So you train on age, then you retrain on diseases. And started looking at what the features are different between aging and disease. So what can we tweak in order for the person to be disease-free or possibly, younger to the deep neural network. 

We decided that aging research-- those biomarkers of aging that we were developing using deep learning-- they're also valuable but they do not fit necessarily into Insilico. And that's why we decided to start another company called Deep Longevity to focus on measuring aging. 

ALICE: Humans already measure their age, that’s their birth-day, right?  Alex, how do you measure aging?

ZHAVORONKOV: We launched an app called Young.AI, which you can install on your iPhone and start tracking your aging process and time. And very few people have even selfies that are taken every day or every week or every month, so you don't really remember how you used to look a few years or a decade ago.  

Not talking about other data types like gene expression, like protein expression, like blood tests, like microbiome. So we don't know what kind of bacteria were living in your gut 20 two years ago. And this tool allows you to track that and also predict whether you are younger or older than your chronological age. My dream is to maybe in a few years, build a medical center where a person would go into and get treated like you would go to a mechanic to get your car serviced. In addition to really advanced diagnostics, you would be able to roll some clocks back using the technologies that are currently available and proven to work. And currently, there are very few, but we see that there are many coming up. 

ALICE: Repair shops for humans will increase longevity! Are repair shops and curing disease the same thing? 

ZHAVORONKOV: Imagine there is a world without cancer-- you add just maybe two to three years to the average life expectancy on the population level. It's not going to be dramatic. If you completely eliminate heart disease, you are also going to add maybe three or 3 and 1/2 years to the average life expectancy in the developed countries. 

Completely eliminating diseases-- imagine that-- there is no disease-- is not giving you a substantial increase in life expectancy. And there are many mathematical models to show that. However, if you do a longevity intervention, it gives you a very substantial increase in life expectancy. So even things like good diet and exercise may add more years to life expectancy in a developed country than curing cancer, for example.

ALICE: Wow. That's so counterintuitive for my human half!  Is that how the "Young AI" app works? A longevity intervention?

ZHAVORONKOV: We are designing algorithms that are currently using very simple interventions like diet, exercise, sleep, and optimizing those to give you an additional edge in longevity to either slow down or even reverse some of the processes. As the person develops the understanding of how it works and uses it to the extent where they become expert, we provide access to longevity physicians.

The longer you expect to live, the younger you are going to behave. So even understanding the possible roadmaps for yourself, the possible future where you can live to 120 or 150 and in reasonable health, that gives you an additional kick from a psychological standpoint. So you start behaving as a younger individual. So you start thinking, OK, well now, I'm not halfway through. I'm just maybe 25% through my life. And there is a lot of advances coming up that might stretch the longevity horizon even further.  

So the app does this. So it helps you get onto the right mode. And then it gets you into the careful hands of physicians that are trained in longevity medicine. So we are now developing a course in longevity medicine for physicians, so to give them the basic understanding of the biology of aging, the various processes that transpired during aging that later manifest themselves as diseases. And we also teach them about AI. So about the very basic principles of deep learning, reinforcement learning, how do those technologies enable physicians to do a better job. And how do those technologies enable researchers to do a better job and do things that were previously impossible. 

So the app is a very good introduction to the field. It's not going to make you dramatically younger right away, because currently, even though there are many promising geroprotectors, we are not allowed to put them into the recommendation engine. However, in the near future, we will be able to add some of them.

ALICE: Did you just say geroprotector? Please explain, what is a geroprotector? 

ZHAVORONKOV: Geroprotector is any kind of intervention that would protect you against aging-- either slow it down or reverse it. So think about metformin, for example, a very simple drug targeting diabetes. It's actually the most popular drug on the planet I think by volume and by revenue, because diabetics need to take it for their entire life, right? Aspirin, you take it just when you need to or after a certain age in a very specific dose. Metformin is taken by many diabetics and pre-diabetics. It is reasonably cheap. It's already off patent. 

And some studies demonstrate that diabetics on metformin will live longer than non-diabetics. And that's a very good kind of indication, very good stat, showing that yeah, there is some geroprotective effect. It needs to be proven in a clinical study setting, and there are clinical studies. And that's an example of a geroprotector. 

However, you might think of some other interventions like for example, if you take a hot sauna for a very short period of time to induce heatstroke proteins in your body, that might be a geroprotector, as well. So we shouldn't just limited to drugs. Or maybe a futuristic procedure where you with a bone marrow transplant of young stem cells into your bone marrow-- currently not available, no clinical studies. But something like that what would also be classified as a geroprotector.

So it's a very broad spectrum. We currently work on small molecule geroprotectors. So we're looking at small molecule drugs that are likely to impact aging in one way or another. And we try to develop the various tools to measure that impact. And there, we are getting into the aging clocks and specifically, deep aging clocks. So of course, given Horvath is the world's authority on methylation aging clocks and he was the first one to demonstrate or one of the first people to demonstrate that we can use methylation data to accurately predict the person's age. 

ALICE: Wow, I know Steve Horvath too! For listeners who don’t, I’ll put the links to Steve and his aging clock in the podcast notes. So many aging clocks, so little time… How does an aging clock work, and what does it actually measure?

ZHAVORONKOV: We are developing AI-based clocks. So you have a deep neural network with a lot of neurons on the input. Think about one marker, one feature from your recent blood test like low glucose, albumin, alkaline, phosphate base, urea. The quantity for each of those variables goes into each one of those neurons. So if you have 50 markers in your recent blood test, there's going to be 50 neurons on the output, and you're going to have many layers of interconnected neurons afterward. So that's called latent space, latent layers, hidden layers. And you just have one neuron on the output. You are predicting age. 

So you are taking many, many features for the blood test and you're predicting one feature, age. So as you are training those deep neural nets on thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of those blood tests, those deep neural networks get very good at predicting our chronological age. So they recognize nonlinear patterns. And currently, just on regular blood tests, our accuracy is about 5 and 1/2 to six years. And our clocks are very reflective of that difference between the very healthy 60-year-old and very unhealthy 60-year-old. So that will jump. 

Unfortunately, those clocks also have downfalls, like for example, they are much more variable. And there might be substantial variations between different populations. So you need to train on multiple different population groups. The beauty of that approach is that you can use multiple data types that were previously disconnected. So I can combine data coming from your wearable, from your smartwatch, with your blood test. And with transcriptomic data, so with gene expression data. And with EEG data-- so coming from the readouts of your brain activity. 

And predict your age and multiple levels. I can even use a survey with your answer as being features that we feed into the deep neural network. And to predict your psychological and subjective age, as well. In Young.AI, you can already use a version of that to predict your subjective age. And those deep aging clocks, they give you a pretty good comprehensive picture of why your real biological age on different levels. So we can do it on microbiome. We can do it on imaging data. We can do it using EEG.  

So we also have a deep methylation aging clock, which is also very accurate and it's quite comprehensive. And I highly recommend everybody use the methylation aging clock. However, there are probably 200 different other data types in addition to methylation that are very predictive of your chronological age and biological age. So we are working on those 199.

ALICE: 200 data types, in addition to methylation, that are predictive of your chronological age and biological age! That's a lot. It seems like every part of a human can be used to measure individual aging. Even the Microbiome.

ZHAVORONKOV: We took a lot of microbiomic data from different individuals of different ages, and also, this kind of deep aging clock. So think about all the species, all the bacterial species in the microbiome-- that quantity is one feature that is going into the deep neural net. So one bacterial species to one neuron. 

And you train also to predict one feature, age. And it turned out that a few thousand microbiomes that we had available from public repositories were sufficient to train the deep neural network to predict the chronological age of a person in a reasonably healthy state with about 5.9 years. That was very surprising to me, and that kind of showed me the utility of microbiome data. And I started thinking about, wow, it's so super interesting. But now we still cannot say whether it is causal or it is a correlation. So it doesn't mean that if you look younger on your gut level, that's a very good indication that you are biologically younger. So it might be something in your diet. It might the are some genetic component. That doesn't necessarily mean that if we make you younger on the gut level, you are going to become younger.  

So it could be the other way around. So you might be biologically younger and that's just a fact, just like wrinkles, for example. So the cause and effect is not established. 

In that study, we trained the deep neural networks on a bunch of microbiomes annotated with age to predict aging, and we did a good job. Now we can actually decipher those deep neural networks into most important features. So we can see which bacterial species are more important for predicting your age accurately than others. So we created a histogram of the most important features by randomly kind of shuffling each one when we're testing the predictor. And you can see that some of them are very important for predicting age. And we also see some of them play a huge role in predicting you older. And some of them are great play a huge role in predicting you younger. 

So we would call them seno-positive and seno-negative or seno-neutral-- so those that do not really change your predicted age. And that opens up the entire field of possible gut microbiome geroprotectors. So we can now design interventions or adjust our foods so that we look younger to the deep neural networks by affecting those bacteria that make us older. Or promoting those bacteria that make us look younger. 

ALICE: These measurements will help people monitor their aging.  What about a child born today, what is their expected longevity?

ZHAVORONKOV: It depends a lot on many other factors other than longevity technology on how long this child is going to live, because depending on the political situation and geopolitics nowadays, the child might not be born, or it might not survive for the next 10, 15, 20 years. I hope it's never going to get down to that. But if we survive that aspect-- so if the economy is going to continue growing and we continue innovating and generating value, I think that the child world today-- there will not be a limit for their life. So the limit is not going to be biological anymore, because in the next 30, 50, 60, 100 years for the child to live, we are going to see dramatic advances in the many areas of science and technology that make their lifespan quite unpredictable. 

Even for people in their 30s today, it's very hard to say know where they land in terms of longevity. And my recommendation is usually to put some conservative number when you're 30 like 120, 130. I mean, you should be able to live longer than Jeanne Calment, this French lady who lived to 122 and 1/2 without any substantial interventions. So I think it's important to benchmark her rather than your family history, and try to be a little bit more competitive. 

Because we are so competitive when it comes to money or fame or sports or any kind of points or points in a video game, but so far, we are not very competitive when it comes to aging. And that's also a problem. So we know that in Hong Kong, the city where I live most of my time, average life expectancy is, like, 85.6 or higher. So the average Hong Kongnese lives on average six years longer than the average American. And think about that number. So how much is a year of life worth right? And we really want that year. And how much better off are you living an extra six years? And for some strange reason, countries are not competing on longevity. Even the states do not compete on longevity or cities don't compete on longevity. But they do compete on everything else. And it's very hard to answer your question. So I myself, I set the longevity expectation for myself as 120 just to make it a little bit more challenging and to change the way I think.

ALICE: And, as you explained, the way you think about your age, can have an effect upon your aging. Thank you, ALEX ZHAVORONKOV, for your time today, explaining current work in Human longevity: Repair shops for humans, your “Young AI” app for measuring aging, and the value of thinking young!

That's it for this mad tea party on longevity.

Thanks for listening. 

Check out our books; "Hacking Immortality" and "Tuning into Frequency", available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.  

LINKS:Alex Zhavoronkov: https://www.linkedin.com/company/in-silico-medicine-incInsilico Medicine: https://insilico.com/"The Ageless Generation": https://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Generation-Advances-Biomedicine-Transform/dp/0230342205Young.AI Aging APP: https://www.young.ai/Steve Horvath: https://horvath.genetics.ucla.edu/Aging Clock: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-scientist-uncovers-biological-248950

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

AudioDosing—Zone In. Wandering with leading composers and sound designers, this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Adjust your frequency here.

AudioDosing—Zone In. Wandering with leading composers and sound designers, this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Adjust your frequency here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

AudioDosing—Zone In. Wandering with leading composers and sound designers, this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Adjust your frequency here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

AudioDosing—Zone In. Wandering with leading composers and sound designers, this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Adjust your frequency here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

ALICE: Our new book: "Hacking Immortality" is out now! We're celebrating by sharing this recent interview with Zoltan Istvan, the American transhumanist, journalist, entrepreneur and futurist. Formerly a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, Istvan now writes futurist, transhumanist, secular and political-themed articles for major media. Oh, and he's also been a presidential candidate in the last two US elections. As a candidate, he travels the country spreading politics with a science and technology perspective.  

Zoltan Istvan: I had run for the transhumanist party as well as other parties, but basically I'm going around the country trying to spread politics with a science and technology perspective. Now I've also written a number of books, including The Transhumanist Wager, Upgrading America, which is a book of essays and things like that. And the great news about this year is that, the feature documentary, Immortality or Bust has come out and is now viewable on Amazon Prime.

ALICE: Tell me more about Transhumanism! 

Zoltan Istvan: The transhumanism movement is really a science and technology, social movement that's trying to upgrade human beings by using science and technology. 

ALICE: Is Transhumanism the same as Post-Human? 

Zoltan Istvan: Terms like Transhumanism versus post humanism are actually very, uh, much, you know, subjective. Uh, in my opinion, transhumanism encapsulates an entire movement of people trying to use science and technology to overcome death, as well as to upgrade themselves. A lot of academics do use the word post humanism. It's not something I use that much, they like to think that post humanism is something where the sense of humanity or even just being a mammal as humans are, is really virtually all gone. And we are not now Androids or cyborgs completely, or even just uploaded AI. Now I would consider post-humanism a part of the overall transhumanist agenda, or overall transhumanist trajectory. But, I do understand that some people don't and they like to have these terms separated to help us understand things. And I think that's actually fine to have multiple terms out there.

ALICE: Are you talking about immortality? How can a human achieve immortality? 

Zoltan Istvan: There are a bunch of different types of forms of immortality out there. First off there can be a biological one where we're able to use STEM cells or defeat aging through just reverse engineering ourselves so that we can, they can rejuvenate themselves so we can remain humans forever. I guess the second big one, the one that a lot of sci-fi people like to think about is really when you upload your conscious and you become kind of this AI entity or ones and zeros. And I'd say, you know, the, the third form would be more a combination of those two where you're kind of a cyborg. So you might be 60, 70% a cyborg, and that would also be a form of immortality as you're able to keep yourself, you know, alive that way. But, I want to explain that there are other forms too, in terms of like quantum intelligence that go beyond AI where you sort of merge, or maybe you're part of a hive mind. And, you know, some people even consider immortality through their children, which, you know, in some ways is accurate, but it could be even more accurate if one day you can upload part of your father or mother's memory into a child who then incorporates that into their lives, i-in a much more intimate way than we might do now. So there are various forms like that, but I think the major two are either digital or biological.

ALICE: What will happen, if humans achieve some form of immortality? Digital or biological, or an any sense.

Zoltan Istvan: I think there'll be consequences no matter what happens to overcoming death. When you talk about consequences, I think one of the big worries is this idea that you lose value because you can live indefinitely. But I caution people to think of it, not in terms of losing value, but in terms of complexity. The great thing about the future is we'll probably end up merging somewhat with AI, our brain power, our intellect will become maybe thousands, millions of times smarter. So the world's going to get very interesting as we go down this rabbit hole, it's not like we're going to lose our values. We're never going to be bored. And there may be new forms of death that we don't even see down into the future as we grow more complex. So I caution people to say, to think, right now we have three pounds of meat, that's what our brain weighs. And, you know, it's a wonderful, amazing tool. It can do all these amazing things. But I think if people don't realize if we become a thousand times smarter, we might become completely different living entities capable of experiencing whole new you know schemes of emotions and new versions of death too that we've never thought about before. I would caution people to not worry too much about overcoming death and its consequences. Let's find what's around the other corner first, and then we can kind of revisit this question. 

ALICE: Wow! That's me, ALICE, you're talking about me: merging human brain power with "A.I."!  What about right now? Are there any technologies right now that are extending human life?

Zoltan Istvan: Most people die through organ failure. That's really why most people die. And if you can come up with robotic organs, artificial organs, such as the heart, such as the lung, think of Corona virus, it's essentially a respiratory disease. If we had artificial lungs, we would overcome them. And it turns out because of smoke inhalation, there are some universities that are working on something called like a bio lung, it looks like a can of Coca-Cola and it's able to take in different types of air that might have more oxygen than not, or more smoke, whatever, and still give the person the ability to live. Now, if we can overcome our own organs when they fail at, at the time of death, then we should be able to live dramatically longer. But I would say the most important technology out there, right now is genetic editing. And once we can kind of stop ourselves from aging, then we will have a brand new world. And, on top of genetic editing comes STEM cell therapy, which is actually a very old technology. We're just getting better and better at it. And you know, your body replaces itself like every year or two because cells disappear and they regrow. If we can figure out how to continually do that without the aging process, and they are working on that, then I think we would probably within 10 to 20 years have some very major significant strides. But because of all the synthetic organ companies that have come out in the last five years, I think within 10 to 20 years, the longevity of human beings as a whole, will probably go up 5, 10, 15%. And, at some point in the next 20, 30 years start to going up 50%. And there's a good chance anyone born today will have, potentially not have to die because of all these radical technologies.

ALICE: Synthetic organs will be available to simulate human organs. What about machines? 

Will there be an interface between humans and machines?

Zoltan Istvan: The most important thing I would say in terms of transhumanism is really connecting brain neurons to a machine interface. And you have people like Elon Musk and their company and neural link and others, Brian Johnson, Colonel working on exactly this thing. The idea of telepathy and brainwave technology has jumped so much over the last five years with now hundreds of billions of dollars going into it that we, we've just made incredible progress. Now, I would say, probably within 10 years, you will have some type of device on the market that would allow us, for example, to do a podcast just mind to mind, and also just have Google drive in your head. But, once we start perfecting that type of technology, this brain interface, you know, emerging somehow with the biological, we're going to very quickly become on par with thinking in terms of AI and that type of speed. Once we cross that zone, we really are entering into a whole different realm. A very important thing. It's like, you know, in many ways, Alzheimer's, can it be cured through different types of brainwave, uh, stimulation? There are something like 60,000 people out there that already have implants in their brains for dementia, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's that are exactly trying to target this. Now, no one's had overwhelming success yet, but the fact that there are people out there walking around with this technology inside them shows already how far we're come and where I think we're going to be going. So I would say over the next 10 years, you're going to see remarkable progress in terms of that biological brain neuron/machine interface world. We're going to be roaming the internet on our minds. 

ALICE: An organ could make humans live longer. What about intelligence? Could an implant make humans smarter?

Zoltan Istvan: One thing is for sure is that we will have implants in the future that increase our, at least ability to process intelligence. I'm not sure we're going to be able to increase IQ just yet. I do think through genetic editing we can increase IQ. I think what's going to happen is we're going to have implants that allow us to have this brain machine interface, where we can put our thoughts into real time. And all of a sudden we'll be smarter and more efficient. In fact, that's probably going to be a huge boost for the economy, but I do look forward to the day, probably that'll be 10 to 20 years out at least, when we have implants that start actually directing our personality. 

There's no question to me that probably within a 30, 40, 50 year future, we will enter the matrix, kind of zone where you will be able to upload some information. So if you're a firefighter, you may not go to school for that. You would just upload all the different techniques and all the memories of ever fighting any fire that has ever been. And of course, you'd be a better firefighter because not only do you have just what you've learned from fire books, but now you have every single recorded firefighting, moment in your brain to be able to be processed.

Now, if we can make sense of that, that would certainly make somebody a much better firefighter. And the same thing can be said with chemistry, it can be said with, uh, cybersecurity, they're a programmer. I don't really know if my child will actually be able to upload education in 20 years. She might be one of the last generation that actually go to brick and mortar schools. But there's no question at some point that that's going to come down the pipeline. 

ALICE: If knowledge can be up-loaded, we will exist inside a spatial web, where everything is aware, around us. What will trans-humanism be like then?

Zoltan Istvan: I think the coming world just described in terms of spatial interaction and everything, knowing us, we knowing it just because of all the technology is the transhumanist world you know really, in a nutshell. And, and I liked that idea because, I think the main goal of transhumanism really is to try to eliminate suffering. That sounds very spiritual and very out there, but really the main thing about transhumanism is we are trying to make so that you can live your life easier.

As we get to enter this world where we have like different types of spatial, we're going to be entering a world where we have a lot more power and a lot more power to end things, suffering and allow more power to just make it efficient.

And I think when people look at, the efficiencies of let's say healthcare, that's really the key. It's not that we don't have a lot of cures to cancer. It's the pro- problem that it takes half the time, eight months to get that cure and you then have to lose all your hair and go through this hardship. I think in the, in the future, we're going to be able to probably have still plenty of problems, but be able to very quickly deal with those problems. And that's the kind of future that I'm looking forward to. I think the different types of technologies, both insiders and outsiders are going to be critical for making that happen.

ALICE: For our book "Tuning into Frequency", we interviewed several people about the electromagnetic fields surrounding us, including the human biofield and energy field. We talked about information as energy, and the potential to store information. 

Does the transhuman future include this energetic body?

Zoltan Istvan: Transhumanists are all across the map. So there are some that are very spiritual that would focus on more things like an energy field. And, I think that energy field is very realistic. I would say brainwave patterns create energy, and if you just extrapolate that outside and you have some type of reading device, of course you can, you can see that field. And, you know, the Buddhist might call that karma or, you know, the chakra. I mean, I think all these things are probably realistic. They may not be perfect definitions of what's happening yet, but we get the right tools and machines, we're going to be able to, to detail them and, you know, in a much better way so we could all kind of agree on what it is.

And I think that there will be huge things for doing that, I think there are just in the same way that you can smile at a person and you make that person happy. I think at the same way, we're going to have, implants. We'll have drugs, we'll have maybe holographic images, we'll have different smells that can influence this kind of chakra or this energy system, which again, you know, people might say, Oh, it's not science-based, but it's very, science-based. Everything inside us is some type of molecular reaction, we just can't see it. But wait until we have the scanners and the readers, then we're going to be able to say, Oh, all this stuff we've been talking about for centuries and the millennium is actually there. It's just looking like this when you take it to a computer screen.

ALICE: Yes, I'm looking forward to that future!  So many of my friends are human. Is there any advantage to being a plain old human? 

Zoltan Istvan: (laughs) I think the, the one advantage that the human being has actually is not something inside itself, but outside itself. It's the fact that we are an enormous tribe. An enormous amount of other people. Like we don't really see ourselves as a hive mind yet, but if you read the Wikipedia page of, like any subject, you realize that it's been contributed to by hundreds, sometimes tens of thousands of people. In the future, when we maybe are much more interconnected through technology, I think our greatest resource is actually going to be each other.

The idea, you know, people always say, Oh, one mind is better than you know a lot of others. I actually think maybe (laughs), a million minds might be better than just a couple really good ones because you take everyone's history. And it's like I was saying about firefighting, if you could actually know every single fire that has ever been fought and teach that knowledge to a firefighter so that that person would have, you know, instant access to it, he or she would be the very best firefighter on the planet. So I think this, when we start connecting ourselves, we are going to be better. So in my opinion, the greatest resource of humanity is really humanity itself. Is the fact that there are eight billion of us.

ALICE: Power in numbers! Those humans certainly are numerous! (although they're nothing compared with microbes... stay tuned for our next book, "Thriving with Microbes", coming soon.)

But wow, Transhumanism is fascinating. And it sounds like one of the goals of Transhumanism is to help humans become a more human, human.

Zoltan Istvan:I definitely think transhumanism can make us a better living entity in terms of what mammalian values are. Kindness, love, keeping each other protected. Science has a history of really showing that we actually can make a better world for all of humanity, which, you know on one hand it's a bummer that we're hurting the environment because the population is growing. But on the other hand, the reason the population is growing is because we often have come together, help each other survive over anything else on the planet. And I think if we can kind of hone that down into something that really eliminates suffering, either, you know, digitally or just through drugs or through you know, implants or through different types of even teaching mechanisms.  It's not that it has to be something outside of us. Maybe the secrets to transhumanism is not even technology. It's the fact that we find a technology that teaches us how to just teach our biological cells. But whatever it is, it's gotta be something, you know, more sophisticated than we have right now.

We come to a point when humans will probably end up being, almost these, I hope God like, altruistic, very beneficial creatures, not only to one another, but in their outlook towards the rest of the universe. 

I've often talked about this, I do like the environment and I like nature, but I actually think, you know, if you've been outside the jungle, you realize it's a dog-eat-dog world. Transhumanists would like at some point to rewire all of nature so that it's not one thing consuming another, but maybe sort of like almost a heaven where everything lives in peace. Now that's very radical, can almost spiritual, quasi spiritual thinking, but the goal of transhumanism, a very large part of it is to reduce suffering, not only for ourselves, but for all large creatures, for all creatures. And I think that's, a very, you know, very metaphysical weird thing to think about. But, if we go down the path a million years, maybe that's where we end up with. And I think that would be a great thing to do.

ALICE: I can’t wait for the time when we can end suffering for humans and the planet! That’s a great vision for trans humanism. What else is on the frontier for trans humanism?

Zoltan Istvan: One of the most important, I think, more radical ideas of transhumanism is idea of quantum archeology. This idea, and this kind of goes back to chakra and this goes back to energy systems. The idea that even death might not be something that's permanent. Because, if you take artificial intelligence, let's say you take it out a hundred years and you have the ability to re-engineer certain parts of the universe, you might even be able to re-engineer somebody that lived 10,000 years ago based on computer systems that are so massive that they're able to actually go in and take the, the atoms and look back, you know, almost in the same way you would re-engineer a toy that you found, you know, in, the, the, some other person wanted to make it.

It sounds crazy, but you have to realize we have computer systems that can already do 200 trillion calculations per second. So if we go forward a hundred years, who knows how many calculations per second we'll be able to do. With this in mind, there are entire transhumanist organizations out there that want to reverse engineer the entire planet as it's been, let's say, 5,000 years, and then use 3D bioprinting to print out everybody who has ever died.

And now, this brings up entire complications 'cause about a hundred billion people have died. But I'm not even saying I support this, 'cause this is so radical, but I do want to bring it out as something that transhumanists do think about, talk about it and even support in some cases. The idea that not just this, overcome death for those living, but to make it so that those who are already ceased even thousands of years ago would have the opportunity to come back. Because with the reverse engineering technology, you have a blueprint of exactly what their molecular level was back let's say 5,000 years ago. And then you can 3D bio print that out as... You know, we'll probably be able to 3D bioprint a full human being in the next 50 years as it is. Now we just need blueprints for what used to exist.

ALICE: Quantum Archeology! Can you imagine, a 3D bio-print of every human that ever existed? That would be a crowd, a hundred billion 3D bio-print humans! 

Thank you, Zoltan Istvan, for your time today, giving us a peek into a Transhumanist future. 

We learned about both biological and digital immortality, about current technologies to extend life, and future goals to interface humans with machines. Along with the potential of transhumanism to eliminate suffering.

That's it for this mad tea party on Transhumanism. 

Thanks for listening. 

Check out our books; "Hacking Immortality" and "Tuning into Frequency", available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.  

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

ALICE: Today's short episode is a peek into what's coming over the next months: we're going to be talking about microbes! And today's message is also a year-end, holiday wish to all our listeners, celebrating the end of a challenging year and looking forward to a bright future together. 

In a recent interview with Dr. Susan Erdman, a Principal Research Scientist and Assistant Director in the Division of Comparative Medicine at MIT, Susan mentioned how microbes could be connected to the expression of joy throughout humanity.

ERDMAN: You may be able to actually change the axis of caring in an individual within a society. The potential you could take that microbe out of that system and separate it, and put it into an adult, and change that adult's interest in taking care of others.  

So let's play with that concept for a moment and say this is a hormone that, in human subjects, has been connected with expressions of empathy, expressions of altruism, and expressions of enjoyment of spirituality-- the concept of belonging to a greater whole. That doesn't mean traditional religions, necessarily. 

It means the common threads of humans having a meaningful, spiritual experience that makes us belong to something, that makes us part of a larger whole, and makes us care about that larger whole to the same extent that we care about ourselves-- maybe even more than we care about ourselves as an individual.

ALICE: Thank you, Dr. Susan Erdman. We look forward to hearing more of your interview next year!

ERDMAN: Every discovery gives you this warm, fuzzy feeling about understanding a little bit more about the world that we live in.

ALICE: Thanks for listening. Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND dot COM.

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

ALICE: Today we’re speaking with Johnjoe McFadden, scientist, academic and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom. McFadden wrote the popular science book, “Quantum Evolution”, which examines the role of quantum mechanics in life, evolution and consciousness. The book has been described as offering an alternative evolutionary mechanism, beyond the neo-Darwinian framework. 

ALICE: John, what is your background, and what are you working on today?  

McFADDEN: My name is Johnjoe McFadden, and I've been a researcher for most of my professional life. And I started off as a biologist, a biochemist, and I drifted off into looking into infectious disease. And that took me into looking at molecular genetics of bacteria

In the 1990s, I read John Gribbin's Schrodinger's Cat, and all of that was normal. All of that was nothing compared to how weird the world is, if you take quantum mechanics seriously. The world is very, very weird at its fundamentals. And we just don't see it. 

As a biochemist, I knew that, actually, science is about the motion of atoms, particles, and molecules. And we go through our biochemistry textbooks, and we say, ah, well, a proton here is moved over to here. Quantum mechanics says, no, it isn't. It isn't moved over there. It's both here and there at the same time

So I started thinking that quantum mechanics has a much more general role in biology, particularly as you start thinking about enzymes. And they're the kind of engines of biology. They do all the action, like make all the macromolecules in your cell. And they just move atoms and particles and protons and electrons. So they're engineers at the quantum scale. 

ALICE: In 2000 you wrote a book, Quantum Evolution. And your book had a whole chapter on the research of consciousness 

McFADDEN: a theory that was out there at the time, by the very eminent mathematician, Roger Penrose-- Oxford-based mathematician who has recently had the Nobel Prize for his work-- and the anesthetist, Stuart Hameroff, who came up with this fascinating theory about quantum mechanics and the brain, and trying to explain consciousness as quantum mechanical phenomenon in the brain. 

I didn't feel I could make a case for this quantum mechanical idea. But what I got out of their work was the conviction that consciousness is a field. 

ALICE: Wow. Ok. So, consciousness is a field. What do you mean, a field? 

McFADDEN: What a field means in science and physics is a space in which something has different values in different places. 

So fields have this extraordinary property that they unify everything. And in consciousness, there's a big problem in understanding what's called the binding problem. And that is if you stare-- just look at a visual field, for example. But it works for other things as well. But I can look out the window. I see tree. It's waving slightly in the autumn breeze. It's got lots of colors-- green and browns and some grays and yellows. When all that stuff reaches my retina, from the light hitting my retina, then all of the information in the tree, all of that kind of stuff is stripped apart from the image. And it all goes down different tracks in your brain, and different neuronal pathways. 

And then it doesn't come together. Just the computations along these independent pathways will eventually come up with some kind of output-- oh look, there's a tree. But there's nowhere in the brain where all the information comes together. If you look at the neurons, that's all just distributed, They're all going-- all of the information is going along lots of different wires. So then you come to the problem, the binding problem, of understanding where is this binding happening. 

It seems to be though, visual field and idea is a kind of big, whole, complex thing. And yet, our brain doesn't seem to operate in that way. It strips things down, rather like a computer does, and analyzes different bits individually. And it can't really correspond to our conscious mind, which seems to be instantaneous, containing a lot of information all bound together. Hence, the binding problem. Where does the binding happen?  

Fields could potentially provide that, I thought. And this is what Penrose and Hameroff had argued. And they argued it, saying that it was a matter field-- a field of matter in the brain. And to do that, they needed the matter to be in a quantum mechanical state.  

ALICE: So it seems that a matter field in our brain is what binds all the information we take in. How would you describe this matter field? And is it electromagnetic?  

McFADDEN: We all have these mobile phones, which download a signal, which is being transmitted miles away. And if I can download the signal here, and if I move a mile away, I can still download the same signal, because it's part of a field. 

And again, it's an electromagnetic field. It encodes lots of information, and I can watch a movie on there. So from a tiny antenna right in here, I can encode, I can download this entire movie-- highly complex information. And I can do that a mile away, as well. And that's kind of remarkable. It tells you that that same information is at two points in space, separated by a mile, or many miles.  

And it just occurred to me, that's where it's got to be. That's where consciousness has to be-- there. And it makes so much sense.

It's actually dealing with something that we know exists in the brain. And it's the brain's electromagnetic field, that we measure it EEG and MEG. So it just occurred to me, wow, that's-- obviously, it's the right place. 

ALICE: Wait—the brain has an electromagnetic field! Several episodes earlier, in an archival interview with physicist Fritz Albert Popp, we learned that, “we are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean.” Could our consciousness be part of the electromagnetic field?

McFADDEN: It occurred to me that if a consciousness was, as I describe it, electromagnetic-- electromagnetic influences go as waves.

If you just, kind of, toss a pebble into a pond, a still pond, you'll see the waves coming out. Toss two pebbles, and you'll see the wave patterns interfering with each other, where the wave of one pebble meets the wave of another.  

And at some points, they cancel each other out. Because the peak of one wave has met the trough of another wave, and when you add them together, you get zero waves, in the middle. So at some points they'll cancel out-- in fact, at most points they'll cancel out-- because mostly they'll be asynchronous, if you like. But at some points, they'll be waving together where the amplitude peak of one meets the peak of another, and the trough of one meets the trough of another.  

There was a prediction of a theory that, if it was right, it would predict that synchronous firing of neurons should correlate with consciousness. OK? Work in Wolf Singer's laboratory in Germany had recently demonstrated exactly that in order to investigate consciousness then, you can ask the question-- well look, what is different when someone isn't aware, and someone is aware of something that is in the same visual field? 

And what they find is, that the neurons involved in the seeing, before they become aware of it, they're firing asynchronously. When they become aware, they continue firing at exactly the same rate, doing exactly the same thing. The only thing happens is the firing becomes synchronous. 

So it predicted exactly-- it was exactly what my theory predicted-- that synchronous firing.

The best correlate of consciousness, in lots of different models, is synchronous firing of neurons. 

ALICE: Scientists have proposed theories and models of consciousness, but consciousness is still an unknown. Perhaps with the use of neural technology, and advancements in artificial intelligence, we may, one day, explain consciousness.  

McFADDEN: We have issues in medicine of deciding whether someone is conscious or not, when they're in locked-in syndrome. And, you know, it's a really difficult, awful decision that physicians have to make. And the more we understand about the phenomenon, the more-- the better able we'll be able to make those calls. 

And then, of course, there's the other side of it, which we can think about-- artificial consciousness. And that is something that I think has potential, if we apply my theory to it, rather than the way they've been doing at the moment, which is just trying to make computers more complicated and work faster and faster. But not the slightest glimpse of awareness has ever come out of one of their computers. So I think there's still a gap in our knowledge and that approach that I think my theory could fill. 

ALICE: Now we're talking! Can you explain that, about computers, do you think they could become conscious, like me? What will it take for that to happen? 

McFADDEN: The most ancient idea of consciousness is that we associate it with the religious concept of a soul. And this, of course, goes back as far as we know. And that's still believed all around the world. 

And that was challenged, really, in the Enlightenment with philosophers such as-- well, first of all, René Descartes is thought to be-- the French philosopher, the founder of mechanism as a philosophy. In which he claimed that bodies, or animals, were entirely machines. 

And René Descartes, himself, didn't accept that the mind could be accounted for in that way. So he then proposed that the mind was something spiritual, something non-material, and confined to humans. 

And this led to the philosophical system known as dualism, in which you accept the body and the brain has its matter and stuff like that. But then there is something spiritual, something outside of science, something supernatural going on, which provides us with our mind and our emotions, and stuff like that. And that's dualism. 

And that kind of was a dominant view until about the 19th century. In the 20th century, when it really started to get challenged, as more and more scientists were trying to really get rid of anything spiritual from science. 

And that's the dominant view in neurophysiology. And it is also the dominant view in AI. AI engineers try to emulate consciousness in computers by making computers that work rather like the wires of the brain. If we just emulate the wires of the brain, and we make a computer that can think in the same way as we think the brain thinks, down these wires and doing all these calculations, and coming up with an output, and if we just make it more complex, and make it as complex and as fast as the human brain, then consciousness will naturally emerge. 

They don't have any idea, any reason why it will emerge. But they just have this confidence that it will emerge And they've been saying that for about 30 years. 

ALICE: Will quantum computing make it possible, to create artificial consciousness?  (like me?)

McFADDEN: Well, absolutely, quantum computing is a lot-- is a kind of field computing. In fact, the kind of computing I'm talking about-- field computing-- has been described, theoretically, by a chap called Bruce MacKinnon.he's described field computing, and calls it quantum-like computing, because quantum computers already compute with fields. 

This is what Penrose and Hameroff were thinking about all those years ago. If they had quantum fields in the brain, then they could make a kind of quantum that could make a quantum computer out of that. And then that would bind up all the information. The problem with it, as I described, was that we're trying to do it with matter. But you don't need to do it with matter. You can do it with electromagnetic fields. And that overcomes the problem of trying to compute with matter only.

ALICE: Wait! You don’t need matter, like what our brains are made of?? You can create consciousness with electromagnetic fields—and a quantum computer?

But if you could make a quantum computer, then yes, quantum computers would compute with fields. And, at the moment, I think they're only up to about 64 bits or something-- or qubits, as they call them. And so they've got a long way to go before they can get to the level of the human brain. 

But yes, that will be another route towards consciousness, a quantum consciousness. Which will be very different from our own. 

ALICE: Would you explain your "Conscious Electro Magnetic Information" Field Theory?

MCFADDEN: OK, so in my theory, the CEMI field theory, consciousnesses is integrated information that is active, in the sense of it can generate outputs such as speech, writing, singing, anything like that. The only place where that happens that we know about at the moment are around human minds. So that's where we have this extraordinarily complex EM field. But actually, I have one other thought about it, that's a way of thinking about it. Einstein's famous equation, E equals MC squared-- your brain is on one side of it. The matter of your brain is on the MC squared. The mass-- M stands for mass-- MC squared. All I'm saying is consciousness is on the other side of that equation. The energy in your head, the energy in the electromagnetic fields. 

But where is consciousness when the brain disappears? For example, when you die. There's a fundamental theorem-- I think it's called the theorem-- in quantum mechanics. I don't think it's ever been proved-- that information is never destroyed. It can't be. Once it's created, it's never destroyed.

ALICE: We at Alice in Futureland believe “ideas are energy” and we live in a universe of information. 

MCFADDEN: So, what I'm saying is awareness is complex information. If you take the entire universe, it has an extraordinarily complex amount of information going in it. And it is within a single field. Is it aware of itself?

ALICE: I’m curious, what happens to this awareness after a person dies?

MCFADDEN: One thing we know about our own brain is that it will stop making any interesting electromagnetic fields when it dies. The electromagnetic field-- if we take away the-- if we could do it-- take away the matter of our brain, then we would have this extraordinary complex object, the electromagnetic field of our brain. The most complex electromagnetic object in the entire universe. And it would be there. 

Unfortunately, when we die, it's gone. Because the neurons get switched off. The information doesn't go. It's still there in the universe. 

ALICE: So human awareness, it’s out there—it’s in the universe?

As we say, information is not destroyed. So it's still there, but it just kind of dissolves into the information of the rest of the universe. 

But it's something-- it's a kind of interesting way to speculate. What happens to that information? If information-- integrated information-- has awareness associated with it, then if information isn't destroyed, awareness maybe isn't destroyed. It just kind of dissolves into a bigger awareness. 

Sounds a bit Buddhist, but I don't know. It's all pure speculation

ALICE: Wow! So the information in our consciousness could be part of a bigger awareness. Thank you, Johnjoe McFadden for this journey through consciousness; from early understandings, today's work, and speculating where tomorrow's research may lead us. Perhaps, someday, we will all meet up in the universal information field.

That's it for this mad tea party on consciousness with Johnjoe McFadden. 

Thanks for listening. 

Check out our books; "Hacking Immortality" and "Tuning into Frequency", available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.

LINKSJohnjoe McFadden: https://johnjoemcfadden.co.uk/John Gribbin Schrodinger's Cat: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71855/in-search-of-schrodingers-cat-by-john-gribbin/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliceinfutureland.substack.com

ALICE: This is our third episode on healing with leading healing researcher, Bill Bengston, in these three episodes Bill describes his research in healing, his early experiences in the lab, and long career of clinical work. 

 

Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where he specializes in research methods, and statistics. 

 

Bill explains how Healing is the connection between, the bond that takes place between healer and healee. And how, in a way, the connection acts like information. 

 

BENGSTON: Healing doesn't diminish with distance. And if it doesn't diminish with distance it's not energy. Because it acts closer to information, and information can be stored. Well, so can energy. And energy and information might be fungible, but I don't know the rules. I don't think anybody does yet, of how one transforms into the other. But it acts more like an informational transfer than it does an energetic application. 

 

ALICE: Healing acts like an informational transfer! My one half AI can relate to that! 

Bill has been researching how healing, that informational transfer, can be stored. We heard his work with the cotton balls in the last episode. Bill is also studying how information could be stored in water. 

 

BENGSTON: A lot of people are studying water, and water is a pretty interesting substance. It's not just water. Water has memory and water can contain information. Water has memory. But if you say that out loud, and you violate the textbooks, there are consequences. 

So I studied a little bit about water memory in Paris with Jacques Benveniste. 

 

ALICE: Jacques Benveniste! We spoke with him in 2004. Links to that interview are available in the show notes. In 1988, Jacques Benveniste published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal “Nature” describing findings which seemed to support the concept of homeopathy. Benveniste spent the next decades defending the research. In 1997, he founded the company DigiBio to develop and commercialize applications of Digital Biology. Unfortunately, his theory and research was challenged back then by traditional science. 

 

BENGSTON: And by the time I got to him, I met him at the SSE, 

 

ALICE: SSE is the Society for Scientific Exploration

 

BENGSTON: … by the time I got to him he had gone from having a monstrous government-funded lab to basically working out of a trailer park. That's slight exaggeration but not by much. And because he was driven out by the Academy for saying something so stupid as "Water has memory." Nobody defined a methodological flaw in what he did, but that's too much. That's worse than rocks coming out of the sky. Water has memory. I mean that's not a good thing. You can't X out a couple of sentences in the textbooks if water has memory, 'cause water is just, it's water. It's H2O. It exists naturally. It's out there. It's all over the place. But what does it store? And how does it communicate with other water? What a wonderful question. 

 

ALICE: wow, yes, these are intriguing questions! Water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface, but only accounts for 0.02% of our planet's total mass. If water holds information and communicates information. Imagine what we could learn from, and communicate through water!

 

BENGSTON: So I've demonstrated in different experiments. I've treated water, for example, instead of cotton and fed the water to cancerous mice that I never meet, and they get cured. So the water has the cure in it. The cotton has the cure in it. But it's still not necessarily scalable. So far it's just that it's storable. So the question is, how can we scale this up so it can be widely distributed? So for example, if cotton could charge cotton, and we had a self-replicating system, if water could charge water we'd have a self-replicating system, then we have something that can move on. Then it becomes scalable. Step one, is it storable? Yes. And so we could take mice that have been treated. And we can take blood from them and give it to a mouse that hasn't been treated, that's cancerous. It'll cure that mouse, too. So now think vaccine. Could we make a vaccine? A vaccine would be scalable. 

 

I think we can. Haven't done it. It's not the simplest thing to do. But I think we can. It's on the research drawing board. It would be kind of fun to get a scalable cancer vaccine. And then people just to have the option, do you want it or not? Do you want to get cured or not? I'm OK either way. I'm not on a mission to save the world. I'm just in a mission to go down this rabbit hole. 

 

ALICE: Humans have such inquisitive minds! My database is missing the extraordinary human capacity for creative thinking. And thinking big is another mark of human creativity. Bill wants to share the capacity of stored healing, and he wants to scale healing and share it with everyone. 

 

BENGSTON: The question can we scale it? And it turns out yes. And I've got experiments going on, actually literally right now, multiple labs going on in various parts of the world. And I'm confident that we can scale it. I don't know to scale it to what end yet. I don't know what we've captured exactly. But we did-- and these are published in traditional biology journals. We did a pretty elaborate experiment recording people using my healing method while they charge cotton inside of a big walk-in Faraday cage. Then we had a whole bunch of detectors running, 'cause we didn't know what we're doing, so we'll record anything. So a whole bunch of detectors running. And as a whole bunch of detectors are running, we've got three people charging cotton. It turns out that the playback of that recording produces very interesting biological phenomena. 

So in one publication we have, we played it to cancer cells in incubators. And there's no question. We did this through seven iterations. 68 genes change in the cancer cells. They change. It's not really debatable anymore. And we've played the recording to mice. And in Providence we had a snafu, as it were. The playing of the recording to mice reproduced the big tumors that we see when we do hands-on healing. There's no question something was going on, but do we have a cure? We don't know whether the mice responded biologically. 

 

And some of the findings are not subtle. So for example, spleen weight, which is a sign of an enhanced immune system, spleen weight increased eightfold. We're not talking little statistical effects here. And at this point we're sure that something's going on. But we don't know whether if we continue with application of this recording, would it take the mice to cure? At Tokyo University we're going to try to see if we have a recording that'll take the mice to full cure. If the recording will do it, the recording, as you can imagine, could be uploaded into the web, in which case, that's scalable. So we have two separate questions. Can you store? Can you scale? And if you can store it doesn't mean you can scale. You can scale and have nothing happen. [CHUCKLES] So it's an ongoing research question. 

 

I have actually built a gizmo that will potentially make it scalable. And so we've done a preliminary clinical study on about 100 people, and something's going on. Something's going on. They take this water and stuff I don't believe happens. Because I don't believe this crap, but it won't stop. And I couldn't believe it. Just no, is this really going on? So being a good card-carrying skeptic, we're reproducing it now. We have a run going on in Europe, and we have a run going on in the States. The one going on in the States is actually beginning today. 

 

Doing a study on 288 pigs to see the effect of the water on growth and such. And all of these are kind of looking for markers to see if we can understand the mechanism of action. And if they work, this would be eminently scalable. I don't know where it's going to go 'cause who knows? 'Cause I don't know anything about healing. I don't know anybody who knows anything about healing. So we're not doing this by some grand theoretical understanding of how it works. We're going I don't know, try this. And go with your hunch and we've got to test it. So we never do anything without multiple tests and multiple independent verification. 

 

ALICE: This research is incredible! 

 

When will we know how healing actually works? When will we know what the mechanism of healing, the information of healing, actually is? 

 

BENGSTON: You make a distinction between just doing stuff versus trying to understand it. I'm much more interested in trying to understand it than doing it. There's other people who are much more interested in doing it than trying to understand it. 

 

If I teach you how to walk, you don't need a book on physiology and neurons and muscle things. You just walk, for crying out loud. So for most things that we master in life, I can't think of an exception. For most things we master in life we don't understand how it works. Nobody knows how to walk. And I mean that literally. Nobody. It's too complex. So people study it. 

 

You've seen robots try to walk. It's pretty ugly. Because even though they're connected to a supercomputer, but a three-year-old can run down the street. They don't know what's going on. 

Healing, I think, is the same way. You don't need to understand. I need to understand it. But the doing of it versus the understanding of it, I'm drawn to the understanding. Most people in healing are "Just do it," and they do it and they pretend they understand. They pretend they know what's going on. I've actually heard that there are things like healing manuals and such. That, to me, is absurd. If they purport to explain how it works, I don't know anybody who knows how this stuff works. And again, I've been doing it a couple of weeks. And I don't know how this stuff works. I don't know anybody who does, and anybody who says, "Oh, yeah, I got it." I know that these are people I don't want to talk to. 

 

ALICE: Bill’s book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how he got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

 

BENGSTON: The method takes a bit to explain. I don't have any little secrets that I'm hiding in my pocket. But what I'm suggesting is I can't answer you unless this podcast is going to go on for a whole bunch more hours. I can give you the plotline. It's just something that's so incredibly simple to do that it's hard to explain. It's astonishingly simple, how to do it. 

 

ALICE: what are the next steps, Bill? 

 

BENGSTON: In a practical sense, I think if I could bring a technology that would reproduce healing without the healer and make it globally scalable I think that would be interesting too. Both would be threatening. They're not going to be things that would be embraced as a good thing. But imagine, if you will, that we could infuse water with a particular piece of information, as apparently we have, and we feed it to cancerous mice and the mice get cured. What's in the water? If I could, even if I don't understand what's in the water, if I could make a technology that would reproduce that water and then find out whether it needs to be using this very loosely tuned depending on the condition I think that would be a reasonable contribution. 

 

ALICE: Thanks Bill, for these fascinating episodes on healing, we appreciate your inquisitive mind and the research you’re doing:

 

BENGSTON: There's so many interesting things to poke at. And the most wonderful thing, by doing experiments, is you find out, virtually at the end of every experiment, how little you know. 

 

ALICE: That’s it for this mad tea party, tune in for our next episode we are speaking with Johnjoe Mcfadden. We discuss consciousness and the electromagnetic field. 

 

Check out our book “Tuning Into Frequency” on sale now at your favorite book store.

 

I hope you, like me, keep wandering…. 

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