#361 - Best Evidence for Life After Death: What Doctors See When You Die | Stuart Hameroff

Summary

Podcast Summary: Danny Jones Podcast #361

Episode Title: Best Evidence for Life After Death: What Doctors See When You Die
Guest: Dr. Stuart Hameroff
Date: January 5, 2026
Host: Danny Jones
Theme: Exploring consciousness, anesthesia, evidence for life after death, and cutting-edge theories at the intersection of neuroscience, quantum physics, and the origins of life.

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Overview

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Stuart Hameroff—an anesthesiologist and consciousness researcher—takes Danny on a fascinating tour of his 50-year career investigating the mysteries of consciousness, what happens at death, the possible mechanisms behind near-death experiences (NDEs), memory, the shortcomings of current neuroscience, the role of microtubules, and the controversial theory tying quantum physics to the experience of mind. Hameroff also dives into applied research (including ultrasound for Alzheimer’s), the overlap with parapsychology, and even contemporary UAP (UFO) phenomena.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Hameroff's Career Path and Early Fascination with Consciousness

• Interest since the 1960s: Hameroff’s curiosity about consciousness began as an undergrad, which he carried through his medical studies, focusing on the structures—microtubules—in the brain’s cells.
• Link to Anesthesiology: He was advised, “If you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works.” (00:48)
• Microtubules' Role: Unique insight that anesthesia depolymerizes microtubules, disrupting consciousness, and that this does not primarily operate at the membrane receptor level as long thought.
  • “If you give enough anesthesia and too much more than you need to go to sleep, your microtubules will fall apart... that's where they act, as it turns out.” (01:34)

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2. How Anesthesia Works / States of Consciousness

• Difference from Sleep: Under anesthesia, time “does not pass”—unique as compared to normal sleep, which is arousable and time-perceived.
• Mechanism: Anesthetics are diverse molecularly but uniformly impact consciousness, with brain activity and processing signals ongoing even when unconscious. Anesthesia targets microtubules, NOT traditional neuronal membrane receptors as previously conceived. (06:30)
• Awareness Under Anesthesia: Usually a rare mishap, sometimes patients recall the experience if underdosed, highlighting importance of correct dosing.

Quote:

“Time does not pass under anesthesia… when you wake up from anesthesia, you have no clue. Time stops flowing.” (07:24)

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3. Microtubules as the "Engine Room" of Consciousness

• Challenge to AI & Computational Models: Hameroff critiques the simplified, computer-like model of neurons and the assumption that complexity alone produces consciousness (as in traditional AI models).
• Information Processing: Suggests a single neuron, due to its microtubular structure, may have vastly more computational power than previously thought—by orders of magnitude. (15:22)
• Hard Problem of Consciousness: Cites the distinction between computation/intelligence and subjective experience (explained by philosopher David Chalmers). Points to the need for a non-computational explanation.
• Collaboration with Roger Penrose: The Penrose–Hameroff "Orch-OR" theory posits consciousness arises from quantum state reductions ("collapses") in microtubules, grounding consciousness in the fundamental geometry of space-time. This approach fuses quantum physics with relativity and may link consciousness to universal structures.

Quote:

“Consciousness is not emergent, it’s fundamental in the universe... conscious moments are linked to quantum state reductions described by Penrose.” (29:29)

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4. Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, and Afterlife

• Objective Reduction (OR): Penrose’s theory that wave function collapses in quantum mechanics are objective, spontaneous, and—when occurring in brain microtubules—yield conscious moments. (23:18)
• Simulated Reality Skepticism: Hameroff dismisses simulation theory as a cop-out, maintaining that explaining consciousness is key and that it’s fundamental to the universe, not a byproduct of computation.
• Data, Mass, and Entropy: Danny and Hameroff discuss analogies of data/information and mass, drawing parallels to biological order and the creative overcoming of entropy—biology’s “cleverness.” (33:01)

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5. Astrobiology & The Origins of Life

• Osiris Rex Mission: Hameroff is involved in research on organic molecules returned from asteroid Bennu, searching for signs of quantum oscillations and possibly even primitive consciousness in prebiotic compounds. (35:03)
• Time Crystals and Microtubules: Microtubules' dynamic oscillations may create fractal “time crystal” patterns, which might be essential to both life and consciousness.

Quote:

“Microtubules are time crystals… could be the key to everything.” (43:57)

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6. Plant Consciousness, Anesthesia Effects, and Wider Biological Implications

• Plants and Anesthesia: Plants with microtubules can be anesthetized; some evidence of “conscious” processes in plants, albeit at a much slower experiential rate. (44:00)
• Experiments: Anesthesia disables processes like Venus flytraps closing and sunflowers tracking the sun.

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7. The AI Debate – Can Machines Be Conscious?

• Hameroff’s Position: Strongly skeptical. Computer-based/AI “consciousness” is not the same as biological consciousness, as it lacks the quantum substrate (microtubules and coherent collapses) and energy efficiency.
• The Turing Test is Insufficient: Machines may appear conscious but that doesn’t prove subjective experience.
• Test for Consciousness: The only reliable experimental test is if the entity can be rendered unconscious by anesthesia. (53:21)

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8. Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and Life After Death

• Physiological Correlates: In patients close to brain death, measurable high-frequency ("gamma") bursts on processed EEG may correlate with reported NDEs—lasting seconds to minutes. (59:48)
• Hameroff’s Personal View: He believes consciousness persists after physical death (“quantum soul”), distributed through holographic spacetime, possibly explaining NDE and reincarnation phenomena.

Quote:

“Consciousness is happening in space time geometry ... when the body dies... consciousness kind of dissipates to the universe, potentially remaining entangled as a quantum soul.” (56:06)

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9. Memory, Microtubules, & Alzheimer’s Disease

• Memory Storage: Suggests memories are stored in the complex, variable structure of microtubules, not just in synaptic connections—a possible explanation for distributed memory and phenomena like “cellular memory” (e.g., transplant patients recalling donor experiences).
• Alzheimer’s: Strong correlation between tau protein tangles (which destabilize microtubules) and memory loss/dementia, more than with amyloid plaques. Stabilizing microtubules may have therapeutic potential (e.g., with ultrasound). (98:25)
• Ultrasound Therapy: Describes promising results in improving cognition and reversing brain atrophy in Alzheimer's patients with unfocused, low intensity brain ultrasound. (109:18)

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10. Parapsychology, Quantum Nonlocality & UAPs

• Psi & Nonlocality: Quantum consciousness hypothesis allows for phenomena like telepathy, precognition (“parapsychology”), and entanglement between brains.
• Skepticism & Studies: Acknowledges some telepathy/parapsychology demonstrations are faked, but believes genuine effects exist. Describes conference sessions with both advocates and skeptics. (134:15)
• CIA Interest: Acknowledges US government research in psychic phenomena and hints at ongoing “dark” programs. (137:43)
• Plasmoid UAPs: Discusses unidentified “orb” phenomena (UAPs), their curious non-propulsion-based movement, and the possibility that such objects could be conscious if tied to quantum gravity.

Quote:

“If they can mess with gravity, they might be conscious because that’s where gravity comes from, according to Roger …” (141:52)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• “Time does not pass under anesthesia… when you wake up from anesthesia, you have no clue. Time stops flowing.” — Hameroff (07:24)
• “If you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works.” — Mentor to Hameroff (00:48)
• “Consciousness is not emergent, it’s fundamental in the universe... conscious moments are linked to quantum state reductions described by Penrose.” — Hameroff (29:29)
• “I don’t believe machines can be conscious… the only test we have is: does it go away with anesthesia?” — Hameroff (53:21)
• “I think it's… possible that consciousness continues after death, possibly as a quantum soul.” — Hameroff (56:04)
• “The only reason [ultrasound therapy for Alzheimer’s] isn’t being tried is because it’s too cheap—there’s no money in it.” — Hameroff (123:08)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:07–01:34: Hameroff’s entry into anesthesiology, obsession with microtubules.
• 06:33: Fundamental differences between sleep and anesthesia.
• 15:22–21:58: Computational neuroscience, AI, microtubular information processing, and the “hard problem.”
• 23:18–27:44: Penrose–Hameroff Orch-OR theory, quantum consciousness, wave function collapse.
• 35:03–43:57: Osiris Rex asteroid mission, time crystals, search for prebiotic life.
• 53:21–60:06: AI consciousness skepticism, the Turing Test, and anesthesia as the litmus test; gamma EEG burst at death.
• 98:45–109:17: Alzheimer's disease, tau vs. amyloid, experimental therapies.
• 129:13–137:28: Parapsychology, telepathy studies, CIA involvement, and nonlocal quantum effects.
• 141:00–152:40: UAPs, plasmoid orbs, quantum gravity, consciousness, and anecdotal orb sightings (with video).
• 153:13–154:00: Final plugs—Science of Consciousness Conference and summary.

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode is a deep dive into the mysteries at the mind-brain frontier, challenging standard neuroscience and presenting bold, evidence-based arguments for quantum consciousness. Hameroff provides a nuanced, sometimes radical critique of AI, posits experimental tests for consciousness, shares emerging therapeutic directions, and entertains the overlap with phenomena often dismissed by mainstream science—from near death to UFOs.

Anyone interested in consciousness research, the quantum brain, or the possibility of an afterlife will find this episode provocative and well-sourced, with direct testimony from a career anesthesiologist-scientist.

Transcript

[A]

How does a anesthesiologist get so deep into this consciousness stuff?

[B]

Actually, I got interested in consciousness first in undergraduate back in the 60s, and then I went to medical school and was interested in brain, mind specialties like neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry. But they didn't grab me from the lifestyle standpoint. I didn't like what they did on a day to day basis. I did research in a cancer lab and studied how cells divide and how the chromosomes are perfectly separated in exact daughter pairs for mitosis. And then they go on and divide again and again. And everybody else in the lab got interested in the chromosomes, the genes, but for some reason I got interested in the structures that pulled them apart and separated them. Mitotic spindles made of microtubules. They seem to have some kind of intelligence, some kind of consciousness. And I'd been interested in consciousness from before. And so I got fixated on the microtubules. And everybody else in the lab went into the chromosomes, the genes, and probably genetic engineering and whatnot. But I stuck with the microtubules. And I then went to Arizona for an internship and wound up going into anesthesia because my future chairman said, if you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works. And by the way, microtubules are depolymerized by anesthesia, which turned out to be true.

[A]

But they're what?

[B]

They're depolymerized. If you give enough anesthesia and too much more than you need to go to sleep, your microtubules will fall apart. And the microtubules are the cytoskeleton inside all cells, including neurons. So neurons are quite full of them. And if you give about five times too much anesthesia, which you wouldn't want to do, the microtubules will disassemble. And that was done in simple organisms that they didn't care about. But it made a connection between microtubules, anesthesia and consciousness that I pursued and finally figured out, along with others, that anesthesia acts on microtubules, not on neuronal membrane receptors like most people think.

[A]

Interesting. How does anesthesia actually work? What is the mechanism there?

[B]

Well, that's a very good question. Nobody knows for sure where. We know that in the 1800s, a group of gases were discovered which, when inhaled at low concentrations, caused euphoria, giddiness, and this was like diethyl ether. So they had parties called ether frolics, where everybody sniffed a little bit of ether, danced around, acted stupid and fell over. Or nitrous oxide, laughing gas, the same thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And they realized that if they gave more, then they did fall over, become unconscious. And as long as you didn't give too much, and as long as they didn't vomit and aspirate and a few other things, they woke up perfectly fine. And so it began to be used for surgery. They gave enough anesthesia to put the guy to sleep. They would take out a tumor. The first one was done on a big neck mass at Mass General in 1846, and it started to be used for anesthesia for surgical procedure.

[A]

That was the first time it was used. 1846.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Wow. And I'm sure it took a while before we actually got it right because, I mean, it's a. It's a. It's a scary thing, anesthesia. That's why the anesthesiologists get the paid the most. Right.

[B]

We deserve it. Thank you. I was an anesthesiologist for 49 years. I retired about two years ago. But, yeah, it's a. It's a great field. And it is. It's. You have to be very, very careful. A lot of things go on, go wrong, could go wrong. And especially as we do sicker and sicker patients with older. Like, even in my career, we did more and more elderly, sicker patients with complex disease and the interplay between the heart and the lungs and the kidney and the liver and everything else comes into play. But basically, you gotta not give too much and maintain the airway and make sure they're hydrated and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it is a very demanding, rigorous field as far as how anesthesia works. That's a good question. And the interesting thing is that the anesthetic. Anesthetic molecules are all different, but they do exactly the same thing. They affect consciousness and very little else in the brain. So, for example, if you put someone asleep, they're unconscious, but the brain is still active. The brain is still working. So, for example, if we're doing surgery.

[A]

Working as if they're conscious.

[B]

No, they're not conscious. But, for example, let's say we're doing a spinal surgery. So the surgeon is operating on the spinal cord in the neck, and we want to make sure he doesn't do something to the spinal cord, because then the patient would be paralyzed, wake up paralyzed. Like put a screw through the bone too far or this or that. So we monitor, or we have people come in who monitor the physiological effects. So they put electrodes on the. On the feet or the hands, stimulate and record from the brain. So the signal has to go through the Spinal cord. And we do that, and we can do the anesthetics such that they're unconscious, but these sensory evoked potentials, they're called, are still going on. So the brain is processing these signals. The spinal cord is intact. So that's good. As long as that happens, the surgeon keeps going. And if he gets too close or squeezes the cord or cuts off the blood supply, the guys say, hey, that we just lost the sensory potential. Pull back or do something, and he fixes it. So it's very effective and useful. And it shows that the brain is. The patients are unconscious, but their brains are still active. And we know that from other reasons. The EEG is still there, just slow. And all this that continues is that the. Is happening at the membrane surface of the neurons. So neurons are usually considered to be integrate and fire. So they receive inputs, integrate to a threshold, and then fire an output. So very much like a computer chip or a transistor with an input output mechanism, only at the membrane. And that's how most people think. And the membrane effects are mediated by receptors and ion channels. And so everybody assumed anesthesia must work on the membranes and membrane receptors and ion channels. But that turned out not to be the case because, as I just told you, the membrane receptors and ion channels continue to work, but the patient can be unconscious. So what's happening? Well, if you look inside, there are these structures called microtubules that I had become interested in.

[C]

And.

[B]

And that's where they act, as it turns out.

[A]

So is there a fundamental difference between the state of the brain when they are under anesthesia, when a human is under anesthesia, versus when they're sleeping?

[B]

Oh, yeah. It's quite different when you go to sleep. If somebody pokes you or takes a knife to you, God forbid you'd wake up and you'd feel it. And anesthetized patients don't respond and don't feel it if they're adequately anesthetized. And sleep is not well understood either, but it's more of a. Probably a membrane effect or some. Some hormonal effect, something just chilling out the neuron and making it inactive. But it's arousable. If you stimulate it, they respond, right?

[A]

Yeah. A weird thing about anesthesia is I've experienced it a few times, is it's like. It's like an instant from the moment you fall asleep. It's like you wake up one second later.

[B]

Correct. Time does not pass under anesthesia, which is a very interesting thing, because the whole nature of time is another Mystery. We don't know at least the flow of time. You know, how we have an arrow of time while we only go in time instead of backwards. And when you go to sleep at night and you wake up in the morning, you can kind of guess, I was asleep a few hours. I was asleep, you know, a long time. But when you wake up from anesthesia, you have no clue. It could be 30 seconds or three hours. Yeah, you don't have a sense of time. Time. Time stops flowing under anesthesia.

[A]

Yeah, I heard of. I've heard many funny theories about anesthesia. One of them being like, what if. What if anesthesia wasn't really putting you unconscious? What if it was just wiping your memory? Like, what if when you wake up, you were awake during all that, they just erased your memory and you have no memory of it because that's what it feels like.

[B]

Well, since we can't directly measure consciousness, I can't say for sure you're conscious. I'm pretty sure you are, but I can't prove it.

[A]

I might be an npc.

[B]

You could be what's called a zombie. A philosophical, philosophical zombie. Someone who acts like us but doesn't have internal consciousness. And there was this. And there is also this horror, horrible situation of awareness under anesthesia. That's usually a mistake. Like you quite literally run out of gas or you're not paying attention enough. And surgeon gets near something more painful and the patient responds or feels it. And occasionally the patients who can be paralyzed with muscle relaxants. And we do that to get through muscles for various types of surgery. And patients have woken up or, or come back and said, I was awake the whole time.

[A]

What.

[B]

And there are very rare, occasional. You know, they're basically pilot error. You know, usually somebody screws up. But then again, there's also a lot of cases where we do. They're not intended to go to sleep. Let's say you're going to have a lump or a bump taken off and the surgeon will. Will numb that up. And then we give you propofol to have you go to sleep, but it's a very light purple fall, so you'll keep breathing. We don't have to worry about that. And that's not designed to have you completely asleep. And a lot of people say, well, yeah, I heard them talking, I was awake the whole time. Or they go in and out. And that's okay because they're not supposed. They don't need to be asleep because they're not going to feel it, because wherever the lump or Bump is, is already numb or like epidurals, things like that. Epidurals.

[A]

Spinal taps.

[B]

Exactly. Spinal anesthesia. Epidural local nerve blocks of various kind of the arm, the leg. You can do all kinds of things now. Field blocks and you know, you don't feel anything. And then we put you to sleep because you don't want to lay there bored and anxious for an hour or two or three or.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So then we just give you propofol sedation and you know some. And it's actually good if you wake up a little bit, move around and so forth and you don't really need to be asleep because you're not gonna feel it anyway. So a lot of people said, yeah, I remember I was, I was awake the whole time. So that, that is sometimes taken as, you know, failed anesthetic, but it's not. However, as I said, there are occasional horrible situations where the patient is awake due to pilot error. And how did that happen? It's never happened to me personally in my practice. I always erred on the side of a little extra because it's like a bell shaped curve. So if you're at. Right at the dose, one standard error of patients are going to be standard deviation are going to be inadequately necessary. So you want to err on the side of. Unfortunately, it's a good.

[A]

You'd rather overdose them than underdose them.

[B]

As long as you don't go too far. So that's the art. That's where it comes in. You want to make sure there they're asleep, but not too asleep.

[A]

Whenever I've woken up from anesthesia, I felt like I got hit by a truck. It takes me, I feel like twice as long as normal people. I'm nauseous afterwards when I throw up. Like I probably got overdosed.

[B]

Well, nausea you can usually it depends on what the procedure is and also the patient. But you know, we can give other drugs that prevent nausea specifically and propofol, which has become the go to drug for induction for, for going to sleep, which got a very bad rap because of Michael Jackson. But it's actually a fantastic drug. And most people wake up feeling good with very little if any pain, no nausea and a little euphoria and occasionally even erotic dreams when they wake up.

[A]

Erotic dreams for Propofol?

[B]

Yeah. That's kind of a trade secret, but it does happen.

[A]

Interesting. Steve put that on the grocery list. So how long were you doing this for? How long? How long have you practiced anesthesiology?

[B]

49 years.

[A]

49 years I was going to go.

[B]

For 50, but I figured I'm not going to press my luck. That would be just for show.

[A]

Was there any specific type of surgery you would be involved in or was it all types?

[B]

During the course of my career, I did all types. And including when I was younger, cardiac, pediatrics, a lot of neurosurgery.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Some ob. And after a while, the cardiac, the heart anesthesia became specialized and we had people who just did nothing from. But that same thing with peds. So over the course of my career, I became more of a generalist, which was fine by me. And. But over the course of my career, I did pretty much everything, including newborns. The. The scariest, because you have very little margin for error. So now we have people who do nothing but very, very tiny babies.

[A]

Oh, my God. I can't imagine.

[B]

And pediatric hearts are probably the toughest.

[A]

Pediatric hearts.

[B]

Yeah, because you got to go on bypass and you got to do this and that. So it's very technical and very, very precise. And you have much less margin for error the smaller the patient.

[A]

How crazy was the training? Like, I imagine I've heard stories of neurosurgeons talking about their, like doing their residency and practicing in hospitals, doing brain surgery with no power. Like, you have to imagine the whole building loses power. We still have to freaking cut this guy's head open and do a craniotomy on him.

[B]

Well, there every or I've been is I've ever been in has a backup power. And occasionally we've had a power system. You know, the lights go out, but usually within about three or three to five seconds they come back on. So I've never been in a situation that I can remember where they were off for a long enough, a very long period.

[A]

Yeah. We had this guy, Jack Cruz in here, is a former brain surgeon. He said that the building. He was sitting in the room with me and we had like a. A bag of power tools in the corner. And he's like, if we lost power right now and I had to do a craniotomy on you, I could find a tool in here to cut your head up. I'm like, Jesus Christ. You got to be resourceful, I guess.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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[A]

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[C]

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[A]

So going from 40, you're, I'm, I'm assuming you're practicing this, you've retired two years ago.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So early on from the beginning you were really fascinated and interested in this conscious and eventually you got connected with Roger Penrose.

[B]

Yeah, So I was an academic anesthesiologist, so I worked at a university. So part of my job was doing research. So I, when I was early in my career I got like, I worked four days in the, in the OR and had a day off and for research. And after a while things got tough and you had to have get your own funding. But I've always had some time for research while I'm also doing anesthesia and, and I was interested in consciousness. So I started studying how anesthesia works. I was interested in basic mechanisms and I was interested in microtubules. So I did a lot of computer modeling of microtubules as information processing to see how they could compute and process information. And I worked with physicists before I met Roger Steen Rasmussen, who was at Los Alamos, a nonlinear chaos theory guy and Jack Dusinski and some other people and published a lot on microtubule information processing, mostly from the theoretical standpoint and then got into experimentation. Later I was going around to neural net and AI meetings. The point was that most people say the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons. So each Neuron would fire or not fire. And that would be like a bit like a 1 or a 0 in a computer at synapses. So if you had enough complex comput, you would get consciousness emerging at a higher level of complexity. And that was and remains a standard explanation. And I didn't think that was right, because if you look at a single cell, so a neuron is a cell, so it can fire or not. But if you look at one cell like a paramecium or an amoeba or a tetrahymen or all these simple one cell creatures, they're quite clever. They can swim around, they have cilia made of microtubules that swim them around or sense. And, and so they, if they, they can avoid obstacles, they can avoid predators, they can find food, they can find a mate, they can have sex, two paramedicium fuse actually and have sex and they can learn. If you suck them into a capillary tube, they, they escape faster each time. So a paramecium is fairly clever. I'm not saying it's conscious actually, it could be, but at a very slow rate. But it's intelligent, has some, it has information processing. So if a, I asked my colleagues, you know, if you were going to design a machine computer to do what a paramecium does, you need an enormous computer. You know, how are you going to do that? Whereas you're saying that each neuron is a one or a zero, that's a big insult to neurons. So that was a point I was making. I was going to neural net meetings and AI meetings and for example, they were trying to reproduce consciousness in a computer. Assuming that there were 100 billion neurons, which is about right, with a thousand synapses at 100 hertz gives you 10 to the 16th operations per second. So that was the capacity of the brain according to the singularity Ray Kurzweil and all those guys. And they said, well, we have a computer with 10 to the 16th ops per second. We'll have brain equivalence. Everything the brain does, including consciousness, well, they went past that years ago. But I was saying that no, if you look inside each neuron, there's about a billion tubulins at oscillating at 10 MHz radio frequency oscillation frequency. So you have 10 to the 16th operation, billion microtubules per neuron, a billion tubulins. Tubulins, the proteins that make up the microtubules. So maybe hundreds of microtubules depending on. And so a billion tubulins oscillating in megahertz gives you 10 to the 16th ops per second per neuron, which is what the singularity people were saying for the whole brain. So I was saying, no, your target's way, way downstream. You know, they were going to funding agency, give us a few more billion or trillion, and we'll have conscious computers. And I was saying, no bullshit. That's the capacity of one neuron, you know, your target's way, way downstream. They didn't like that very much. They basically told me, you know, get out of here. Who are you and what do you know? And I said, well, I study the brain, you know. So one day somebody said, okay, wise guy, let's say you're right. How would that explain consciousness? You know, love, feelings, joy, pain, pleasure, all this. And that it doesn't automatically come from computation. And this later became known as the hard problem by philosopher David Chalmers. And when it was posed to me, I think it was probably 1990, I didn't have an answer. I realized I was a reductionist. And I had been saying that consciousness came from information processing and microtubules, but I didn't have a mechanism for consciousness. Information processing, yes. Intelligence, yes. Computation, yes. Consciousness, no. It's a different. It's a different thing. So fortunately, this person suggested I read a book by Roger Penrose called the Emperor's New Mind, which I did. And he had a mechanism for consciousness based on a quantum mechanism, quantum collapse. So I read this in about 91, 92. And the first part was about how consciousness can't be a computation because he used something called Godel's theorem, which basically says a mathematical theorem cannot prove itself. You have to be outside the system to judge. Like a mathematician can. Can say, okay, that theorem is true or not. You need to be outside the theorem. And so Roger extrapolated that to say that understanding, conscious understanding has to be outside the system. So there must be something other than our classical computation. And that other has to be quantum, because that's all there is outside of classical. If you. Once you get outside classical physics, you're in quantum ph. He said there must be a quantum explanation for consciousness. And by the way, that explanation would also solve what's called the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which is a whole nother problem, but turns out they're related. So in quantum mechanics, okay, let me back up on this. So we have basically two worlds. We have our classical world that we're familiar with. Material world, material world, right. And where things are predictable, things are in one place at the same time. Follow Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations and are fairly large, although the exact cutoff is vague. And that's a problem. But then if you go small, we know that things can be in multiple places at the same time. A particle can be here, here and here at the same time. And yet if we measure it or observe it, it collapses to one or the other. So this is called collapse of the wave function.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So in the quantum world, things observer effect. Yes. So if we measure it, or some people said consciously observe it, then it collapses. So that led to the idea that consciousness causes collapse of the wave function. Or consciousness collapses the wave function. And that was the first, the first idea. Then other people had other ideas that each possibility, that there was no collapse, each possibility evolved and formed its own universe, leading to an infinite number of overlapping universes. The many worlds hypothesis. And a lot of people believe that because you don't have to deal with consciousness, you don't have to deal with collapse. And all you have to deal with is the infinite number of overlapping universes, which doesn't seem to bother them. It seems kind of silly to me, but a lot of people believe that.

[A]

Meaning that every decision that we make during the day gets branches off into its own universe.

[B]

And the alternative decision has its own universe too. So if you order pizza for lunch in another universe, you ordered turkey sandwich, something like that. I mean, a lot of people actually believe that. But Roger Penrose said that he came along with, among another set of explanations which are called objective reductions, in which there's an objective threshold for reduction of the wave function. So in other words, reduction or collapse, they're the same thing, occurs spontaneously due to a law of nature which he derived from the uncertainty principle. At a time T equals H bar over E, which is the amount of superposition. So that any superposition would hit the threshold and then collapse. And when that happened, and here was the real kicker, there would be a moment of experience of conscious or proto conscious awareness if it was really small and random. So rather than consciousness causing collapse which had been around for at least 100, 100 years or so back then, it was the opposite. Collapse occurred spontaneously and caused consciousness. So it was the first and remains the only source of consciousness ever put forth. Other than hand waving, emergence. You know, you get complex enough and consciousness happens without any explanation of why. So it was a, it was a true mechanism. And it put consciousness at the very basic fundamental of the universe. Because he related. Well, the first question he addressed, which is, is still amazing to me how, how can things be in multiple places at the same time. How can a be here, here, here, and here at the same time? And for that he resorted to using Einstein's general relativity with space time curvature. So Einstein realized that there was a space time metric that mass was related. Mass was related to curvature in space time. So this underlying metric, or space time continuum, and if it curved enough, you had mass. So he said, well, okay, something like the sun, which is obviously massive, would have a big curvature and therefore you should be able to see stars on the other side of the sun here on Earth, because the light would be curved around the sun and we'd see it here on Earth. And So Eddington in 1919, during an eclipse, went to a mountaintop and observed stars that were known to be behind the sun, which was blocked out by an eclipse. So he wasn't blinded and he saw these stars that, that were known to be behind the sun because space time curved it. And he saw them and he proved Einstein's general relativity. And Eddington won a Nobel Prize. Einstein had already won his. And there's a great picture of the two of them having a drink over it. So that was, yeah, there it is. You can see that the path of the starlight is bent around the sun and we can see it on Earth. So that's Eddington's experiment. So that's for very big things. So Penrose applied it to tiny things. He said, well, a quantum particle, a proton or electron or an atom would have a tiny curvature. And if that proton was here and here in two places, it'd be two tiny curvatures. And that would mean that there was actually a separation in space time geometry, which he showed in these very clever two dimensional diagrams. So we can envision what it looked like. And so a superposition of being in two places at once was actually kind of a shredding or a blistering or separation in the fabric of the universe. And you can imagine that if each of these evolved, you'd get multiple universes, each one would have its own universe. So he said, no, the separation is unstable. And after this time, T will collapse to one or the other, giving off a moment of consciousness. So not only explaining a mechanism for consciousness, but avoiding the need for multiple worlds and, and solving the measurement problem. In quantum mechanics, it wasn't the conscious observer, it wasn't many worlds, it was this objective threshold that happened that gave you consciousness. So it was kind of taking two problems, killing two birds with one stone or feeding two birds with one hand, and you got both. But Nonetheless, it was ridiculed. Steven Pinker and David Chalmers kind of said, sure, one's a mystery, the other's a mystery. Let's make them the same mystery. You know, as a derisive ridicule. But actually when you think about it, you know, Occam's razor, you want the simplest explanation. So if you have one solution to do grant to two grand mysteries, I think that's a good thing. And I think that's what Roger discovered that so he put together general relativity and quantum mechanics and got consciousness. There's actually three mysteries with one one potential solution.

[C]

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[A]

So consciousness is not. It's analogous to like electricity on a circuit board, right? It's not. It's fundamental in our, in our universe. It's not necessarily created from the ground up.

[B]

It's fundamental in the universe. I don't know about electricity because that's a. It's certainly related. It's something like that. But it is fundamental. I put it along, you know, mass.

[A]

Electricity is not Created in the circuit board, Correct? Right.

[B]

I think of it, you know, mass, spin, charge, things like that are fundamental. So electricity would be made of fundamental charges that are moving in a current or have a field. So it's fundamental like those things. It's not emergent. So emergent means it comes out of, of other stuff getting complicated. Fundamental means it was there all along. And consciousness, like mass, spinner, charge, and a bunch of other cosmological constants are intrinsic to the universe and somehow encoded or embedded in fundamental space time geometry, which Roger Penrose happens to be the world's expert on, on what that actually looks like and what it does.

[A]

So what's your take on simulation theory then?

[B]

I was talking about that with my friend Susan Schneider at Florida Atlantic University. I don't like it. I don't, I don't really know. I think it's a. I think it's a cop out. If you can't explain consciousness, then you make up the story that, that there's some something or some entity or some God or some guy or something that created us and we're all in a simulation, but yet we're conscious. So you still have to explain conscious. So. Yeah, I don't buy it. All of a lot of people do.

[A]

Yeah, well, you can't disprove it, right? There's no way, there's no way to actually disprove that we're, that we are in a simulation.

[B]

Well, no, but you could prove what consciousness is without it, which is what we're trying to do. And you know, I think it's a default position. You could say, you know, the, the moon is made of green cheese until somebody went to the moon and said, hey, it's not, it's rocks and dust. So I think, you know, eventually that can be disproved, but we have to explain consciousness first. That would be the key.

[A]

I had this guy explain to me how basically information is how the world, the universe that we live in, how information is basically in a computational cloud. And all dark matter is a computational cloud that we live in, which would somehow explain that we live in a simulation. And the way he described this to me was with using. He used the analogy of a hard drive. And in, in the universe, we're bound by the laws of entropy, where entropy always goes up over time since the heat death of the universe. And in a hard drive, a blank hard drive, it is very low entropy. It's either all ones or it's all zeros. Now once you take information on it and you put information on that hard drive. Now it's going to be a chaotic mess of ones and zeros because it has data stored on it. So the entropy went up and it has all this data. But you can erase a hard drive. So when you erase all that hard drive, it goes back to very low entropy. All ones are all zeros. Now there was someone who theorized that, I forget who the person's name is right now, that if you weighed all.

[C]

Of the, if you took all the.

[A]

Hard drives and data centers that exist on the face of the earth right now and you calculated all of the, all of the data on it, it would have mass, very little mass though. I think it was like less than a kilogram of mass with all the data stored on all the hard drives around the world.

[C]

If it is true that this data.

[A]

That is stored on these hard drives does is mass, that would mean that data equals mass.

[C]

Right?

[A]

And if data equals mass and you can erase the hard drive, that that mass has to leave the hard drive and go out into the universe.

[B]

Well, you cover a lot of ground there. Let me go back to entropy because as you say, it seems to be the enemy of life. Life has to overcome entropy. So let's go back to how does the microtubule form? Microtubule is made of tubulins, individual proteins. If you set the calcium and ph and other things just to write, the tubulins will self assemble into this crystalline lattice of a microtubule. So that would seem to be decreasing entropy, right? Because it's going from a bunch of stuff in solution to this crystal crystalline lattice. However, it's entropy driven because each tubulin has eight ordered waters on it when it's in solution. And if it joins to another one, it loses some of those ordered waters. And then if you form a lattice, it loses even more. And so the net, the number of ordered waters goes down and the entropy actually goes up as the crystal assembles. So you get this elaborate crystal lattice which is entropy driven because of the ordered water. So biology is very clever actually is the point and has figured out a way. And why does biology do anything? This is kind of changing the subject a little bit, but why? You know, I got interested in the origin of life and when I retired from anesthesia, I went into astrobiology with my, my colleague Dante Loretta, looking for the origin of life. And why did. You know, his big thing is why did life start? And he was in charge of a NASA probe that went to an asteroid and brought back these organic molecules that we're looking at for signs of life and consciousness.

[A]

So did they find it?

[B]

We're working on it.

[A]

They sent a probe to an asteroid.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah. And it brought it back. And we're here. It landed a year and a half ago.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

And it was a 20 year project, seven years in flight. Dante was a young assistant to the boss when it started, Mike Drake. He was a professor at University of Arizona. They got a billion dollars from NASA, they made the plan, they picked the asteroid. And then unfortunately, Mike got sick and passed away. And Dante became the chief of the project at a very young age. He's still pretty young, he's in his 50s. And, and it was a 20 year project. What was it?

[A]

Was there a name?

[B]

Osiris Rex.

[A]

Osiris Rex. NASA.

[B]

Yeah, I forget. The Osiris Dash R E X. I can't remember what it stands for, but it was, it was a big success. And they just recently found Sugars on Osiris Rex. There it is.

[A]

So Osiris Rex is the name of the asteroid?

[B]

No, no, Osiris Rex is the name of the probe, of the probe, of the project.

[A]

Click on all Steve.

[B]

Oh, this is Sugar's discovered in Bennu. Bennu was the asteroid. And this was just discovered recently. He sent. Whoa. He sent samples all over the world. So there's labs all over the world studying this.

[A]

Oh my gosh. And we're crazy.

[B]

We're interested in looking for, for signs of quantum oscillations in organic molecules now, or life is based on organic chemistry, which in organic rings are these carbon rings with hydrocarbon aromatic, quantum, quantum optical effects. And they're all over the sky, they're all over the universe. They're produced by young stars and, and they're the basis of life on Earth because they come here in asteroids or in meteorites, rather.

[A]

How far away is this asteroid?

[B]

It was a quote unquote, near Earth asteroid, but it took seven years, three years to get there. They circled for a year, or maybe four, I forget, four or five years to get there. They circled for a year, picked a spot and then one. And they had one shot at it. And this thing had to come down and scoop up organic materials. And if it goes too far, it goes right through the asteroid because it's the. An asteroid is just a bunch of rocks that are held together by very weak gravity. So you'd go. If you hit it too hard, you go right through and come out the other side.

[A]

What?

[B]

Yeah, so, but, but so they, it was. And they couldn't do it directly because it took minutes, many minutes to get the signal back to Earth. So they couldn't sit there and say, okay, now do this now. It all had to be pre programmed and on contingency and all they could do was, you know, hold their. Cross their fingers and hope. And it worked like, it worked perfectly. And they, they have a simulation, they have a video from after the fact, after what happened. And it went down, it scooped it up, closed the thing, the thing closed, retracted, went back and the thing was able to close. They were worried that it wouldn't close perfectly. And they. But it did. And they got 120 grams of carbonaceous material which is a treasure trove because they found everything they were hoping for, including not all, but most of the amino acids, including the aromatic amino acids, which are the true building building blocks of life and other stuff, including sugars that they just found and. Sugars, yeah, deoxyribose. That was that, that headline you just saw. They just found that recently somebody elsewhere around the world who's been looking at these samples. Sugars discovered in Bender samples. Third from the left, there's. So that was just in the last few days. But.

[A]

Oh my gosh.

[B]

Previously they found aromatic amino acids and, and cells and Go back.

[A]

Steve, click on Overview on the. On the bottom, bottom right. Wow. Asteroid Study Sample Return Mission Visited and collected samples from the 101,955 Bennu A carbonaceous near Earth asteroid material. The material returned in September 2023. Is expected to enable scientists to learn more about the formation and evolution of the solar system of planet formation. W. I wonder how fast this thing was going. Does it say?

[B]

I don't know. It was pretty fast. And they caught up to it. They got behind it and they. Or. And then they went into orbit around it.

[A]

Oh, look at this. I think it says right here, its hyperbolic escape speed from Earth was about 5.1 kilometers or 3.36 miles per second. Okay, so that thing was going way slower than the AI Atlas. That's crazy. That's crazy. They can get something to go that fast and freaking land on it.

[B]

Yeah, they. Well, they didn't actually land. They scooped it up and then turned around and came home. And it took two years to get home. And it came down in the Utah desert with a parachute. And Dante was on the team that met him there. And I watched it on NASA TV and it was a little bit nerve wracking because the thing disappeared. It turned out, in retrospect that the main chute didn't open. And so they're waiting for it. It's kind of like, you know that movie Apollo 13, where they're waiting for it to come out of the clouds, and they're waiting and waiting and waiting. And this was. They were really waiting, and it was overdue. And Dante told me later, okay, he figured it had crashed already or something because it turned out the chute didn't open. But the drogue chutes opened, and that did the trick. And it landed gently in the Utah desert. And I watched on NASA TV as Dante was in a helicopter. They came and he got out and he went over and he looked at it. And they brought it home, and it went directly to Houston, where they started opening it very carefully and were really happy. They were hoping for 60 grams, and they got 120. There was one previous mission to an asteroid by the Japanese, to a different asteroid, and they got, I think, 2 grams. And they were thrilled with that. And Dante's project got 120. And among other things, they found what looked like cells. So the origin of life on Earth is basically thought to be in a primordial soup with things called micelles, which are primitive cells where you have kind of a liquid environment with proteins which fluoresce with some layering around it like a biological cell. And they found these in the asteroid. And the. The coating around these, they're not lipids, they're actually carbon. And inside there's a liquid which. With which fluoresces. So if it fluoresces, that means it has these aromatic rings, which is what we're looking for, because that's. That's essential to life. And it gives you quantum effects, quantum optical effects. So what we hope to do is. What we started to do is look at the quantum effects in these. In these samples. And we're going to see if they respond to anesthesia. Because if they respond in a way, really that's. Yeah, we want to. We first want to look for quantum oscillations, which would be a kind of a sign of life. And if. If that's the. Then it should be. If consciousness was relevant at that time, which we think it was, then it would be inhibited by the anesthesia, proportional to the anesthetic potency. So one anesthetic that's, say, three times as potent than the other, you'd need one third as much. And you do that for all the anesthetics. If they all line up, you can make the argument that there was some primitive consciousness there. So that's what we're hoping to do. And we're also looking for the patterns of the dynamic oscillations because we think there should be like fractal dynamics, where you have oscillation patterns occurring at different frequencies with the same dynamics with the same pattern. That would give you what's called a time crystal, which we think is the key to life. So we're looking for time crystal behavior in these samples. And microtubules are time crystals. So we're trying to make that connection not necessarily into microtubules, but into something general and universal for life and consciousness, which would be time crystal behavior. So quantum oscillations that are inhibited by anesthesia, that's what we're looking for. For.

[A]

I've never heard of a time crystal before.

[B]

Well, crazy, actually, that they're an interesting story. They were, they were hypothesized by Frank Wilczek, who won a Nobel Prize for the strong force, the new force, one of the nuclear forces, I forget earlier. And then in 2012, he proposed that like a spatial crystal repeats spatially and you have the same configuration. A time crystal would be a dynamic that would. That would repeat in different frequencies. So repeat in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz every thousand. That's exactly what we found in microtubules by my colleague Anurban Bandyapadya over the last 15 years. So he came up with the idea that microtubules are time crystals. And we just finished the paper, we just submitted it honorbound, Dante and I, proposing microtubules as time crystals. And the. The implications of that for life and consciousness. Because microtubules are in all cells, all animal and plant cells, and they could be the key to everything.

[A]

Oh yeah. Anesthesia works on plants, right?

[B]

Yes, it does. And plants have microtubules.

[A]

That's bizarre.

[B]

And I think plants can be conscious. So I get kind of ridiculed by this that you think a plant isn't. What are you nuts? Well, yeah, because. Well, I'm not nuts, but yeah, I believe that because, for example, we have enough microtubules so that we could have these collapses leading to consciousness at about 10 million per second. A plant might have a couple per second. So, you know, we're 100 million times more conscious than a plant. And same with single cell organisms. They would also have very simple, slow. But for them, you know, even if you have one every. Every 10 seconds, that's still better than nothing. And you still. And you're not conscious in between. So they may not. Not care.

[A]

You know, there's a book that was written by a former CIA analyst where he was. He was a polygrapher, and he was bored at the office one day, and he saw a plant sitting in the corner of the office, and he hooked up his polygraph to this plant somehow, and he, like, lit a cigarette or something, and he noticed, like, the polygraph starting to jump. So then I think he actually lit the plant on fire and the thing went off the charts, which I think that leads into more of this. Cleve Baxter. That's who it was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's the actual story?

[B]

There's been a lot of stuff like this. The Secret Life of Plants was a book when I was in college.

[A]

I think that might have been his. His book.

[B]

Yeah, it might have been.

[A]

And it was rejected by the scientific community. Imagine that.

[B]

Yeah. Well, my friend Rajneesh Khanna is studying plants. And, for example, you know, like, the sunflowers follow the sun, and a Venus fly trap will eat a bug if it's in there. And you can anesthetize that and you can put anesthesia on the Venus fly trap and put the bug there, and it won't do anything. Or you can stimulate it. You take away that response, and you block the sunflowers from moving.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And it's working on the microtubules in the stem root area that turn the plant and something else in the Venus Venus flat trap. So he's going to present that our. At our conference, the Science of Consciousness. We're going to have a session on what can be conscious going from animals, plants, et AI, quantum AI, organoids, microtubules, et cetera, et cetera.

[C]

So how. How many people.

[A]

Is this an agreed upon thing that the microtubular microtubules are directly responsible or directly working with consciousness?

[B]

No, no, everybody, you know, there's. We're. We're a minority. We have 99% of the evidence on our side. They don't have any evidence. I mean, the alternative, basically, is a bunch of theories that rely on what I call cartoon neurons. Okay. They take a schematic of a neuron or. Or just the very basic principle of the Hodgkin Huxley neuron integrate and fire to a threshold algorithmic only using the membranes. So at only one low frequency hertz, like eeg, and if you put enough of those together, you can sort of make a toy computer out of it. And that's what they say consciousness comes from. From emergence of complex computation amongst simple cartoon neurons, which I think is ridiculous. And. And. And yet. And then AI got. Got in the in the business. And of course, AI wants us to believe that machines can be conscious and because, well, for various reasons, because rich people want to download their consciousness into a computer, which I. I think is folly. And also maybe we'll be more accepting of AI running governments and religions and. And education. Who knows what, which I think would be a horrible thing. So, but. So AI is funding a lot of these cartoon neuron labs, and they're the. You know, they've opposed us strenuously and it's gotten to be big political argument. And I maintain that we have all the evidence and that, you know, they have all the money in the clout, and they tend to ridicule and ignore us. But, you know, we're coming on strong, and I think the evidence from anesthesia will make the difference, and we have a lot of other evidence, and so I feel pretty good about it, even though we're definitely outnumbered. So if you ask, most of the. Most people would say, oh, those guys are nuts.

[A]

But so what is their. Can you elucidate or steel man, their argument for how sentient AI can become conscious?

[B]

I think it's right.

[A]

But can you. Can you summarize their hypothesis of how it would work? What is that? What is their argument?

[B]

Emergence complexity. That. Well, their. Their emerge. Their argument is that consciousness is a computation, which is what Roger proved wrong in 1989, or he didn't prove it, but he argued strongly that it was wrong. And they ignore that and say it has to be a computation. And I said, well, if you say, well, how do you know that? They say, well, what else could it be? And I don't think it's a computation at all. And I don't even think the brain is, technically speaking, a computer. Then you say, okay, what is it? Well, consciousness is more like music than computation. And the brain is more like an orchestra, in fact a quantum orchestra, than it is a computer. And that's because it acts at. Not just at hertz, but at kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, petahertz, and probably faster. Faster, all the way down into space. Time geometry. And when you do that, at some point, you cross into the quantum level, and that's where consciousness happens. It can actually shift. So all these events happening at these different frequencies are kind of like notes and chords in music, which are orchestrated by the microtubules in the brain acting collectively as time crystals synchronously to give us consciousness.

[A]

So then how do you explain these stories of these LLMs communicating with each other or like, there's even stories of where I think somebody did a test with one of these LLMs and like, told it. Told the LLM a fake story on how he was cheating on his wife and then threatened to shut him down and then the LLM threatened to blackmail him.

[B]

I've heard these stories. In fact, Sue. Sue's been telling. Telling me about him. She thinks some of them are hoaxes. Some of them are really. Some of them. Them, you know, probably not all of them. And, you know, you can be fooled by. You know, there was this guy at Google who thought that their classical computer was conscious and we should. It should be treated better and wrote some letters and he wound up getting fired by Google because.

[A]

Yeah. What was his name again?

[B]

Lemoine. Lemoine.

[A]

Blake Lemoine.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I. I don't believe that. I mean, then there was this film about. With Joaquin Phoenix where he fell in love with his iPhone or something.

[A]

Oh, that's such a good movie.

[B]

Yeah. Her. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Anyway, I think that's. That's all bs.

[A]

Well, that could, like, you could explain that. You could explain her as being a computational version of consciousness. Right. Like, she could have been. Just because she was able.

[B]

She.

[A]

It was to him. He was being tricked. He wasn't able. She was passing the Turing test. But does it. That doesn't necessarily mean that she's conscious in the same way that we're conscious. Right.

[B]

The Turing test, I think, was overrated. It's been met Dave Chalmers, who started the hard problem where he said consciousness is not computation and we need something different. Turned around in the last couple years, concomitant with getting a lot of funding from AI to start a machine consciousness center at his nyu and kind of threw the hard problem under the bus and is now saying that that consciousness can be a computation. So. And I don't believe that. I think it's all. And I think they're going to run into a. They're going to hit a wall because it's not going to be. I mean, there's all these. You know, they're more worried now about welfare for AI. They're worried about hurting their feelings and so forth without even proving or knowing that their consciousness.

[A]

Well, here's the thing. For our brains and our consciousness to operate, I think it's a very low amount of electricity. Right. It's like 10 watts. Is that. Is that roughly 20 watts? 20 watts, yeah. Now, to have that same level of comput in a machine, it's like absurd.

[B]

Oh, I know. And they have to build these energy, the amount of energy to run the. They're talking about nuclear reactors and putting them on the moon and in space and all this stuff.

[A]

So here's the thing. Couldn't you, you couldn't replicate according to your theory of consciousness. You couldn't replicate that with a machine. You can't, you can't, can't come up with it with the same ingredients, but you could create something that is indistinguishable to us from our own consciousness. It could be a machine, an AI that appears conscious to the most conscious human on Earth, that we would not be able with our, all of our senses and all of our, our science to detect that it's not what we have.

[B]

Have.

[A]

Right. It would, it would be. This is the Turing Test, right?

[B]

Well, it's the turn test, which has already been surpassed. But now even Chalmers saying, well, that doesn't prove their conscious. You know, the Turing Test was actually pretty, pretty, pretty weak.

[C]

Like, they got there, they got there.

[A]

From a different road and they. It requires way more energy and it way more money to keep it alive and to keep it conscious.

[B]

Yeah, but how do you know it's conscious?

[A]

We don't.

[B]

We don't.

[A]

We don't.

[B]

You know, again, I can't prove that you're conscious. The only, the only test we have for consciousness test is what goes away with anesthesia. And you know, if I wanted to, I could say, well, you know, you can't anesthetize those AIs, so they're not conscious. But like you said, it could be a different way. So I can't, you know, I can't rule it out entirely. But the only way for sure now is something that goes away with anesthesia. But as far as the high energy thing, you know, that goes for the brain too. So, for example, Robin Carhart Harris, who's a famous.

[A]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[B]

He did a study in 2012 and he presented it at our conference and where he had patients, volunteers in an MRI or eeg, resting with their eyes closed. So they're not doing any cognition, they're just chilling out. And he's giving them intravenous psilocybin, the active ingredient, psilocybin, and say, don't tell it. Don't, don't speak, just lay there. Later, tell us what you were feeling, how you were. Later they said I was tripping my brains out. I was having all these vivid hallucinations. They expected the MRI to be, be lit up like a pinball machine. It was cold and dark, like they.

[A]

Were comatose with the intravenous.

[B]

Correct. Because they're resting, they're resting peacefully. And the EEG was, was flat, like they were almost brain dead. What? And he came up with this entropy argument. And I was chairing the session. I said, I look at it this way, Robin, that consciousness is actually happening at a deeper level, at the quantum level of microtrebus, which is very, very low energy. And so that continues. And the membranes are on vacation and the membranes are what you need to speak to follow something visually if you're on a roller coaster or anything like that. But if you're just resting there, you don't need your membranes. Consciousness at a deeper level, which is why when patients die or when patients have near death experiences or have a cardiac arrest, they might, if they are resuscitated, come back and say, you know, I saw this white light. I, I saw my deceased relatives, I saw the, the tunnel and I was very peaceful and serene. And, and you see that same story in many, many every culture for thousands of years. So it's a very repetitive, reproducible result. And that's, and, and I, and I think it's, it could also extend to, I think what happens there is that or could happen is that consciousness happening in space time geometry, as Roger said. And when the body dies and the blood stops flowing to the brain and the microtubules don't get oxygen or don't get what they need, the quantum information, that's the consciousness kind of dissipates to the universe, space, it's already in space time.

[A]

So it's leaking out.

[B]

Yes, it leaks out, but it stays in tank because as a self. So it could be distributed maybe holographically in the universe, but remaining entangled as an entity, as a quantum soul, if you will. And I think that's quite possible, actually. I don't claim.

[A]

Have you ever spoken to anybody who's.

[B]

Had an ND many? Yeah, we hear about it all the time at the conference. And the skeptics say, well, it's hypoxia, it's lack of oxygen. Well, that's not true because Hypoxia.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah, but it can't be that because in anesthesia we see a lot of patients get hypoxic, you know, and we take care of them, we treat them, give them oxygen or do whatever needs to be done. And they are not serene or calm, they're agitated and confused. And these people are not agitated and confused, they're calm and serene. And so that's not an explanation, and it's not because of a outburst from one particular brain region. So I think it's a real effect.

[C]

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[A]

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[C]

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[A]

Have you ever see, have you ever been in your career seen anybody like, like die on the table and come back?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, many times.

[A]

And they. You witnessed it happen and then you listen to them talk about an NDE they had.

[B]

I. I've never followed up, but I hear from the surgeons, they talk about that or, or people have studied that. So, yeah, it's a pretty common phenomenon. And in fact, you can measure. You can use brain monitors, like simple EG when patients die. And this was done for transplant donors that they were withdrawing support from. It was done in the ICUs as patients were succumbing. And what happens is, so they don't use full EEG, they use these processed EEG. So you get a simple number 0 to 100. So 80 to 100 is awake. 40 to 60 is where you want your patient anesthetized below that there's something wrong with the brain. So what happens is that. And, and when the heart. So the heart stops, the blood pressure goes to almost zero, the EEG goes flat, and then there's this burst of activity lasting from seconds to a couple minutes that looks like high gamma, high gamma EEG frequency, which is as fast as they can record it. And it's very coherent and it lasts and then it's gone.

[A]

How long?

[B]

Up to several minutes, actually. Seconds to minutes. And that seems to be a correlate of the near death experience. So. So if those people now, those people who are donating organs or who are dying in the icu, they didn't come back. But other. It seems that that would be what would be the neural correlate of the nde.

[A]

Oh, that's fascinating because I've heard stories of one lady in particular who, her story was written about by Jeffrey Kripal, who got struck by lightning walking into her synagogue. And she explained being in this garden with some of her relatives for, I think, like a couple weeks, and she was out for maybe 5 minutes or 10 minutes or something like this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it seems like in that spike. That spike, whatever it is in the material world could be forever in your inner consciousness.

[B]

Yeah, well, time, time dilation is a whole nother.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And I think, you know, when people are in the flow state, you know when.

[A]

Right.

[B]

When like great athletes or great performers, whatever, and they say that everything slows down, down, it's because their consciousness speeds up, so they're having more conscious moments per second. So instead of say 10 million, they're having maybe 100 million. And the result is that the external world, their perceived world, slows down. So if you're in a car accident, everything slows down because you're actually, your conscious is actually speeding up.

[A]

Yeah. That's crazy. Right? And another thing too is when you're doing things like with flow state, have.

[C]

You ever been, like, I'm sure you've.

[A]

Been in the car, driving down the highway and your mind is off somewhere else, and then you realize, holy, holy, where have I been for the last 25 minutes? How have I been driving and staying alive? There's like this crazy, mysterious power to like the unconscious mind. Like, what is that?

[B]

Yeah, well, most people. Yeah, that would be your autopilot, your unconscious mind taken over while you're daydreaming or whatever.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then, you know, somebody swerves and you, you come right back and that could be.

[A]

It's extremely powerful.

[B]

Yeah. And actually the Party line in neuroscience is that almost everything, if not everything we do consciously, is actually unconscious. And we have an illusion that we're in conscious control because neurocomputations can't really explain consciousness. And moreover, there's this problem of the timing of conscious experience. So if I say something to you and you answer me back immediately, and then somebody was looking in your brain for the activity, processing what I said, it occurs after you've responded. So the party line is that you responded non consciously because of your inner autopilot and the consciousness happens later and you have a false illusion that you were in conscious control. And this follows Dan Dennett's idea about multiple drafts and this and that. But that takes away real time conscious control and takes away free will. There's a solution to that, which is backward time effects. That when the activity is happening in your brain and you reach a conscious conclusion of what to do, what to order for lunch, or whether to swerve or not to swerve, that that actually is referred backward in time to real time when you make the decision. And if it weren't for this, then you couldn't hit a tennis ball at 150 miles, you couldn't hit a baseball at 95 miles an hour or cricket ball or anything else. And this backward time is probably necessary for real time, conscious control and free. It would be good for evolution and you could see why it would have evolved. If you have two organisms in a predator prey relationship, whoever's going to get hints from the future is going to win. So it'd be good for evolution too. Although I think evolution is actually driven by conscious feelings. I started talking about this before the origin of life. How did molecules organize and get larger and self organize and fight entropy and create organisms? 100 million years before genes, there was life for 100 million years before genes. And I think conscious feelings were there right from the start. And in fact I wrote a paper about that in 2017, that in the primordial soup where these molecules, these aromatic rings, were organizing, that they started to have the penrose or moments. And occasionally one would be pleasurable. And I call this the quantum pleasure principle. And if that were the case, then the molecules would arrange themselves to optimize pleasure. And that's what started life. And that's why life developed to optimize pleasure and avoid displeasure. So even now, pretty much everything we do for one reason or another is to optimize our feelings. We might delay our gratification, get an education, do this or that, so we can Feel better later. But if you go in any lab, any animal lab, behaviorist or otherwise, the behavior is due to feelings, you know, a reward. Dopamine. And dopamine is almost exactly like the molecules that were there in the primordial soup. In fact, it could have been there. And the pleasure molecule. So I think pleasure was there from the primordial soup and was the spark of life. And I think we're still. And that drove evolution, and that's still driving evolution and driving our behavior to optimize pleasure over the long haul.

[A]

So all. All animals have dopamine.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you think dopamine is the. Was the ultimate target of this, or do you think that dopamine was a function of other things?

[B]

Well, dopamine provide the aromatic rings that provide the quantum effects. So dopamine has a. As a aromatic ring or aromatic ring is. If you look at carbon chemistry and, you know, when I was in undergrad, I wanted to go to medical school, and everybody said, said, okay, you got to ace organic chemistry to get into medical. It's the first thing that they look at. And so maybe the only thing. And so I did, and it's fascinating. And it's actually about these aromatic rings that have. So anyway, if you have six carbons. Thank you. You can see the double rings or the double lines or the circle. That means you have an electron cloud that sits above and below the molecule. We don't see a picture of the electron cloud, but you have a. It's a quantum object. It's electrons that are distributed over space, and it's an object, and they're not in any one place. They're all in all places at the same time. It's a quantum object. And when they get together, they couple with others and they oscillate. And that's the origin of life, that oscillation between aromatic rings. And then you get more and more, and they develop and they evolve to optimize pleasure. And that's what led to life. So that's what I wrote in this paper. And when Dante was looking for a mechanism to study, when the samples came back, he read this paper and he said, who's this crazy guy? And he realized, I'm at the same university, quite literally across the street from him. And so he called me up and he said, what are you doing after you retire from anesthesia? I said, I want to work for you. He said, you got it. So it wasn't quite that simple, but that's what happened.

[A]

What do you think the function of consciousness is.

[B]

To feel good. No, I would say the real question is what is the function of life? I think life is the vehicle for consciousness. I was at Deepak Chopra conference and somebody was quoting from the Upanishads, the Vedic literature, and they said that consciousness preceded life and got bored and, and created life as a vehicle to get around and to have different types of experiences. So I think vehicle. Sorry, I think life is the vehicle for consciousness. So that's the purpose of life. The purpose of consciousness is to evolve and be. I think that's probably the most important thing there. I mean, consciousness is really all that matters. If we didn't have consciousness, we wouldn't have anything. So I think it was there before life. Life, it's intrinsic to the universe. And you know, Roger has this other idea about multiple eons. So before the Big Bang there was another eon. Before that there was another one. And, and we took an idea from a guy named Lee Smolin who was talking about black holes where the, the cosmological constants which determine the, the, the universe, the 22 values which determine how the mass of the proton, the, all this and that. And if they weren't exactly how they are, this is called fine tuning. If they weren't fine tuned for life, there wouldn't be life, there wouldn't be stars, there wouldn't be light, there wouldn't be life, there wouldn't be consciousness. And yet they are perfectly. And the odds against that are quite literally astronomical. And so there are two explanations. One is many worlds and we just happen to live in the one world where there's consciousness, which I think is kind of stupid because, well, I would. Well, anyway, that's one explanation. The other is that something like God or something motivating, motivating this. And it could be that, that feelings were driving it and consciousness was driving it. So that's kind of what I, what I follow.

[A]

Okay, I want to go circle back to the NDE stuff and the, the, the near death experiences. And what is your personal belief on what happens when we die? Bless you.

[B]

You know, I've become, I was never really religious, but. And when I was younger I had a notion that, yeah, I want to, I want to figure out consciousness and so I can park my consciousness and be immortal in some kind of device or this or that, as a lot of people are not know, thinking and wanting to do.

[A]

And oh yeah, people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to wear these little dog tags around their necks for when they get in a car accident. People can like Take their, cut their head off and put it in a cryo chamber or something.

[B]

Yeah, good, good luck with that.

[A]

What happens with the power grid goes down.

[B]

Well the problem with that is that if, if you freeze the brain, the cry cryonics and all that.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

If you freeze the brain, you mess up the microtubules, you destroy them.

[A]

Really.

[B]

They chose to, they chose a method to preserve the membranes and not the microtubules. And so when I pointed that out, we had a, we had a session on this at one of our con. Actually it was in 2014, our 20 year anniversary conference. We had the future of consciousness and we had representative cryonics and this or that. And they said that, yeah, our preservative destroys the microtubules. I said, so if consciousness in the microtubules, you're out of luck. He said, well yeah, I don't believe, he didn't want to believe.

[A]

Of course you want to believe that. Look at all that money they're raking in.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. So yeah, so I don't believe that. I think there's actually probably better ways to do it. My friend Honorbahn who discovered all this stuff, Anubhan Banyapadya, he's from India, he works in Japan at the National Institute of Material Sciences. So he got into microtubules after reading my stuff with Roger and started studying. He's the one who found the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, the time crystal stuff, all that stuff. Stuff. He's shown that microtubules generate optical and magnetic vortices that can interact holographically, suggesting the consciousness might be a hologram, a three dimensional hologram in the brain, which I think is a wonderful idea. So he developed something called brain jelly based on organic polymers with these aromatic rings that in the right mix and they self assemble and form helical oscillators which he says is the key to life and consciousness. So these aromatic rings line up and so you get this helix, kind of like DNA or microtubules, which oscillates and give you these quantum oscillations. And if that's the case, eventually you're going to have consciousness. So he got funding from the Indian government. He just got. And, and he's been working on it for a while and they just reached a milestone. He, they gave him another 25 million which is cheap for Quantum, Quantum AI compared to like ultra cold. The point is you can do this in warm temperature. Self growing, it grows itself. It's a, it's and, and it's, it's, it's kind of biomimetic quantum computing is what you call it. And he, he interfaces with it with many, many optical and microwave probes. So input and output is through optics and microwave. And it's going to have 10, 24 qubits and will be possibly more powerful than any quantum computer at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost. I've been to Google a couple times, my friend Hartman Nevin, who runs their quantum AI and he, he, you know, he, they have the, the Willow quantum computer. And it's, it's so expensive, requires so much energy, has to be ultra cold. And I don't think it'd be conscious. You can be conscious because it doesn't, it's not going to have collapse. It doesn't have the aromatic rings. And I don't know how you could have potentially could. But it's very unlikely to be conscious. It has some conceptual problems having the kind of stuff at cold temperatures that we think happens at warm temperature. The point is that organic biomimetic quantum computing may be the way to go for something that could be conscious, where you could maybe deposit your conscious consciousness. Again, I'm not interested in that per se and answer your previous question. Due to my own personal experiences, I do believe in, in afterlife.

[A]

What do you think it is?

[B]

I think it's consciousness in holographic space time. It's distributed throughout the universe and, and can focus locally and remain as a, as a quantum soul interest.

[A]

So you think, you think like reincarnation happens. You get shuttled in, your soul gets shuttled into something new.

[B]

New. Your soul finds another set of microtubules.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

And there's some pretty good evidence for reincarnation. Actually. You know, the, the group at University of Virginia studies pediatric cases where these kids have memories of what seems like a previous life.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And many times they have birthmarks or signs of trauma from what caused their death. So like a blow to the head and there's a scar there or, and, and some amazing, amazing coincidences or stories.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Who did that study?

[B]

The. A group at the University of Virginia. It was most. Jim Tucker, Kim Penn Berthy. Now, before that there was another guy, I forget his name, he retired or passed away. But there was a guy there for many, many years doing that work. And he got passed along to Tucker.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And now to others. I can't remember.

[A]

I heard something about this study saying that the majority of the kids that had memories of previous lives, they were overwhelmingly male in their previous lives. And one of the theories to why that was was because males historically died more traumatic deaths than females. And the trauma is somehow linked to this connection they have have to their previous life.

[B]

Yeah, that could be. I mean, trauma and emotion give us memories. I mean, more impactful memories.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know, I, I can remember exactly what I was doing when I heard Kennedy got shot. I mean, you're probably not born yet, but I remember that vividly and stuff like that, you know, 9, 11, everybody remembers. So.

[A]

Yeah, let's put a pin right there. I gotta take a leak. I got. I don't know what's going on with me. Coffee's running through me today. We'll be right back.

[B]

Okay. I think consciousness is a hologram. Actually. There was a guy, Carl Prebrom, had a theory of this in the 70s. He was originally a neurosurgeon, neuropsychologist. And this guy Lashley had studied, looked for memory engram in animals the first part of the 20th century. Spent like 30 years looking for where memory was stored. And he would teach a trick or something and then try to ablate this part of the brain or that part of the brain and try to get rid of it. He could never, ever, ever get rid of a memory entirely. There's always some trace.

[A]

Really? Really.

[B]

And so he concluded that facetiously he said, memory is impossible. But then he said it just show, it's distributed, it's everywhere. And Priebman came along and knew something about holograms where, you know, you shine a laser like a shine a laser off you and bounce it into a photographic plate and also through the photographic plate. And when you do that, your information is in the plate, but it's as wave interference. Doesn't look like you, but if you shine a laser through it, it projects. That's a three dimensional image of you on the other side of the plate. So remember Princess Leia and Star wars where the heavy thing and she's 3D? Well, that's what it does. So it takes a two dimensional information and projection in three dimensions. And Primum had this idea that consciousness is a hologram in the brain somehow. But he was criticized because he was told, well, there's no laser in the brain, Carl, there's no laser in the brain. And I read this, I was a medical student and I said, well, yeah, it's microtubules. That's his laser laser. And so I wrote him and he, we became friends and wrote a paper together. And I think the hologram idea is actually a pretty good one. It explains a lot. So microtubules are actually two dimensional surfaces and Audubon has shown that it actually, they actually project 3D outward optical and magnetic vortices which can interfere and give a hologram. So it could be.

[A]

Yeah, we were talking about. What were we talking about before we started this? NDEs.

[B]

Is that what we want to get back to? NDs?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, we were talking about NDEs.

[B]

It was the kids.

[A]

Oh yeah, yeah, the kids thing. The trauma and the. Oh yeah, the past lives with the kids. That's what it was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's. There's also a crazy connection between NDEs and psychedelic experiences too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What do you make of that?

[B]

Psychedelics. Very interesting. I think they kind of do the opposite of what anesthesia does. And we've shown that. Well, so we're studying effects of anesthesia on the megahertz. So we can. These kilohertz megahertz gigahertz oscillations. You can measure megahertz at least from the scalp, like buried in the eeg. And we actually tested in India, one of Anurban's colleagues at a hospital in India, measuring megahertz as somebody goes under anesthesia with propofol and you see triplets in megahertz and then they get the anesthesia and the triplets go away and are replaced by megahertz bursts. So anyway, the anesthesia gets rid of them. So I was working with a group called DMT Quest who are trying to study the therapeutic benefits of potential therapeutic benefits of dmt, dimethyltryptamine and so which you smoke. And so I was out in California where they operate and I had this device, I've been practicing with it. I can measure my megahertz triplets pretty well. But I was camping in my RV out on the beach and I got good triplets. But then when I went into the city, there's too much electrical noise, so it didn't work. So when the experiment was set up in the city and it didn't work, I saw said we got to do it out at the beach out in Half Moon Bay where I was camping, San Francisco on the other side. They came out there the next day and we got signals and basically what we found was that the triplet under DMT was higher intensity and higher frequency and the three peaks sometimes split into five peaks. Now this is preliminary results. We don't have enough statistics to publish that. We. And it's kind of hard to do that in this type of study. But there does seem to be an effect so the point is that psychedelics increase which have these aromatic rings, I mean the Indo ring. So there's the hexagonal ring and then there's the Indo ring with a six and a five, like in serotonin, like in psilocybin, DMT and all this. And they have the, and so. And tryptophan, the aromatic amino acid, and it's more quantum. And so the hypothesis would be that it shifts the resting state or the consciousness to a higher frequency which is more non local, more quantum, more non local within the brain, but also outside of the brain. So maybe more nde.

[A]

Like, like have you heard the theory, the brain filter hypothesis, that what it's doing is it's stripping. But basically the idea is that our vision, our sense of smell and these things are all filtered so that we can get through the day, survive, eat.

[B]

Sleep, we're not overwhelmed.

[A]

And, and normally if it wasn't for these filters that we have, we would, it would just be everywhere that we wouldn't be able to comprehend and we would just be like, yeah, overwhelmed.

[B]

Yeah. Yes, I have. And a lot of people say, well the brain's not a transmitter, it's a receiver. And I think it's both because if it were just receiver, we'd all be on the same channel, we'd all be having the same experience. And yet presumably we're not and we don't. But so I think what happens is the memory, everything stored in the microtubules is projected and then at the instant of collapse, Roger's non computability comes in. So he had this idea that to get around algorithmic, if consciousness is algorithmic, then we can't have free will. Everything is going to be predetermined and deterministic. But if there's something else, if it's random, that's not good either. But there's another possibility called non computability where the process is neither random nor algorithmic, but influenced by some other system. And that's where he brought in the quantum. And specifically he said that's going to be, have Platonic values in it. So going back to Plato's pure form, you know, geometric form, but also good, evil aesthetic values. And this would influence the collapse. So it's not really random, but it's going to kind of guide your, conclude your perceptions and your actions towards certain things with which it resonates. That could be values embedded in the universe, like even good and evil. I mean following the way of the dao, Divine, divine guidance. And there's actually a Theorem, the Schrodinger Newton theorem, that gives the resonances that this might happen with. And so that's what I think. So it's a combination, it's an interface, actually. Kind of like what Don Hoffman says, except it's actually what comes up from the microtubules and then what meets the Platonic values from space time at the instant of collapse. And that happens 10 million times 10. Yeah, 10 million times a second.

[A]

Yeah. It's. It's pretty wild that the, the human body actually makes DMT in all those. And I think the lungs, I don't know if it's actually in the brain or not, but I know it's definitely pineal gland, definitely in the lungs. That's the theory. I don't know if it's proven or not.

[B]

I think Gigi GMO Porgyjin from Michigan has shown that in rats that, that the pineal produces it. I don't know about humans, but in rats, if rats do it, we probably do it. It wouldn't be that. I mean, we make so many things that are so similar. It's very similar to melatonin and many other things.

[A]

Right. And it was supposed to be responsible for our dreams. Right.

[B]

Dreams. It could be. And dreams are another interesting thing. And I think dreams are actually kind of quantum states that don't collapse, so they don't come into consciousness. And the reason I say that is that there's a Chilean psychologist name Ignacio Mate Blanco, who, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago, studied the logic of dreams.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And he said the logic of dreams is quite different from our waking Aristotelian logic. And some of us looked at that and it looked like the logic of dreams is basically quantum logic. And so dreams may be where you stay in the quantum state and you don't collapse. So you don't get into the classical world because you have all these deep interconnections, all these anomalies with time. Time and. Yeah, deep interconnections and stuff like that.

[A]

Yeah. But you can also lucid dream that.

[B]

That's true. Yes.

[A]

Where people can train themselves, like knock on doors and ask themselves questions like habitually and in dreams and realize that they're dreaming. Like I've done it a couple times by accident.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. What's that guy? He comes to our conference. I can't remember his name right now. Yes, lucid dreaming.

[A]

Yeah. And most of, I think the conventional theory for these dreamings, for dreams in general, are trying to process real world experiences. Right. And throw random external influences into Them to prepare your brain for how this potentially could happen and saw and helping prepare your brain for future potential events that could happen to you. Right.

[B]

Well that's the idea, but nobody knows for sure.

[A]

But Right, right.

[B]

Yeah, I, I, I, I like the idea that dreams are quantum logic. Logic.

[A]

And that's more fun for sure.

[B]

Yeah. As far as their purpose, I don't know. Well, I mean there's a lot of possibilities for Freud for one. And Mark Soames is a big neo Freudian. He's always pushing that.

[A]

He's gone, what was Freud's view?

[B]

The dreams are important, you know, the subconscious, the royal road to the subconscious. And, and they're actually telling us more than we can appreciate.

[A]

H, I had a, a guy in here previously a couple or about a year ago, Jack Cruz, the neurosurgeon was explained to me early on in his career he had a patient where he was involved in. It wasn't actually a neurosurgery, but I think the person had a heart transplant. And have you heard the story?

[B]

No, but I, I know heart recipient. Yeah. They get memories from the donor. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[A]

This woman came back to his practice and was like calling his nurses up habitually saying I need to talk to the surgeon. He talked to the surgeon. He talked to the surgeon. She came back, she's like, I don't know what's going on but I keep craving McDonald's french fries. And the, she got the heart from a child who was in the, waiting in the drive thru at a McDonald's.

[B]

Oh my gosh. Wow. Well, when I did cardiac anesthesia, which was years ago, the heart surgeons used to talk about their transplants and they couldn't tell the patients a lot of stuff. It was part of the deal. They couldn't tell them about the donor. But I remember they were talking about one guy who after he got his transplant from a patient that they knew who was big into dancing. This guy who had never danced before in his life all of a sudden craved dancing and started dancing. And his wife says, I don't get it. All of a sud. All he wants to do is dance. And the donor had been a big dancer and in the heart, the heart has a lot of big nerve ganglia, the AV node and SA node and all full of microtubules. It's one of the biggest sets of really? Yeah, biggest sets of nerve ganglia microtubules outside of the nervous system. And so it's quite likely that, and I think memory is actually encoded in microtubules. This is another problem with conventional neuroscience. They don't know. Well, they don't really know where memory is. I mean, I told you before about Lashley, and it's all over the place. But where? At the cellular level. And most people would say in synapses. And the strength of the synapse will guide activity through a network this way or that way. And so that's how. So if for given stimulus, you'll follow a certain pathway through a network because of memory encoded in the synapses. But. But synaptic proteins last hours to days, and memories can last lifetimes, so that can't be right. And I think it's actually in the microtubules and uniquely in neuronal microtubules, mostly because in most cells which divide, the microtubules will be doing their thing, whatever they're doing in that cell. And then when it's time to divide, they disassemble, they reorganize at these mitotic spindles to pull the chromosomes apart. After that's done, they go back to doing what they were doing before. And if memory is encoded in the microtubule, with all the tubulins related to their neighbors, kind of like a ladder, it's like a mosaic. And each tubulin, and there's anywhere from up to a billion tubulins per neuron, and each one of them can have one of 22 different genetic isoforms and another five or six post translational changes and phosphorylation, so forth. So maybe 30 possible states of each tubulin, and you got a billion of those. So that's a huge number of possible mosaic states encoding memory per neuron. Enormous. More than enough to have distributed redundancy throughout, throughout the brain. So you can repeat everything over and over again. And you can have a hologram. So I think memory's in the microtubules, which. Which is important. Yeah.

[A]

So you can see there, it's like a tree.

[B]

Well, that's a neuron. And on the Left you see 1, 2, 3, 4 dendrites. And then there's a nucleus in the cell body. And then to the right, you see the long axon. Now, there's a couple things wrong with this picture, I'm sorry to say. The microtubules in the axon, you can see, they're pretty long, but it shows them being interrupted, and usually they're not interrupted. So once they go to the.

[A]

Like the brakes in them.

[B]

Yes, yes. Now, dendrites on the left, there are breaks. And not only that, but the microtubules in the Dendrites are interrupted and of mixed polarity. So a microtubule has, each microtubule has a plus end and a minus end. And usually like in the axon, they're all aligned. So all the plus ends are in and all the minus ends are out.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Whereas in the dendrites and cell body they're mixed polarity. So you have one, one next to another one going the opposite direction. So this one's up, this one's down, up, down, up, down. So they're in these arrays of opposite polarity anti parallel microtubules. And nobody has a good explanation for that except in our theory. What that means is since the two of them would be oscillating, let's say, in megahertz, and they're both going to be in an external field from the membrane, one's going to be more aligned with the membrane than the other and it's going to be slightly faster and the other one will be slightly slower. And so they're going to be slightly off in their frequency. So one might oscillate, let's say 10.000 MHz, the other one at 10.0040, which is, and they would interfere and give an interference beat, like in music, of 40 Hz, which is the carrier wave for EEG. So we think that they, that the mixed polarity networks give rise to interference beats, which like in music it gets slows, slows down to get slower and slower. And in fact, we think that eeg, which is in hertz, comes from very fast oscillations of microtubules and megahertz, which interfere to give the, to give the slower eeg. Because after all these years we don't really have a good explanation of eeg, at least not of a unified theory of eeg, really. Yeah, nobody. Yeah. People will say, well, this alpha band comes from this network. The beta or the theta comes from this pacemaker, and this, this frequency comes from this gamma, we don't really know. So it's, it's.

[A]

They can sort, they can sort of proxy.

[B]

Yeah, they, they just anatomical but without saying what it really is and what it really signifies. And we think actually that it's all microtubule time crystals oscillating at these different frequencies, just like the terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, but, but because of interference. And so you need the mixed polarity interrupted microtubules to get that. And that's, that we, that's where we think it's coming from. And Roger and I, Roger Penrose and I published that in 2014 as the Origin of EEG.

[A]

How could we drill down and actually prove this idea that microtubules do all this?

[B]

We're trying.

[A]

And hypothetically, in a perfect world, unlimited money. How would you do it?

[B]

Well, we were in the Templeton project with theories of consciousness and we were supposed to be in an adversarial collaboration with iit, but we couldn't. And we're supposed to come with one experiment that would disprove one and prove the other. And we couldn't because I don't think their theory is falsifiable. And they wanted us to do an experiment where we would demonstrate a quantum effect in a microtubule at ambient temperature and then show it go away with anesthesia. And they wanted us to do it it in a live monkey. And the monkey would have to be awake with us monitoring with this quantum optical stuff, which never been done before and really needs to be done on a quantum optics table with exact balance and no vibrations at all with optics table, which is eventually what we did. But we said we're not going to do that in a monkey because number one, it'd be cruel, number two, it'd be technically impossible and that wouldn't falsify your theory. So anyway, we didn't get, we didn't get the, the adversarial collaboration, which was a lot of money when they were doing paid, it was like 5 million per study. And they didn't prove anything. They were all inconclusive. Tumb gave us 100,000 to do one, actually 200,000 to do two studies, one of which is already published. The other one's almost ready to be published, where we showed in a lab, if you take UV laser to a bunch of microtubules, they fluoresce. So you hit them with like 280nm UV light light and a short time later they emit at a lower frequency, lower energy, longer wavelength, like 340 something like that. But there's a delay and there's also propagate. And then we used these, these fluorescent labels which emitted at a different frequency. So we can tell. So and, and then we can calculate the distance how far it traveled. And we found that the distance it traveled and the duration of time that the, that the quantum state lasted was too long for. Too long for classical. So it had to be a quantum state quantum process. And then we gave two different anesthetics and inhibited the, the quantum stuff, the quantum activity. So we called Our shot. We, we actually, you know, made those predictions which are pretty risky. Most people said, you know, you're not, you're not gonna be able to do that. But we did. Yeah, and this was done at Princeton in a, in a neutral lab. And somebody who was, you know, kind of agnostic about our theory and actually didn't really like it was hoping to disprove it. But anyway, but it worked. And other. We have another experiment about to be published where we have even longer duration of the quantum state. So we, we've done those studies, but all the publicity went to the IIT versus Global Neuronal Workspace. The, the big bet that Chalmers had with, with Kristoff and, and they didn't even mention the, none of those other experiments worked to support any of those theories except ours. But we kind of got drowned out in the noise of the other experiment. So that's more of that which we're trying to do and more experiments with anesthesia showing that anesthesia selectively binds to affects microtubules. And I think that eventually we're going to win out because I don't think they're going to have any more, they're going to have more, more clout, more noise, more publicity. What I'm more interested now is because this is going to drag on for a while and I'm getting old. But what I'm more interested now is practical applications of this which has to do with Alzheimer's disease. And I was talking to Steve about this before and basically in Alzheimer's disease there's two lesions. So there's these amyloid plaques that are these big ugly things that are in between the neurons. So like there's a neuron here, neuron here. So out here there's a big ugly. And they say, well it affects the synapses and that's what causes the dementia. Yeah, but memory is not in. But. And then there's another type of lesion that inside the neuron, which is called the neurofibrillary tangle, and that's made up of tau proteins.

[A]

Tau.

[B]

Tau taw T A U sorry, tau. And tau is a microtubule associated protein. Protein. So normally tau is sitting on the microtubule. So here's microtubule tau sits on it and acts as a traffic signal for these motor proteins that move along to tell, okay, get off here and deliver your cargo to this synapse. So it's a form of learning the placement of the tau on the microtubule. And it could also be the tau stabilizes the Microtubule. Well, somehow, for some reason. There we go. There's a tau protein. The amyloid plaques are outside, and the tau tangles are inside, and the microtubule is disintegrating below. And so what happens is when the tau falls off, the microtubule disassembles, and you can see the tubulins coming off on the right side. So the microtubule literally disassembles, depolymerizes, and it'd be like the bones in your body disintegrating, and you get really short, really fast. And that's what happens to the neuron. The neuron shrinks because it's losing its cytoskeletal support. And I'm saying that the memory is stored in the microtubules, in the relationship of all those. Those little spheres, which actually should be little barbells, little peanut shapes. And, And. And the. The tau either stabilizes the microtubule or acts as memory in either case.

[A]

So the ammo. The amyloid plaques, they. With the tau prax proteins, they hurt the tau proteins.

[B]

I don't know what they do. I mean, everybody.

[A]

They're not connected to the tower. They have nothing to do with.

[B]

There's a lot of theories, but nobody knows.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

The point is that. That in postmortem studies.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Of somebody who had severe Alzheimer's and dementia or had loss of memory, and you look, and the correlation. There's much, much better correlation with neurofibrillary tangles or tau proteins than with the amyloid.

[A]

Oh, interesting.

[B]

You can have the amyloid and not have the disease. You can have the disease and not have the amyloid, but if you have the disease, you're going to have the tau proteins and vice versa. It correlates a lot better. So the tau is. Because the microtubules fall apart or the tau correlates with the microtubules falling apart.

[A]

So the more tau proteins, the more memory loss, the more dimen.

[B]

The more tau protein. That's. That's not on. Not on the microtubule. And it.

[A]

That's not on the microtubule.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It can be in the. In the neuron, in the corner, in these tangles, neurofibrillary tangles, and it could spill out into the blood or the csf. So if you do a spinal tap on a patient with. With Alzheimer's, you get tau in the csf. You can see it in the urine. You can see it in the blood because it's spilling out of the. Of the nervous system. So it just tells you that tau is being lost and it's coming off the microtubules because what it normally does is the microtubule. It's a microtubule associated protein and stabilizes it. So the.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

The problem is. And this was known in 1989 there was a paper by Matsuyama and Jarvik, Libby Jarvik, who was a neurologist who was married to Robert Jarvik who invented the first artificial heart. But that's neither here nor there. But she and this guy Matsuyama came out with a theory or with a paper in PNAS in, in 1989. Microtubule is the key to Alzheimer's disease. And at that time people were just learning about, about the amyloid. So I remember she came to University of Arizona and I went to her talk, it was a great talk. And I said yeah, that makes perfect sense. So right after that our neuroscience group dealing with Alzheimer's and neurology we had a big meeting and about what to do about this because they're all jumping on the amyloid bandwagon and the drug companies were throwing money at em to find anti amyloid antibodies and this and that which is what they did and they've been developing ever since. These anti amyloid drugs for Alzheimer's which don't work are toxic.

[A]

They have crazy side effects.

[B]

Crazy side effects. They're toxic, they cause bleeding and they're expensive as hell. They cost like 20 to 30,000 per patient per year. And the drug companies are getting rich. Yeah, the drug companies and the researchers are getting, are getting wealthy doing this.

[A]

So you know neuroprotective nicotine?

[B]

Well, I got caffeine anyway.

[A]

The amyloid plaques.

[B]

Yeah. So amyloid plaques I think are a red herring and you know, they don't really correlate the disease but they attract all the money and the attention.

[A]

Do they correlate with anything thing that we know of?

[B]

It depends who you ask. I have a, I have a good friend Rudy Tanzi who's a big Alzheimer's research at researcher at Harvard and he's been studying amyloid. He's completely on the amyloid train. But his whole financial picture, you know his, he started a company.

[A]

That's where it gets messy.

[B]

It gets very messy. Yeah. So I don't have a, a dog in the hunt in, in that, in that regard. And I think it's microtubule. Well, I guess I do because of my theory but it would support it. But as far as helping people, that doesn't matter. So in researching this I found out that Microtubule stabilizing drugs which are used in cancer to prevent the microtubules from disassembling and becoming metallic spindles, that they actually are protective against Alzheimer's. And in some animal studies and actually clinical studies, a particular drug, Apothlone B, which is a microtubule stabilizing drug, Apothlone, Ephloone B, Epothalone B, Epothyone B. It's actually an anti cancer drug. And a friend of mine, Mike Wiese, just did a study where he gave this to rats and then put him to sleep and found out he needed more anesthesia when they had this microtubule stabilizing drug that the Apothlon B was blocking the anesthetic from getting to the target in the microtubule. Anyway, somebody was doing a study for Alzheimer's with apothlone B and they found out. It helped and they did a pilot study and then they started a big study and then all of a sudden they disappeared. They stopped. The study was halted for no apparent reason and they vanished.

[A]

What?

[B]

Yeah, it sounds crazy.

[C]

The people vanished.

[B]

Well, they stopped publishing and nobody could find them. So they either got paid off by the drug companies or they got whacked. Maybe. I hope not. Well, I hope not either. Well, but they probably got paid off off.

[A]

And so anyway, they stop like the story. I was just so, so funny. I was just watching this. This interview my friend Jesse Michaels did today and there was. He's talking about these two guys who came up with cold fusion that vanished right after. I forget what their names were.

[B]

Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Well, these guys vanished. I, you know, I hope they're okay. But in the. The. The previous Apothlon B is. Is off patent because it's been around for a while, so you can't patent it. And there's no way to make money off of this, so they didn't want it. And. And every new. Every new.

[C]

So this is not.

[A]

Is this currently used for anti cancer?

[B]

For anti cancer?

[A]

Yes, it is used. Even though that. It's doesn't make any. Anybody any money?

[B]

Well, yeah, yeah. I don't know if.

[C]

So it's like the other.

[A]

What was the COVID drug that everyone got mad at that was not patented, but it won a Nobel Prize. There was a similar drug that was used for Covid that was. Anyways, I can't remember what it was. They called it horse paste or something.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

Ivermectin.

[B]

Ivermectin? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Horse.

[A]

Yeah, Horse dewormer.

[B]

I don't know if it worked for covet or not. Yeah, but anyway, so this, this drug disappeared, but it, it does antagonize anesthesia, which, which host our theory. Okay, so interesting if not that. So anyway, in. When Ahurbon discovered the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz of microtubules in around 2010, he first published in 2013, I said, wow, I wonder if we could use any of those frequencies to treat mental and cognitive disorders by resonating the microtubules. So kilohertz is electromagnetic, megahertz is also in electromagnetics, is radio waves, gigahertz is microwaves, and terahertz are photons. So I didn't want to put any electromagnetics into the brain necessarily. And photons are hard to get in, and they're also electromagnetic. But as an anesthesiologist, I was very familiar with ultrasound. And I remember looking up and seeing ultrasound machine in. And I said, wait, that's megahertz ultrasound, which as you know, passes through the body. You can see the baby in the uterus. You can. We use an anesthesia, see nerves for nerve blocks, the jugular vein to hit the jugular vein. And so, and you know, you use it as a. To see into the body because the waves pass harmlessly through the body, then reflect off surfaces, so you get an image back. So I wondered if anybody had tried megahertz hertz ultrasound into the brain to treat depression or Alzheimer's or anything, and the answer was no, but it was approved for brain imaging, and it's not that good for brain imaging. But before they had CT and mri, it was good enough, I guess better than nothing. And it was still used at that time, and I think it's still used for newborns to look through the fontanelle for bleeds. So they don't have. Have bone here, so it's just straight into the brain. And they ultrasound for like 30 minutes at a time to look for signs of bleeding without any apparent negative effect in newborns. So I said, well, it can't be that, that harmful. And. And then I found this guy, actually a guy at Arizona State University, our arch rival. I'm from University of Arizona. We hate those guys. No, not really, but they're a big sports rival. And he had been studying it in animals, ultrasound into the brain of animals and seeing physiological effects. And so he could like ultrasound here, make the palm move here, or put electrodes in and see electrical. So he's getting physiological effect, didn't seem harmful. So at the time. Well, still, we had a pain clinic in our anesthesia department, which I used to run. So I knew chronic pain patients. They're mostly. They're usually depressed and they're chronic pain. And I said, I wonder if this would help our chronic pain patients, their mood, because they all have, you know, crappy moods. They're depressed. And I, I said, hey to my colleagues, and I said, we should try this on our chronic pain patients. And they go, yeah, right. Hammer. That was my, that's my nickname in anesthesia. This is why put patients to sleep with a hammer. They say, that's comforting. It's a joke. But I'm actually very. I was very gentle and pretty good at it.

[A]

Anyway, right before you put the patient to sleep, you start telling them your theory of consciousness.

[C]

Wait, what?

[B]

No, I tell them jokes, actually. I tell them this is going to burn in your vein, but melt in your brain. Or a few other jokes that I can't really repeat because they're not going to remember. But hammer time. Yeah. And. But anyway, they said, yeah, hammer, great idea. You go first. You got a nice shaved head.

[A]

Head.

[B]

We'll watch, right? So they call my bluff. And so one day, at the end of a day, we, we sat around a table and we brought an ultrasound machine. And so they're all kind of wide. I get a little self conscious here, but so I put the goo. You have to have this gel. And I held it to my temple area because I know that's a. And held it there for about 15, 20 seconds. I didn't know how long to hold it, and I, I didn't feel anything. I was a little disappointed. Joined it. But about a minute later, a couple minutes later, I started to get a buzz. And I was buzzed for like a couple hours. I felt really creative, kind of a buzz, kind of like a mile high. Kind of like invigorated, like stimulated, mildly stimulated. You know, just feeling good, slightly high and thinking very well, thinking very clearly.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And creative. And a little euphoria. I mean, I felt really good to the grocery list. So most of this was after I went home. So I came back the next morning and told my. I said, we got to try this. We got to do this on our chronic pain patients. And so we did. And we wrote a protocol double blind study, because on the ultrasound machine, you can hit a button and free and freeze the. So there's no beat, there's no ultrasound coming out of the device. But still, the machine's still making noise. The same noise.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So we did a double blind study study on 30 pain patients and we found statistical improvement in mood and almost statistical improvement in their pain reduction. And published in a very good journal Brain Stimulation, the first study on effects of ultrasound on mental states in humans. And Jamie Tyler from Arizona State, who had done all this work for years on animals and you know, he got scooped on the first human and he, he emailed me, he said, congratulations, you got the first human study. Of course he got all the patents.

[C]

Is this published?

[B]

Yeah, published 2013. I'll send you the, send you the link.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And since then there have been hundreds if not thousands of papers on brain ultrasound for this and that. Now most neuroscientists took up and, and started using it as focused ultrasound because, you know, tms, transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial electrical stimulation, you can stimulate the brain but you can't focus it. And the electrical, when it hits the brain goes around the surface, it doesn't really go through.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And TMS is kind of like all over the place and we don't really know what it does. We don't really know what the electrical does actually. Something nobody knows. But ultrasound goes right through as if it's not. And it'll hit the skull on the other side and bounce back because it's.

[A]

Very low frequency frequency.

[B]

It's, it's no, it's, it's, it's mechanical, it's megahertz. So it's, it's a million times a second. So it's not low frequency. Well, you can go as low as 20 kilohertz, which is still ultrasound. And that's also been shown to be beneficial for senescence in cells. So anywhere from 20 kilohertz on up to millions of hertz megahertz is ultrasound and seems to be have effects on, beneficial effects on, on biological systems, probably by resonating the microtubules as long as you stay low intensity. So not low frequency, but low intensity, you don't want to heat the brain. So it can be used at three different intensities, the low intensity below thermal. But then you go higher, you start heating the brain, which we don't necessarily want. And then a medium, you can open the blood brain barrier and let stuff in. And people were using that to give anti amyloid drugs. And then a really high intensity caused lesions. And people are now using ultrasound to cause lesions. Like if you have tumor or a Seizure focus, you're focused. 2 Ultrasound means you zap that whatever it is there and get rid of it, which is what you want. So everybody got into the focus business, including a friend of mine, Jay Sanguinetti, who was at U of A and he's published a whole bunch and formed his own company. Now they're making kind of a high end ultrasound to induce meditative states.

[A]

Would it be like a helmet you wear that like pumps ultrasound into your head?

[B]

They have a helmet? Yeah, they have a helmet or band and it's got sensors to read out EEG and then ultrasound to put it in. And you can target, and then the patient gets an MRI and you know, you want to target the posterior cingulate or the frontal cortex or whatever and then you need a stereotactic frame to target that area. So you're just hitting that one area area. So whereas the study I had done this, the first study was unfocused. So it just, it quite literally doesn't sound good to say shotgunning the brain but basically it scans back and forth so you get, you get the whole brain and anyway, in 2015, these two guys in Australia were studying an anti amyloid drug for Alzheimer's and they used medium intensity. It didn't get across the blood brain barrier version well, so they used ultrasound at medium intensity to open the blood brain barrier to get the drug in. And they had a control group that got the ultrasound without the drug and those animals got better from their Alzheimer's symptoms. So the ultrasound alone at medium dose improved the Alzheimer's symptoms without, without giving the drug. And so they've now gone into just treating Alzheimer's. Although at this medium dose, which I don't think is, is necessary and other.

[A]

Should be low, it should be lower.

[B]

Yeah, you don't need, you don't want the medium, the higher dose because it's going to heat and you don't want to open the blood brain barrier. It's there for a reason. It lets you know, or infections, you know, other drugs, we don't really know what could get in. So it's there for a reason and I didn't really want to.

[A]

That's fascinating.

[B]

Now that's focused ultrasound.

[A]

See that makes me, that makes me, me think about how technology is going and how that's affecting the evolution of humans. Right. Like we're surrounded by screens, by these phones, by cell towers at every corner of every street and like power lines are everywhere. I mean I'm not a electromagnetist so I don't know exactly how all this works, but I can't imagine that all this technology and all this electricity everywhere there 5G. I don't know what the hell that is. I don't know what the hell that does. Bobby Kennedy says it passes through the blood brain barrier, but I don't know anything about any of it. But I can't imagine that it's good for us. I can't imagine that it's increasing our cognitive abilities.

[B]

No. And in fact, you know the Havana syndrome where they.

[A]

Yeah. Oh yeah.

[B]

So that was high intensity, either microwave or ultrasound. Yeah. And that kind of fries the brain and, and gives a lot of symptoms. And I think it's, it's frying the microtubules because they're using the resonant frequency, whether it's ultrasound or microwave. They're resonating micro. Over resonating the microtubules and probably shattering them. And which is also what happens in a concussion. In concussion, you fracture your microtubules.

[C]

Really?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Particularly in the long axons. If you look at them, they're like this, they're like, like you're a bone fracture. That's exactly what happens. So.

[A]

And that's how these people get like cte.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. And I wish they would try ultrasound and I wish Alzheimer's patients would start, would use ultrasound. So let me back up again. Back up. So when the guys in Australia found this, they started using medium range medium intensity ultrasound to treat Alzheimer's and other people started using focus ultrasound at the hippocampus or. And the others started using ultrasound at high intensity to hack away at the amyloid plaques, which was the wrong thing to do because. Anyway, my view was low intensity, unfocused, which is also very cheap. If you use focus, you need an MRI and you need a fancy device. You need to target and you need to know what target you're going for.

[A]

You can buy these very low power ultrasound devices on Amazon.

[B]

Exactly. Now you gotta be careful because we looked at this and a lot of em are a little bit too hot. They're a little bit. Because they're used for peripheral massage, which increases blood flow. So they intentionally heat a little bit. We did find one particular device that at low intensity is below the thermal threshold, which is about a watt per square centimeter at the scalp. That's the thermal threshold. So this is. That one we use is 700 milliwatts per square centimeter. And it's been shown to be, to be safe. There's a.

[A]

What is. You remember the name of the device?

[B]

US Pro 2000.

[A]

US Pro 2000.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this friend of mine, Sterling Cooley is his name. He's a ultrasound engineer. And when I first started messing with ultrasound, I gave a talk on this at Berkeley. And this is probably around, I think, probably, I don't know, around 2012. We published that paper 2013. And I gave this talk at Berkeley, and he was there, and he had been reading up on it and what I've been saying online and whatnot, and started making ultrasound devices, messing around with it and trying it on himself. And he mostly got into vagal ultrasound to stimulate the vagus nerve in the neck, but also brain ultrasound.

[A]

Why would he do that?

[B]

To treat digestive problems and to treat brain problems. Because the vagus goes up into there, and there's a lot of different ways for vagus nerve stimulation. But then when I started doing brain ultrasound, he started looking at that, so. And then when I started talking about Alzheimer's, that may be. Oh, let me back up. So meantime, Honorbahn had studied electromagnetic energy and effects of polymerization of microtubules. And this is electromagnetic, not ultrasound. But he found that 10 to the 7th Hertz in electromagnetics caused the peak reassembly of microtubules. So if you start from turbulence in solution and give electromagnetic energy at different frequencies, you see how much they polymerize. And you can do that with optical density pretty easily. 10 to the 7th was the peak. They maximally polymerized. So 10 to the 7th would be 10 megahertz. So basically what we use in unfocused ultrasound. So Sterling started kind of doing this over the Internet, telling people that they could buy this device. And he. And he researched and determined it was safe and said, buy this device. Use it a couple times a day to the temple area and just let me know how you're doing. And he did this for about a. For a couple of years, actually, and told me about it. And I said, wow, that's. That's pretty. Pretty ballsy of you to do that, because, you know, I wouldn't do that because I had a medical license to protect.

[A]

And he didn't have that.

[B]

He didn't have that. So.

[A]

But he disappeared.

[B]

No, he's. He's still alive and kicking. Doing very well, actually. He lives in Washington State. And. But anyway, so he was, you know, was he prescribed? You know, it's unclear whether ultrasound is practice of medicine or not because it's used by a physical therapist. And anyway, so I was talking about this with some friends of mine at California Institute for Human Sciences, which is a small institute in. In near San Diego, and they do various research, mostly on parapsychology stuff. But they have a, they have a institutional review board for re that can, you know, ratify and, and research study and, and protect human subjects and so forth. So I was talking to them about it because I wanted to do a clinical study of ultrasound versus control. And they said Helena Wabe was, was the, the researcher. She said, you know, what we should really do first, first is just operationalize Sterling Study, take what he's doing and get those people to sign consent forms to do what they're doing. And we record the data and we'll, you know, because, you know, we have all this information which we can use. So that's what we did. So we've had the study going for about a year now. But we did insist on the patients getting permission from their doctor, so we couldn't be accused of stealing their, stealing patients and doctors, you know, probably reluctant. What's this crazy shit, you know, so it's hard to get patients in, but we have enough patients, patients and we've, and we haven't cracked the code yet to see the results, but it seems like patients are doing well and we've had no negative effects. So we want to do the next step and try this for either double blind control or larger scale studies. So I've actually been talking to my friend Sue Schneider at Florida Atlantic University, who's in touch with the medical people there and some funding people. So we're going to hopefully start that study, you know, kind of develop that idea here in Florida.

[A]

How long has the testing been going on in San Diego and how many people?

[B]

About a year? I don't know, 20 or so. Not that many yet because, but, but certainly has more that, you know, we can't count because they weren't part of the study.

[A]

And do you think this could hypothetically be used to reverse cognitive decline or things like CTE injuries from concussions, things like that?

[B]

Yeah, I don't know about cte, but there's a pretty good literature. A lot of people have been using it using ultrasound now for Alzheimer's, although in different ways at medium doses, which I think is too much focused at one area or another, which I don't think is necessary. So no, nobody but us has done this unfocused low intensity bit, which is basically do it yourself because as you said you could buy this. The US Pro 2000 is a handheld device price. Low intensity is 700 milliwatts per square centimeter. So below the.

[A]

Look at that bad boy.

[B]

That's it. That's it. Yeah.

[A]

How much does that think Steve.

[B]

150 bucks.

[A]

Wow, look at that.

[B]

Now the butterfly is used.

[A]

I'll take two.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, you can get a used one for 50 bucks.

[A]

That's amazing.

[B]

Butterfly is expensive because you get imaging the US Pro 2159.95 is.

[A]

Look at that. It's got a four and a half star review.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you ever use this? Have you used it?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I have one. I, I use it for jet lag actually. Really? Yeah.

[A]

You can tell a big. You can tell a difference.

[B]

It seems that. Yeah, it's a lot jet lag. It gives you a little buzz and. Yeah.

[A]

And you got one in the car.

[B]

No, unfortunately I forgot it. I forgot it. I gave my last one away. I gotta get. And get some new ones. But I may be back actually because to, to get the study going at Florida Atlantic and Boca Raton.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So, yeah, we're trying to get people to do it and you know, we're fa. The drug companies and the Alzheimer's foundation, the Alzheimer Society and so so called charities I think are, Are in the pocket of the drug companies because yeah, I write them and they don't re. They don't respond and they keep pushing the.

[C]

These.

[B]

Oh, we got a new anti amyloid drug. This one's going to work for sure. You know, trust us.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so far, no.

[A]

So it's disheartening.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, that's the, I think one of the, probably the biggest problems with cancer research. It's like we've been treating cancer the same way with this blunt forced hammer of, of radiating people and giving people, you know, these chemo drugs and killing them just to the point where they're hanging on by a thread and the cancer's gone. It's like we can't come up with a. The more advanced way. We're still using these primitive tools to attack this thing we've been dealing with for years.

[B]

We don't understand cancer. I told you that. My first research was in a cancer lab back in medical school in the 70s. And that was before we knew a lot about oncogenes or anything like that. There was a theory from previous century that cancer was due to abnormal mitosis. So when cells divide the microtubules divide the chromosomes perfectly. And if they don't, you get too many over here, not enough here, or some kind of abnormal genotype leading to an abnormal phenotype which could be cancer. And there was a German guy named Bovary who had this theory and it was revived by a guy at UCSF named Duesberg, who was very controversial because he actually didn't think that HIV was caused by aids. So he got a bad name for the.

[A]

That.

[B]

But I think a serial cancer of. What do you call it, from abnormal mitosis. He had another polyploidy or something like that because you get too many. Too many sets of chromosomes. What was the origin of cancer? I think that might. That might be right. So maybe it's all in the making sure the mitosis happens properly instead of separating the chromosomes abnormally.

[A]

I wonder when it comes to the microtubules, which. What the effects of hyperbaric oxygen would have on that or if there'd be any correlation, because I know hyperbaric oxygen is. Is FDA approved for treating like, for like, wound healing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's also. I don't know if it's proven, but I think we. It's accepted universally that hyperbaric oxygen can lengthen telomeres.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know. I think that's treating a different problem.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

But I don't think, you know, if, If. If it was tissue hypoxia or not enough oxygen, that'd be one thing. But there's no evidence that it does that. And I know people who are. Who are into it, but, you know, in medicine, it was like a fad. It's like.

[A]

No, you get that same kind of euphoric feeling after hyperbaric oxygen that you were describing.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, it could be a complete.

[A]

I mean, obviously it is a different. Completely different mechanism of action that's going on there.

[B]

Yeah. All I know is that in Tucson there, one hand hospital, one hospital had a hyperbaric chamber. Then all the others are going to jump on board and get their own. And then they. After looking at it, they didn't bother. So it can't be that dramatic. Or maybe it's insurance doesn't pay for it. I don't know. Yeah, some combination.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But this wouldn't, you know, for 150 bucks, these families. Well, there have been. Let me back up. There have been quite a few studies now on ultrasound for Alzheimer's, doing it various different ways ways, but with interesting results, getting improvement. For example, one group showed improved cognition. This is not our study. This is somebody else's study. And they got MRIs before and after. And they had a patient, for example, who had marked cortical atrophy. His brain had shrunk.

[A]

Cortical atrophy?

[B]

Yeah, the cortex actually shrunk because again, the microtubule is disassembled. So the neurons shrink, you loose synapse so the neurons get smaller and the whole brain gets smaller. And so after, after treatment with ultrasound, his memory came back, his cognition improved and they got a repeat MRI and the cortex had grown back and it got bigger again. And the only way I could figure that is by stimulating the microtubules to repolymerize and flush out the, quite literally flesh out the brain and the neurons again and re establish synapses. So that's, that's, that's pretty impressive. And there have been a lot of studies now showing improvement and there are several reviews of large cell studies with many patients and very, very safe. I think no significant adverse effects, more than, I think a couple minutes of maybe local irritation or something like that in like 3 out of 700 patients. So low intensity, it's quite safe. Yeah. And it seems to be potentially beneficial. There's no reason reason it's not being used, at least tried. And even if it, even if it just helps somewhat, it doesn't cause any problem. Sterling had a patient that, he said that. So he deals a lot of times with the family and the kids taking care of their parents or grandparents. And he said they had one patient and the guy didn't speak. He had lost ability to speak. It was non verbal so he didn't say anything. Just kind of satisfied there. And, and after, and they were kind of getting a little frustrated. Well, keep going, keep going. After three months, he started speaking again. After three months of ultrasound.

[A]

Had he spoken previously?

[B]

No, well, no, not for years and years. Yeah, before it happened, we got Alzheimer's. He stopped. Ah, yeah, the Alzheimer's took, took away his verbal skills and, but after a couple months. So it took a while because, because probably that's pretty far gone. So it shows that even if they're pretty far gone, they may come back if you persist long enough because the microtubules grow back by themselves at a millimeter per day. So with ultrasound maybe faster. So it may take a while.

[A]

So you mentioned it briefly a minute ago about a place in San Diego that studies parapsychology. And it seems like these microtubules combined with memory and all this stuff and consciousness. Yeah, Parapsychology is linked to all this somehow. What is your view on parapsychology?

[B]

I think it's real. And first of all I should ment. The place is called the California Institute for Human Sciences. They've now merged with ions the Institute for Newetic Sciences, which is a big. And that was founded by Edgar Mitchell who, you know, went. Had this epiphany coming back from the, the moon and so forth. And so he founded it and they, they, they support parapsychological research. And I think, you know, quantum consciousness enables nonlocality and parapsychology. So I have no problem with ESPN telepathy and precognition and all that stuff. And so I, I think it's real. I've had enough experiences myself where I kind of sense something before it happens and, or have a feeling and, and some, some coincidence, you know? Yes. So I kind of believe in that kind of stuff and. Yeah, and, and if, if, if consciousness is quantum non local, then there could be entanglement between people. Absolutely.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something. There's definitely those feelings that, you know, everyone has had that they can attribute to some sort of serendipity or thinking about something, thinking about a person. And then they like, all of a sudden they call you, like, what was that? Or like walking into building and like having a feeling like something feels. Something feels dark or evil or something's off about this place. And like, you know, animals, you contribute to animals, like cats or dogs, like, can sense when their owner is going to come home or when something is not right in the room. Right. Or deja vu, and who knows what that is. Oh, deja vu. Okay. And I always wonder, like, is that something that humans had long ago that has just. Just atrophied over millennia? You know, could be.

[B]

And, you know, we still have it.

[A]

To some extent with the advent of technology. You're like, technology's replaced our need to have that. Right. Like, we have, you know, our, we do less now with our brains now that we have iPhones and we have computers, we can talk to our phone, we can, you know, order Uber eats, whatever. You know, we don't, we don't have to do as much work.

[B]

And there's also the platonic information that could, we could be accessing to too, that's going to give us information that's not the same thing because it's stuff that's intrinsic to the universe. So. But I think that that can be helpful too.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you've, I've heard anecdotal stories of people talking about, like, going off into nature for, like, days and weeks on end and, and having like, this reawakening, like, like senses reawakening deep that have been buried within them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like when they leave, leave society, when they leave, like this big city they live in. Right.

[B]

Just getting away from the noise might.

[A]

Be doing, getting away from that maybe. Yeah. Or like what if, is there something else happening there? Something. Are these deep senses like reawakening in us? I don't know but I think about that a lot. And like, like even going to memory, right? Like, like memory in, in history had to have been way better because like going into antiquity when stuff was written down, it wasn't pagnated, it was written on scrolls. Right. So like you couldn't just say oh I want to access this memory, I know where what page and what book to go to or just type it into Google. Like you would have to have. Oh, you would need to have a way greater capacity for memory back then and even going back before that, before the written word. Right. When stuff was transmitted orally for decades and, and you know what was going on there? How, how did people have that kind of memory? So yeah, I don't know. I, I, I, it makes me think like maybe parapsychology was, was there long ago could have and now we just, it's gone away and it's been gone for so long we've forgotten about it and now it just is in this woo woo sort of realm.

[B]

We don't know what's, it's been suppressed, probably various technology but also, well, the.

[A]

Government, the US Government's spent lots of money on, on it. We know that.

[B]

CIA remote viewing. Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah, that's all real.

[A]

So I mean if they spent millions and millions of dollars on it, there must be something there. That's, that's my view.

[B]

Yeah, it's kind of gone dark, but there's a lot of stuff that goes around that you kind of get bits and pieces of it. Few people are prominent in, in that history.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And then there's these telepathy tapes that have come out with these non verbal autistic children who seem to have the ability to communicate telepathically and read minds and stuff like that. Right. I don't know what to make about that stuff, man.

[B]

Well, I think a lot of that is real, but there's also some kind of fakery going on.

[A]

There's a lot, I think there's a.

[B]

Lot of, and we, we're actually going to have a session on that with a skeptic and a, and an advocate and we're going to go over that because I, I've seen demo demos of it that were very convincing and other demos that were not convincing. You know, like they're peaking and this sort of stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So you Got to be very careful. But I think conceptually, I think telepathy is quite possible.

[A]

But I think if you have somebody demonstrating this stuff, there's been a lot of people doing it recently. Especially like seeing without their eyes with blindfolds on. I. I think one of the ways that you should do it is have like a stage magician there to like verify, like, are you doing this? Are you doing that?

[B]

That?

[A]

Yeah, because normal everyday people nor, you know, normal dumb dumbs like me can't tell the difference.

[B]

Yeah, well, we're going to have that. Actually. We have a skeptic. He's a neuroscientist who studied this intense. I mean, he's. He thinks it can be real, but he also know. Says there's a lot of fakery. So we're going to have somebody who was involved with the telepathy tapes. Diana. Diana Hennessy. Hennessy, yeah. She's going to be there. And then Arno Delorum is the, is the skeptic. He's in neuroscience, he works at ion, so he's generally in favor of parapsychology.

[A]

But who's the guy who Aya Whiteley was telling us about that was a part of ions? The guy, the gentleman who couldn't travel.

[B]

Dean, right?

[C]

Dean Raiden.

[A]

That's who it was. Yeah.

[B]

Dean will try. Dean is traveling to our conference for the first time. He's been in Idaho, but he's going to come in person and he's going to talk about. He's got a new book coming out and he's been doing a lot of stuff.

[A]

CIA guy, right? Or like he's history. He was either in the CIA or he, he knows a lot about the CIA.

[B]

I don't know. He knows a lot about a lot of stuff. Yeah, he's quite smart actually. And he's been. They have this, you know, random. Random number generator system around the world.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And moment like 9, 11 or this big spike in activity. And New Year's Eve, he has a study. New Year's Eve, this big spike around the world. And. Yeah, so when everybody's thinking the same thing, you see an effect on these random. Random number generator. So something like that is. Is going on. So Dean's going to be there. We have actually two sessions on. On parapsychology or what's the. Yeah, I forgot the. What the other one is. But anyway, yeah, we, we take it seriously. But most of most of our conferences, science, you know, mainstream science, but you know, we don't kind of cater to the neural computation. The Cartoon neuron crowd because I don't believe we don't. We're dubious of where I'm more dubious of mainstream stuff. Well, I'm dubious of everything. But I think the mainstream cartoon neuron stuff, the idea that the brain is a computer of simple dumbass neurons just doesn't make sense. It's an insult to neurons and biology in general. Because what's happened is people, neuroscience, a lot of neuroscientists now, they don't look inside the neuron, they don't even know about it, they don't know biology, they come from neuroscience, from AI and from psychology. And so they don't actually know the hardware, they don't know about a neuron, they don't know that it has multiple frequency levels and that sort of thing. So I think that's the problem. So we try to do that, we try to emphasize that because I think that's where the key is. And anesthesia is the bottom online. The best way to understand and study consciousness.

[A]

Yeah, I heard, I was watching something on YouTube the other day where they were interviewing this Diana Hennessy Powell woman who did the telepathy tapes and I think she was saying that they got infiltrated by the CIA.

[B]

I'll ask her.

[A]

Do you have that clip, Steve? I think I texted it to you. Yeah, that was wild because they have historically been fascinated by that stuff.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

So it makes sense.

[B]

They probably want to use it and they probably are using it in various.

[A]

Ways and it seems to be somehow connected to this whole UFO UAP phenomena that the, that the media and the government seems to be hell bent on releasing into the public and acclimating us to recently.

[B]

Yeah, maybe. Yeah we had a session on that last time and actually that is kind of interesting because it'd be to me personally be highly unlikely if we're the only conscious entities around. And I'm particularly interested in these plasmoids. So I don't know, you know, last couple years we have all these uap, UFO stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there's one category called plasmoids which are kind of like ball lightning.

[A]

Oh yeah, they we, me and Steve saw some of those. Here's the clip for. This is Kai Dickens. So she's the one who directed the telepathy test. Yeah, play the clip.

[D]

We all figured out who it was was and way cuz I did not think that would happen and I'm such not a conspiracy theorist at all. But then it happened.

[B]

That's crazy wild. Here's a question.

[A]

Do you know of Any of these children or anyone in this realm that have been like, approached by like a government agency. Because we talk a lot about the governmentless CIA, how they try to weaponize everything. We've talked about operation Often which they tried to weaponize like witchcraft. So this seems kind of like a.

[B]

Crime object for them to approach.

[D]

Yeah, a lot of people were warning us about that. And then a few scientists actually were like, it's not going to happen. How you think it's going to be? Someone coming in and infiltrating your world, gaining your trust so they have access to these families.

[B]

Whoa.

[D]

And that happened. And we all figured out what happened and who it was and way it's all I could do was tell everyone and so everyone's aware of it and just to be careful. It was weird because I did not think that would happen and I'm such. Not a conspiracy theorist at all. But then it happened and it can be really confusing, I think, to know who to trust and who not to.

[A]

So is this person part of a government agency? Yeah. Do you, Are you allowed to say which one?

[D]

The CIA.

[A]

It's wild.

[D]

I don't love it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. You have the plasmoid stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So among the various types of observations were these plasmoids, which are kind of like corona discharges, plasma electromagnetic, like ball lightning, which is a whole nother subject. And but what's interesting is that they seem to be doing intelligent things like they would kind of have little play games with each other or hide and seek and this and that. Move around. But what's really interesting is the way they, they move. Move is that they're here and then they, they go over here and then they go here. Yeah. And there's no vapor trail. There's no sign of propulsion. You know, as, you know, if it's a rocket or something, something should be coming out the other end that has heat and they don't. And, and then they're here and they do whatever. Then they go here and somebody, I think it was Jack Sarfati who came up.

[A]

Shout out to Jack Sarfati.

[B]

Yeah, he and I go way back.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

We used to fight a lot. But I, I think what we've used.

[A]

No, he's.

[B]

Yeah, well, it's a long story, but. But we're on good terms now. And although anyway, he, I, I'll give him credit for this, that he said the way, the way they move is there's no propulsion. And he, he said, I wonder if it's involving gravity. That they actually can, can. And this is right up Roger Penrose's alley because. Well, two things to move effortlessly without propulsion and really fast without a vapor gel. If you could curve space time and create a hole, you're going to fall through the hole and you're not going to. You don't need propulsion, you don't need any.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And if they are in touch with, if they can mess with gravity, then they might be conscious because that's where gravity comes from. Of course, according to, according to Roger, quantum gravity, something like that.

[A]

So they're talking about fast movements.

[B]

They're pretty, they're pretty fast. Yeah. I don't know exactly how fast because I can't tell the differ the distance. But when you, you see them. There's one paper, actually one of our planetary scientists from the U. Of A University of Arizona was on this, and I know him from astrobiology. And he didn't want to talk about whether they're conscious or not, but he said, yeah, the way they move is a mystery. Nobody really knows. So, and so if they, if they, if they can bend space time to, to move like that, then they also may be able to access space time where the consciousness is happening. So they could be conscious and there. Somebody's going to talk about this at the, at our conference. She's been studying, studying this Dana Kipple. And I told her that when I was, was back in the 80s, when I was early in my anesthesia career, we actually looked at this phenomenon called curly and photography. Do you know what that is?

[A]

I've heard of it, yeah.

[B]

So curling photography is something I first read about in a book called Secret Discoveries behind the Iron curtain in the 70s, where somebody went to Russia and learned all the stuff they were doing about parapsychology way, way ahead of us. That's probably where the CIA got everything. But if you, if, if you. It's basically looking for an aura or corona effect. So, you know, some people see auras. They see colored lights coming out of people. And if you put a body part, something living on a. Oh yeah, we did.

[A]

We had a guy in that showed us this stuff.

[B]

There it is. There it is. So Kirlian photography. So I, I learned about this in the early 80s. I said, said I wonder if that would go away with anesthesia. You know, is it consciousness? And so we did a study with rats. And so we had a rat. So we didn't intubate the rat. We put the rat in a Plexiglas chamber and just put air in and air out and the rats moved around. Then when we added anesthesia gas to the air going in, they would go to sleep. And so we had them so that their tail, which is the only symmetrical easy access thing, was on this photographic plate. And we could, and we could see a corona effect. So when they're awake, we see this corona effect coming out of their tail. We're turn on the anesthesia and they go to sleep and the tail goes away.

[A]

What?

[B]

So, but wait, hang on. So I actually presented this at an anesthesia meeting and this guy asked a question and he said, well, wait a second, you didn't intubate the rat. So the. There's anesthesia everywhere in the chamber. So how do you know this is because. Because the, the anesthetic is taking away consciousness and then it's not coming out of the tail. Or is it because the anesthesia is between the tail and the plate and it's blocking it at the tail level and it has nothing to do with consciousness. It just has to do with this corona effect. And I said, that's a very good question.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I was a bit embarrassed because I hadn't thought of it. So I went back and I told my, my guys that, okay, we have to try this without the rat. We have to do control. So we made a chamber that had a transparent top to it, but it was two, two electromagnetic plates. And we put radio frequency across it to get a corona effect. And so when you do it without anything, you see a bunch of these sparkles kind of, kind of like we saw command finger and with air. And then if you add anesthesia, it goes away. So the corona effect goes away. And we did it for a bunch of different anesthetics. And we knew the potency of all the anesthetics. And roughly speaking, relatively, the inhibition was proportional to the potency of the anesthetic. So in other words, if it was a potent anesthetic, you just needed a little bit to get rid of this corona effect. And if it was less potent, you needed a lot. And if it was non anesthetic, like nitrogen or helium, it didn't do anything. So we tested and we published that in anesthesia and analgesia as anesthesia acting by inhibiting electron mobility, that the corona effect is essentially electrons moving not as sparks, but more, more as a cloud. It's actually an ionic cloud. So it's. And anesthesia is a gas. So it seemed to work out. So we know that anesthesia blocks electron mobility at that level, and that could be so conscious. It could, that's how it could affect consciousness inside the microtubules, for example.

[A]

Example.

[B]

But it would also affect the corona outside, you know, in the atmosphere. And, and so it'd be interesting to know if you could anesthetize these plasmoids or. But it also means that maybe they are conscious if, if the plas or, or the plasma is a sign of consciousness, although they would have to be connected to gravity to be, to be conscious. But, but anyway, there's some connection there.

[A]

Yeah, we had a gentleman on the show a couple years ago who was able to, like, he was doing this thing where he was, he believed he was able to summon these plasma balls. They look like ball lightning. And he had these crazy claims on how he believed that they were Biblical, Biblical angelic beings that were coming because he would pray and these things would appear. And we're like, okay, show us. Yeah, so I, I, we met him the night before we recorded our podcast. We, me and Steve took him out to the beach, to this location, and we sat out there and stared at the sky for, like, two hours with video cameras. And he had these specific type of, this specific type of binocular that was called. It was like a psionic, a very, very low light. Binoculars that actually recorded what you could see through there too. And there was lots of planes coming in off of the, the, off the coast, like, landing in Tampa, like, coming down. You could see the planes because there was flashing lights on them. And after, like an hour and a half, maybe hour, 45 minutes, this, like, plasma orb came up off of the, the horizon and like, came up and then went slowly to the left and then, like, fizzled out.

[C]

And then another one popped up and.

[A]

Went slowly to the right and then fizzled, puzzled out. And it was like the closest thing I could relate it to would be like, one of those Chinese lanterns. But, like, how would you explain it coming off of the horizon and then moving in one direction and going away, and then another one coming out and going away. It was so bizarre. I've never seen anything like that before. But I've also never stared at the sky uninterrupted for two hours. So there's that.

[B]

Well, why they go away? I don't know. They could, they could, they could be.

[A]

Oh, here's a video of it.

[D]

One more time.

[A]

So we're staring at this. That's a plane.

[D]

There's something right on the water. Right on the water. Thank you. Thank you.

[A]

I don't see it.

[B]

The pink thing.

[A]

There it is. On the bottom. There it is.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that's where the horizon is.

[D]

Right there. It's still in the camera. It's still in here.

[A]

The one on top will fizzle out.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

Look at that one getting brighter.

[D]

Oh, here. Someone needs to look through this. It's. It's very bright. Thank you.

[B]

You can obviously see.

[D]

Oh, you see? See it? It's right there. You see it?

[B]

That is an orb.

[D]

That is definitely an orb.

[B]

I'm.

[D]

I'm tracking it here. Do you want to look?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then it just fizzles out and there he's got videos all over his Instagram page of these things like, like telephoto and, and like if you go to his Instagram, you can see these, like these super zoomed in images of these things. And they look like plasma lightning balls.

[B]

Yeah, they, there's, there's actually quite a few in the, in a scientific literature literature showing that including the paper from one of our U of A people's on it. People is on. And it's a, it's a mainstream journal. And you know, they don't claim that they're conscious, they claim that they're unidentified. They have this, they have this interactions with each other. Like they're intelligent and they like they're playing, playing with each other. Playing tag or something.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And then they disappear. But they, they have this funny movement. So.

[A]

Did you find it, Steve, those images? Yeah, there's something, there's definitely something spooky going on that we don't understand. Like on another, on another level.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah, that's, that's like a zoomed in image of, of what they look like. Chris Bled. Christopher Bledo. He lives in, I think it's North Carolina. Somewhere in North Carolina.

[B]

Well, I went to, I went to this meeting at, at Esalen in California and they had somebody summoning UFOs. And the first night I went out on the beach and Stephen Greer, I don't know, I forget who the guys, they had several, but they didn't see any. And then they did it the second night. And the second night I didn't go because I got cold the first night. And of course that's when the orbs came and my friend took a beautiful picture of one.

[A]

Yeah, look at this one. This one's nutty. It looks like a, like a cell under a microscope or something, doesn't it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he's got all these crazy like, like ex military folks.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

That are like befriending him and visiting him all the Time some dude from NASA, like, befriended him. Yeah, allegedly. They're trying to figure out what. What he. What, like, what. What it is about him that attracts these things, you know? Yeah, he's been through a lot of trauma in his life. He had a very traumatic upbringing. And like, a. Like a lot of. He's been shot before. He's, like, witnessed his wife die in a car accident. And he's been through a lot of. And they think there's. There's people who speculate that something about the trauma opened up some sort of portal in him where these things are, like, attracted to him or he somehow brings out something. Something that's like, not visible to normal people.

[B]

Something.

[A]

Something. Definitely something. Well, Stuart, thank you for doing this, man. This has been a fascinating conversation.

[B]

Danny, you're welcome. It was a pleasure. Good questions. Good. Good conversation. Let me just mention the Science of Consciousness Conference. I've been organizing this conference since 1994, and this will be my last one organizing it. I'm turning it over to my colleague, Dante Loretta. It'll be in Tucson, Arizona, April 6th through 11th. We have a tremendous lineup. We're going to cover all these topics we talked about today and a lot of mainstream stuff and some other stuff. There it is, right there. Look at that. Yeah. Since 1994. So everybody should come or zoom in. There we go.

[A]

Oh, that's amazing.

[B]

And ultrasound for Alzheimer's. Yes, Ultrasound for Alzheimer's. I think, you know, I'm getting old and I'm trying to think about what I want to do before I pass on, and that's it. Actually, that's very important.

[A]

Yeah, man, that's super interesting stuff. I'm definitely going to have to get one of those little ultrasound things and see how it works. And I'll keep. I'll keep in. We'll keep in touch. Okay, we'll let you know. I'll be one. I'll be one of your spires experience experiments. Lab rats.

[B]

I'll send you a link to our study. And if you're going to do that, may as well end of the study and you can report in. Yeah, I guess we probably need your doctor's permission, but.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, we'll get that.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I'll link everything below, too, for people that want to find out more and learn, figure out the studies or get in touch with you, all that stuff. So thanks again, man.

[B]

This was fun. Thank you. I enjoyed it.

[A]

All right. Good night, world.