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Michael Levin: Hacking Life's Code: The Future of Bioelectric Medicine
March 21, 2025
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines.
Just think, someday you should be able to sit in front of a computer and draw the anatomy of exactly what you want. If you could convince cells to build whatever you wanted them to build, birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease, all of these things would go away. We are literally reading out the electrical memories.
What if the most important intelligence isn't in your brain at all, but is instead encoded in the electrical conversations happening between trillions of cells? At Tufts University, Dr. Michael Levin tells us about the future of medicine by revolutionizing our understanding of biology. How so? He decodes these bioelectric signals, the recently discovered language that tells cells what shape to build,
how to repair damage, and even when to become cancerous. This talk was put on by Addie Chaugh from Ecolopto, Professor William Hahn from Florida Atlantic University, and academic philanthropist Reuben Gruber, all of whom are attempting to create a toe of theory of everything for biology and medicine by open-sourcing science through research hackathons and salons, both in person and online.
The link to their events is on screen and in the description. In fact, I was there at this event and their previous Polymath event. A link to my presentation is on screen. A link to my interview with William Hahn is on screen as well. And more from this event is coming up. Ecoloptos founder Adi Cha aims to enhance the capability of the mind and body to better understand the world around you.
My name is Kurt Jaimungal, and on this channel we explore theories of everything primarily from a theoretical physics lens, but also we explore philosophy, math in general, and consciousness. It's a peregrination into the fundamental laws of the universe. Now would be a great time to subscribe and click that like button. This will tell the algorithm to push this content to more viewers, and that will consequently help me produce more high-quality, in-depth technical discussions on physics, philosophy, medicine, biology, and consciousness.
All right. Good evening, everyone. I'm so excited to announce Polymath Medical, our way of trying to make big innovations in medicine using AI, but also taking a very rigorous approach to that. And we're going to be talking about a lot of different things tonight. We're going to be talking about theories of everything in medicine and biology, theories of everything in physics and math. What does that look like when applied to different fields? We're going to be talking about how to apply AI into medicine, AI into medicine when you're at your house, when you're in your car, when you're in a fight, also when you're in your doctor's office or your hospital.
And in order to really understand what drives disease and what drives illness and all these different things that seem to plague our society in different scales, I think we have to have a very deep fundamental understanding. And right now, I think there's nobody better who's trying to get a deeper understanding of biology than Michael Levin at Tufts. Give it up for Michael.
He's one of my role models, and I'm very excited for this. Take it away. Thank you so much for that extremely kind introduction. And thank you for having me here to share some thoughts with you. You can find all of the peer reviewed stuff, the papers, the data sets. Everything is at this address. And then here is a personal blog of what I think some of these things mean. What I'm going to talk to you about today is bioelectricity and specifically the use of bioelectricity as an interface
I like to think of the end game of our field as something called the anatomical compiler just think someday you should be able to sit in front of a computer.
and draw the anatomy of the animal, plant, organ, biobot, whatever it is, you should be able to draw it. And this system will then compile that specification into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to cells to get them to build exactly what you want. Now, so in this case, I'm showing you this three headed flatworm, but if we had something like this, then birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease,
All of these things would go away. If you could convince cells to build whatever you wanted them to build, all of these things would go away. Now, why don't we have something like this? We're actually very far away from it. Where we stand today with molecular medicine is that we're very good at this kind of information. Which cells and what the cells are doing, what individual proteins are binding to what other proteins, which genes turn on and off other genes. The molecular information is very strong.
But we're quite a distance away from being able to restore limbs and repair birth defects and things like this. And so why is that? I'm going to argue that this is because where medicine is today is where computer science was in the 40s and 50s. In those days, in order to reprogram a computer to get it to do something different, you would have to physically interact with the hardware. Here she is. She's rewiring the machine to get it to do something different. And so what I think we've just now started scratching the surface of is to understand
Actually the plasticity and more specifically the intelligence of the living material meaning that it is reprogrammable and For the same reason that you would laugh if I told you today that on your laptop to switch from Microsoft Word to PowerPoint you'd have to get out your soldering iron and start rewiring the thing, right? That's we don't we don't do that anymore Why because we understand that that the material that we're dealing with is is reprogrammable and living material is that and more
So this is what we are made of for made of individual cells so here's this this is a free living organism called the lacrimaria but it gives you an idea of what individual cells can do this thing is incredibly competent in its own little sphere of influence here. There's no brain there's no nervous system it handles all of its physiological metabolic and so on and all in one cell and in fact all of us were a single cell once.
And these cells did this amazing process of embryonic development where they became one of these complex organisms or even perhaps a human. And in fact, even below the single cell level, the molecular pathways within single cells already have learning capacity, right? The different signaling pathways and gene regulatory network components
Come together into a collective intelligence that is able to form six different kinds of memories, including Pavlovian conditioning. You don't need a brain. You don't need neurons. You don't even need the cell. It's just the molecular pathway alone has this capacity. And we are now creating devices that we're using to train these pathways. And then there's many applications like drug conditioning and so on. So the idea here is that
Bodies are made of multiple levels not just of different scales of organization not just the nest the doll structurally what actually every every level has its own capability of solving problems in different spaces.
So we're familiar with animals solving problems in the behavioral space, but your molecular networks, your cells, your tissues, all of them are constantly navigating these other problems. And we are made of this amazing multi-scale competency architecture. I'm going to give you just one example because time is short. I'm going to give you just one example of the kind of problem solving I mean. So this is a tadpole of the frog, Xenopus laevis.
You've got the brain here, here's some nostrils, here's the mouth, these are the eyes, and this is the gut. And so these tadpoles have to become frogs. In order for a tadpole to become a frog, it has to rearrange its face. So the eyes have to move, the mouth has to move, the nostrils, everything has to change. And you might think that this is a hardwired process, that somehow the genetics specifies that every organ moves in the correct distance, the correct direction.
And then you get your frog. Well, we decided to test this because anytime you're going to make a claim about the level of intelligence of something, you have to do experiments. You cannot just assume. So we decided to test it. We made so-called Picasso tadpoles where everything is scrambled. So the eyes on top of the head, the mouth is off to the side here. Everything is, is, is mixed up like a kind of like a Mr. Potato Head doll. Everything is mixed up. And then what we found is something amazing that these, these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs.
Hi, Kurt here. If you're enjoying this conversation, please take a second to like and to share this video with someone who may appreciate it. It actually makes a difference in getting these ideas out there. Subscribe, of course. Thank you. And what we found is something amazing that these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs. And that's because these organs don't just move the right distance in the right direction, because then they would be wrong.
They actually move in whatever way is needed through novel paths to get to where they're going and they make a correct frog face so this ability to reach your goal from different starting positions right get your goal satisfied despite novelty things that you did not know we're going to happen is a key aspect of intelligence of intelligent behavior. I know you have to ask a simple question how do the cells and tissues know what a correct frog face looks like how do they store the memory of the end point.
We know they can remember the end point because they stop when they get there. When they achieve the normal frog face, then they stop. How can we think about collection of tissues storing these kinds of memories? Well, we took our inspiration from what happens in the brain, which is a familiar system where groups of cells store memories and guide behavior, in this case in three-dimensional space. The way it works in the brain is this. You have a network of cells. Here's a neuron. It's touching the southern neuron down here.
It has these little proteins called ion channels, which let charge molecules in and out. And as a result, it acquires a voltage and that voltage may or may not be propagated to its neighbors. And the flow of electrical signaling through this network is what underlies all cognitive activity. And so here is a video that this group took of a zebrafish, a living zebrafish brain. And you can see this, this amazing electrophysiology going on here.
And it's the commitment of neuroscience that if we could decode this, so this is the project of neural decoding, if we could decode this, then we would be able to read out the memories, the goals, the preferences of this animal. And so that is what we would like to do. But outside the brain, we want to do it for the rest of the body. And the reason that's possible is because actually this amazing system of using bioelectricity to integrate information, store memories and guide intelligent behavior is way older than brains.
In fact evolved around the time of bacterial biofilms it's extremely ancient and in fact every cell in your body has the sign channels most cells have these electrical synapses to their neighbors.
And your tissues are running these electrophysiological networks. And so you might ask the question, what do they think about? We know what our brain thinks about. What do the body tissues think about? And so I'm going to tell you that that one thing they think about is shape. They think about arranging the body in the correct shape and then maintaining that against aging, against injury and against cancer.
And we can start them. So here, much like this video of this brain, we can start taking a look at the bioelectrical signals. This is a frog embryo. What you're seeing is a time lapse of a frog embryo. And you can see all the conversations, the electrical conversations that these cells are having with each other. Could we decode this? And here's what some of these patterns look like. First of all, this is something we call the electric face. So again, here's a time lapse of a frog embryo putting its face together.
And there's a lot going on here, but if you look at one frame of that video, you can see that prior to the appearance of the craniofacial organs, this is the map that it's going to build. Here's where the animal's right eye is going to go. Here's where the mouth is. Here are the placards. So this, we are, we are literally, what you are seeing here is literally reading out the electrical memories that tell the cells what a correct face is supposed to look like. And this is what guides a normal, normal development. So we can now begin to read out what it is that, uh, that these cells remember as the correct thing to build.
And not only does this bioelectricity serve as a kind of cognitive glue that binds individual cells into a global vision of what the whole large scale thing is supposed to look like, it actually does this for multiple embryos here. You can see if we poke this embryo, all of these guys find out about it. See this? So this injury wave, so this bioelectrical communication tends to merge subunits into a coherent whole.
And you can see here, these are individual cells. By the way, the way that we are monitoring all of this is with a voltage sensitive fluorescent dyes. That's a technology that we've developed to use these dyes to help understand what the cellular collectives are thinking. Now, watching these patterns is all well and good. And in fact, you can use them to diagnose birth defects and so on. But of course, the more important thing is to start to rewrite these pattern memories. So if I'm telling you that these are memories,
What we're doing is manipulating the natural interface
that these cells are using to control each other. So on their surface, they have these ion channels, which set the voltage, and then here they communicate that voltage to each other. So just like neuroscientists do, we take all of those tools and we can use pharmacology to turn the channels on and off. We can use optogenetics and so on. So we can control the voltage and the communication between cells. So I'm going to show you very quickly three stories that illustrate why this is powerful and why this is important.
And they work not because we're so smart, they work because the system actually is using this electrical communication as a cognitive medium, as a decision-making substrate for determining growth and form of the organism. So the first thing I'm going to show you is a quick story about cancer. So if we take nasty human oncogenes like KRAS and P53 mutations and so on, and we inject them into tadpoles, they will eventually make a tumor.
But before the tumor becomes apparent, you can already see using this voltage imaging. You can already see that, uh, that these cells have an aberrant voltage from their neighbors. And what happens is that that voltage causes them to disconnect from the network. Uh, once you've disconnected from the network, you can no longer remember this grandiose goal that you had before where the collective was working on, uh, building and maintaining organs. As far as you're concerned, you're an amoeba. The rest of the body is external environment and that border between self and world has shrunk.
The cognitive light cone of that cell has drastically shrunk. It is not more selfish than other cells. It just has a smaller stealth. So cancer is in large part a dissociative identity disorder of the cellular collective intelligence. And it happens by breaking these electrical connections. Now, now that weird way of thinking about it has implications. It means that instead of trying to kill these cells,
You can actually try to force them to reconnect with the with a pattern with the with the other cells that are holding the memory pattern and so we've done that here by co injecting so so here you inject the oncogene but you also inject an ion channel that's going to force the cell to be in the correct electrical state and so these are the same animal and so you can see the oncoprotein is blazingly strongly expressed it's all over the place but there's no tumor.
And there's no tumor because it's not the genetics that drives. It's not the mutation that determines the outcome. It's the physiology and the cellular decision making and these cells are remaining connected and they are working on the same goal as they were before making nice skin, nice muscle, whatever. Okay. So that's it. So that's it. So that's a story at the level of single cells. Now I'm going to show you what this means for a birth defects. So here is a, here's a brain of a tadpole and you can see here for brain midbrain and hindbrain.
And what we can do is we can introduce a mutant to a gene called notch and that that's a very important neurogenesis gene. And so these animals have a very abnormal brain. The forebrain is missing the midbrain and hindbrain are a big bubble. You can see the difference. These animals are profoundly affected. They have no behavior to speak of.
What we could what we were able to do is to build a computational model of the electrical pattern that normally tells the brain what size and shape it's supposed to be and we simply ask the question given given this kind of disorder what channels would you have to open and close to get back to the correct shape and the computational model gave us an answer.
And we found we found a couple of drugs already human approved so this is already kind of already in use in patients for other reasons but but when you use them here's here's what happens the the brain you got a normal brain they have actually learning rates indistinguishable from controls and yet they still have me to that mutation.
Okay so this is an example and i'm not saying this will always be possible but this is an example of fixing what is fundamentally hardware error meaning the mutation you fix it in software you fix it by a computer designed a brief biochemical intervention that resets the electrical patterns so that the tissues know what to do and then they bring a they make a correct and the final story that i'm going to tell you is about regeneration when regeneration so.
I don't frogs do not regenerate their legs unlike salamanders so if they happen to lose a leg then forty five days there's basically later this basically nothing so we asked the question could we communicate with the cells through the bioelectrical interface and guide them towards the leg growing path in anatomical space instead of the scarring path.
And so we designed a cocktail. Um, uh, basically a 24 hour application of that cocktail, uh, ends up with, uh, driving about a year and a half of leg growth. So at that point, immediately within the first 24 hours, you get the pro regenerative genes coming on here. This is MSX one. You then by 45 days, you've already got some toes. You've got a toenail, eventually a pretty respectable leg and it's touch sensitive in its motile. Okay. So.
Again, keep in mind that in this case, we did not have to manipulate that process during that whole time. We didn't have to talk to the stem cells. There are no scaffolds here. We didn't have to micromanage it at all. We provided a very early signal that said go down the leg building path. That's it.
And so at this point i have to do a disclosure because david caplan and i have a company called morphosuticals where we are trying to push this forward to to buy medical use is such that eventually so so now we're trying this in mammals and so eventually you will have these wearable bioreactors and not just for the limbs but potentially for all organs that would provide the correct.
What we're doing here is reprogramming the pattern memories of these cells.
I showed you that little eye spot in the electric face and we wondered what would happen if we reproduced that same pattern somewhere else. So what you can do is inject into this early embryo RNA encoding a particular ion channel that produces a little pattern of particular voltage and sure enough those cells get the message and they build an eye. In this case on the gut. These eyes have all the same layers right in the lens optic nerve, all the same stuff.
Just notice what this means. First of all, it means that bioelectrics, as I've shown you in these other examples, is instructive. It's instructive at the organ level. We did not have to say which genes to turn on. We didn't have to tell the stem cells what to do. We found a high-level subroutine call that says, build an eye here. The cells are very competent in doing that. The material, as I was pointing out, is not only competent to receive low information content stimuli and then have a very complex downstream response,
But also it does this cool thing that other collective intelligence is do for example ants when ants come along a piece of food that's too big for them to move what do they do they recruit other members of the community.
Will the cells do the same thing if we inject a few cells, they can tell there's not enough of them to build an eye so what do they do they recruit a bunch of cells from the environment that we did not inject at all so there's the ability for the material to scale itself to the available to the to the to the message that they receive and just to point out if anybody is interested in plants.
This is another great example of the plasticity of life. You might think that the oak genome encodes for this shape because this is what you see most of the time. These acorns give rise to exactly this shape, this flat green thing. But along comes this non-human bioengineer, this wasp, which is a parasite, which puts down some signals for the plant cells and it hacks them. It hacks the morphogenesis exactly the way that I've been showing you that we can hack
What the cells are capable of if we didn't see this amazing example of a bioprompting or reprogram ability.
In fact, it's kind of interesting that the sophistication of what is built is roughly parallel to the sophistication of the hacker. So bacteria and fungi make these kind of boring, lumpy things. Nematodes and mites do a little better. But by the time you get to insects, you get this beautiful kind of construct. So this is what we're trying to do. It took millions of years for the WASPs to be able to do this. We want to accelerate this process.
So the last example I want to show you is a new kind of technology, which are which are basically synthetic bio. So when you look at this, you might think that this is something we got from the bottom of a pond somewhere. But actually, I could tell you that that if you were to sequence it, it's 100% homo sapiens. These are human adult tracheal epithelial cells. We have a process that allows them to reboot their multicellularity into this little creature itself motile. Now, why is this interesting for biomedicine? What does this do? Well,
Uh, and by the way, you know, you would never guess that the human genome would make something like this. This is nothing, uh, like any stage of human development. Well, one thing they have the capability of doing is healing wounds. So if you make a, if you make a bunch of human neurons in a culture like this, and you put a big scratch through the middle, right? So kind of a wound assay, and then you put these bots into their environment, they form this thing called the super bot cluster. And here you can see what they're starting to do. You lift them up four days later, you see that what they've done is knit the two sides of the wound together.
Who would have thought that your tracheal epithelial cells that sit there quietly for a long time much is that kind of getting rid of the mucous and so on are capable of having a completely different life in a different environment different form factor with the ability to heal some of your some of your bones and.
This is just the beginning. This is the first thing we discovered. They probably do a lot more. And so we're envisioning these anthropobots as personalized autonomous therapeutics. In other words, they're made of your own cells. If we inject them into your body, you don't need immune suppressing drugs. You're not going to reject them. They biodegrade within a few weeks. And in the meantime, there might be many applications in which these things could be cleaning out the joints, looking for cancer cells, dropping off pro regenerative molecules, fixing up neural connections and so on.
And so the bottom line is this much of molecular much of biomedicine today is focused around these bottom up technology. So we're so at the level of the hardware, but there's a whole frontier of medicine that's opening up, which are these top down interventions that take advantage of the intelligence of the living material to not to micromanage molecular states, but to convince the cells to and reset set points. We can train them.
Here are the electroceuticals that I've been showing you, right, which are basically just signals to get the bioelectric pattern memories shifted in the right way. And of course, AI is going to be very important in enabling us to communicate to all the different layers of the body. So my claim here is that future medicine is going to look a lot more like a kind of somatic psychiatry and not like chemistry, because the name of the game is going to be to really take advantage of the intelligence of these other layers of the body.
And the final thing I will just say is that because of the plasticity of life and because of the innate problem solving capacities of tissues, pretty much any combination of evolved material, engineered material and software is some kind of possible embodied mind. So in other words, cyborgs and hybrids and augmented humans and weird kinds of creatures that you could only begin to imagine. Some of these already exist. Many are coming. They will be here with us in the future. And that means that
We need to let go of old categories around living things versus machines and all that because the entire variety of life what darwin called endless forms most beautiful are a tiny corner in the space of possible beings and and i think we need to take very seriously the idea that.
This technology is not just about fixing all of the medical situations that plague us today, but also to release a kind of freedom of embodiment where people really can reimagine their life in a very different way than the body they happen to have been given as an accident of the trial and error process of evolution. And we need to really work on a new way of synth-biosis, of living up
in a mutually beneficial way with beings that are going to be different from us. So I'll stop here. I'm just going to thank the postdocs and the students who have done the work that I showed you today. We have lots of amazing collaborators. I thank our funders who have supported this work and the disclosures of these are the companies that have supported us over the years. So thank you very much and I will stop there. Awesome.
I think the work that Michael Levin is doing is Nobel Prize worthy, if you ask me. And the things that he's saying are not just really interesting and have deep implications for biology, but it's for life itself, for computing, for this idea of sentience. Right, Tyler? Right? Sentience. And so we actually have a very diverse crowd in the audience of physicians, students, academics, there's even high schoolers that are here. And I did want to ask Michael if you have maybe a couple of minutes if you wanted to take a question or two from someone.
Sure. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Who's got a really good question. I was very interested in your slide about this theory of cancerous cells failing to communicate electrically with their neighbors. One of the vague things I do know about larger tumors is that they do start to coordinate with other cancerous cells and become more dangerous for the body. Is there a potential avenue for research of disrupting the coordination within cancerous cells so that you get a meta
Cancer that sort of helps the body.
Yeah, great question. Absolutely. And we're working on this. I mean, basically, after the individual cells disconnect from the normal network, they will eventually end up connecting within themselves to form something else that again, tries to reinflate that cognitive light cone that was shrunk to the level of a single cell. And then they make a tumor and then they compete with the rest of the body. And so yeah, that process is absolutely a good target for cancer therapies. And we're working on this stuff now.
Thank you for a very interesting presentation. I just want to ask you in regard to the plasticity of cells, how do you see the relationship between the bioelectric signal about an epigenetics? Is that sort of software versus hardware or how do you see that?
Yeah, great question. I have a talk on my site that's about an hour just exactly on that question. To briefly address it, the software-hardware analogy is actually pretty good in this case. The genetics is what specifies the hardware available to cells.
Everything that happens after that is really a function of the physiological software which is both by electrical but also by chemical by mechanical and so on.
And we have a number of cases and it's a southern this this lengthy talk i go through all of them where you can actually see where the information diverges completely where if you track the genetics or the transcriptomics or the proteomics you get the wrong answer and i kind of showed you this already and you know in the case of the of the tadpole when you look at the mutation you would make a prediction oh it's going to have a brain defect and that's in fact not what happens
So wonderful talk. I just have a quick question.
At this point, a listener asks whether biology has a unifying theory akin to the Langlands program in math or a theory of everything in physics. They note that biology currently consists of fragmented disciplines like genomics and proteomics with no overarching framework to unify them. They wonder if bioelectricity could be a key foundation or if something more is required to develop a comprehensive theoretical model of biology. Yeah, thank you. That's a very good question. Let me clarify.
But bioelectricity is only interesting because it happens to be the cognitive glue that enables the scaling of intelligence forming into bioelectrical networks is how the tiny little goals of single cells metabolic goals and proliferative goals and so on are scaled up into grandiose goals like building a limb or a face and so on.
It is the cognitive glue, that's why it's interesting, it's otherwise not special by itself, but it happens to be very convenient and that's what evolution has chosen. I would claim, and so this is a controversial claim, this is not the mainstream view, so take this with whatever grain of salt you want, but here's my claim.
I think there is a general theory of biology that is being developed now i mean this is what we're trying to do and send some other people and that theory is going to be in the shape of things familiar to behavior science not things familiar to physics and chemistry.
I don't think you should be looking for equations. I don't think you should be looking for emergence, complexity theory, dynamical systems theory. These are all nice, but these are not the backbone of biology. I think the backbone of biology and things we call life are just systems that are very good at scaling up the cognitive properties of their parts into bigger and bigger light cones and so cognitive light cones.
And so what we're going to get it's it's natural that the that the theories the unified theories of physics come out in in in numbers of various other. I'm not even sure that's true anymore but the various other kinds of constructs the the overall theory of biology is going to be all around.
Goals, memories, preferences, and basically terms that you would recognize from psychology and behavior science. And that's because the fundamental interesting thing about life is not any of the dynamics that are currently studied in chemistry and so on. It's the creative problem solving of the material and it starts very early on. It goes below the single cell level and you don't even need cells for it. But the story of life is the story of scaling of intelligence.
And so that theory is, this is why we use bioelectricity, because it's an interface to one way to demonstrate what I'm talking about. It's a convenient interface to the intelligence of life. That's its only goal. It's only a role here.
I think the theory of biology is going to be basically a theory of intelligence. And it's already begun. This is not a science fiction pipe dream. Those theories are exactly what enable us to regenerate the limbs, normalize tumors, repair birth defects and so on. It's precisely because that way of seeing the biological material is fruitful and opens new avenues in therapeutics.
Thank you so much, Dr. Levin. Your work is incredibly fascinating. I wanted to know if you think that pathologies are a failure of bioelectric signaling, and if so, does this have implications for reprogramming something like memory loss?
Yeah, a couple things. There are pathologies that are fundamentally bioelectrical errors. I'm sure there are many pathologies that are not. So this is not a blanket solution for everything. Memory loss is a whole other... If you want to email me about it, I'll point you to some stuff that we've done on this. The storage of memory and how it sort of moves across tissues in the body and how much of it is in the brain and how much of it is not.
These are all really interesting kinds of things and there are some developments coming on that front that I think are going to kind of overturn some of the current assumptions. It's too early to say much yet for sure, but I do think that there are some radically different therapeutics coming on that front. Hi Michael, it's Kurt. I have a question.
So I want you to paint the picture for this audiences to the future that pipe dream that you talked about in the beginning where there was the computer from the 1940s and you're manually taking wires and moving switches and when you were putting the regeneration bioelectricity or what have you in the frogs limb it was with tweezers so you were still manually poking and prodding so what does this future look like
Where it's at a high level do we wear something and are people programming on a computer that's one question and then the second one is. Biologist said that the unit of selection for for for darwin evolution is the gene but what is the unit of selection for bio electricity.
You picked some big ones. I'll do the last one first. In some cases it's very helpful to look at genes as the universe selection and so on. I think fundamentally what's going on in biology is the unit of selection is the perspective.
It is observers and when i say observers i don't mean humans and that's not not just humans but but every every active system is an observer that has a perspective of some degree and it is different perspectives trying to interpret hack.
Compete with and cooperate with each other. It's all all of this is really a battle of and a differential battle of perspective And I think that's true for bioelectrics and I could tell you is I could I could tell you a whole thing about how When we inject those that the ion channel to make the eye There's a battle of worldviews that goes on basically where there's a bunch of cells that are saying to their neighbors Hey help us make this eye and theirs and they are using their cancer suppression mechanism to say to the cells we injected
No you guys have a weird you should be like us and be nice normal skin and those two stories kind of battle each other out in the electric patterns until one one of them wins. Anyway what what is it going to look like in the future i suspect right now that what's going to happen is that. There's going to be there's going to be a software system with a with a with a front end which will probably speaking in normal human language.
And what's going to happen is it's going to have access to the various
What is going to be able to do is basically in effect allow you to communicate with the various subsystems of your body so you're going to have a conversation with your various organs and systems
And or your doctor and or your doctor will and what you're gonna end up doing is all of the kinds of things that that you do. In the in the behavioral sciences some of the for some of it you will be training your cells and tissues with specific stimuli those in some cases you will be resetting set points in some cases you will be providing other kinds of information and those will come through. Electroceuticals which are drugs ion channel modifying compounds that you do that you would take systemically
And in some cases i be optogenetics meeting a light patterns put down on a certain certain cell groups that turn channels on and off and then they have you know are able to transmit information through the electrical interface so you know it's too early to paint the entire picture but but i think we can do quite a lot with electric vehicles and without the genetics.
What are the capabilities of the tissue what are the messages that get the tissue to do specific things that's once once we have that it's a road map for pretty transformative applications. Awesome michael are you wanna ask real quick quick yeah so. I have a question about like neurons and machine learning i suppose.
Like so we know the actual animal neurons are very good at like learning various different tasks and it sounds like they're able to learn things on the cellular level as well. This sounds like it should factor into how we model like the behavior of biological neurons and it could potentially have offer clues on how like neurons are able to learn so well compared to like our mechanical neurons.
Yes, I think that's right. I think any mature theory of how networks learn in this case is going to have to be a multi-scale theory that takes into account the fact that the individual cells have agendas and memories and preferences
And problem solving competencies and even the molecular mechanisms inside of them have it too. I don't see any way how we could get to the bottom of these things and have all of the applications that will come of it without having a mature theory of the scaling of intelligence from from the lower levels up through the higher levels.
Dr. Levin, thank you again for this talk. It was phenomenal to hear your work. My name is Neil Sachdeva. I'm here from Yale. I had a question on a comment you made about how this bioelectrical prodding is speeding up evolution by a million or so years. The flip side of that call might be that it's actually replacing the effect of natural selection and evolution. I wanted to know how you might see your work integrating with the next 10,000, 100,000 years worth of human evolution.
Wow yeah i mean i don't think we can predict the next ten years never mind a hundred thousand years out but but i will just say this i mean if i have to think about it. The way the way that i envision this is that you know when you first when you first went to school and you.
I heard about the caveman and you know and it really sinks in that like wow you know if you stepped on a on a rest you know on a sharp stick you'll get an infection and you'll die and all that like how did they live this way you know and this is this is what i see people in the future i don't think it will be a very long out future they will look back and will say.
You're telling me that these people had to live their entire life subjected to dumb bacteria viruses some kind of effect of some stray cosmic ray hitting their cells when they were an embryo they have to live in the whatever body they were given a birth by accident not not chosen for them by anybody for their well being.
But just you know the results of trial and error process of mutation and selection and they have to live like this and they have to have you know the right cues were limited to whatever whatever they were they were given and and and they would agent and i have you know lower back pain in the stigmatism and kidney failure and all this you know loss of mental acuity and all this unbelievable how did people live this way.
And that's what I see. I see a world in which most of the things that we struggle with today are just even unimaginable. And I cannot imagine myself that a mature
Do you think that we may be able to interface with these layers, these systems even linguistically? How general do you think their intelligence is?
such that perhaps we could interface with them. Crudely zapping is effective, but of course what we really want is to try to replicate a much more sophisticated signaling system. Is it possible to learn what they're really up to and then also be able to interface with them at that level?
Yeah, I think it is and I think we're going to have the same problem that we have in ethology or behavioral science or exobiology if we were to meet aliens. What you're dealing with is a mind that is not really like your mind.
The things they care about, the things that they can think about, the space that they're operating in is different. You're not going to have a conversation with your liver about the movie that you saw and so on, but you absolutely could have a conversation with your liver about what it's like to live in physiological state space and what happened yesterday when you drank too much and your hopes for the future where things sort of balance out correctly with your potassium flux and so on.
So these will not be, these are not conventional human minds, but they are absolutely intelligences that you can have some kind of relationship with. We have one last question from a member of our lab. Dan Van Zandt, you want to go?
Yeah, I know we're at the 11th hour. So if I just should email you about this instead, let me know. But I'm a neuroscience student and I see a clear path from where I am to go a very theoretical route and work with the Santa Fe Institute or something like that. I see a clear path to go a very experimental route and do lots of clinical work. I don't see a clear path to get to where you are, where you're getting really deep into the theory and you're getting really deep into the experiments and you're doing both. How do I become you when I grow up?
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My question was could we affect these processes in vitro before someone's born potentially? So preventative?
I don't think you can do away with cancer once and for all because cancer is a fundamental failure mode of the system that keeps us together. The question isn't why do we get cancer? The question is why isn't it all cancer all the time? Why do we have anything but cancer? And it's because of these communication networks that allow
cells to join together to have bigger goals goals about shape instead of metabolism and i don't think you're ever gonna get rid of that fund once once and for all i don't think. But what we will of course have effective effective treatments and preventative strategies for you just don't think you can make it disappear but fixing things up prior to birth absolutely and.
This is what our program on detection and repair of birth defects is all about. I think all kinds of augmentations will be possible. I think repair of birth defects will be possible for sure. Even ones that are considered psychiatric, so almost like there are certain disorders that are associated with a lack of activity in certain parts of the brain.
This gets into things that are still not known. Some aspects that are due to brain structure and physiology I think will be completely fixable. But there are other things, a way of saying it is the thought that breaks the thinker. There are problems which are not organic disease, there are ways of thinking or
You know experiences that lead that lead to specific patterns of thought that that are that are harmful Those things are not going to be handled at the level of repairing the brain that's you know now you're into psychoanalysis and and and and environment and and you know conversations and love and whatever else so So some of it will have an organic of a path But you will still you will still have the issue of you know people who get depressed because they realize a certain existential Questions about the universe that you're gonna drive crazy and whatever
We are eternally grateful to have you speak to us. One last thing where can people find you online?
Thank you so much.
Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. Have a look at Kurt's, Kurt's channel. We've got it. We got it. He and I have done a bunch of interviews that were like really good. So thank you everyone. All right. Thank you Michael. Have a great evening.
I've received several messages, emails and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me.
New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts?
While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " Just think, someday you should be able to sit in front of a computer and draw the anatomy of exactly what you want. If you could convince cells to build whatever you wanted them to build, birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease, all of these things would go away. We are literally reading out the electrical memories."
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"text": " What if the most important intelligence isn't in your brain at all, but is instead encoded in the electrical conversations happening between trillions of cells? At Tufts University, Dr. Michael Levin tells us about the future of medicine by revolutionizing our understanding of biology. How so? He decodes these bioelectric signals, the recently discovered language that tells cells what shape to build,"
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"text": " how to repair damage, and even when to become cancerous. This talk was put on by Addie Chaugh from Ecolopto, Professor William Hahn from Florida Atlantic University, and academic philanthropist Reuben Gruber, all of whom are attempting to create a toe of theory of everything for biology and medicine by open-sourcing science through research hackathons and salons, both in person and online."
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"text": " The link to their events is on screen and in the description. In fact, I was there at this event and their previous Polymath event. A link to my presentation is on screen. A link to my interview with William Hahn is on screen as well. And more from this event is coming up. Ecoloptos founder Adi Cha aims to enhance the capability of the mind and body to better understand the world around you."
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"text": " My name is Kurt Jaimungal, and on this channel we explore theories of everything primarily from a theoretical physics lens, but also we explore philosophy, math in general, and consciousness. It's a peregrination into the fundamental laws of the universe. Now would be a great time to subscribe and click that like button. This will tell the algorithm to push this content to more viewers, and that will consequently help me produce more high-quality, in-depth technical discussions on physics, philosophy, medicine, biology, and consciousness."
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"text": " All right. Good evening, everyone. I'm so excited to announce Polymath Medical, our way of trying to make big innovations in medicine using AI, but also taking a very rigorous approach to that. And we're going to be talking about a lot of different things tonight. We're going to be talking about theories of everything in medicine and biology, theories of everything in physics and math. What does that look like when applied to different fields? We're going to be talking about how to apply AI into medicine, AI into medicine when you're at your house, when you're in your car, when you're in a fight, also when you're in your doctor's office or your hospital."
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"text": " And in order to really understand what drives disease and what drives illness and all these different things that seem to plague our society in different scales, I think we have to have a very deep fundamental understanding. And right now, I think there's nobody better who's trying to get a deeper understanding of biology than Michael Levin at Tufts. Give it up for Michael."
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"text": " He's one of my role models, and I'm very excited for this. Take it away. Thank you so much for that extremely kind introduction. And thank you for having me here to share some thoughts with you. You can find all of the peer reviewed stuff, the papers, the data sets. Everything is at this address. And then here is a personal blog of what I think some of these things mean. What I'm going to talk to you about today is bioelectricity and specifically the use of bioelectricity as an interface"
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"text": " I like to think of the end game of our field as something called the anatomical compiler just think someday you should be able to sit in front of a computer."
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"text": " and draw the anatomy of the animal, plant, organ, biobot, whatever it is, you should be able to draw it. And this system will then compile that specification into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to cells to get them to build exactly what you want. Now, so in this case, I'm showing you this three headed flatworm, but if we had something like this, then birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease,"
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"text": " All of these things would go away. If you could convince cells to build whatever you wanted them to build, all of these things would go away. Now, why don't we have something like this? We're actually very far away from it. Where we stand today with molecular medicine is that we're very good at this kind of information. Which cells and what the cells are doing, what individual proteins are binding to what other proteins, which genes turn on and off other genes. The molecular information is very strong."
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"text": " But we're quite a distance away from being able to restore limbs and repair birth defects and things like this. And so why is that? I'm going to argue that this is because where medicine is today is where computer science was in the 40s and 50s. In those days, in order to reprogram a computer to get it to do something different, you would have to physically interact with the hardware. Here she is. She's rewiring the machine to get it to do something different. And so what I think we've just now started scratching the surface of is to understand"
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"text": " Actually the plasticity and more specifically the intelligence of the living material meaning that it is reprogrammable and For the same reason that you would laugh if I told you today that on your laptop to switch from Microsoft Word to PowerPoint you'd have to get out your soldering iron and start rewiring the thing, right? That's we don't we don't do that anymore Why because we understand that that the material that we're dealing with is is reprogrammable and living material is that and more"
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"text": " So this is what we are made of for made of individual cells so here's this this is a free living organism called the lacrimaria but it gives you an idea of what individual cells can do this thing is incredibly competent in its own little sphere of influence here. There's no brain there's no nervous system it handles all of its physiological metabolic and so on and all in one cell and in fact all of us were a single cell once."
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"text": " And these cells did this amazing process of embryonic development where they became one of these complex organisms or even perhaps a human. And in fact, even below the single cell level, the molecular pathways within single cells already have learning capacity, right? The different signaling pathways and gene regulatory network components"
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"text": " Come together into a collective intelligence that is able to form six different kinds of memories, including Pavlovian conditioning. You don't need a brain. You don't need neurons. You don't even need the cell. It's just the molecular pathway alone has this capacity. And we are now creating devices that we're using to train these pathways. And then there's many applications like drug conditioning and so on. So the idea here is that"
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"text": " Bodies are made of multiple levels not just of different scales of organization not just the nest the doll structurally what actually every every level has its own capability of solving problems in different spaces."
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"text": " So we're familiar with animals solving problems in the behavioral space, but your molecular networks, your cells, your tissues, all of them are constantly navigating these other problems. And we are made of this amazing multi-scale competency architecture. I'm going to give you just one example because time is short. I'm going to give you just one example of the kind of problem solving I mean. So this is a tadpole of the frog, Xenopus laevis."
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"text": " You've got the brain here, here's some nostrils, here's the mouth, these are the eyes, and this is the gut. And so these tadpoles have to become frogs. In order for a tadpole to become a frog, it has to rearrange its face. So the eyes have to move, the mouth has to move, the nostrils, everything has to change. And you might think that this is a hardwired process, that somehow the genetics specifies that every organ moves in the correct distance, the correct direction."
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"text": " And then you get your frog. Well, we decided to test this because anytime you're going to make a claim about the level of intelligence of something, you have to do experiments. You cannot just assume. So we decided to test it. We made so-called Picasso tadpoles where everything is scrambled. So the eyes on top of the head, the mouth is off to the side here. Everything is, is, is mixed up like a kind of like a Mr. Potato Head doll. Everything is mixed up. And then what we found is something amazing that these, these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs."
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"text": " Hi, Kurt here. If you're enjoying this conversation, please take a second to like and to share this video with someone who may appreciate it. It actually makes a difference in getting these ideas out there. Subscribe, of course. Thank you. And what we found is something amazing that these animals give rise to pretty normal frogs. And that's because these organs don't just move the right distance in the right direction, because then they would be wrong."
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"text": " They actually move in whatever way is needed through novel paths to get to where they're going and they make a correct frog face so this ability to reach your goal from different starting positions right get your goal satisfied despite novelty things that you did not know we're going to happen is a key aspect of intelligence of intelligent behavior. I know you have to ask a simple question how do the cells and tissues know what a correct frog face looks like how do they store the memory of the end point."
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"text": " We know they can remember the end point because they stop when they get there. When they achieve the normal frog face, then they stop. How can we think about collection of tissues storing these kinds of memories? Well, we took our inspiration from what happens in the brain, which is a familiar system where groups of cells store memories and guide behavior, in this case in three-dimensional space. The way it works in the brain is this. You have a network of cells. Here's a neuron. It's touching the southern neuron down here."
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"text": " It has these little proteins called ion channels, which let charge molecules in and out. And as a result, it acquires a voltage and that voltage may or may not be propagated to its neighbors. And the flow of electrical signaling through this network is what underlies all cognitive activity. And so here is a video that this group took of a zebrafish, a living zebrafish brain. And you can see this, this amazing electrophysiology going on here."
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"text": " And it's the commitment of neuroscience that if we could decode this, so this is the project of neural decoding, if we could decode this, then we would be able to read out the memories, the goals, the preferences of this animal. And so that is what we would like to do. But outside the brain, we want to do it for the rest of the body. And the reason that's possible is because actually this amazing system of using bioelectricity to integrate information, store memories and guide intelligent behavior is way older than brains."
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"text": " In fact evolved around the time of bacterial biofilms it's extremely ancient and in fact every cell in your body has the sign channels most cells have these electrical synapses to their neighbors."
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"text": " And your tissues are running these electrophysiological networks. And so you might ask the question, what do they think about? We know what our brain thinks about. What do the body tissues think about? And so I'm going to tell you that that one thing they think about is shape. They think about arranging the body in the correct shape and then maintaining that against aging, against injury and against cancer."
},
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"text": " And we can start them. So here, much like this video of this brain, we can start taking a look at the bioelectrical signals. This is a frog embryo. What you're seeing is a time lapse of a frog embryo. And you can see all the conversations, the electrical conversations that these cells are having with each other. Could we decode this? And here's what some of these patterns look like. First of all, this is something we call the electric face. So again, here's a time lapse of a frog embryo putting its face together."
},
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"text": " And there's a lot going on here, but if you look at one frame of that video, you can see that prior to the appearance of the craniofacial organs, this is the map that it's going to build. Here's where the animal's right eye is going to go. Here's where the mouth is. Here are the placards. So this, we are, we are literally, what you are seeing here is literally reading out the electrical memories that tell the cells what a correct face is supposed to look like. And this is what guides a normal, normal development. So we can now begin to read out what it is that, uh, that these cells remember as the correct thing to build."
},
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"text": " And not only does this bioelectricity serve as a kind of cognitive glue that binds individual cells into a global vision of what the whole large scale thing is supposed to look like, it actually does this for multiple embryos here. You can see if we poke this embryo, all of these guys find out about it. See this? So this injury wave, so this bioelectrical communication tends to merge subunits into a coherent whole."
},
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"text": " And you can see here, these are individual cells. By the way, the way that we are monitoring all of this is with a voltage sensitive fluorescent dyes. That's a technology that we've developed to use these dyes to help understand what the cellular collectives are thinking. Now, watching these patterns is all well and good. And in fact, you can use them to diagnose birth defects and so on. But of course, the more important thing is to start to rewrite these pattern memories. So if I'm telling you that these are memories,"
},
{
"end_time": 846.493,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 829.309,
"text": " What we're doing is manipulating the natural interface"
},
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"text": " that these cells are using to control each other. So on their surface, they have these ion channels, which set the voltage, and then here they communicate that voltage to each other. So just like neuroscientists do, we take all of those tools and we can use pharmacology to turn the channels on and off. We can use optogenetics and so on. So we can control the voltage and the communication between cells. So I'm going to show you very quickly three stories that illustrate why this is powerful and why this is important."
},
{
"end_time": 901.084,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 874.121,
"text": " And they work not because we're so smart, they work because the system actually is using this electrical communication as a cognitive medium, as a decision-making substrate for determining growth and form of the organism. So the first thing I'm going to show you is a quick story about cancer. So if we take nasty human oncogenes like KRAS and P53 mutations and so on, and we inject them into tadpoles, they will eventually make a tumor."
},
{
"end_time": 930.06,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 901.493,
"text": " But before the tumor becomes apparent, you can already see using this voltage imaging. You can already see that, uh, that these cells have an aberrant voltage from their neighbors. And what happens is that that voltage causes them to disconnect from the network. Uh, once you've disconnected from the network, you can no longer remember this grandiose goal that you had before where the collective was working on, uh, building and maintaining organs. As far as you're concerned, you're an amoeba. The rest of the body is external environment and that border between self and world has shrunk."
},
{
"end_time": 952.637,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 930.367,
"text": " The cognitive light cone of that cell has drastically shrunk. It is not more selfish than other cells. It just has a smaller stealth. So cancer is in large part a dissociative identity disorder of the cellular collective intelligence. And it happens by breaking these electrical connections. Now, now that weird way of thinking about it has implications. It means that instead of trying to kill these cells,"
},
{
"end_time": 975.009,
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"start_time": 953.217,
"text": " You can actually try to force them to reconnect with the with a pattern with the with the other cells that are holding the memory pattern and so we've done that here by co injecting so so here you inject the oncogene but you also inject an ion channel that's going to force the cell to be in the correct electrical state and so these are the same animal and so you can see the oncoprotein is blazingly strongly expressed it's all over the place but there's no tumor."
},
{
"end_time": 1002.142,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 975.247,
"text": " And there's no tumor because it's not the genetics that drives. It's not the mutation that determines the outcome. It's the physiology and the cellular decision making and these cells are remaining connected and they are working on the same goal as they were before making nice skin, nice muscle, whatever. Okay. So that's it. So that's it. So that's a story at the level of single cells. Now I'm going to show you what this means for a birth defects. So here is a, here's a brain of a tadpole and you can see here for brain midbrain and hindbrain."
},
{
"end_time": 1018.933,
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"start_time": 1002.449,
"text": " And what we can do is we can introduce a mutant to a gene called notch and that that's a very important neurogenesis gene. And so these animals have a very abnormal brain. The forebrain is missing the midbrain and hindbrain are a big bubble. You can see the difference. These animals are profoundly affected. They have no behavior to speak of."
},
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"index": 41,
"start_time": 1019.36,
"text": " What we could what we were able to do is to build a computational model of the electrical pattern that normally tells the brain what size and shape it's supposed to be and we simply ask the question given given this kind of disorder what channels would you have to open and close to get back to the correct shape and the computational model gave us an answer."
},
{
"end_time": 1057.705,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1038.677,
"text": " And we found we found a couple of drugs already human approved so this is already kind of already in use in patients for other reasons but but when you use them here's here's what happens the the brain you got a normal brain they have actually learning rates indistinguishable from controls and yet they still have me to that mutation."
},
{
"end_time": 1084.087,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1057.705,
"text": " Okay so this is an example and i'm not saying this will always be possible but this is an example of fixing what is fundamentally hardware error meaning the mutation you fix it in software you fix it by a computer designed a brief biochemical intervention that resets the electrical patterns so that the tissues know what to do and then they bring a they make a correct and the final story that i'm going to tell you is about regeneration when regeneration so."
},
{
"end_time": 1104.77,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1084.787,
"text": " I don't frogs do not regenerate their legs unlike salamanders so if they happen to lose a leg then forty five days there's basically later this basically nothing so we asked the question could we communicate with the cells through the bioelectrical interface and guide them towards the leg growing path in anatomical space instead of the scarring path."
},
{
"end_time": 1130.998,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1105.128,
"text": " And so we designed a cocktail. Um, uh, basically a 24 hour application of that cocktail, uh, ends up with, uh, driving about a year and a half of leg growth. So at that point, immediately within the first 24 hours, you get the pro regenerative genes coming on here. This is MSX one. You then by 45 days, you've already got some toes. You've got a toenail, eventually a pretty respectable leg and it's touch sensitive in its motile. Okay. So."
},
{
"end_time": 1149.326,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1131.527,
"text": " Again, keep in mind that in this case, we did not have to manipulate that process during that whole time. We didn't have to talk to the stem cells. There are no scaffolds here. We didn't have to micromanage it at all. We provided a very early signal that said go down the leg building path. That's it."
},
{
"end_time": 1171.118,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1149.326,
"text": " And so at this point i have to do a disclosure because david caplan and i have a company called morphosuticals where we are trying to push this forward to to buy medical use is such that eventually so so now we're trying this in mammals and so eventually you will have these wearable bioreactors and not just for the limbs but potentially for all organs that would provide the correct."
},
{
"end_time": 1197.892,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1171.664,
"text": " What we're doing here is reprogramming the pattern memories of these cells."
},
{
"end_time": 1226.391,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1198.439,
"text": " I showed you that little eye spot in the electric face and we wondered what would happen if we reproduced that same pattern somewhere else. So what you can do is inject into this early embryo RNA encoding a particular ion channel that produces a little pattern of particular voltage and sure enough those cells get the message and they build an eye. In this case on the gut. These eyes have all the same layers right in the lens optic nerve, all the same stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 1254.087,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1226.783,
"text": " Just notice what this means. First of all, it means that bioelectrics, as I've shown you in these other examples, is instructive. It's instructive at the organ level. We did not have to say which genes to turn on. We didn't have to tell the stem cells what to do. We found a high-level subroutine call that says, build an eye here. The cells are very competent in doing that. The material, as I was pointing out, is not only competent to receive low information content stimuli and then have a very complex downstream response,"
},
{
"end_time": 1266.118,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1254.428,
"text": " But also it does this cool thing that other collective intelligence is do for example ants when ants come along a piece of food that's too big for them to move what do they do they recruit other members of the community."
},
{
"end_time": 1286.254,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1266.732,
"text": " Will the cells do the same thing if we inject a few cells, they can tell there's not enough of them to build an eye so what do they do they recruit a bunch of cells from the environment that we did not inject at all so there's the ability for the material to scale itself to the available to the to the to the message that they receive and just to point out if anybody is interested in plants."
},
{
"end_time": 1314.753,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1286.578,
"text": " This is another great example of the plasticity of life. You might think that the oak genome encodes for this shape because this is what you see most of the time. These acorns give rise to exactly this shape, this flat green thing. But along comes this non-human bioengineer, this wasp, which is a parasite, which puts down some signals for the plant cells and it hacks them. It hacks the morphogenesis exactly the way that I've been showing you that we can hack"
},
{
"end_time": 1333.2,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1315.299,
"text": " What the cells are capable of if we didn't see this amazing example of a bioprompting or reprogram ability."
},
{
"end_time": 1361.408,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1333.2,
"text": " In fact, it's kind of interesting that the sophistication of what is built is roughly parallel to the sophistication of the hacker. So bacteria and fungi make these kind of boring, lumpy things. Nematodes and mites do a little better. But by the time you get to insects, you get this beautiful kind of construct. So this is what we're trying to do. It took millions of years for the WASPs to be able to do this. We want to accelerate this process."
},
{
"end_time": 1391.22,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1361.903,
"text": " So the last example I want to show you is a new kind of technology, which are which are basically synthetic bio. So when you look at this, you might think that this is something we got from the bottom of a pond somewhere. But actually, I could tell you that that if you were to sequence it, it's 100% homo sapiens. These are human adult tracheal epithelial cells. We have a process that allows them to reboot their multicellularity into this little creature itself motile. Now, why is this interesting for biomedicine? What does this do? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 1420.23,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1391.783,
"text": " Uh, and by the way, you know, you would never guess that the human genome would make something like this. This is nothing, uh, like any stage of human development. Well, one thing they have the capability of doing is healing wounds. So if you make a, if you make a bunch of human neurons in a culture like this, and you put a big scratch through the middle, right? So kind of a wound assay, and then you put these bots into their environment, they form this thing called the super bot cluster. And here you can see what they're starting to do. You lift them up four days later, you see that what they've done is knit the two sides of the wound together."
},
{
"end_time": 1437.654,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1420.23,
"text": " Who would have thought that your tracheal epithelial cells that sit there quietly for a long time much is that kind of getting rid of the mucous and so on are capable of having a completely different life in a different environment different form factor with the ability to heal some of your some of your bones and."
},
{
"end_time": 1466.698,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1438.012,
"text": " This is just the beginning. This is the first thing we discovered. They probably do a lot more. And so we're envisioning these anthropobots as personalized autonomous therapeutics. In other words, they're made of your own cells. If we inject them into your body, you don't need immune suppressing drugs. You're not going to reject them. They biodegrade within a few weeks. And in the meantime, there might be many applications in which these things could be cleaning out the joints, looking for cancer cells, dropping off pro regenerative molecules, fixing up neural connections and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1495.077,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1467.039,
"text": " And so the bottom line is this much of molecular much of biomedicine today is focused around these bottom up technology. So we're so at the level of the hardware, but there's a whole frontier of medicine that's opening up, which are these top down interventions that take advantage of the intelligence of the living material to not to micromanage molecular states, but to convince the cells to and reset set points. We can train them."
},
{
"end_time": 1522.824,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1495.486,
"text": " Here are the electroceuticals that I've been showing you, right, which are basically just signals to get the bioelectric pattern memories shifted in the right way. And of course, AI is going to be very important in enabling us to communicate to all the different layers of the body. So my claim here is that future medicine is going to look a lot more like a kind of somatic psychiatry and not like chemistry, because the name of the game is going to be to really take advantage of the intelligence of these other layers of the body."
},
{
"end_time": 1552.466,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1523.251,
"text": " And the final thing I will just say is that because of the plasticity of life and because of the innate problem solving capacities of tissues, pretty much any combination of evolved material, engineered material and software is some kind of possible embodied mind. So in other words, cyborgs and hybrids and augmented humans and weird kinds of creatures that you could only begin to imagine. Some of these already exist. Many are coming. They will be here with us in the future. And that means that"
},
{
"end_time": 1568.78,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1552.961,
"text": " We need to let go of old categories around living things versus machines and all that because the entire variety of life what darwin called endless forms most beautiful are a tiny corner in the space of possible beings and and i think we need to take very seriously the idea that."
},
{
"end_time": 1596.988,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1568.899,
"text": " This technology is not just about fixing all of the medical situations that plague us today, but also to release a kind of freedom of embodiment where people really can reimagine their life in a very different way than the body they happen to have been given as an accident of the trial and error process of evolution. And we need to really work on a new way of synth-biosis, of living up"
},
{
"end_time": 1622.295,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1597.381,
"text": " in a mutually beneficial way with beings that are going to be different from us. So I'll stop here. I'm just going to thank the postdocs and the students who have done the work that I showed you today. We have lots of amazing collaborators. I thank our funders who have supported this work and the disclosures of these are the companies that have supported us over the years. So thank you very much and I will stop there. Awesome."
},
{
"end_time": 1650.316,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1623.797,
"text": " I think the work that Michael Levin is doing is Nobel Prize worthy, if you ask me. And the things that he's saying are not just really interesting and have deep implications for biology, but it's for life itself, for computing, for this idea of sentience. Right, Tyler? Right? Sentience. And so we actually have a very diverse crowd in the audience of physicians, students, academics, there's even high schoolers that are here. And I did want to ask Michael if you have maybe a couple of minutes if you wanted to take a question or two from someone."
},
{
"end_time": 1680.299,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1650.52,
"text": " Sure. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Who's got a really good question. I was very interested in your slide about this theory of cancerous cells failing to communicate electrically with their neighbors. One of the vague things I do know about larger tumors is that they do start to coordinate with other cancerous cells and become more dangerous for the body. Is there a potential avenue for research of disrupting the coordination within cancerous cells so that you get a meta"
},
{
"end_time": 1682.824,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1680.811,
"text": " Cancer that sort of helps the body."
},
{
"end_time": 1712.5,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1684.514,
"text": " Yeah, great question. Absolutely. And we're working on this. I mean, basically, after the individual cells disconnect from the normal network, they will eventually end up connecting within themselves to form something else that again, tries to reinflate that cognitive light cone that was shrunk to the level of a single cell. And then they make a tumor and then they compete with the rest of the body. And so yeah, that process is absolutely a good target for cancer therapies. And we're working on this stuff now."
},
{
"end_time": 1727.978,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1713.097,
"text": " Thank you for a very interesting presentation. I just want to ask you in regard to the plasticity of cells, how do you see the relationship between the bioelectric signal about an epigenetics? Is that sort of software versus hardware or how do you see that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1745.845,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1729.189,
"text": " Yeah, great question. I have a talk on my site that's about an hour just exactly on that question. To briefly address it, the software-hardware analogy is actually pretty good in this case. The genetics is what specifies the hardware available to cells."
},
{
"end_time": 1760.145,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1746.135,
"text": " Everything that happens after that is really a function of the physiological software which is both by electrical but also by chemical by mechanical and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1783.114,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1760.555,
"text": " And we have a number of cases and it's a southern this this lengthy talk i go through all of them where you can actually see where the information diverges completely where if you track the genetics or the transcriptomics or the proteomics you get the wrong answer and i kind of showed you this already and you know in the case of the of the tadpole when you look at the mutation you would make a prediction oh it's going to have a brain defect and that's in fact not what happens"
},
{
"end_time": 1807.09,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1783.114,
"text": " So wonderful talk. I just have a quick question."
},
{
"end_time": 1835.913,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1807.944,
"text": " At this point, a listener asks whether biology has a unifying theory akin to the Langlands program in math or a theory of everything in physics. They note that biology currently consists of fragmented disciplines like genomics and proteomics with no overarching framework to unify them. They wonder if bioelectricity could be a key foundation or if something more is required to develop a comprehensive theoretical model of biology. Yeah, thank you. That's a very good question. Let me clarify."
},
{
"end_time": 1856.732,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1836.323,
"text": " But bioelectricity is only interesting because it happens to be the cognitive glue that enables the scaling of intelligence forming into bioelectrical networks is how the tiny little goals of single cells metabolic goals and proliferative goals and so on are scaled up into grandiose goals like building a limb or a face and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1874.428,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1856.971,
"text": " It is the cognitive glue, that's why it's interesting, it's otherwise not special by itself, but it happens to be very convenient and that's what evolution has chosen. I would claim, and so this is a controversial claim, this is not the mainstream view, so take this with whatever grain of salt you want, but here's my claim."
},
{
"end_time": 1893.08,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1874.428,
"text": " I think there is a general theory of biology that is being developed now i mean this is what we're trying to do and send some other people and that theory is going to be in the shape of things familiar to behavior science not things familiar to physics and chemistry."
},
{
"end_time": 1916.493,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1893.08,
"text": " I don't think you should be looking for equations. I don't think you should be looking for emergence, complexity theory, dynamical systems theory. These are all nice, but these are not the backbone of biology. I think the backbone of biology and things we call life are just systems that are very good at scaling up the cognitive properties of their parts into bigger and bigger light cones and so cognitive light cones."
},
{
"end_time": 1935.486,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1917.073,
"text": " And so what we're going to get it's it's natural that the that the theories the unified theories of physics come out in in in numbers of various other. I'm not even sure that's true anymore but the various other kinds of constructs the the overall theory of biology is going to be all around."
},
{
"end_time": 1964.804,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1935.828,
"text": " Goals, memories, preferences, and basically terms that you would recognize from psychology and behavior science. And that's because the fundamental interesting thing about life is not any of the dynamics that are currently studied in chemistry and so on. It's the creative problem solving of the material and it starts very early on. It goes below the single cell level and you don't even need cells for it. But the story of life is the story of scaling of intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 1981.22,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1965.094,
"text": " And so that theory is, this is why we use bioelectricity, because it's an interface to one way to demonstrate what I'm talking about. It's a convenient interface to the intelligence of life. That's its only goal. It's only a role here."
},
{
"end_time": 2008.456,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1981.766,
"text": " I think the theory of biology is going to be basically a theory of intelligence. And it's already begun. This is not a science fiction pipe dream. Those theories are exactly what enable us to regenerate the limbs, normalize tumors, repair birth defects and so on. It's precisely because that way of seeing the biological material is fruitful and opens new avenues in therapeutics."
},
{
"end_time": 2025.06,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2009.036,
"text": " Thank you so much, Dr. Levin. Your work is incredibly fascinating. I wanted to know if you think that pathologies are a failure of bioelectric signaling, and if so, does this have implications for reprogramming something like memory loss?"
},
{
"end_time": 2052.858,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2025.742,
"text": " Yeah, a couple things. There are pathologies that are fundamentally bioelectrical errors. I'm sure there are many pathologies that are not. So this is not a blanket solution for everything. Memory loss is a whole other... If you want to email me about it, I'll point you to some stuff that we've done on this. The storage of memory and how it sort of moves across tissues in the body and how much of it is in the brain and how much of it is not."
},
{
"end_time": 2075.094,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2053.148,
"text": " These are all really interesting kinds of things and there are some developments coming on that front that I think are going to kind of overturn some of the current assumptions. It's too early to say much yet for sure, but I do think that there are some radically different therapeutics coming on that front. Hi Michael, it's Kurt. I have a question."
},
{
"end_time": 2099.787,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2075.862,
"text": " So I want you to paint the picture for this audiences to the future that pipe dream that you talked about in the beginning where there was the computer from the 1940s and you're manually taking wires and moving switches and when you were putting the regeneration bioelectricity or what have you in the frogs limb it was with tweezers so you were still manually poking and prodding so what does this future look like"
},
{
"end_time": 2117.363,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2099.787,
"text": " Where it's at a high level do we wear something and are people programming on a computer that's one question and then the second one is. Biologist said that the unit of selection for for for darwin evolution is the gene but what is the unit of selection for bio electricity."
},
{
"end_time": 2140.043,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2118.114,
"text": " You picked some big ones. I'll do the last one first. In some cases it's very helpful to look at genes as the universe selection and so on. I think fundamentally what's going on in biology is the unit of selection is the perspective."
},
{
"end_time": 2155.503,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2140.486,
"text": " It is observers and when i say observers i don't mean humans and that's not not just humans but but every every active system is an observer that has a perspective of some degree and it is different perspectives trying to interpret hack."
},
{
"end_time": 2181.169,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2155.691,
"text": " Compete with and cooperate with each other. It's all all of this is really a battle of and a differential battle of perspective And I think that's true for bioelectrics and I could tell you is I could I could tell you a whole thing about how When we inject those that the ion channel to make the eye There's a battle of worldviews that goes on basically where there's a bunch of cells that are saying to their neighbors Hey help us make this eye and theirs and they are using their cancer suppression mechanism to say to the cells we injected"
},
{
"end_time": 2207.773,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2181.169,
"text": " No you guys have a weird you should be like us and be nice normal skin and those two stories kind of battle each other out in the electric patterns until one one of them wins. Anyway what what is it going to look like in the future i suspect right now that what's going to happen is that. There's going to be there's going to be a software system with a with a with a front end which will probably speaking in normal human language."
},
{
"end_time": 2212.449,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2208.217,
"text": " And what's going to happen is it's going to have access to the various"
},
{
"end_time": 2238.712,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2212.858,
"text": " What is going to be able to do is basically in effect allow you to communicate with the various subsystems of your body so you're going to have a conversation with your various organs and systems"
},
{
"end_time": 2266.578,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2238.712,
"text": " And or your doctor and or your doctor will and what you're gonna end up doing is all of the kinds of things that that you do. In the in the behavioral sciences some of the for some of it you will be training your cells and tissues with specific stimuli those in some cases you will be resetting set points in some cases you will be providing other kinds of information and those will come through. Electroceuticals which are drugs ion channel modifying compounds that you do that you would take systemically"
},
{
"end_time": 2287.688,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2266.578,
"text": " And in some cases i be optogenetics meeting a light patterns put down on a certain certain cell groups that turn channels on and off and then they have you know are able to transmit information through the electrical interface so you know it's too early to paint the entire picture but but i think we can do quite a lot with electric vehicles and without the genetics."
},
{
"end_time": 2313.848,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2287.688,
"text": " What are the capabilities of the tissue what are the messages that get the tissue to do specific things that's once once we have that it's a road map for pretty transformative applications. Awesome michael are you wanna ask real quick quick yeah so. I have a question about like neurons and machine learning i suppose."
},
{
"end_time": 2341.425,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2314.189,
"text": " Like so we know the actual animal neurons are very good at like learning various different tasks and it sounds like they're able to learn things on the cellular level as well. This sounds like it should factor into how we model like the behavior of biological neurons and it could potentially have offer clues on how like neurons are able to learn so well compared to like our mechanical neurons."
},
{
"end_time": 2360.896,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2342.022,
"text": " Yes, I think that's right. I think any mature theory of how networks learn in this case is going to have to be a multi-scale theory that takes into account the fact that the individual cells have agendas and memories and preferences"
},
{
"end_time": 2379.599,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2360.896,
"text": " And problem solving competencies and even the molecular mechanisms inside of them have it too. I don't see any way how we could get to the bottom of these things and have all of the applications that will come of it without having a mature theory of the scaling of intelligence from from the lower levels up through the higher levels."
},
{
"end_time": 2410.384,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2380.708,
"text": " Dr. Levin, thank you again for this talk. It was phenomenal to hear your work. My name is Neil Sachdeva. I'm here from Yale. I had a question on a comment you made about how this bioelectrical prodding is speeding up evolution by a million or so years. The flip side of that call might be that it's actually replacing the effect of natural selection and evolution. I wanted to know how you might see your work integrating with the next 10,000, 100,000 years worth of human evolution."
},
{
"end_time": 2430.725,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2412.346,
"text": " Wow yeah i mean i don't think we can predict the next ten years never mind a hundred thousand years out but but i will just say this i mean if i have to think about it. The way the way that i envision this is that you know when you first when you first went to school and you."
},
{
"end_time": 2452.534,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2430.725,
"text": " I heard about the caveman and you know and it really sinks in that like wow you know if you stepped on a on a rest you know on a sharp stick you'll get an infection and you'll die and all that like how did they live this way you know and this is this is what i see people in the future i don't think it will be a very long out future they will look back and will say."
},
{
"end_time": 2471.084,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2452.91,
"text": " You're telling me that these people had to live their entire life subjected to dumb bacteria viruses some kind of effect of some stray cosmic ray hitting their cells when they were an embryo they have to live in the whatever body they were given a birth by accident not not chosen for them by anybody for their well being."
},
{
"end_time": 2493.746,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2471.084,
"text": " But just you know the results of trial and error process of mutation and selection and they have to live like this and they have to have you know the right cues were limited to whatever whatever they were they were given and and and they would agent and i have you know lower back pain in the stigmatism and kidney failure and all this you know loss of mental acuity and all this unbelievable how did people live this way."
},
{
"end_time": 2506.8,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2493.746,
"text": " And that's what I see. I see a world in which most of the things that we struggle with today are just even unimaginable. And I cannot imagine myself that a mature"
},
{
"end_time": 2536.698,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2507.346,
"text": " Do you think that we may be able to interface with these layers, these systems even linguistically? How general do you think their intelligence is?"
},
{
"end_time": 2555.196,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2536.988,
"text": " such that perhaps we could interface with them. Crudely zapping is effective, but of course what we really want is to try to replicate a much more sophisticated signaling system. Is it possible to learn what they're really up to and then also be able to interface with them at that level?"
},
{
"end_time": 2568.37,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2555.657,
"text": " Yeah, I think it is and I think we're going to have the same problem that we have in ethology or behavioral science or exobiology if we were to meet aliens. What you're dealing with is a mind that is not really like your mind."
},
{
"end_time": 2594.684,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2568.746,
"text": " The things they care about, the things that they can think about, the space that they're operating in is different. You're not going to have a conversation with your liver about the movie that you saw and so on, but you absolutely could have a conversation with your liver about what it's like to live in physiological state space and what happened yesterday when you drank too much and your hopes for the future where things sort of balance out correctly with your potassium flux and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 2610.23,
"index": 111,
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"text": " So these will not be, these are not conventional human minds, but they are absolutely intelligences that you can have some kind of relationship with. We have one last question from a member of our lab. Dan Van Zandt, you want to go?"
},
{
"end_time": 2636.357,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2610.401,
"text": " Yeah, I know we're at the 11th hour. So if I just should email you about this instead, let me know. But I'm a neuroscience student and I see a clear path from where I am to go a very theoretical route and work with the Santa Fe Institute or something like that. I see a clear path to go a very experimental route and do lots of clinical work. I don't see a clear path to get to where you are, where you're getting really deep into the theory and you're getting really deep into the experiments and you're doing both. How do I become you when I grow up?"
},
{
"end_time": 2648.37,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2636.476,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what's it do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 2666.664,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2648.848,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 2695.469,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2666.783,
"text": " My question was could we affect these processes in vitro before someone's born potentially? So preventative?"
},
{
"end_time": 2724.292,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2695.879,
"text": " I don't think you can do away with cancer once and for all because cancer is a fundamental failure mode of the system that keeps us together. The question isn't why do we get cancer? The question is why isn't it all cancer all the time? Why do we have anything but cancer? And it's because of these communication networks that allow"
},
{
"end_time": 2748.319,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2724.292,
"text": " cells to join together to have bigger goals goals about shape instead of metabolism and i don't think you're ever gonna get rid of that fund once once and for all i don't think. But what we will of course have effective effective treatments and preventative strategies for you just don't think you can make it disappear but fixing things up prior to birth absolutely and."
},
{
"end_time": 2772.125,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2748.319,
"text": " This is what our program on detection and repair of birth defects is all about. I think all kinds of augmentations will be possible. I think repair of birth defects will be possible for sure. Even ones that are considered psychiatric, so almost like there are certain disorders that are associated with a lack of activity in certain parts of the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 2799.411,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2773.387,
"text": " This gets into things that are still not known. Some aspects that are due to brain structure and physiology I think will be completely fixable. But there are other things, a way of saying it is the thought that breaks the thinker. There are problems which are not organic disease, there are ways of thinking or"
},
{
"end_time": 2829.753,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2799.753,
"text": " You know experiences that lead that lead to specific patterns of thought that that are that are harmful Those things are not going to be handled at the level of repairing the brain that's you know now you're into psychoanalysis and and and and environment and and you know conversations and love and whatever else so So some of it will have an organic of a path But you will still you will still have the issue of you know people who get depressed because they realize a certain existential Questions about the universe that you're gonna drive crazy and whatever"
},
{
"end_time": 2859.718,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2829.753,
"text": " We are eternally grateful to have you speak to us. One last thing where can people find you online?"
},
{
"end_time": 2880.162,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2860.145,
"text": " Thank you so much."
},
{
"end_time": 2890.589,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2880.606,
"text": " Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. Have a look at Kurt's, Kurt's channel. We've got it. We got it. He and I have done a bunch of interviews that were like really good. So thank you everyone. All right. Thank you Michael. Have a great evening."
},
{
"end_time": 2911.374,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2895.401,
"text": " I've received several messages, emails and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me."
},
{
"end_time": 2938.865,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2911.8,
"text": " New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts?"
},
{
"end_time": 2951.084,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2939.275,
"text": " While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 2975.725,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2953.336,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
},
{
"end_time": 3001.749,
"index": 128,
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"text": " Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube. Hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 3021.698,
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 3045.179,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3021.698,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 3051.749,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3045.179,
"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think either way your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much"
}
]
}No transcript available.