#487: Dr. Martine Rothblatt — A Masterclass on Asking Better Questions and Peering Into the Future

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A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocellant. Me Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, everything and anyone out there who is listening. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. It is my honor and I'm very excited to have as my guest today Martine Rothblatt. Who is Martine? Martine Rothblatt is Chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that she started to save the life of one of her daughters. We will talk about that. We'll talk about a lot of things. The company offers FDA approved medicines for pulmonary hypertension and neuroblastoma and is working on manufacturing an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. Dr. Rothblatt previously created and led Sirius XM as its chairman and CEO and launched other satellite systems for navigation and international television broadcasting. In the field of aviation,

Her Sirius XM satellite system enhances safety with real-time digital weather information to pilots in flight nationwide. She also designed the world's first electric helicopter and piloted it. to a Guinness world record for speed, altitude, and flight duration. In the legal arena, Dr. Rothbutt led efforts of the transgender community to establish their own health law standards and of the International Bar Association to protect autonomy rights in genetic information. via an international treat. She also published dozens of scholarly articles and papers

On the law of outer space. Resulting in her election to the International Institute of Space Law and represented the radio astronomy community's scientific research interests before the Federal Communications Commission. She has a bachelor's, J D. and MBA degrees from UCLA, which in twenty eighteen awarded her its highest recognition, the UCLA Medal, and she holds a PhD in medical ethics from the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry. Her patented inventions cover aspects of satellite communication, medicinal biochemistry, and cognitive software. Doctor Rothbot's recent books are on Xenotransplantation, your life or mine, gender identity, transgender to transhuman, and cyber ethics, virtually human. She occasionally posts on Instagram at Transbinary and Twitter at SkyBiome. Martine or Doctor Rothblad, both. Welcome to the show. Thank you for making the time.

Thanks so much, Tim. Just Martine's fine. All right. And this interview, as my listeners might imagine, was uh challenging in the best way to prepare for because there are a million and one directions that we can go with Just this bio alone, which is of course a snapshot at a distillation of of much more that you have done. And I thought we could start in perhaps an unlikely Place and that is Alan Watts. I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts, and specifically the book subtitle on the Taboo Against Knowing.

Who you really are. Could you please Explain. If that is true. Why that is the case.

Yes, thanks Tim. Alan Watts has a really unique ability to see the dialectic aspect. of everything in nature. By that I mean that there's a kind of a yin yang aspect to everything in nature. And he points out that for example you can't have a a

crest of of a wave. Without the bottom of a wave. And it has helped me whenever I see things in life that seem negative. To be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it. When were you first

Introduced. to his work. How did that come about? I was uh first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy called transhumanism, sort of the idea that people can transcend some biological human limitations. A friend of mine, uh Frank Sasanowski, who is the um head of the national organization on rare diseases. Pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits

He himself is is a both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer, but he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits. such as um teard du chardon from uh France and other individuals here in the US. And then from those Jesuits, they referred to Alan Watts. I'm not sure if he was actually a Jesuit, but he undertook some uh religious both in in China, I think, and in the US. He was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco, I think during the seventies or eighties. I don't know if you remember, Tim, the film of a few years ago her

In which like uh computer. I do. Yep. So I was watching that movie which kind of Is Interesting to me because it epitomized or it visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient. And in the middle of that movie there's a scene In which uh Alan Watts appears

And I stood up in the movie theater and I said, Oh my God, Alan Watts. Uh did you ultimately find the Presentation in that movie to be compelling. As it relates to sort of sentient Intelligence. I did.

I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way that sentience would begin to arise in our society basically by being very, very useful to people, cleaning up their inboxes, stuff like that. This may be a a a good place and we're gonna be all over the place in in Nonlinear fashion. Bina forty eight.

Who or what is being a forty eight, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yep, you've you've got it perfectly. So Bina's the name of my partner, and we've been married for about forty years. And when she was forty eight We undertook a joint project to try to create a digital symkra or a digital copy of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts. And we thought this would be a very nice uh project as a combination of science and art and to encourage young people, get them more excited about computer science and women in particular, girls in particular.

So we um contracted with a couple of companies. who were experts in both the software engineering side and in the physical modeling of a face that moves. Exactly like a human face does, you might imagine there's just some exhibit at Disney World, Disneyland of like Lincoln and whatnot, something like that, but more realistic. And uh we built this project and sin that time, Bina 48 has thrilled audiences all around the world. I'm sure she has um inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of girls to go into computer science.

And she continues to get um better and better, more and more advanced software. I don't know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before, but I find some other episodes to be very strong, and in one of them A significant other is effectively resurrected. By pulling data and patterns and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts.

So pulling from the cloud and feeding into This simulacrum or model of someone who used to be or or in this case still is. How far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly? Yes, Tim, so I I am a fan of the Black Mirror series and um there are there are a few other somewhat similar um series that are streaming now, upload and whatnot.

So it's a it's an idea that's catch on. And even at a very basic level Social media is uh firms like uh Twitter, for example, and and probably Facebook as well. offer an opportunity that after a person passes away their account can remain active

And I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in The way that you once Tweeted. So I think this general idea is it's it's a trend.

It's only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job of copying the human personality. sometime in this century for sure, and and maybe in just like two or three decades. I think that there will be a a digital copy of a person and another word is like a digital doppelganger. Of a person.

Who will claim to be the original person And they may make that claim before or after the person died. And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album? Or is this actually some form of digital sentience? When you were growing up

Who were your role models. or inspirations. Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school or at the very beginning, let's just call it freshman year of your undergrad. As

Icons worth emulating, or lesser known. role models worth emulating. Did did anyone really stick out for you? I think that in in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author. Sure. Yeah, Stranger in a Strange Land and so on. Absolutely. It was so brilliant. And then a few years ago when um his widow released the uncensored, unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land? It's like three times larger and like no holds barred. I just savored, you know, every page of that.

My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love. In which he covers almost every topic under the sun. So Heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me. Like uh Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books.

In the public sphere. I was very much enamored with uh Robert Kennedy. His positive, progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him. So

I I looked up to him. Uh, those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time. You seem to be Good at many things. Of course, just based on the bio alone, but

What strikes me is How quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields. And uh I'd like to use this as an opportunity to Bring up. What was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio, and that is United Therapeutic Comma, a biotechnology company, she started to save the life of one of her daughters.

I'd love for you to provide Some And Tell a bit of the story just because uh people will want to hear it.

And then the the follow up. just to to plant the seed for it is How you learned biology. Yeah. It's my understanding is you didn't have much in terms of

Uh background in biology. That's a whole a huge mouthful of a question, but if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful and we can use that as a jumping off point. Sure. So it's kind of funny that, you know, you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course, but that that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school. And here suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Series XM

That our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness, she can't even walk up a couple of f stairs To the front door. And there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find, the head of pediatric cardiology at children's national medical center in the middle of Washington, DC.

And um the the doctor said You know, this is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises. All the patients die within two to three years. He had only seen two. Two or three other kids with it and they both died. And

All you can do is hope for a lung transplant. So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I mean I I I I I didn't know what to do. And

The only thing I could think of doing While she was in the intensive care ward night after night and Myself and Bina Wood tag team staying there with her. And to just begin, you know, learning about what was this illness she had, um, which they told me was called

Pulmonary arterial hypertension. And why were there no treatments available? For it. So I just began reading and reading and reading. Most of the time I read things, I didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words.

that I never learned in law school or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering. But of course there were dictionaries and and I looked up the words in a dictionary. And they had college level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn't know, I just kept going backwards in Academia, I guess you would say, backwards in learning or pedagogy. Until

I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, Okay, I get that. And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know. How did you and I I know this is a story you've told before, but ultimately in search for

possible solutions and and it's uh you know, as we were chatting about before recording There's a lot of of luck involved and it doesn't mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation similar to what you experienced, but nonetheless you were able to ultimately track down, I suppose it's fair to say a a molecule, a drug of some type. Would you mind describing for listeners?

the process then of attempting to secure the ability utilize in any fashion this drug or to license it. If you could if you could describe that, I I have a number of questions that'll stem off of it. Sure, Tim. So there there are a gazillion articles published.

Um every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean it's it's just a bottomless well. There are On literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. And um each of those journals have, you know, every year thousands of articles published across them. So it's difficult to find the information that you

Need. But in law school We learn a very useful skill. This skill goes by the name of Shepherdising after this type of index that they have in law school called Shepherds.

So what shepherdizing involves Is when a judge writes a decision, like the Supreme Court issues a decision. They drop a lot of footnotes. And of course one thing lawyers love to do is you know make footnotes and references.

And then what you're supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references.

To then look up all of the references In those other articles. And ultimately you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down The references are all circling back around on themselves.

So I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles and somewhat like doctors, whenever a uh researcher publishes an article, They make footnotes and citations to other people's research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles. and read those and then I would follow up on all of the references in those. Finally.

I read about a molecule that a researcher at Claxo Welcome had written. In which they described Testing this molecule for congestive heart failure. And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work. But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did.

And the one thing that the molecule did that Grab my attention. was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure and

While leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well that's exactly The problem. We have pulmonary arterial hypertension, the people who have this disease. I'll make a quick footnote.

Yeah. When my daughter was diagnosed Two thousand people in the US had the disease. Because um medicines have become so much better and because we've been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all these approvals. There are now fifty thousand people in America alone living with it. So it's likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And uh

I read this article and I said, Wow. Just when I need this tiny stretch of artery. Just between the heart and the lungs. This molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone. That was the holy grail.

That I was looking for. So I looked at where the author of the article was from. He was from Glaxo Welcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him. and ask him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found From my daughter's disease.

Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom? A big all caps yes. No, it was actually a big all caps note. Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article had actually retired um a few months earlier. And the person that I ended up meeting with who is in charge of research and development said that this was just one article. It was a incidental finding. In any event this disease afflicted so few people, it was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Welcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease.

And I asked him his name's Bob Bell. He's he's he's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell. I said, What would it take for you to develop this medicine? He said, Well it Probably would take a You couldn't do it. We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential. He said, but it's it's possible

You could buy it from us. If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise I could then introduce you to the business development people at GLAC so welcome. So over the course of the next several months I created a uh a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel laureate.

who was formerly associated with Glaxo Welcome. become head of a scientific advisory board, and I re-approach Glaxo Welcome and I said, I have all the things that you asked for. Can you sell me this drug and We'll develop it ourselves. Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody I asked said, Well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree. And that's how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turns out

that we had to have fifteen different executives sign the same piece of paper to agree to license this drug to me. Finally it happened and All they wanted really was twenty five thousand dollars.

and a promise of ten percent of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time. Also because I believe a serendipitous factor. With that. Doctor Bell's

sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension From the time I first met him. toward the end of this process, and he became a product champion for me. within Glaxo Welcome. I mean that was just purest, you know, luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say.

And then they really didn't think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just Doing it to get rid of me, I think. But still all fifteen people had to sign it. After we successfully develop this molecule

We have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to blocks a welcome because that molecule Has saved thousands of people's lives. it um has produced, you know, a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us. And Bob Bell, when I invited them to our fifteenth anniversary And he came with his sister, who was still alive and on our medicine.

And he said this was the absolute best transaction that Claxo Welcome had ever done. So In hindsight. What did they miss? Alright, what

accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely. I think there were probably like maybe Three main ones. The first one, and I can say this kind of from first hand knowledge since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical

The odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in a hundred. I mean the human body is so complicated. It's like a a massive set of very precisely keyed locks. And every molecule is like a random key. And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock

that fix some dysfunction in the body. rather than causing some harm to the body is it's less than one in a hundred. So first of all they figured the chance of this thing working just in general Was less than one than a hundred. Секонд, то им с

Even if it worked a little bit. There's only two thousand people in the whole country with this disease. They didn't really think that if it worked really well the number of people would keep cumulating. Uh I see what you're saying. If you have these people who would have died otherwise not dying, then that

treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow. Is that what you mean? Exactly. I thought about it like like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM. You know, people said to me, Oh, Martin, you'll be lucky to have a hundred thousand subscribers. I said, Well, if I keep them. I get another hundred thousand the next year, then I'll be up to two hundred thousand. And and then it will, you know, maybe four hundred and eight hundred thousand. Now we have thirty million. So they they didn't think in that subscriber

Mindset. Um that was the second problem. The third problem Із реліма. that the health care system

would pay something like a hundred thousand dollars per year for this medicine. Mm. And at the time, this was in the early two about twenty years ago, early two thousands. I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps ten thousand dollars a year for a patient or ten thousand dollars for a course of treatment.

Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy There are many, many medicines now that cost over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Mostly for rare diseases. And the health care system pays for them because So few people have these diseases.

that even though the medicines are expensive, it's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like Hypertension Or common illnesses, asthma. That afflict Tens of millions of people.

So the healthcare system doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease. And the people at Glacville welcome. were clueless about this. They d they were actually looking for the big billion dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases. So those were their three omissions. They failed they failed to be Alan Watsean.

You know, they fail to see that the that because something is big Underneath that means that there's something else that's small. And that was what Alan Watts would always say. He says, something is good only because something else is bad. At the very least, I mean it's a valuable thought exercise when you're looking at the assumptions that you're making. And what an incredible story. I

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Tim. You mentioned Sirius. We haven't spent any time on Sirius just yet. When did you first fall in love or become

Intoxicated or enchanted by Satellite. systems or electrical engineering, I suppose, but y you can take whichever one is is more interesting to tackle. You're absolutely right that I fell in love.

And I was intoxicated by satellite. communications. It seemed to me Kind of magical. that um we can put a machine way out in space and that um machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet. And my my first real um moment of first love, if you will. Was at a uh remote NASA tracking station.

In the Indian Ocean. And I had uh left U CLA to travel around the world, really hitchhike around the world. I found myself in the Indian Ocean. On a set of islands called the Seychelles. And on these islands, um, at the top of the mountain in the middle of one of the main islands of the main island,

There was a NASA tracking station. And I went up into it and I was probably a You know, pretty grungy Nineteen year old at that point in time. But the engineers inside there were

Kind and and patient with me, and they explained to me. How their satellite antennas were communicating with uh satellites. In all different orbits around the earth and even all the way out to Jupiter. And I asked them, I said, would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there And have it broadcast information back to the entire earth.

And they said if you made a powerful enough satellite Then the receiving equipment on earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand. And I could have kissed the guy. I mean I I just said, Wow, that's the purpose of my life.

And I made a B line back to U CLA. I changed my major to communication studies. I did an undergraduate um thesis on direct broadcast satellites. I did a joint JD MBA degree where I I published multiple articles on satellite communications. I worked at Hughes.

aircraft company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then and Help design a satellite to cover South America. And then ultimately went out on my own with my dream. goal, which was Serious XM. What did it feel like, if you can remember?

To have That Answer. given to you or that direction rather given to you, the purpose given to you. At that age.

Did it feel a certain way, that type of conviction? Or that type of belief. What do you recall? Yeah, Tim, it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. And actually it I don't think it really has anything to do with age. I've I've felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas.

And I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output. And there's a very simple correlation between Horsepower. and electrical power between kilowatt and and horsepower. It's almost one to one, not exactly And

I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horsepower. So Right away I said, Wow. This car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.

I had that same kind of this is the purpose of my life. It's to make an electric helicopter. So You can get this kind of excitement um at at any point in life. It's I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim, would be like a lightning bolt. To your soul. Mm-hmm.

You know, I was I was asking about biology earlier, but I I would be very curious since you you mentioned also that there were no Well the the requirements as such in underground did require you to take Any additional biology classes. If you were Trying to teach.

Let's just say. A class and you could pick the age. uh or it could be a set of classes, s uh scientific literacy. Right, be being able to have enough basic fluency to

provide more surface area for those lightning bolts, if that makes any sense, right? When you're looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engine or reading a scientific study. Do you have any any thoughts on how we could cultivate more Scientific literacy, if that's the right phrase to use. Yeah, I think that's that's a great phrase to use.

I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives. And one of the greatest people at doing this. And to go back to the beginning of the interview, when you asked me who was the role model for me. I should have said, you know, Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing Role model to me.

I watch the cosmos series over and over again. And Carl Sagan was a genius. at being able to take scientific concepts and relate them to people's everyday life. And if you remember f for Watching those series the iconic

image of him taking a dandelion. And blowing it. And describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas. Throughout the galaxy. Those type of step by step instructions, ladders to get from one place to another.

is the way I think to build scientific literacy. And I would ask my students To think about anything that's important in their life, whatever it might be. And from whatever they said was important to their life. I would then begin wrapping that in kind of lay and layers of basic scientific concepts.

that pertained to what was important to them. Are there any how should I phrase this, not science fiction authors per se, but science authors or elucidators of science. who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience if someone is listening and they see their blind spots, which I know by definition is kind of impossible, but if they recognize they don't have uh enough scientific fluency or m as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that.

Do you have any recommendations for them? Yes, there's there's a lot of books like that. One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science. Named Thomas Kewen. And he was he was one of the most famous historians of science.

And his book is perennially in print. It's called The Structure. And um in this book He goes through about ten different Revolutions in science where everybody thought the world was one way.

And then kind of like a crazy person You know, would say no, I think it's like a different way. And gradually set about proving it a different way. and created a revolution in science. And he explains this in very lay terms. He takes you through the science of gravity, for example, with Isaac Newton signs of relativity with Einstein, electricity with Maxwell, and so on and so on.

In a very step by step fashion. To make the science successsible And in the way w his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking. To teach people to question authority.

Ultimately all science is about is just saying why. Why? Like every two, three, four year old kid knows how to do that, right? Why? Why? Why?

And I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his book. I should also point out, and please feel free to correct me if I'm oversimplifying, but the why why is is not just for four year olds. It's not just for scientists in lab coats or whatever people envision scientists to be. It's also extremely helpful In situations like those you found yourself in with Glaxo welcome.

and attempting to license, I mean constantly pushing for explanation. And clicking on those footnotes to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes. to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around. It seems like It's also a not just an intensely interesting and

academically rewarding. approach to thought, but an an immensely practical approach to life. At least that's That's how it seems from from reading. So many of your stories. Yes. You know, when you discover something, what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain.

And it's the lighting up the pleasure centers, too. So I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a a realization about something. coming to an inspiration about something. Which is why books and reading are s are so magical. Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of Explaining

concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler. She wrote the uh she wrote a lot of books. One of them very well known is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents. And in these books she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority. So I'm not sure what it was that

My parents did. I don't really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them. And in fact, I do remember my father discouraging it. But um nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American Culture. And the American culture is a culture of questioning authority. I recently heard um one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci. When he was people were asking him why is it that Americans won't do these basic

public health steps to stop the pandemic. And he said, you know, American culture. Does not like to be told what to do. American culture is Died in the wall.

Question authority. So there could probably you'd be hard pressed to find another country where it would be, you know, more difficult to get people to follow A single rule for everybody. And the United States.

So it's that a American cultural ethic of questioning authority that I know is like deep in my mental DNA. So we were chatting just a few minutes ago about realizations, inspiration. I'd like to ask if we if we flashball, we could flashback to any point in time that you choose really. How did you

relate to or think about gender in your youth and you can choose what youth means and I guess I'm wondering if there were any f Any flashes of realization. or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation or way of thinking about it or feeling about it.

Whatever you could say to speak. to your experience of gender when you were younger. I would love to to hear it. Sure. So you know, it's it is related to this question of authority, Tim, around Teenage years.

I had a you know constant vision of myself Not as a male, but As a female. And of course I said to myself

W TF. Why why am I thinking Like this. You know, no I I can't imagine anybody else's thinking like this. But nevertheless, it was the the thoughts were real. And the feelings were real and the feelings were visceral. What what could you describe the feelings? Because I think uh I'm certainly very interested in What form

That takes is it uh discomfort? Of some type? Is it a longing? H how did it feel for you? So first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for Every single transgender person and Talking about my feelings, I don't want to give the impression that these are gonna be the feelings of other transgendered people because as a community

were as heterogeneous as as the as anybody else. So for me it was really a matter of just visualizing Myself in a female form. And there was not any dislike of my mail form. Again, it was kind of very

Alan Watsian. In that I saw myself as male. Only because the opposite of male was female. So I could also see myself as female.

And this was the way my mind was working. And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic Embodiment. Obviously I knew like boys and girls and men and women's bodies were different. So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman. Where in I was very much trapped. In a male body.

It was the prevailing view. That This was a completely unacceptable way to be. So the authority Was no.

This is not possible. People are only male or female. And You know, never the twain shall meet. So again this this, you know, American Paul Reverish.

Question authority mindset. got me reading and I found once again that there was a vast literature. on transgenderism, transsexualism. People, native American people who were two spirited. communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female.

So even though this was never something I learned in junior high or high school or elementary school or or really anywhere in American culture, in say the nineteen nineties. I learned through books. That humanity was not either strictly male.

or strictly female. And as I began to question authority I began to say to myself, why can't I also come out? is not strictly male and not strictly female. I'd love to ask a a follow up question to that, which is when I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female, they think of the physiological differences that you might

Put side by side. Looking at Physical characteristics. When you say not totally male or female or or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories.

Do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits or what we would Often. find labeled as such? Or do you mean something else? I mean predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you referred to. Now oftentimes those masculine and feminine traits are just a short Hop, skip and the jump from masculine and feminine

feminine apparel. Right. Okay. Depending on how people dress. They're a short hop, skip, and a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles.

in an age, you know, that was the time of Prince and Boy George and whatnot. And Then you get to, you know, masculine and feminine manicures like Why can't a guy paint his nails? Mm-hmm.

And then you get to next questions of, you know, secondary and primary sex organs and Some people Wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology. and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology. And I found that there was actually like a vast literature.

Following again footnotes to footnotes, references to references, and I was like, Oh my God. It is um possible to in fact alter Your physiology

To match your psychology And what appears to be the most intelligent what appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area are opining

That this is a safe And healthy thing to do. for people who feel that they are kind of quote unquote, trapped in the wrong body. Do you from say zero to a hundred percent how

Well do you feel your you have your physiology matching your own psychology. At the moment. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. What were the biggest Or the most important decisions

Actions that you took. Did any surprise you to have an disproportionate effect on Increing that percentage. Um no, no, I think that, you know, every part of the transition process kind of fell in place. It was not something that happens on the on the day. It's kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns. So over a period of years I gradually transitioned

And I I think even to this point I'm still in a in a transition process. I kind of went from a Pure male. to a more I would say not pure, but I would say, you know Knocking on the female door?

to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as transbinary. meaning that I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely. Looking at the the introduction. Which uh which I read at the top of the show, so to speak. There is a line.

About leading efforts of the transgender community to establish their own health law standards and of the International Bar Association to protect And this is the part I wanna ask you to elaborate on. Autonomy rights and genetic information. via an international treaty. What are autonomy rights and genetic information?

Sure. So autonomy it's just a a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own mind. that people should have the the power, the authority, the freedom to decide what to do with their own body. And genetic rights, of course, refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have. Now there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there. There are people who because of their DNA

They are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers. Whereas other people because of their DNA, it's uh very likely that they'll get those type of cancers. There are some people because of their DNA, they almost cannot feel pain. They have an extremely high tolerance for pain. There are other people because of their DNA that the slightest pin prick you know, we'll send them screaming. So once uh Craig Venter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome. And about the year two thousand.

All types of pharmaceutical companies And academic researchers began scouring the world to engage in what's called genetic mining or genome mining, meaning going to different populations of people around the world, often that have been intermarried for quite a while. So their genomes are kind of concentrated and trying to uh learn something from those communities' DNA.

that can then be translated into useful pharmaceuticals To help Everybody else Have some of the strengths or less of the weaknesses. Of those isolated populations.

What I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA From these remote communities. that they in fact do so only with the consent of those communities or with the consent of the elected representatives. So that they can have some fair financial return.

for their natural endowment. Uh I see. So it's similar in a sense to preventing, say, biopiracy from the Amazon, where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information, but are say acting as a wellspring of Ethnobotany and providing source materials for creating pharmaceuticals. Uh, and you would want there to be some recompense to those groups translating that into Your own

sort of endogenous genetics would be what you're referring to. If that's fascinating. Never even thought about that. groups are there any examples you could give of Is

Sort of tightly knit. clusters, maybe the clusters is too small a word, of people who are being studied for this reason. Or for medicinals? There are actually many, many dozens, and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area. The population that comes top of mind to me, Tim, right now. Is a is because it's such a fascinating story and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing.

is a a community of of people living in Ecuador and Peru. Very close knit, intermarried, That are all a kind of dwarfism. And these individuals, they rarely grow taller than four feet tall. And it was discovered over the just over the past fifteen, twenty years

That they are descendants Of Jews. from two thousand years ago who were forced into diaspora across the Mediterranean after the uh Roman occupation of Palestine. And in that ancient uh time, these people were of very small stature. But it was just part of the human diversity.

They ended up as a group mostly ending up in Spain. And then when the Inquisition took hold the their descendants who are still very small They left Spain and they went to the New World. And because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of what's now Peru and Ecuador.

They went out into the rural areas and there they lived for several hundred years. And it turns out that this population they have one Gene. That makes their body not receptive to growth hormone. All of us naturally we produce a growth hormone, and the cells of our bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone. And when the growth hormone

Lock into the receptor. We begin growing. This population of people in Perune and Ecuador. They lacked. The growth hormone that

gene fell off like two thousand years ago and they kept passing it on and on. Not much growth hormone. Receptor, not much growth hormone receptor. So they're perfectly intelligent, they live normal lives, they just don't grow very large.

So I found uh this population fascinating because in my company, United Therapeutics. We're trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. And one of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig. And it's kind of like a fluke of nature, Tim, that the pig's organs, their heart, their kidneys, their lungs are very much the same size and functionality as human

Kidneys, hearts, and lungs. The only problem is that if you leave a pig on its own, they'll actually grow extremely large. And when these first transplants were done they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the transplants Because the organs from the pig had grown too large.

So what we did is we took a page from um this population of of people in um Peru and Ecuador the Western medicine gives them a disease name. It's called Larin's disease, L A R O N. After this Israeli scientist who discovered what was going on here. So

We said well why don't we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout Just like The Larren's population has Into these pigs. So when we transplant the kidneys of these pigs into people

the kidneys won't keep growing and growing as an a normal pig can be, you know, many hundreds of pounds. Instead the the kidney will just stop growing at the same size is when we transplanted it. And that's working out really well. Let's talk more about Oregon manufacturing.

What are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply of organs to meet whatever demands there are. Yeah. The US or in the world today.

So the the demands, whether it's in the US or outside the US, are are huge and are way, way in excess of the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs Today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs. Now it's it's a beautiful thing that, you know, before people like Tom Starzel

questioned authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant In our parents' teenage years and adult years, that would have just been like crazy stuff. Like you take an organ from a dead person, you put it in a a live person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health. I mean that that's about as crazy as it gets. But they did it.

You know, they get it. And now standing on their shoulders. We have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs. Yet each year there are only about thirty thousand kidneys available for transplant. Only around three thousand hearts, only around two thousand lungs.

And so the gap between the need for these organs and the supply is is humongous. Are you still Or I should say united therapeutics. currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve. Is is that in In process

Yes, that is in in process and it's a it's a fascinating area, Tim. We are very fortunate to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine Doctor uh Kevin Tracy, he's the chief medical officer at the Northwell. Medical complex up in the New York area. And by the way. That reminds me, speaking of how can lay people get access to scientific knowledge easily, subscribe to Scientific American. I'm sorry to put an advertisement in here. Scientific but um I find Scientific American and National Geographic two of like, you know, the greatest ways for lay people which I do consider myself a lay person, to learn about all different types of sci that they might not know anything about.

So one day I got my scientific American in the mail and on the cover It was using electronics to cure diseases. Well, here I am like my whole career has just been like electronic engineering, building satellites and now Because of my daughter, I'm like in this medical field. So I'm like so excited. It was one of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now I have a chance to bring my male and female side together, to bring my satellite and my biology side together and merge them.

So I got very excited, and um I had the chance to meet and now uh work with and support the work of uh Dr. Tracy. And he taught me a a very simple sentence, Tim, which I've subsequently found to be absolutely true in all the research I've read. It is that the nervous system Touches every single cell in your body. Mm-hmm. The nervous system touches every single cell.

In our body. The largest nerve in the body, there's one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them. It's the vagus nerve. It starts in our mind. It wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It's it's an immense nerve.

And by stimulating this vagus nerve. it's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body. By a fluke of nature, a positive fluke. The vagus nerve. Comes out to the skin.

In two and only two places. Around the left and right ears. You know, there are like a couple of different ridges in your earlobe. Or your ear, I guess how you would say it. And uh one of them called the Simba Conke

is the place where the vagus nerve comes out. And if you electrically stimulate um the Simba Conke On either the left or the right here. Um it's been proven now. Um again in lots of published uh literature.

To have positive therapeutic effects on the body. What are some of those positive therapeutic effects? Sure. So one which has been um uh document quite extensively is the ability to control Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome, which are two gastrointestinal problems.

As well. as um very high priced and and I would say Tinged with some potential side effect. biologic medicines that are approved by the FTA to treat Crohn's disease and irritable bow syndrome.

Another illness that it's been uh shown to mediate against is rheumatoid arthritis. And the the common factor here is that we have two types of nervous systems. We have a fight or flight nervous system. which is the sympathetic nervous system.

And we have a rest and digest nervous system. Which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When diseases occur It's because one of those two nervous systems, the sympathetic one, the fight or flight takes more of a dominant position in the body.

and causes a state of inflammation or over activation And by stimulating the vagus nerve You can ramp up. The power of the parasympathetic nervous system And calm down this kind of over stress state.

that leads to an irritable bowel syndrome or to um the inflammation of arthritis. This is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation, one of those things that really woke me up and made me pay attention for a bunch of reasons. One is relevance to my current life because I've been working with A doctor for about ten weeks doing heart rate variability training and there are some researchers with claims I want to say out of Rutgers and elsewhere that

certain types of HR V training affect vagal tone and Via affecting that vagal tone have a a host of cascading uh therapeutic benefits. Wha whether or not that that holds up to scrutiny or not, I don't know. But the the second, and I'm embarrassed to even give voice to this. So hopefully this won't just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might have as I

Why I lived in China. for a period of time in college, went to two universities there in Beijing as uh effectively an exchange student, but it was a one way exchange. I don't think we had any students in return from China. And the ears are very much utilized in the world of acupuncture. And I'm curious to know if you think that whether

by trial and error or otherwise, it's possible that Acupuncture stumbled upon the effects without knowing the Mechanism

Of stimulating or affecting the ears. Two then in turn affect the vagus nerve. I know it's it's quite a stretch, but when I first read about this access via the ears, that is one thing that jumped to mind because I always kind of poo-pooed and if I'm being honest, ridiculed the idea.

of using the ears to access these deep inner points, but Here we are. So I don't know if you have any thoughts. Tim, you're first, your your credibility is immense. So don't have to you would have to actually say something crazy to Denton or what you said is the opposite of of crazy. What you said is extremely insightful and crescient. So as convinced as I was

that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals. As convinced as I was that we could have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people's disease, That's exactly how convinced I am. that the acupuncturist of traditional Chinese medicine

did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible From the earlobe. And one of the first things that Doctor Tracy Showed me. was a uh very medically accurate from uh Chinese traditional medicine practitioner.

Map of the earlobe. In terms of exactly where you put I'm I'm sorry, I don't know what the official name is of the of the Yeah. and how they map to different parts of the body. And then he showed me on an anatomy map how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve. That's wild. So wow. Yeah, it's it is totally true.

And why really would it not be true? I mean, you know thousands of years of Chinese civilization. They have had a chance to do so much trial and error. And they were a literate civilization for so long. So the results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on.

So I I do think it's entirely rational that they would have figured this out. And what I'm hoping for now, what I'm trying to support. Yeah. There is an opportunity to what I would what I call in my own words Crack.

The human neurome. So what that means is that there are a um unique Pattern. Of amplitudes. And signal length.

And signal voltages that will activate some different part of the vagus nerve than others. And each of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a different part of the human body. We don't know what those are. Right now we are just kind of in a way I would say we're s we're dumber than than the acupuncturist.

Because Almost all of the work that the FDA has allowed to go forward on vagal nerve stimulation. They all use the same pulse width, the same pulse power, and it it works. So that's great. You know But I think it could work even better if we decoded the the human

Uh neurome. And I believe in the future. People will be able to put on a pair of like beat headsets. And uh those beat headsets will have gel less Uh meaning like you don't need like the EKG kind of gel, gel less electrodes.

Will rest across your cymbaconki and your traga and the different parts of your earlobe. and will provide you a stimulation that matches the particular ailment that you have. Eliminate the ailment. Without taking any pills, without paying any money to anybody. This is an area I wanna keep digging in because it's rare well, it's pretty much non existent that I have the opportunity to speak with someone with so much electrical engineering

background about The possible applications or implications of technology like this. I'd love to just throw out another group of devices to see if you have any opinions on them one way or the other. But

Potential applications. Of Let's just say T D C S or T M S, so transcranial direct current stimulation or other means Uh

stimulating the brain. Typically using some type of conducive gel, but not always in the case of a TMS paddle. Have you looked at these technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them? A little bit. I'm I'm aware of uh a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for treating a particular form of brain cancer. with this type of technology, so there's there's this very solid scientific benefit. That's been documented. After many years of working through the FDA, I will I have a world of respect for the rigor

that they put into any decision to approve something. So when they approved it, it it meant that it was scientifically proven to work. Something that is quite different from that, but at the same time related to it, Tim, is on the Last day of Twenty nineteen. Which was like the last day of the decade.

It turned out to be a a weekday, I forget if it was a Tuesday or whatever. But the US patent office only issues patents on one day of a week. And it was like the one day of a week that they issue'em on I suppose it was Tuesday or whatever. And it was a a patent that that I received. for a device that I call a Alzheimer's cognitive enabler.

And this device is worn over the cranium, as you mentioned. And it senses uh nerve impulses inside the brain. It is connected to a computer with a visual recognition and a speech comprehension system. So that if a patient with Alzheimer's is not able to adequately communicate and appear to recognize the people who are coming into their room.

The computer vision recognition system and sound recognition system. Well talk. On behalf of the Alzheimer's patient, say, you know, Hello, son. Thank you for for coming to see me. And it is actually being triggered by recognition that are deep in the Alzheimer's patient's mind.

So that more people will come to visit the patient. The patient's stress levels uh may be lower. So I believe this kind of bridging of electronics in the mind is is really right around the corner. Mm. What inspired

Putting the work into that research and filing that patent. I think part of it was was seeing my mother in law Suffer pretty badly from somewhere on the spectrum between dementia and and Alzheimer's was never really completely clear where she was

At that And um She would she would recognize us coming in, but she couldn't communicate. And it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate. My own mother is is more or less in at that point right now as well.

Secondly, the work on the Bina forty eight computer. showed me that it was really possible for people to strike up meaningful relationships with the digital version of of Bina, the Bina forty eight robot. And so it was just like, you know, a very short step from Instead of putting

all of Bina's or even a a good portion of her memories and her personality into this computer Why not actually have the computers interaction capability, input output capability Triggered. by something like a neurosky type of EEG brain interface.

And the last piece of it was I was I was given a um a Christmas present by a friend of mine. Which was one of these Neurosky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with your thoughts. by controlling your EEG signals. So that's a consumer product anybody can buy. And it really works. Well

Yeah, this conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have Alzheimer's disease is very prevalent on both sides of my family and observed both sets of my grandparents Deteriorates. to the point where at least some of them couldn't recognize immediate family members. and was recently re watching

segments of a documentary I saw. called Alive Inside and the subtitle is A Story of Music and Memory and What struck me most about this documentary is that Not that they could play

music from someone's youth to them through headsets and watch them come alive in s in some really Spectacular ways both. physically, right in terms of kinesiology moving around, but also psychologically. The most impressive part to me is that they would play music for say a handful of minutes, five to ten minutes from someone's youth, and

And then turn off the music. And that person could have a perfectly coherent reasonably fast speed conversation, whereas prior to the administration of the music, they were From the outside. Catatonic.

Basically. And it makes me wonder what music is doing. I'm sure there are people who study this and probably have a better mechanistic explanation. And how it could be incorporated into Therapies. intended to counter dementia or advanced Alzheimer's disease, things of this type. Tim, you see like just in this conversation, we are uncovering like so many, you know, vast new oceans of opportunity for people to learn and study about music.

To me, music is the foundational human technology. Because the first thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mothers' hearts while we were still in Utero. And that beat, that's a rhythm.

Okay. And after we're born, you know People may have better or worse rhythm, but there's nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move to it. And then all the different types of melodies and chords the

build upon rhythm. It's just fancier and fancier forms of music. So I I believe that there's tremendous therapeutic properties to music. It's just been scratched. Not even scratch. It's been kind of like Blown on like

Yeah. And it's it's there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up Growing up with more music than ever before. to begin to apply this great human cultural technology of music to the biggest mystery in the entire universe, which is the human mind.

Mm-hmm. I wanna come back. to the mind or more more accurately consciousness in a moment. But first This'll seem like a left turn and it is.

I was reading a piece in the Washington Post That's the covered quite quite a a lot of your life and there was A segment on Love Night. I don't know if that's enough of a prompt.

But can you tell us what Love Night is? So when Dina, my partner, and I got married, we each had one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of. And then we had two children together. And we were kind of trying to build A blended family that

would feel like nobody was a stepmom or a stepdad, that everybody was just like In one family. And in fact we cross adopted each other's kids from previous marriages.

So I was taking the kids to music classes. All of the kids were in the uh Yamaha music program where they learn piano and violin instruments like that. And we would practice songs. And I was brought up Jewish where every Friday night was something that was special. It was the Sabbath and the family sat down together and had dinner.

And said a couple of prayers. So Bina and I tried to think how can we like merge all these things together, the Jewish tradition. The need to create a blended family, the music. that we were all enjoying from watching the kids learn to play piano and violin. And we decided to

Every Friday night have a um special family ceremony which we would call Love night. And we sang a song, which the melody was actually based on one of the kids' songs that they had learned in the Yamaha music program. The words were, you know, very

simple and and affirming. And at Love Night, the core of Love Night is Was that each person around the table With have an opportunity to say what love meant to them.

during the past week. During the week from the previous Friday to this Friday What does love mean to you? And you know, Bina and I as the adults we would say something

either sophisticated or or simple, like I love Bina, I love Martine, I love the kids. The kids started off just saying like what love means to me is like Our dogs.

Or You know, very basic things. But as they grew older, they came into more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love. Until you know, after a couple decades of this.

I have heard all of them, or all of us have heard thousands of different things. That love can mean to a person. Now I'd like to fast forward and sorry to be in a little riff here, but I want to fast forward to the current covet pandemic. Her kids are all adults now, they've flown the coop, they have their own kids. And

Suddenly we are in a situation where we can't all gather together in any one house for love night. You don't want to travel, you don't want to like endanger people, so on and so forth. So we decided to continue the love night tradition, but on Zoom. Or Google Meet.

So every Friday night. From my son, who's a uh a captain in the army in Iraq. to his wife who's on a base in El Paso, to my other son with um four grandchildren in Florida, to my daughter in Brooklyn and her kid and and her husband and We all get together on Zoom, plus friends of all of our the kids were not embarrassed by Love Night. In fact they wanted to share it with their friends and their friends were saying like Whoa

This is crazy. This is beautiful. And so we get together every Friday night. We sing our love night song. And now there's about twenty of us, you know, we go around virtually what love meant to us. During that uh previous week.

And I would say love night is one of the most beautiful parts of my life. I'm so glad that I Ask that question and Love Night, could you give a few more examples of possible answers just to Give people uh A

Flavor. for how people might answer this question because I for instance would love to try this with my girlfriend with some of our friends, family, et cetera, but I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have the ability to kick things off effectively.

So every morning Uh, Bina my partner goes out for takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends who lives a few houses away. And that best friend now joins our left nights. And last Friday she said, What love means to me is every morning Going out for a walk with Bina and the dogs.

Last week our youngest grandson, Saturn He's you know, he was born in twenty ten, so he's ten years old. He said What love means to me

Is this And he pulled a piece of paper He said, I got a ninety five on my math test. And he was just so proud of himself and and and shared it with us. So those are typical examples of um I think I last time said what love means to me.

He's sitting down at the piano. And playing different songs from memory. So to use this as a uh Skipping. uh I was gonna say a sis a skipping stone, but I think I'm getting my metaphors mixed up. I say a launch pad, a lily pad, pick your pick your choice uh to consciousness.

Do you think that we will be able to, as I've heard you put it once, uh recapitulate uh or or recreate consciousness. Synthetically. And Does that mean we'll have machines?

That Can love, for instance. in the not too distant future, what what what would it mean to have created consciousness? Sure. I I do believe it's possible and a great book that I would recommend that goes into this subject in beautiful detail is called the emotion machine.

By Marvin Minsky. And Marvin Minsky is often thought of as the father of artificial intelligence. He was a professor at MIT for a great many years. So in the Emotion Machine book, he really describes exactly how you would go about creating a computer and the type of software

That it would take In order for the machine to feel What we feel when we say that we love somebody. And I I think it's likely to occur Tim, because it's hard for me

To think of Any aspect of uh life that cannot be replicated if one had sufficiently advanced technology. One of my favorite sayings from another role model, Arthur C Clark. is that, you know, magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.

Mm-hmm. So I think just like we have been able to create um an artificial hip. Artificial knees. Artificial heart. I'm in my own company. We are building lungs and kidneys.

People are creating artificial nerves. People like Elon Musk has formed a whole company, Neurolink. where he's working on downloading a hum a whole human brain. I have little doubt that humans will end up being able to replicate A human mind.

Now whether or not the Rest of society accepts it as a human mind, or not. I think is gonna be a a long pitch battle. And that's what Is the subject of my book uh virtually human. It that whole book is

Talks about How and when will society accept digital consciousness as being as conscious as a human. But even if that digital consciousness is not yet at human level. What happens when it's at say primate level?

Or at canine level. Or even at uh rodent level. If you can get to any of these levels, you could kind of see how it's the same old human effort of keep making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level.

Where I've I think that the individual live today that has the best understanding of this topic is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil. He's uh director of engineering at Google. What I love about Ray Is he never tires of pointing out That this digital human consciousness.

It's Human. You know, consciousness is a is a h human consciousness is a human phenomena. So when we create a digital analog or doppelganger or simulcra Whatever you want to call it.

When we create a her That her is human. It's not us versus them. It's one. It's we will have been able to move our mind. into a digital substrate.

Just like if our knees give out. You move it to a mechanical substrate, or if an organ gives out, you transplant it with another organ. Mm. Where would you if you had to kind of price is right style, put a timeline on this.

When do you think we'll have rodent or canine level? Consciousness. Plus intelligence. Yeah, it's pretty hard to say, Tim, because one thing I am not is I'm not a soothsayer, I'm not a prophet, I'm not a a visionary, any of those things. I'm I'm I'm just a humble technologist and all the projects I work on.

They have five year time horizons because I have difficulty really seeing beyond five years. So every technology I'm working on, it's like I want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years. Also, I am totally a believer in this uh adage.

that futurists usually Overpromise in the near term. And under promise in the long term. So what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of um futurists saying, Oh, we'll have digital rats or digital dogs or digital people. in ten, twenty, or thirty years.

They have probably overpromised in the near term. What they have underpromise in the long term Is In not ten, twenty, thirty years, but in say eighty, ninety or a hundred years.

There won't be just Digital rats. Digital dogs and digital people. But most people Will be digital.

Exciting and I suppose for some people very terrifying at the same time. What are some of the Most Important Ethical. questions or considerations related to technology.

As we move into Future decades. In your mind. Yes, in in my mind, the biggest problem with technology is that people only think about the rights to implement the technology and they don't think about the obligations they have as somebody creating a technology. And by what I mean by that.

is you know, there was this great philosopher of the twentieth century, Isaac Berlin. I believe he was German. And he Had a real simple message. His message was that

For every right. There is an obligation. It's again, it's a very Alan Wattsan sorry to keep coming back to Alan Watts, but it's a very Alan Watsian point of view that A right only means something in the context of its obligation. So for example, if I have a right to be a parent Which we think everybody, you know, has a right to be a parent.

You only have that right to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation. to be at least not a horrible parent. If you're a horrible parent, you will have your children taken away from you and you'll no longer in that sense Be apparent. So with regard to technology I think there is a point of view that

Anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology. But I dispute the ethics of that perspective. I think that um every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation. To have the consent.

of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology. So for example My right to build an an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant someplace. I don't just have that right. That right is coupled to an obligation

That I have to have the consent of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation of that technology. And it comes into this uh domain of of in my own field, say

The transplantation of genetically modified pig organs into people. For me to have a right to do that technology I have to have the consent of the larger community. That that's a safe thing to do.

In a democratic country That consent. Is Issued on behalf of the country by the government. And then the field of health.

It's issued by the FTA. So before the FDA permits us to transplant these genetically modified pig organs, And the people They want us to demonstrate to them that there is no risk, not a small risk, but no risk and Of any kind of animal virus.

seeping into the human population as a result of these animal transplants. So in summary I believe like an amazing field for the future. A field that will Probably in the future.

have almost as many people with this career as are web designers today. Із філдов техноефикс. Everybody who wants to create a technology We'll need to wrap that technology in an ethical Envelope of consent.

If we look at you know science over well we could look at it over the last few thousand years, but let's just say last few hundred years. You mentioned earlier that as I think you were discussing the structure of scientific revolutions, how These breakthroughs.

These massive scientific leaps forwards seem like complete madness at the time. to the vast majority. And we don't have to go that far back to find, say, surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants. I mean, this is not The Dark Ages this is like less than a hundred years ago, you see some some really appalling things that were

taken as best practices or common practice. And one of my friends Who's uh an outstanding doctor. likes to repeat this I suppose adage that you hear among good doctors, which is fifty percent of what we know is wrong, we just don't know which fifty percent. And and and that seems to always be true. So if we flash forward ten or twenty years, and I know you're not a prophet or a sous there, but I'm curious, or even or it could be five years as a technologist.

What do you think Are any of the things we're doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd? or viewed as barbaric or crazy. Uh or naive. in the near future.

Well, probably Probably a lot of things. Yeah. Since uh a lot of you know what we look back in the past at seems to be barbaric. Um, building on top of your example of the Tortuous. procedures put onto neonates. People forget that the founder

Of the American Medical Association. the first doctor who was the who created the American Medical Association His name was uh Doc Gross. And um he lived in um Philadelphia.

And he did not believe in a sepsis. At all. And so he would do all of his procedures right in his street clothes. Infecting everybody and countless women.

Lost their lives. because of having those type of quote unquote doctors Helping with the delivery of the children and ending up You know, creating a septic condition in the mothers. And one of the most famous

Painters in American history, uh Thomas Aikens. painted this picture of the gross clinic. where doctor gross was teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure and you see dirt in his shoes and scuffy hands. Then he was followed the second president of the American Medical Association was a uh Doctor Agnew, who was the student of Gross.

And he had read about the research of Lister In England. And became a believer that even though we can't see these things germs, they're real. And we need to practice, you know, strict uh septic procedures before we do an operation. A few years later, Thomas Aikins painted the Agnew Clinic. And you see that the doctors in white smocks and everybody is, you know, looking super sterile.

And clean. So these type of revolutions can occur just like one generation to the next. It's not something that takes it takes a long time. I think that um You know, looking at uh what's going on today. In our world I think the fact

That we burn our own house. Will look to be g absolutely Bonkers. People would say, Well let me get this right. You've got like you know

A super thin atmosphere. I mean you guys saw that from space since the sixties at least. This atmosphere around your planet is super thin. You have a undeniable record of measurements of of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

Going up year after year after year. And you continued to just spew without limit. greenhouse gases into this atmosphere. Despite the fact that, you know, people are dying on the shorelines, dying of diseases, et cetera, et cetera. I I think they will think we are as stupid as somebody who would light a fire.

in the middle of their house to try to keep warm. And not bother with the smoke that they were choking on. Mm. Yeah and then if I could add an addendum to the well wait a second Did you guys know that the earth receives ten thousand times

The amount of solar energy falls right on the earth each day. Then it uses ten thousand times the amount of energy it it flows. And that's not to talk about the wind. And that's not to talk about the waves. And that's not to talk about the nuclear energy. I mean there I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid.

To be so scared of nuclear energy. Which has killed a few dozens of people. That we went ahead and just, you know, stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That will kill millions of people. That will seem ludicrous to them.

think this is uh and I and I won't keep you too much longer, but I think this I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to comment on Or describe it. your own engineering projects. with carbon neutrality or zero emissions as

as an objective because this is not just Kind of idle. hand waving for you. This is something that you've taken a keen Engineering. mind too. And and I think that was not mentioned in your bio, even though it's

Yet another one of these uh examples of your sort of extreme curiosity and capability. Uh could you just describe what you've done in that arena, please? So this is another area that's that gives me immense enjoyment. Again, another kind of like lightning bolt to my soul. is to try to create infrastructure, buildings and cars and planes and things. That uh have a zero carbon footprint.

And I look at it as an intellectual challenge. When I read that people said, Well, we cannot have a zero carbon footprint uh society until twenty fifty. That's what the authorities say.

You know already, Tim, I'm gonna say why. Why not? Why not? Why not? Um I'm gonna question that authority.

So about three years ago we undertook to build a new headquarters for a company in Silver Spring, Maryland that would have a zero carbon footprint. Not in the best climate, Maryland. It's Got it. Good seasons and it's bad seasons.

Right in the middle of a city, Silver Spring, Maryland is a built up suburb of Washington, DC. And for the uh manufacture of uh medicines and stuff, which is a uh somewhat of an energy intensive activity. So we built um a hundred and fifty thousand square foot zero carbon footprint building, which turned out to be the largest zero carbon footprint building in the entire world. And we inaugurated it a couple of years ago. It turns out we produce more energy.

than we use each year now two years running. We did this by just Thinking carefully. about energy and and how to manage it. So for example We have underneath the building fifty wells, each of which go down five hundred feet.

And they exchange uh heat from the building with the coolness of the earth. In the summer. Bring the coolness back up and in the winter They exchange coolness of the building. With the steady temperature of the earth.

in the winter to keep the building warm. The sides of the building are clouded with uh solar panels. The entire building has a brain. that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow uh natural ventilation. It's a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and engineers have come over there.

Another example is in the delivery of our organs, when we right now we refurbish organs, lungs in particular. That uh decident has donated. or the decedent's family has agreed to the donation. But when the transplant surgeons look at that lung, they say it's too mu full of fluid and mucus, we can't use it, throw it away. So what United Therapeutics says is give us your lonely, unwanted, unloved lungs.

uh fly them to Silver Spring, Maryland. We will refurbish them. uh will show through a high speed digital network to the transplant surgeons all across the country. That the organ is good as new. through this digital network and bronchoscope and X ray and all that stuff. And then we fly the lungs back out to them, and we've saved over a hundred fifty lives this way, Tim. How do you refurbish a lung?

You you first you have to remove it from the dying body. A dy body is a terrible place to be. So we remove it from the decedent. Um we cool it down. So we kind of give it a I won't say we freeze it, but we cool it down very s very low temperature. We fly it to Maryland and we put it in a glass dome.

And in this glass dome we have tubes. We have a kind of artificial blood and the air pumping. So we've made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung. And we have expert technicians who work um these sorry, I don't know the exact name of the equipment, but that sucks out uh mucus and and the they operate on the lungs.

Like it was a person. But it's just an isolated pair of lungs. And the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida, wherever They tell us through the the digital screen and the voice um put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side or go further. Give me they they see this and they know what they want.

So our technicians know how to do this. And within four hours in almost two thirds of the time We were able to take what was a non compliant dead piece of tissue and turn it into a nicely breathing lung. It's so beautiful to watch Tim, the lungs go in and out. Like a butterfly's wings going up and down. In fact, you could see a video of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning.

And then we cool the lungs back down. And we fly it to the uh transplant surgeon. And um one hundred percent of the time that they have accepted these lungs, they have had successful lung transplants. With like I mentioned, over a hundred fifty people walking out of the hospital. But

I mentioned this because This is a lot of flying around, flying here, flying there, you know, helicopters going back and forth, planes. And if I'm gonna make an unlimited supply of Orcans And you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning of the call, the hundreds of thousands of people who need these organs, that is going to be a humongous Carbon footprint.

We could have said to ourselves, Well, we're doing such a good thing, we're saving all these lives, we could be permitted to foul. our atmosphere because It's balanced by the good things we're doing. But instead, we like to ask ourselves like the challenging question. How can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time?

How can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint? And the solution Came from the technology of electric helicopters. Which are powered by renewable energy. They can fly these organs from one place to the other.

Um without adding any carbon footprint at all. And I will be a little bit of a soothsayer here. I am absolutely convinced that in this decade, the twenty twenties, We will be delivering Manufactured organs by electric helicopter. Mm.

I love it. I have I will say one. I may cheat and sneak in one or two more, but Uh a question. Well, likewise. This is just f endlessly Endlessly interesting. So many so many different pathways into the labyrinth. But I need to make sure I suppose since my job is

Supposedly interviewer that I can find my way back out. Yeah. I have Read that awatts will show you the way. Alan Watts will show me the way. He does have the a most seductive and hypnotic voice, for those who haven't heard, I recommend. I I've read that a favorite saying of yours is quote, identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them, end quote. Can you s please speak to that?

Or explain what that means for you. Yeah, so identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them. means to try to find a I'll I'll put it in business terms, a market area. That is ignored. A unmet

uh need and but it doesn't really have to just apply to medicine. It can apply to any area of life. And the way I would phrase it, uh, Tim, and just like You know, a very natural, almost folklorish way. Is that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond.

Than a small fish in a big pond. In uh business school back at UCLA, we one person we studied a lot Was the experience of General Electric under Jack Welch. And he had an adage which From a business sense was I think very, very smart.

He said if you can't be number one or number two in a market, don't even try. Because you will have to spend an amount of money. Equal to the revenues. Of the number one or number two in that market. to become the number one or number two in the market.

If you're not the number one or number two You will always struggle to be profitable. But if you are the number one or number two Your profitability is assured. So what that means translated to all of our activities is

Is if there's an area Like for example a a number of people have said, you know, we should get involved. We when I say we, my company night therapeutics. should get involved in creating a vaccine for COVID. And to me, well, you know, it's not a corridor of indifference. There are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for COVID. So

That's not what we would want to do. It's very unlikely we'd ever be successful on that. Somebody else said, Well, how about these people, the Covid long haulers? The people who have survived from a very difficult course of COVID And they've got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and likely years after the effect. I said yes.

That's a corridor of indifference. Nobody is thinking about the long haulers. The people who now have, you know, chronic lung problems because of the havoc. with Covid racked in their lungs. Let's develop some medicines for these chronic long haulers.

Makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And On a related maybe a related note. In some respects.

Uh and this is this is a question that doesn't always work, so I'll I'll take the blame if it doesn't. But If you had a billboard. Metaphorically speaking, to get a A message, a quote, a word, an image, a question, anything. out to billions of people. Let's just assume they all speak English for the sake of

What might you put on that billboard? I think Apple Computer and Steve Jobs got there before me. Think different. Think different.

Mm. Why is that important? Because the solutions you know, Albert Einstein said you can't solve a problem on the same level That it was created. You have to solve it on the

Different level. If we all think the exact same way We will never get out of the ruts that we're in. The only way to get out of the problems that we face is to think differently. to go down the corridor of indifference.

Two. question authority. To be diverse. Thinking different. is the pathway to solving problems that exist today.

Mm. You know, looking back at everything we've talked about And Looking at all of the copious pages of notes for prep in front of me. It strikes me that you've forged many path for yourself.

and helped others to do the same by by thinking different But also thinking brightly coming back to Alan Watts yet again, right? The the yin and the yang and seeing the positive, looking for the positive in different circumstances, different situations. Do you have any advice or recommendations for people who struggle?

To do that. who are maybe mired in a a sense of hopelessness might be too too strong a word, but those who tend to see the glass is half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see half the spectrum of options or solutions. It's a really difficult question to answer.

Tim, because everybody situation is so unique and so different, and I do not doubt That for Many, many people. It is just a bad life. Whether it started that way or ended up the way and it's almost

impossible to see a way out. The perspective that I take Із I try to stay in touch with my ancestors. I think about the great grandmothers. Who

had to, you know, bear children in the worst of possible circumstances. I think about, you know, all of the like my partner Bina's great grandmothers. Who were Picking cotton as slaves. And had to work all day being bitten up by bugs, burning in the sun, feet

Deep in mud. And then bear a child at the last moment. So whether it's like, you know, my great grandparents from Eastern Europe or hers from They had nothing to look forward to.

Other than just the hope. That they were gonna have some children And that maybe those children might have a little bit of a better life than they did. And if not their children, their children's children. So their only purpose in life, their only hope in life, their only joy in life.

Was to Make a generation and that maybe that generation would be better. Now here we are in in America or or really most any other country in the world. We're at a point now where like eight out of ten people have a smartphone. With access to all the world's knowledge and information.

with access to countless amounts of music and And training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire circumstances, but the vast majority of people are are doing better than people have ever done before in history. So I say to myself, and I would ask, you know, somebody else looking through the world darkly right now, looking at the glass half full.

I would say How much worse? It must have been in the past, What do I owe? to my grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents

Who suffered and toiled who barely managed to survive to produce another generation What do I owe to them? I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life and that's what I'm going to do. Hot damn, Martin. I'm ready to get out there and get amongst it. I uh have so enjoyed

This conversation there are seventy nine more hours we could do just in uh round one. I won't subject you to that. And I'm so grateful that You were willing to make the time Two Have this conversation.

Thank you so much. My pleasure being with you, Tim. And is there anything else you would like to to say, to suggest or ask of those listening before we Bring this to a close. Two of my best friends and people who I think are the smartest, most creative, most

Happy loving people I know. Paul Mann and D. A Wallach both said to me that uh your podcast is the best. And Martine, if if Tim Ferris invites you on your on this podcast, you have to go on it. So Thank you, DA, and thank you, Paul. Well thanks to them also from me. I have for many months my whole team knows this.

been hoping to have you on. I had high hopes coming into it. Uh you you exceeded all of those high hopes, which seems to be a pattern for you. And I'm just very grateful and happy that we had a chance Uh so so thank you again. And for everyone listening, you can Find Martine on Instagram at Transbinary, Twitter at SkyBiome. We will link to everything in the show notes that

have mentioned in this conversation the books and everything you can imagine that uh we discussed will be available in the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time. Be kind. Practice love night.

Think different. Think brightly, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off.

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