← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Part Two: Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin
00:54:43
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My Nbialix breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
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Spring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues. Night sweats, back pain, motion transfer. Those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun. With free shipping in the US they have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. Plus they're happy with Helix Guarantee Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix Guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to Helix Sleep do slbreakdown for 27% off sitewide that's helixsleep.com breakdown for 27% off sitewide helixsleep.com breakdown. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
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And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Michael Levin. He's a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. His background's in computer science and biology and his lab works at the intersection of developmental biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science. In part one of our conversation with Dr. Levin, we talked about how cells create a collective consciousness and how bioelectricity or electrophysiology is running the whole system. He talks about what his lab has discovered, about how we can treat cancer without chemotherapy, and the implications of understanding how many different kinds of intelligence and mind abilities there are in in the world.
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He's going to also paint a picture of what life will be like in the near future when each one of us has an app on our phone that can monitor our organ function and our internal experience.
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It might not even be on our phone. It might be in a contact lens in our eye. But we'll let Dr. Levin explain it all in part two of our conversation. Make sure to join us over on Substack. And Here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Michael Levin. Break it down. I also really love your, you know, your your take on sort of the woo woo of it all. That many people spend you know, people are spending a lot of their time and energy, some might say too much in certain cases, looking for, are the aliens here? And what about abductions? And what about, you know, pieces of, you know, ships? I don't even UFOs, right? Can we analyze them? And, you know, we've spoken to a lot of people in this realm, but I love your point. That kind of the most phenomenal thing is that we exist, right? And we spend so much time trying to look outside for how would we understand intelligence, what would we look like? And are they more intelligent than us? And where does AI come into it? And the fact is it. It involves a breaking of the mold of how we think about our existence, our consciousness, and our conscious experience, right? So when we talk about, you know, would we recognize an alien if they were not carbon based, right? Would we recognize an alien if they were mostly a computer on a desk? You know, the first time that was introduced to us, like, I felt like, why are we even talking about this? That if aliens exist, they're probably millions of years ahead of us. Who's to say that they have forearms, walk on two legs, and have eyeballs, right? Just that notion kind of blows apart some of the sort of sensationalized components of a very legitimate conversation about what happens not on this planet that might be mindful, like literally have a mind.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And there's a. There's an emerging field called diverse intelligence, which really seeks to. It has. It has components of basal cognition, which is asking about, okay, we already know in our case that we can do these things. Where did they come from, right? And how did they get scale up during evolution? So that's like a part of it, but another part. It is really developing tools to detect and then communicate with really radically different minds on. Completely unlike our own, that work in different scales at different problem spaces. And the amazing thing is, so, you know, there's this thing, seti, right? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I wrote a paper once talking about SUTI S U T I the Search for Unconventional Terrestrial Intelligence. Because if you start to apply the tools that we already have for communicating with intelligence in its general form, if you don't make assumptions that it has to be wet and squishy, it has to have been produced by random mutations. It has to have a brain. You know, if you, if you give all that stuff up and you just start applying the tools, you find these things everywhere.
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Tell me somewhere there's an intelligent being that I didn't see, okay?
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Well, first of all, your body's full of them. And I don't mean the microbiome. I mean, I mean that if you apply. Right, so. So we don't feel each other's consciousness, so we use heurist to.
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Maybe you don't, Michael.
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Okay, well, okay, fair, fair enough. I am behind on this. I do not directly feel your consciousness. And that means that I have to use heuristics to solve the problem of other minds. There are four or five criteria that we use to say, okay, I don't know, I can't tell directly, but I think you have a mind like I do, you have consciousness like I do. We use heuristics for that for those exact same reasons, including the new causal emergence metrics that people are using on locked in patients. And all of this to figure out if there's somebody in there. For all of those reasons, you should be take extremely seriously the idea that various other organs in your body have a mind as well.
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Did you say organs?
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Organs, yeah, liver, skin, like that kind of stuff. Now at this point, people usually say to me, okay, wait, I don't feel my liver being conscious. Of course you don't. You don't feel me being conscious either. And your left hemisphere puts up a very nice sort of story about how, look, I'm the, you know, I'm the conscious one here because it has a linguistic interface that we all find very convincing. But actually, if you look at what these other systems are doing, they may not have language, although the jury's still out on that. But, but let's. There's no evidence yet, so let's say they don't have language, but they have many of the other things that we already know are associated with being minds. And if we have such a hard time with this, how are we going to find aliens?
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It's kind of the other side of a technology question. You know, we were, I was shocked to learn that the, the most popular usage of AI globally is basically making a chatbot your friend, your therapist, your confidant, in some cases even, you know, having romantic or deeply emotional feelings. You know, about a chatbot. You know, I feel pretty clear. I'm kind of a Luddite, but I feel pretty clear that, you know, my analysis of that is that's not a friend, that's not a therapist, that's not a lover. You know, the last time I was in a relationship with someone who didn't have needs, you know, I was in utero. What can you tell us just from your perspective about different kinds of intelligence and the openness that you'd like us to have about recognizing intelligence and entities that have their own minds. I really don't want to anthropomorphize a program. You know, what's happening and what do you see happening for the way people are interacting?
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First of all, I want to blow up our ability to distinguish because everybody kind of feels like they can tell who's a friend and who's just faking. Just to say I recommend a story by Terry Bison called They're Made of Meat. And that just basically, it's one page. It's a bunch of aliens who are looking down Earth and they just cannot fathom how we're supposed to be these cognitive beings that we're made of meat. Like, that's crazy. Okay, so first thing. Second thing is, look, if a spaceship lands on your front lawn and this thing on wheels sort of trundles out and hands you a poem that it wrote along the way about how happy it is to see you and whatever, we are going to be hard pressed to figure out what's actually going on here because we do not have good criteria. We think we do, but we do not have good criteria for who's a real being and who's faking. And the last thing that I'll say, and this is the weirdest thing, and we can spend a lot of time on this, and we have some research recently that we put out on this, and there's going to be more coming this year. People have this feeling that everybody kind of uniformly has this feeling that, okay, living beings, especially us, are not fully encompassed by the laws of chemistry. We don't exactly know why, but, you know, the mechanical laws of chemistry. When you say program, I mean the laws of chemistry look like a program, but we are somehow more than that, which is why we can be friends and so on with each other. We don't know what's going on, but no doubt the scientists kind of have a handle on it. They do not have a handle on it. But okay, so we are somehow more than this, which is why we can be friends. But over here, at least, there's this region which is just dumb machines. And these are algorithms and computers and things like that. And those things do exactly what the laws of computation and physics tell them to do. We somehow fudge it. I don't know how, but somehow we can be friends. But no worries, because while the formal models of chemistry don't describe us perfectly, our formal models of computation and physics describe the Dumb machine. So we cannot be friends with them. They only do what the laws of computation say. I'm here to tell you that our formal models don't describe either one fully. Not even the simplest algorithms. Okay. We studied sorting algorithms like bubble sort and things like this that people have been studying for 80 years. Six lines of code, fully deterministic, even those kinds of things have unexpected capabilities that are A, nowhere in the algorithm and B, fully recognizable to any behavioral scientist. Okay. So this tells us that if minimally, without going too crazy, minimally, it argues for massive humility about our ability to recognize who or what we can actually be friends with. And I would say it's far worse to get it wrong on the sort of false negative side of things than it is on the false positives.
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Okay, so I'm gonna say something, and I don't know if you've ever been asked about this. I mean, first of all, Jonathan has a background as an energy worker which, you know, we kind of keep tucked in his back pocket because he comes at it from a very, very, you know, rational and also very beautiful, you know, intuitive place. But I. One of the practitioners that I've seen for many years is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner. And this is something that is not just intuited from the universe. There's a course of study that goes back to wisdom that's thousands of years old. And there's plenty of things in, let's say, traditional Chinese medicine or other thousands of years old traditions that we would say, okay, we know that's not accurate. It doesn't make sense. Right? Many, many things. We used to believe that leeches would cure everything. Right. I'm setting that aside, however, exactly the way that we're having a scientific conversation about the intelligence of the body, about the wisdom of certain organs, this is something just letting everyone who isn't already in the know know. This is something that traditional Chinese medicine, for example, talks about. And in the same way that when you talk about like, like Jewish law and we say, like, it's not science law, it's got its own, you know, universe. Traditional Chinese medicine also, it has its own kind of universe. There's a different way that things are supp Spoken about, but I'm just being honest. It is thought that the body has a wisdom, the body has an intelligence that's also collective, and that organ systems do speak to each other and energy flows, which we know could also be oxygen being carried through, you know, many ways that flows through particular meridians in the body. Right? Different places in the body that, when stimulated, can support blood flow. Right. Or energy to different organ systems. And I'm not bringing this up to challenge you, although you seem fun to challenge. I think that there's a lot of confluence here between what we're talking about. But obviously, the path that you are on, like the, The. The sperm and egg that made Mike 11 led you to this point, you know, in biology. But how do you speak to or how do you understand traditions that maybe for thousands of years have been having a dialogue around this, but not with the same technology that we do?
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Yeah. So, yes, and I think. I think that's a really good point. And so what I'll say is two things. First, the good news is that we now have tools to actually have empirical, testable answers to these questions. In other words, it is not enough, as most modern science to say that thing is not. Does not have a mind. How do you know? Because philosophically, that's just how I feel. Okay, that's no go. But also, we've had thousands of years where we said, well, there's a beautiful spirit under every rock. And how do you know? Well, maybe we see them and maybe we don't. I don't know. But we're just gonna. Okay, both of those things are not what we're doing in science. So the good news is that now we actually have the beginnings of tools, and we actually have a growing field where you can actually get answers to these things, where you can actually take a system and say, how much and what kind of cognition is embedded in this thing that we would not otherwise know. And sometimes you find out that, whoa, it's way more than we thought. Other times you say, yeah, well, at the very least, I'm not smart enough to talk to it. And so therefore, I can't see it. And people email me all the time and say, oh, man. So the whole solar system is like this giant. Maybe, maybe. But you can't just decide that. You can't just say it. You have to do experiments. And of course, on that scale, it's very hard to do experiments. But that's kind of my point to all of this, is that all of these things are absolutely up for testing as hypotheses. But we now have the tools to actually do this properly. And one of the things that we are developing in our lab is, for example, methods now using. Using various tools of machine learning and so on, to actually talk, to literally talk to cells, organs, molecular networks, all these kinds of things. So interfaces where you can actually push information back and forth and get a human understandable information out of it. And I think that's the future. Here is that one of the best use cases for AI and VR and those kinds of things is to learn to communicate with systems that we previously just had no idea they were even there.
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This episode is sponsored by Wandering Jews, an open door media brand.
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If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bitton and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like anti Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Bret Stevens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked. Bio NMX
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Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by Bioptimizers.
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You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned during perimenopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affects your magnesium levels. And low magnesium. It makes everything harder. Not just sleep. Focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added Magnesium Breakthrough by by Optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it. See if you wake up more rested and refreshed, you've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bio Optimizers offers a 365 day no questions asked money back guarantee. Magnesium Breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene. Overall, Bio Optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan what do they get? When go to bioptimizers.com breaker and use
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the code breaker you get 15% off your entire order and a free Bottle
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of mass Zymes Bioptimizers, bestselling digestive enzyme that'll be added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code.
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That's a $20 product, free on top of your discount already.
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This is a limited time offer, and while supplies last, you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it in stores. This offer exists in one place. Our link, our code. That's it. So maybe you were already thinking about it. This is the sign. Go to buyoptimizers.com breaker. Use the code. Grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. What does that sound like? To speak to cells? I know this might seem like a little bit of a. Of a strange example, but I was recently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and there was an exhibit, an installment that was sort of a theoretical way to try and be in contact with intelligence that might be outside of this solar system. And it had 55 different languages, you know, being spoken, just in case, right? In case there's some algorithm out there that might want to pick up one of the languages that we have. And it's, you know, kind of a conceptual art piece. But the notion being, what would you say, right, to some other intelligence. How would you say it? And the exhibit also featured photos like, what would we want aliens to see that we are. Right. And it was a fascinating collection. You know, what would you choose throughout history? So for this example, what. What does it practically look like, you know, to talk to cells? What language do they speak for you? And you can say mostly math. That's okay.
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No, well, it's that it, it. It might be math, although I think the standard math we have now is not particularly particularly appropriate for it. You know, as far, by the, by the way, as far as I always, I always thought it was. It was amusing that one of the, one of the things for talking to aliens, one of the things that is expanding at the speed of light from our planet is this incredible sphere of Three Stooges episodes, right? So it's, you know, from what, the forties? I guess I forget, but, but like, you know, just, just, you know, this, this incredible like, like giant sphere of, of. Of of videos. And that's what, that's what the aliens are catching.
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Jonathan and I have a game that I call the Aliens Land. Right? When we're in, like an awkward situation or we're like on a ladder and someone falls, like if they landed right now, you know, or like a local, like Burning man, like aliens land right now. Anyway. Sorry, go ahead.
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Yeah, yeah, it's. I mean, that's a good thing to look at, is see how things look from, from those other perspectives. Look, if you want to, if you want to talk to your liver or if you want to talk to a cell or even a collection of chemical pathways inside a cell. Now, you're not going to be talking about current events. You're not going to be talking about movies or any of that. You're going to be talking about the things it cares about. What are the things it cares about? Well, it's navigating all the time. It's navigating a space of physiological, transcriptional, other kinds of states to keep you alive. If we had the ability to imagine, okay, right now we have most of our senses kind of face outwards and imagine if we had the inborn, a direct sense of your blood chemistry, let's say 10 different parameters of your blood chemistry. If we could feel that, the way that we smell and taste, I think we would have zero problem recognizing that we're full of symbionts, right? Our liver, our kidneys and so on that, that traverse that space that we would then feel as a space. We don't, because we don't have the sense for it, that we would say, oh, look at this. I'm, you know, I'm full of these things that are traversing that space to keep me, to keep me alive. We would, we would, we would much, be much better at it. What we are building are language interfaces so that you can ask things like, how are you doing in this space? And the answer might be your potassium levels are terrible. Or the answer might be there's been stress for days and I don't know what you're doing, but I'm stressed out. Or it might be the combination of my electrical connectivity is low, or it might be that actually everything's great. More nutrients. These are the sorts of messages that. And you might be able to push things. You might be able to say, hey, I'd like you to be more on the hyperpolarized end. You're tending towards depolarization too much. And we know that's where cancer sort of gets going, that once you hyperpolarized, like, these are the things we want to be able to talk about. And we already have the interfaces to instrumentize them, optical and electrical and others. Now there needs to be that transduction layer so that we can have that conversation. I just wanted to give you, give you a quick example, like A silly example of what an interface looks like for talking to aliens. Just imagine, imagine for a second you're sitting in a room and you're going to play tic tac toe against an alien. Okay, so you got some chalk, you're drawing lines on the floor and you're making moves. And you know what tic tac toe is? You want to make straight lines. Diagonal is ordered. Okay, so you're doing the tic tac toe and you're having successful games. It's obvious the alien understands tic tac toe. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it's obvious they're playing. Turns out the alien actually doesn't understand geometry at all. Has no concept of straight lines. How are they playing tic tac toe with you? Well, in the aliens room, okay, what he has is a box of basically like billiard balls. Each of those billiard balls has a number on it. And all he's doing is picking out numbers that total to 15. In other words, all he understands is arithmetic. Okay. And all he's doing is picking out balls that total to 15. Why does that allow you guys to play a game of tic tac toe? Because in between you there is this thing called a magic square. Magic square is like a sudoku kind of thing where basically it's a square with numbers in it. Every diagonal adds up to 15. You don't need to know there's a square if that in fact is what's connecting you. All you need is to pick numbers to total to 15. And it turns out that that actually looks like a game of tic tac toe from the other end. So the part here that allows you. Now, you are never going to think like that alien. Okay, maybe you don't know arithmetic at all. All you know is geometry. Maybe he doesn't understand geometry at all. You're not going to be the same. But. But what you've created is that one little, little content context where you guys can share a meaningful activity together.
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This is how two humans can learn to love each other and try and function in the same space.
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This is Mayim and I on this podcast.
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Yeah. So. So that's what we're trying to create. So that, so that we can have that experience with, with other kinds of systems.
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But if I go sci fi for a second, what I'm imagining is that, that the body could have a dashboard and at a quick glance you could see how your oil is low. But imagine many more variables across your organ systems and you can check. Wait a Second, this needs a little top up, this needs a little adjustment, and you can have far more data than you could ever have from blood tests.
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What you're describing is actually a field of medicine called functional medicine, where what they purport is that with the right number of clinical diagnostic criteria, they can put Humpty back together, right?
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Yeah, but they don't have any of the visualization. And the data that they currently have is not even close to what we're talking about in terms of the work that Michael's approaching.
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So part of it is, but I think we can do much better than that. Think about neural decoding, right? So the idea is that we can take readings from the brain. If we knew what we were doing, we would then be able to decode the memories, the, you know, goals, the blah, blah, blah, right? That are. That are basically encoded in this electrophysiological activity. So we've been doing that for cells and tissues and embryos and tumors and everything else. So that's part of it. And literally asking the question, what does the body think about before there's a brain? Well, the answer is it thinks about its shape, quite literally. It recalls and processes memories about what shape things should be and tries to execute on that and so on. And ultimately, what I'm thinking of is, down the line, you'll have various biometrics devices, whatever, but on your phone, forget, hey, Siri. It's going to be, hey, liver. And you're going to say, hey, liver, why do I feel like crap today? And the answer might be, well, you know, I've talked to your fridge and I know what you've been eating, and my potassium levels are not right and I'm not happy. And this is what like, like, like what you actually want is a way to have that interface that's going to translate from the things you care about into the things that these systems care about.
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Can we talk about how far away this interface is that I can be talking to my liver and my other organs on my phone instead of Siri? Like, if you had to ballpark, okay?
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I mean, for this kind of stuff, like limb regeneration, all the things that people ask, I can't give you exact dates, like exact years, but it isn't far off. In other words, we are creating a tabletop version of it in the lab. Then after that, it's all engineering problems, making it smaller, cheaper, putting it in your phone, sticking to sensors which people already have, glucose monitors and all this kind of stuff.
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Within our lifetime, will I be living in the jetsons of my body?
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I. Yes, I think so. Yes, I think so. I mean we, you know, we, we, we have, we have things on this in this space that we have a horizon of one year, two year, three year grants that are designed to implement some of this stuff.
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You better hustle up. Better hustle up.
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C
Well, that's, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's for sure.
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I have two questions. The first is about trauma. Right. And what cells hold and what, what score is the body keeping? Right. As we've, as we've heard in the field of trauma. Right. With Vesel van der Kock, the, the notion of the body keeps the score. Gabor Mate is, you know, based a career right, on this notion. I'm curious what, what your take on, on trauma is, especially from a cellular perspective.
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Yeah. Interestingly, I've had, I've had a lot of outreach from, from people who work with, with trauma of different types. So here' caveat that I'm not a human medical doctor. So I don't know exactly how all this is going to play out in medicine. But I will give you some thoughts. First of all, we know that very important regulatory states are non local. What I mean by that is when I put an oncogene in a particular location in the body of that temple, whether or not it becomes a tumor depends on a bioelectrical state. I can induce on the opposite side of the body. Okay. Far, far away, not, not local. So that's the first thing. Same thing for birth defects. If I want to fix, if I want to repair a birth defect, I can do it from a, from a location elsewhere in the body. So the first thing we know is that, that, that these kinds of things are not, not local to the, to the place where they occur.
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B
So you're making this point because we're going to be talking about events that happened far away, temporarily and also possibly different places. Somatically, correct?
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Yes. I'm getting to the idea that, look, in order to talk about the trauma and what happens to the body, we have to think about how information propagates across the body, across levels. We have to. Right? So that kind of stuff. So the other thing we know is that information, including behavioral information, moves across living tissue. Here's one simple example. Flatworms can regenerate any part of their body and they're smart, you can train them. It happens that and this was discovered in the 60s by this guy McConnell. And then we showed it with Modern Tools in 2013 that if you take, if you Take these flatworms and you train them on something. They have a centralized brain. You cut off their head, including the brain, the tail will sit there doing nothing for about eight days. It then grows back a brand new brain from scratch. And those animals still remember the original training.
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B
That's nuts. Yeah, that's nuts. So can you say that again just to make sure everyone is understanding? You've got a worm, and it just looks like a worm. It's got the kind with the little triangle.
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It's a triangle head. But. But it's different than people might be thinking of an earthworm. Planaria are similar to our direct ancestors. They're true bilaterians. They have all the same neurotransmitters. They have a centralized brain, but, you know, bilateral symmetry, two lobes. If you take a worm and you train it, and I can tell you how we train them, It's a whole thing. But. But then you cut off their heads and leave the tail. The tail will sit there, it will eventually regrow a new head. That's a whole amazing thing in and of itself, but it will regrow a new head. And those animals, then if you retest them, you find evidence that they remember the original training. What that means is without. Without even touching the question of where is the information? That's a whole other question. What it for sure means is that information is now imprinted onto the new brain as the new brain develops, because there's no behavior without the brain. So we already know that information can move across tissues like that. It moves across tissues. In the cases of birth defects, cancer, regeneration, it moves across, and it can from the brain, elsewhere, one other piece of the puzzle. And then you'll see how all this affects the question. Those planaria, if you cut them into pieces, every piece grows. A perfect little worm with one head and one tail. And you might ask yourself, how does it know how many heads I'm supposed to have? If you cut it in, if you cut it through, you know, with two cuts, so that the head, the tail, and then the middle, you take the middle, it has two wounds, one on each side. How does it know that one of them gets a head and the other one gets a tail, right? And so people, right? So people typically say, why the genome, of course. But we know the genomes encode proteins. They don't tell you which side is going to be which. And so we ask the question, how does it know? We found a bioelectrical pattern, AKA a morphogenetic memory that says you should have one head and what did we do? We rewrote that pattern and we changed it using ion channel modifying drugs to say, no, you should have two heads. And when you do that, guess what the pieces make. And I could, you know, I'll send you if you want to put it up with the show.
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B
Love it.
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C
I'll send you some videos. I have beautiful videos, some of them set to music of two headed.
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B
Two headed words set to music.
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Oh sure, I put music, of course.
- [32:14]
B
Who would like to guess what music Dr. Levin sets to his worm with two heads video? We asked for it. Roll the T. Foreign.
- [32:43]
A
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- [32:46]
B
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- [34:10]
A
Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again.
- [34:15]
C
But the interesting thing is that those worms, there is nothing genetically wrong with them. We never touch the genome. In fact, when they rip themselves in half and regenerate, which is how they like to reproduce. If I were to toss these into the Charles river here, I'm not going to do that. But if I did, then scientists would come along and scoop up some samples and say, say, oh cool, a speciation event. We have some one headed worms, we have some two headed worms. Let's sequence the genome and see what happened. And guess what? The genomes are identical. There's nothing in the genome. Because that is not where the information is.
- [34:46]
B
The information's not like floating with magic fairies in the ether. Can you give us the most simple explanation of where that information is?
- [34:55]
C
Sure, sure. And, and by the way, we can never rule out magic fairies in the ether. Right? We're scientists, but this is my type of scientist. This.
- [35:02]
A
Go ahead.
- [35:03]
C
Right here, here's. Here's where the information is that we know where it is and you know, we know where it is because we were able to rewrite it if it was. If it was somewhere that we didn't know where it was, we wouldn't be able to rewrite it. The information is. And I could show you videos and pictures of this is in a stable electrical pattern that sits within the tissue that the cells interpret as. How many heads should I make? It is literally a memory encoded in one of the components of memory in the brain, which is electrical patterns. And we can see it and we can change it. And when we change it to, you know, in ways that we, that we, that we can predict what's going to happen. It controls the number of heads, by the way. If that's not weird enough, we can also change the type of species head that they make. In other words, we can take the same worm and have it make heads that belong to different species 100 to 150 million years evolutionary distance. Again, without touching the DNA. We already know we have devices. You and I are sitting on a device that without touching the hardware, you can put different information patterns into the RAM and it will do different things. Right.
- [36:11]
B
It won't grow a second computer. But yes, I mean, if you go
- [36:15]
C
to the artificial Life conference in Japan, you will see computers that do make copies and things like that.
- [36:22]
A
Does this mean that we are on the path to understanding how humans can regrow fingers, limbs, organs?
- [36:31]
C
I sure hope so. This is what Edwin, I have to do a disclosure here because Dave Kaplan and I have a spin off company called Morphaceuticals which, whose goal is in fact to regenerate limbs. We're working on it in mammals. We solved it in frog. We've shown several years back how to get it to happen in frog. We're now trying it in mammals. Certainly hope so. And I think, look, we already have a large adult mammal that regrows bone vasculature, innervation, and those are deer. So deer regrow antlers every year a centimeter and a half of new bone growth per day. Okay. Crazy amounts of bone growth, innervation, skin vasculature. It's not like mammals can't possibly do this. They don't. But I think we can turn it on. That's absolutely something we're working on. So, yes, the answer is yes.
- [37:14]
A
Let's circle back to that and go to trauma. But circle back to this regrowth.
- [37:19]
C
Sure. So the trauma thing. So think about what happened to these worms. Okay. The way we do it is we expose them for no more than three to six hours of a particular chemical. That is basically a physiological experience for them. We don't touch the DNA, we don't change this, we don't put in stem cells or scaffolds or any of that stuff. We just give them a three to six hour soak and then that's it. And then for the next nine to ten days they regrow two heads. And in the future, if you cut the two headed animal into chunks, it will keep making two headed animals forever as far as we can tell.
- [37:56]
B
Oh, wow.
- [37:57]
C
Despite their normal. Yeah, yeah. Despite their normal genome. So think about, talk about keeping the score. A three to six hour experience, a physiological experience, has permanently changed your body structure. With a new brain, a different body axis of a new, different body plan, new behavior, everything is different. Right? So I mean, there you go. The body can absolutely keep the score. If you, you know, if you, if in these kinds of contexts, how that plays out in humans, I, I'm not speculating on, but I would be shocked and astounded if, if somehow humans managed to escape this very fundamental biological mechanism.
- [38:32]
B
That's so, it's incredibly, incredibly explained. Thank you.
- [38:36]
A
It's incredible. And it leads me to wonder if you can use some of the same tools being developed for cancer to reconnect it to the larger goals of the system. If that can also be rewritten in a way.
- [38:50]
C
Do you mean within the body or do you mean between bodies?
- [38:53]
A
I mean in the body itself. If the body has experience and we can show evidence that for some reason a traumatic effect has weakened the participation or function of that part, can we reactivate it to be more electrically significant?
- [39:10]
C
Yeah, we're, we're working on that now. And in particular we're working on it. I don't have a. We're not using a model of trauma, but we are trying to do it in aging. One of the issues that. Okay, so some years back we showed that if due to. Either to exposure to teratogens, so nicotine, alcoholic, nasty, you know, kinds of teratogens, or due to genetic mutations, certain birth defects can be repaired by reinforcing the correct bioelectrical state. So we took really nasty, like you probably know, Notch mutations. Right. So really important neurogenesis gene. So typically you have a Notch mutation, like the brain is just completely destroyed. Right. Terrible defects all around. What we found is that there is a proper bioelectrical pattern that says here's the shape and size of the brain. If we artificially impose that pattern, even though you have that dominant Notch mutation, you'll have a normal brain, normal iq, that kind of stuff. Right. You can, you can. Some defects can be fixed in software, so to speak. Right. Even certain, I'm not saying all, but certain genetic defects can be fixed. So by reinforcing a particular bioelectrical pattern, we've ensured an anatomically healthy organ. We are taking. One of the things we're doing in the aging and longevity field is to take the same. And this is again a disclosure here. There's another company that licenses called Astonishing Labs that where, where what we're doing is we're looking to see whether during aging the normal bioelectrical patterns that keep your body in sharp coherence start to get fuzzy. It looks like they, they blur with age.
- [40:43]
B
That's what it feels like.
- [40:44]
C
Yeah, it does, right? Yeah. So, so we're trying to, we're trying to see if by, by, by restoring these patterns, we can keep healthy organs. So, so I think that same, I mean, what you're suggesting is that same kind of, of approach to reverse and override the somatic effects of trauma. I think it would be completely reasonable. Completely reasonable. And we'll probably get to it at some point. We'll make some kind of a model system for it and we'll get going. Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable.
- [41:16]
A
I would love to spend a little bit of time in near sci fi painting a picture of when these tools and technologies that you're developing are commercialized. And with the caveat that, you know, miniaturizing and implementing has its own unique set of challenges, but the progression of technology usually allows us to do that in a given period of time. When that happens, can you start to paint a world that we live in with these being readily available to each one of us?
- [41:49]
C
Yeah, so I can't paint the world that we're going to be living in. Because as we all can see, there's all kinds of. Of things happening that could. Could undermine all the possibilities. But I can paint the world that we could live in and that I think we. We should live. We should live in. And I can summarize all of that by. By using the term freedom of embodiment. Here's, here's, here's how I see this. At some point in the future, not very long, I don't think a couple, Couple generations, max, students are going to be reading about us in the same way that we read about our prehistoric hominid ancestors and think to ourselves, wow, you would step on a sharp stick and get sepsis and die. How, you know, how could people live that way? You know, you might get a toothache and it would drive you mad. Like, how could we live like this? So future children are going to read about us and they're gonna say, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're telling me that those people, they were born and just whatever kind of body they happen to have been in, with all its limitations, susceptibilities, birth defects, whatever. Whatever body determined by what? Random cosmic rays? That's what got to decide what, what. And they would have to stay in that body their whole life, just. Just determined by. By the vagaries.
- [43:04]
B
I'm carrying the trauma for hundreds of thousands of years in my DNA.
- [43:09]
C
Exactly. Exactly right. And there was nothing they could do about it. And they were just. Whatever cards were dealt, like, that's what they had to live with. And no one was on top of making sure that everybody was able to have the embodiment that they wanted. The.
- [43:21]
B
The no one. No help, right?
- [43:23]
C
No help. Amazing. I think this will be considered scandalous. And that's because the road to regenerative medicine leads to something called an anatomical compiler. What is that? That is a communications device in which you describe. I want the cells to build this thing that looks like this. And whether it's a healthy organ or whether you want the tentacles or infrared vision on the back of your head or some other.
- [43:53]
B
I just want my body to stop recog itself as alien and attacking it. It's a small request.
- [44:00]
C
A small request. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. That's definitely an issue. But once we are able to communicate our goals to groups of cells and get them to build exactly what you want them to build, which is what all of us in regenerative medicine are working on. Bioengineering. We're all working on it. The Next step, of course, is to say, well, yeah, we can rebuild the same body you always had. But. But I mean, why would we just stop there? It's not like that was chosen in accordance to our values and our hopes and dreams. That's kind of where evolution dropped us. Because evolution likes good enough. That's what evolution likes. And just good enough. And so eventually you're going to be able to have whatever embodiment that you want. And that's the step after being able to handle birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, degenerative disease. After that, it's like, yeah, but what, what kind of organs would you like? Because there's a wide range of options.
- [44:54]
B
Well, we would like to be friends with you. We know that for certain.
- [44:57]
C
Delightful.
- [44:57]
B
And we will let you go. I will say in 2021, you were quoted as saying that you and your wife and kids live with your parents. Is that still the case?
- [45:05]
C
That is still the case. That is still the case.
- [45:06]
B
I love that. Thank you, Dr. Levin. We really appreciate talking to you.
- [45:10]
C
Thank you. It was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Thank you both.
- [45:16]
B
That was a big, big bomb that I dropped that he lives with his parents. I didn't want to say that he lives with his parents, he, his wife and his two children. This was an article written on him in 2021 and I had to follow up and see they all live together.
- [45:31]
A
You know, it's only in very small parts of the world that we think it's a measure of success to be totally independent and not have any familial connection. I think he's independent, no meaning, but not reliant. That's not the way I'm using independent. I mean that, you know, I forget I knew someone who was in a similar situation and they. Someone he was living with his father as like a 50 year old man and you know, someone said, well, isn't that weird? And he's like, it's weirder. If I were to live alone and my dad were to live alone, like, why wouldn't we live together? And he's getting older and I'm helping him. Like, what is more natural than that?
- [46:21]
B
So what I will say, and this actually is an interesting part of Dr. Levin's story, is that he was born in Moscow and he immigrated to this country when he was nine and he was the youngest in his family. His mother was a concert pianist. The article actually says she eventually transitioned to being a holistic practitioner. I was so curious what that was.
- [46:43]
A
What is the holistic practitioner?
- [46:45]
B
I didn't want to ask. His father was a computer programmer. And as a child, the way that his father, like, when they just came to America, they moved to a suburb of Boston in Massachusetts, and they would take apart TV sets, like, just to learn how they worked, and then, you know, put them back together. That was his early training, you know, with his dad, of just like. Like, how to satisfy his interest in the things that, you know, he was interested in. Anyway, his. He was asthmatic as a child, the article says, and so his dad wanted to give him an activity to keep him in one place, you know, when he was sick or having trouble breathing. Anyway, just kind of a cool story. And yeah, he, his wife and his two kids live with his parents, which I just love, I think. And I mean this in the highest complimentary way. Sometimes his explanations are more confusing than the thing that I was asking him to explain.
- [47:42]
A
Well, he's looking at it from a variety of different vantage points, and he's, like, stepping back and back and back in order to explain the mechanism and
- [47:50]
B
also zooming in and in and in. I mean, I love this idea that not so much that, oh, chatbots aren't real people, but like. Like, what are we even talking about? He feels like the kind of person who, like, every word could have further implications. It needs a lot of. A lot of fleshing out. I had to dissect a planaria. I know you're wondering about that. Like, what was that like to dissect a planaria?
- [48:15]
A
I was wondering about it. And I was wondering, how far away are tadpoles from human experience? Meaning what he's been able to recreate in tadpoles. How far is it a leap in order to do in humans? And how do you start to do that?
- [48:31]
B
You can do it. We already know we can do it.
- [48:33]
A
We could grow you a new baby toe.
- [48:35]
B
You know what? That feels very personal. Someone in my taekwondo class broke her toe, and I was like, just cut it off. And people were like, you can't cut off a pinky toe. And I was like, I don't think mine is very useful, so I don't think anybody needs one. And I was like, it's vestigial. Anyway, it was a thing. But. But we already know, like, you can. I mean, I. I hate to say it just because these are really, really, you know, they're kind of hard animal studies to talk about. I. I don't want to get specific, but we do know that you can kind of grow things wherever you want to put them.
- [49:09]
A
I think a lot of people are. Are maybe stuck on this notion.
- [49:13]
B
Yeah.
- [49:14]
A
Of the future that he described, where we have an interface on our phone. You open your app and you're like, let's. All the major organ systems are there. Maybe your blood flow is there. All your biomarkers, you could be like,
- [49:30]
B
did you say blood flow? This is why they don't give you a science degree for doing a science podcast.
- [49:35]
A
Meaning there could be. And you want to see that. Oh, all of a sudden my. I'm not. The blood is not moving as quickly from my ankles up, back up and being pumped back up from the lower extremities of my body. You may be like, oh, my pancreas is not doing the things that my pancreas is supposed to do. And there's a whole list and there's a checkpoint and you're like, I should just send a little bit of electro stimulation back to that area of my body and it will be happier and. Or I need to change something that I'm eating. And you're gonna be able to monitor that in real time. Like, that's pretty crazy.
- [50:13]
B
I'm not trying to tease. I apologize for sounding like I was being arrogant or condescending, but, yeah, you can't. I can't help it. Is that what that face was? What I meant was, yes, it would be amazing. And the kind of information, you know, like, for example, for those of us with a thyroid condition, of which there are many, many kinds of thyroids, right?
- [50:36]
A
Like, you could just tap the app and be like, thyroid, you need a little bit of resignaling.
- [50:43]
B
I think that that glucose metabolism is a really good example for people who are diabetic. You know, that's something that's going to fluctuate throughout the day. It's going to fluctuate before a meal, after a meal, right? That's the kind of monitoring that people, you see them walking around, you know, they have those things on the back of their arm.
- [50:59]
A
People who are not diabetic have these things and they're wondering how the things that they're eating are impacting them on real time.
- [51:08]
B
Well, I mean, I'm also thinking, you know, how many times are we making a decision about what to eat? And we're just basing it on do I want it or not? How about, does your body need this? What does your body need? I had an apple as I was, you know, starting our day today, and I literally had the thought, I know I'm supposed to eat a protein to help slow down the sugar metabolism. So I Don't have a spike. But I don't really have time to grab a spoon of, you know, nut butter. Should I grab a handful of walnuts? And then I was like, screw it, I'll just eat the apple. But who knows what kind of things those micro decisions start accumulating in a body that is decades old. You know, decades old, like half a century old.
- [51:54]
A
Yes. And I think when you have real time information like that, you can see how does my body actually respond?
- [52:02]
B
I have a funny question. And because you're a writer, I'm, I'm posing this as a writing experiment for you. If you are on a date, if you are attracted to someone. Right. What's the information that your, you know, anatomical dashboard might give you? It might say, you may think this person is good for you, but in fact, this is not a chemistry that should be existing. Right.
- [52:31]
A
It could analyze their pheromones.
- [52:33]
B
You're trauma bonding. This is trauma bonding. You think it's chemistry, it's just trauma bonding. Walk away. Walk away.
- [52:41]
A
I don't know if you could tell right away from that.
- [52:43]
B
They are a cystic fibrosis carrier and so are you. If you'd like to have biological children, you may want to go to a genetic counselor before you go on date too.
- [52:53]
A
I think once we have these adjustments, you could just switch on or off.
- [52:58]
B
It'll be the end of romance, that's for sure.
- [53:00]
A
No, if you're a cystic fibrosis carrier, you could probably downregulate that or turn it off so that it doesn't get passed at this stage.
- [53:07]
B
Oh my goodness.
- [53:08]
A
You know the scary part of what he's talking about, these genetic alterations are,
- [53:12]
B
is that no one's going to die and the planet's going to be overpopulated and it's going to just crumble.
- [53:18]
A
Yes. And if you can regrow whatever organs you want, where does it tap out?
- [53:24]
B
That's what I mean. We're going to live forever.
- [53:26]
A
But also like athletic performance. Everyone is now going to have unbelievable lung capacity. Everyone's going to have fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. You're get like you can make these adjustments like, like as he said. Well, why would you just regrow the status quo? That was good enough.
- [53:44]
B
I want a pinky toe that has three different hinges and can grab things that I need.
- [53:50]
A
Look, we all have our goals. Some people's goals may even surpass that. And therefore then you're competing against people who are not adjusted. And that's where he says we're going to get into this exclusionary state. He talked about it with cyborg. And that links back to our conversation with Greg Braden where he talks about the potential for implanting AI technology in our brain. And we've seen that there are already companies out there trying to implant an interface between the Internet and our brains and have it work simultaneously. If you think about that, plus the addition to change birth defects, which will then lead to augmenting body parts, potentially regrowing body parts, regenerating organ systems that are aging, you're on a very quick slope to if you have enough money, you can have whatever internal organs you want, which is a little terrifying because if you aren't able to compete, then it starts to separate and have a multi class system of humanity.
- [54:56]
B
Well, I mean, not. We love to depress people with a good outro. That is what is already happening in that, as you and I knew when we started this podcast, mental health care is really not accessible to most people. It is accessible to the elite. Insurance. Right. And the way our country has structured insurance makes it such that people who cannot afford it do not have access to the same kinds of doctors. You know, it's just that there already is this, this, you know, systemic kind of segregation of care that is socioeconomically based but, or derived. I don't know, it's, it's like a, you know, that's part of the system. Our conversation with Michio Kaku is going to get into this in even more detail because the next conversation is how does quantum computation shift the timescale of when these happen and increase the probability for all of these conversations to get really, really ratcheted up. So there's a tremendous amount of overlap between this conversation and the one with Dr. Kaku as well.
- [56:09]
A
Fascinating. Really, really fascinating.
- [56:11]
B
I also want to just give a nod to the fact that, you know, Dr. Levin is a very, very strict computer scientist, biologist, synthetic biologist, you know, very, very nuts and bolts. He knows, you know, more about ions and electrophysiology than most anyone that we've spoken to or will speak to. But also I appreciate his ability to talk about some of the fantastic and energy components. Even the way that we linguistically describe what it's like to interface with other humans is echoing what he is studying on the cellular level. So I really enjoyed being able to speak with him on both of those levels and for him to sort of meet us there, because I know a lot might be thinking like, what's with all these cells and how does it apply? Guess what? It's the Same conversation. He comes at it from a place of, I need to be able to show it, I need the numbers and I'm going to find them.
- [57:06]
A
I also really loved your addition of how traditional Chinese medicine understands many of the interactions and, and communication that he is doing now in the lab. It's really a fascinating bridge between multiple worlds.
- [57:21]
B
I mean, this is just like a fun tidbit bit. You know, Jonathan, you've, you know, in, in a lot of your studies and you know, the research that you've done personally, both experientially and also just sort of learning about other practices. You know, energy workers who claim to be able to look at your body and assess what's going on in systems. There are people who are medical mediums who will say, I'm going to look at your body, I'm going to feel into your energy field, whatever that means. And I can tell that there's a disruption in your throat. Right. I can tell that there's a disruption in your kidneys. Like some people claim to have this ability. I'm sure they're wrong a lot, but they also might be right a lot. I don't know.
- [58:03]
A
Yeah, they may not be like, oh, I know the balance of your potassium levels are X, Y and Z. They may be like, I see a stagnation in the flow of the bioelectrical field in this area that needs to be adjusted in some way. But to dive even deeper, to say what are the, the chemical reactions or nutrients that are required in order to release that, as well as the emotional component, that's a fascinating dynamic.
- [58:30]
B
Right. But I think that the importance, especially for our podcast and for those of you who are listening and watching, those are different kinds of intelligence.
- [58:39]
A
Totally.
- [58:39]
B
And to me, this is what an open minded, skeptical, scientific mind brings to the table. Exactly what Dr. Levin is bringing to the table. Because what he's saying is there literally are different ways to understand these things and to speak about them. If you want a certain kind of data, that's one language. Right. But to me, that doesn't rule out that there are people who may be able to speak languages that we don't quantify like that. I think it's very, very interesting.
- [59:08]
A
We're all just aliens playing tic tac toe with each other. Separate games connected by a few interfaces.
- [59:15]
B
And when you look from the outside, it just looks like a podcast. Please make sure to join us on Substack.
- [59:21]
A
You know what? I know for sure the conversation with the Breaker community is going to be kind of exciting. On this episode talking about regrowing limbs, what we can understand about the future of what being human is. So come join that conversation as part of the Breaker community on substack.
- [59:41]
B
That's bialikbreakdown.substack.com we hope to see you over there. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.
- [59:47]
C
It's Maya B. Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. Fiction. And now she's going to break down. So break down. She's going to break it down.
- [60:02]
B
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