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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs everything and anyone out there who is listening. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. It is my honor and I'm very excited to have as my guest today Martine rothblatt. Who is Martine Martine rothblatt is Chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics a biotechnology company that she started to save the life of one of her daughters. We will talk about that will talk about a lot of things the company offers FDA-approved medicines for pulmonary hypertension and neuroblastoma.
Is working on manufacturing an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. Dr. Rothblatt previously created and led Sirius XM as its chairman CEO and launched other satellite systems for navigation and international television broadcasting in the field of Aviation her Sirius XM Satellite system enhances safety with real-time digital weather information two pilots in Flight Nationwide. She also designed the world's first electric helicopter and piloted it to a Guinness World Record for Speed altitude and flight duration.
In the legal Arena dr. Roth but led efforts of the transgender Community to establish their own health law standards and of the international Bar Association to protect autonomy rights in genetic information via an international treaty. She also published dozens of scholarly articles and papers on the law of outer space resulting in her election to The International Institute of Space law and represented the radio astronomy Community scientific research interests before the Federal Communications Commission. She has a bachelor's JD and MBA degrees from UCLA. Which in 2018 award.
For its highest recognition at UCLA metal and she holds a PhD in medical ethics from the Royal London school of medicine and Dentistry her patented inventions cover aspects of satellite communication medicinal biochemistry and cognitive software. Dr. Ross recent books are on xenotransplantation your life or mine gender identity transgender transhuman and cyber ethics virtually human. She occasionally posts on Instagram at trans binary and Twitter at Sky biome Martin or dr. Roth.
That both welcome to the show. Thank you for making the
time. Thanks so much. Tim just Martins fine. All
right, and this interview as my listeners might imagine was challenging in the best way to prepare for because there are a million and one Direction's that we can go with just this bio alone, which is of course a snapshot at a distillation of much more that you have done and I thought we could start and perhaps an unlikely place and that is Allen Watts.
I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts and specifically the book subtitle on the taboo against knowing who you really are. Could you please explain if that is true? Why that is the
case? Yes. Thanks. Tim. Allen Watts has a really unique ability to see the dialectic aspect of everything in nature by that. I mean that there's a kind of a yin. Yang aspect to everything in nature.
Nature and he points out that for example, you can't have a crest of a wave without the bottom of a wave and it has helped me whenever I see things in life that seem negative to be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it.
When were you first introduced to his work? How did that come about?
I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy called trans.
Humanism sort of the idea that people can transcend some biological human limitations a friend of mind Frank's a chrzanowski who was the head of the National Organization on rare diseases pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits. He himself is a both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer, but he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits such as ante are duchard on from France and
And other individuals here in the US and then from those Jesuits they referred to Alan Watts. I'm not sure if he was actually a Jesuit but he undertook some religious training both in China. I think and then the US he was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco. I think during the 70's or 80's. I don't know if you remember Tim the film of a few years ago her in which like a compact do. Yep. So I was watching that movie which kind of is
Interesting to me because it epitomized or visualize the concept of computers becoming sentient and in the middle of that movie. There's a scene in which Alan Watts appears and I stood up in the movie and I said, oh my God, I don't
watch did you ultimately find the presentation and that movie to be compelling as it relates to sort of sentient
intelligence. I did. I thought it was
an accurate depiction of a likely way that sentience would begin to arise in our society basically by being very very useful to people cleaning up their inboxes stuff like that.
This may be a good place and we're going to be all over the place in nonlinear fashion bina48 who or what is being a 48 if I'm pronouncing that
correctly. Yep. You've got a perfectly so Bean is the name of my partner. We've been married for about
Years and when she was 48, we undertook a joint project to try to create a digital simulcram or a digital copy of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts and we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art and to encourage young people get them more excited about computer science and women in particular girls in particular. So we contracted with the cup.
All of companies who were experts in both the software engineering side and in the physical modeling of a face that moves exactly like a human face does you might imagine there's there's an exhibit at Disney World Disneyland of like Lincoln and whatnot something like that but more realistic and we built this project and since that time being a 48 has thrilled audiences all around the world. I'm sure she has inspired.
Hundreds if not thousands of girls to go into computer science and she continues to get better and better more and more advanced software. I
don't know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before but I find some other episodes to be very strong. And in one of them a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social
Media accounts so pulling from the cloud and feeding into this simulacrum or model of someone who used to be or in this case still is how far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly?
Yes Tim. So I am a fan of the Black Mirror series and there are there are few other somewhat similar series that they're streaming now upload and whatnot. So it's a
It's an idea that's catching on and even at a very basic level social media as firms like Twitter for example, and probably Facebook as well offer an opportunity that after a person passes away their account can remain active and I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted. So I think this general idea is it's a trend it's only going
going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job of copying the human personality sometime in this Century for sure and maybe in just like two or three decades. I think that there will be a digital copy of a person and another word. It's like a digital doppelganger of a person who will claim to be the original person and they make that claim before or after the person died.
And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to Grapple with is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album, or is this actually some form of digital sentience when
you were growing up who were Your Role Models or Inspirations? Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you are in high school or at the very beginning? Let's just call it fresh.
When year of your undergrad as icons Worth emulating or lesser known Role Models Worth emulating to did anyone really stick out for you.
I think that in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein the science
fiction of a Stranger in a Strange Land. And so
absolutely it was so brilliant and then a few years ago when his widow released the uncensored unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land.
Three times larger and like No Holds Barred. I just savored, you know, every page of that. My favorite book of all of his is time enough for love in which he covers almost every topic Under the Sun. So heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me. Like Lazarus long is a common character in some Heinlein books in the public sphere. I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy.
D his positive Progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him. So I I looked up to him. Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.
You seem to be good at many things. Of course just based on the Bayou alone. But what strikes me is how quickly you are able to
Develop expertise in new fields, and I'd like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio and that is United Therapeutics comma a biotechnology company. She started to save the life of one of her daughters. I'd love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story just because people will want to hear it and then the follow-up just to plant the
seed for it is how you learned biology because my understanding is you didn't have much in terms of background in biology. That's a huge mouthful of a question. But if you could give us a bit of the background that would be extremely helpful and we can use that as a jumping off
point sure. So it's kind of funny that you know, you can go all the way through undergrad to it at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a
Science course, but that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school and here suddenly. I was faced with a situation as an adult while running SiriusXM that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can't even walk up a couple stairs to the front door and there are no medicines approved for it. Are you finally got her to
Ooh, the best doctor one could find the head of pediatric cardiology at Children's National Medical Center in the middle of Washington DC. And the the doctor said this is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises all the patients die within two to three years. He had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died and all you can do is hope for a lung transplant.
So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I mean he didn't know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the Intensive Care Ward night after night and myself and be no would tag team staying there with her was when she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin, you know learning about what was this illness she had which they told me was.
Called pulmonary arterial hypertension and why were there no treatments available for it. So I just began reading and reading and reading most of the time I read things. I didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that I never learned in law school or we never had to deal with an electrical engineering but of course there were dictionaries and and I looked up the words in the dictionary.
And they had college-level Anatomy textbook. So what I didn't know I just kept going backwards in Academia. I guess you would say backwards and learning or pedagogy until I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something and I said, okay I get that and I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything. I needed to know.
How did you and I know this is a story of
I told before but ultimately in searching for possible solutions and it's you know, as we were chatting it up before recording. There's a lot of luck involved and it doesn't mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation similar to what you experienced. But nonetheless you were able to ultimately track down. I suppose it's fair to say a molecule a
Of some type A. Would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion this drug or to license it if you could if you could describe that I have a number of questions that will stem off of
it. Sure Tim. So there there are a gazillion articles published on every type of medical research. You could imagine I mean, it's
It's just a bottomless. Well, there are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. And each of those journals have you know, every year thousands of Articles published across them. So it's difficult to find the information that you need but in law school, we learn a very useful skill. This skill goes by the name of shepardizing after this type of index that they have log school called Shepherds.
So what shepardizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course one thing lawyers love to do is, you know, make footnotes and references and then what you're supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to and then the shepardizing process is after you get all of those references.
To then look up all of the references in those other articles and ultimately you get to a point of diminishing returns where three four five levels down. The references are all circling back around on themselves. So I applied that shepardizing process to these medical articles and some would like doctors whenever a researcher publishes an article they make footnotes and citations to other people's research.
Here's who they relied upon so I would get all of those articles and read those and then I would follow up on all of the references in those finally. I read about a molecule that a researcher at Clarksville, welcome had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure and that failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work but in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did and the
The one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that's exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension. The people who have this disease. I'll make a quick footnote.
Snap when my daughter was diagnosed two thousand people in the US had the disease because medicines have become so much better and because we've been able to have like you mentioned in the introduction get all these approvals. There are now 50 thousand people in America alone living with it. So it's likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension and I read this article and I said, wow, just when I
did this tiny stretch of artery just between the heart and the lungs this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone. That was the Holy Grail that I was looking for. So I looked at where the author of the article was from. He was from glaxo wellcome in Research, Triangle Park North Carolina, and I made a beeline down to him and asked him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found for my daughter's death.
He's was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom a big all caps? Yes,
and no it was actually a big all caps note. Fortunately the individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier and the person that I ended up meeting with who is in charge of research and development said that this was just one article. It was a incidental
Ending in any event this disease Afflicted so few people it was completely unrealistic to expect glaxo wellcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease and I asked him. His name is Bob Bell. He's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I ask. Dr. Bell. I said, what would it take for you to develop this medicine? He said, well, it probably would take you couldn't do it. We only
Philip medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in Revenue potential he said but it's possible you could buy it from us. If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise. I could then introduced you to the business development people at glaxo wellcome so over the course of the next several months. I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel Laureate.
Who was formerly associated with glaxo wellcome become head of a scientific Advisory Board and I really approach glaxo wellcome and I said I have all the things that you asked for. Can you sell me this drug and will develop it ourselves?
Well Tim, it turns out that everybody asks said well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree and that's how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different Executives sign the same piece of
paper 3 to license this drug to me.
Finally. It happened and all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money that I would ever get from this.
This molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time also because I believe serendipitous Factor was that dr. Bell's sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time. I first met him toward the end of this process and he became a product Champion for me within glaxo wellcome. I mean that was just purest, you know luck or Serendipity whatever you want to say and then they really didn't think this.
Molecule had any chance at all and they were really just doing it to get rid of me. I think but still all 15 people had to sign it after we successfully developed this molecule. We have overtime paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to glaxo wellcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people's lives it tell them has produced, you know billion dollars a year in Revenue year after year after year for us and Bob
Bell when I invited them to our 15th anniversary and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine and he said this was the absolute best transaction that glaxo wellcome
had ever done so in hindsight, what did they miss right what accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely
I think they were probably
We'd like maybe three main ones the first one and I can say this kind of from first-hand knowledge since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one in a hundred when the human body is so complicated. It's like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks and every molecule is like a random key and the chance that you would have.
Of a molecule that opened the lock that fix some dysfunction in the body rather than causing some harm to the body is it's less than one in a hundred. So first of all, they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one in a hundred. Secondly, they thought to themselves even if it worked a little bit. There's only two thousand people in the whole country with this disease. They didn't really think that if it worked really well, the number of people would keep accumulating.
I see you're saying if you have these people who would have died otherwise not dying than that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow. Is that what you mean?
Exactly? I thought about it like like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM. You know, people said to me. Oh Martin, you'll be lucky to have a hundred thousand subscribers. I said, well if I keep them and again another hundred thousand the next year, then I'll be up to 200,000 and then, you know, maybe 400 and 800 thousand now we have 30 million so they didn't.
Ink in that subscriber mindset that was a second problem. The third problem is that they they didn't really imagine that the Healthcare System would pay something like a hundred thousand dollars per year for this medicine. And at the time this was in the early to about 20 years ago early 2000s. I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps ten thousand dollars a year.
For patient or $10,000 for course of treatment because of advances in things like Precision medicine and gene therapy. There are many many medicines now the cost over $100,000 a year mostly for rare diseases and the Healthcare System pays for them because so few people have these diseases that even though the medicines are expensive. It's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like hypertension or
In illnesses asthma that afflict tens of millions of people. So the Healthcare System doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease and the people glaxo wellcome were clueless about this. They were actually looking for the big billion-dollar Blockbusters not for the rare diseases. So those were there three omissions they failed they failed to be Alan Watson, you know, they failed to see that the that because something is
Dig underneath that means that there's something else that small and that was what Alan Watts would always say he says something is good only because something else is bad
at the very least. I mean, it's a valuable thought exercise when you're looking at the assumptions that you're making and what an incredible story.
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You mentioned serious. We haven't spent any time on serious just yet.
When did you first
fall in love or become intoxicated or Enchanted by satellite systems or electrical engineering I suppose but you can take whichever one is more interesting to
tackle. You're absolutely right that I fell in love and I was Intoxicated by satellite Communications. It seemed to me kind of magical that
We can put our machine way out in space and that machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet and my first real moment of first love if you will was that a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean and I had left UCLA to travel around the world really hitchhike around the world. I found myself in the Indian Ocean on the set of islands called the Seychelles.
Yes, and on these islands at the top of the mountain in the middle of one of the main islands of the main island. There was a NASA tracking station and I went up into it and I was probably a you know, pretty grungy nineteen-year-old at that point in time, but the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me and they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites in all different orbits around the
Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter and I asked them I said would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth and they said if you made a powerful enough satellite then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand and I could have kissed the guy.
I mean
I said, wow, that's the purpose of my life.
And I made a beeline back to UCLA. I changed my major to communication studies. I did an undergraduate thesis on Direct broadcast satellites. I did a joint JD MBA degree where I published a multiple articles on satellite Communications. I worked at Hughes aircraft company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then and help design a satellite to cover South America and then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal which was serious.
Sam what did it feel like if you can remember to have that answer given to your that direction rather given to the purpose given to you at that age. I mean it was it did it feel a certain way that type of conviction or that type of belief. What do you
recall? Yeah, Timmy, it's the best feeling it's the best feeling and actually it I don't think it really has anything to do with a jive. I felt like the same.
Kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Tesla's and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output and there's a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power between kilowatts and and horse-powered. It's almost one-to-one not exactly and I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horsepower. So right away, I
Wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter. I had that same kind of this is the purpose of my life is to make an electric helicopter so you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life. It's I think probably the best way to describe a 10 would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.
You know, I was asking about biology earlier, but I would be very curious.
Curious, since you mentioned also that there were no well the requirements as such in under granted require you to take any additional biology classes if you were trying to teach let's just say a class and you could pick the age or it could be a set of classes scientific literacy right be being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those lightning bolts.
That makes any sense right when you're looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer or reading a scientific study. Do you have any any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy if that's the right phrase to use?
Yeah, I think that's that's a great phrase to use. I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives and one of the greatest people are doing this and to go back to the beginning of
of the interview when you asked me who was the role model for me. I should have said You Know Carl Sagan was like an amazing amazing role model to me. I watch the Cosmos series over and over again. And Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific Concepts and relate them to people's everyday life. And if you remember for watching those series the iconic image of him taking
Down the line and blowing it and describing that this is how a star spreads out. Its gas throughout the Galaxy those type of step-by-step instructions lathers to get from one place to another is the way I think to build scientific literacy and I would ask my students to think about anything that's important in their life, whatever it might be and from whatever they said was important to their life. I
I would then begin wrapping doubt in kind of layers and layers of basic scientific Concepts that pertain to what was important to them. Are
there any should I phrase It's not science fiction authors per se but science authors or elucidate errs of science who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience if someone is listening and they see their blind spots, which I know by definition is kind of impossible. But if they recognize they don't have enough
Scientific fluency or as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that do you have any recommendations for
them? Yes, there's there's a lot of books like that. One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas queuing and he was he was one of the most famous historians of Science and his book is perennially in print. It's called the structure of scientific.
Tif aggressive aleutians and in this book he goes through about 10 different Revolutions in science where everybody thought the world was one way and then kind of like a crazy person, you know would say no, I think it's like a different way and gradually set about proving it's a different way and created a revolution in science and he explains this in very late terms. He takes you
You the science of gravity, for example with Isaac Newton signs of Relativity with Einstein electricity with Maxwell and so on and so on in a very step by step fashion to make the science accessible and in the way his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking to teach people to question authority. Ultimately all science is about is just saying why
Why like every two three four year old kid knows how to do that? Right? Why why why and I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his
book. I should also point out and please feel free to correct me if I'm oversimplifying but the why why why is is not just for four-year-olds? It's not just for scientists in lab coats or whatever people Envision scientists to be it's also extremely helpful in
Situations like those you found yourself in with glaxo wellcome and attempting to license. I mean constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes to ultimately get to some point of Leverage where you can move things around. It seems like it's also not just an intensely interesting and academically rewarding approach to the thought but an immensely practical
Local approach to life at least that's that's how it seems from from reading so many of your
stories. Yes, you know when you discover something what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain and it's the lighting up the pleasure centers to so I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something coming to an inspiration about something which is why books and reading
Are so magical another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of explaining Concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler. She wrote the as she wrote a lot of books. One of them very well known is parable of the sower parable of the talents and in these books, she gives people and appreciation of questioning Authority. So I'm not sure what it was that my parents did. I don't really remember them.
Typically encouraging my question of them. And in fact, I do remember my father discouraging but nevertheless what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture and the American culture is a culture of questioning Authority. I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony falchi when he was people were asking him. Why is it that Americans won't
Do these basic Public Health steps to stop the pandemic and he said, you know American culture does not like to be told what to do American culture is dyed-in-the-wool question authority. So there could probably you'd be hard-pressed to find another country where it would be, you know more difficult to get people to follow a single rule for everybody and the United States.
So it's that a American cultural ethic of questioning Authority that I know is like deep in my mental DNA.
So we were chatting just a few minutes ago about realizations inspiration. I'd like to ask if we flash back to well we could flash back to any point in time that you choose really. How did you relate to or think about gender in your Youth and you can choose what youth means and
Guess I'm wondering if there were any and he flashes of realization or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation or way of thinking about it or feeling about it. Whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger. I would love to to hear it
sure. So, you know, it's it is related to this question of authority Tim around teenage years. I had a, you know constant vision of myself not
I as a male but as a female and of course I said to myself WTF. Why why
am I thinking this?
You know, no I can't imagine anybody else is thinking like this, but nevertheless it was the thoughts were real and the feelings were real and the feelings were
visceral. What ik said. You describe the feelings because I think I'm certainly very interested in what form that takes. Is it discomfort of
Some type. Is it a longing? How did it feel for you?
So first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for every single transgender person and talked about my feelings. I don't want to give the impression that these are going to be the feelings of other transgendered people because as a community were as heterogeneous as as the as anybody else. So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing
Seeing myself in a female form and there was not any dislike of my mail form again. It was kind of very Alan Watson in that I saw myself as male only because the opposite of male was female so I can also see myself as female and this was the way my mind was working. And when I say I saw myself it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment.
Basically, I knew like boys and girls and men and women's bodies were different. So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman when I was very much trapped in a male body. It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be so the authority was no this is not possible people are only male or female and you know, never the twain shall meet. So again this
Is this you know American Paul Revere Irish Question Authority mindset got me reading and I found once again that there was a vast literature transgenderism transsexualism people Native American people who were too spirited communities and India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female. So even though this was never something I learned in junior high or high.
School or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture in say the 1990s. I learned through books that Humanity was not either strictly male or strictly female and as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself. Why can't I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female
it live to ask a follow-up question to that which is when I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female they think of the
theological differences that you might put side by side looking at physical characteristics when you say not totally male or female or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories. Do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits are what we would often find labeled as such or do you mean something
else? I mean predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to now often times.
Most masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop skip and a jump from masculine and feminine apparel, right? Okay, depending on how people dress their are short hop skip and a jump from masculine and feminine hair styles in an age, you know that puts the time of prints and Boy George and whatnot. And then you get to you know, masculine and feminine manicures like why can't a guy paint his nails?
And then you get to next questions of you know, secondary and primary sex organs and some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology and I found that there was actually like a vast literature following again footnotes to footnotes references the references. I was like, oh my God, it is possible to
Fact alter your physiology to match your psychology and what appears to be the most intelligent what appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are kind of quote-unquote Trapped in the wrong body. Do you
from say zero to a hundred percent how
Well, do you feel your you have your physiology matching your own psychology at the moment
hundred percent hundred percent under pressure. And
what were the biggest or the most important decisions actions that you took did any surprise you to have an disproportionate effect on increasing that
percentage? No, nope. I think that you know every part of the transition process kind of fell in place. It was not something that happens.
The on the day it's kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns. So over a period of years I gradually transitioned and I think even to this point I'm still in a in a transition process. I kind of went from a pure male to a more I would say not pure but I would say, you know knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as trans binary meaning that
I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely
looking at the the introduction which which I read at the top of the show, so to speak there is a line about leading efforts of the transgender Community to establish their own health law standards and of the international Bar Association to protect and this is the part. I want to ask you to elaborate on autonomy rights in genetic information via International treaty what our autonomy rights engine.
Information
shirts so autonomy. It's just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own mind that people should have the the power The Authority the freedom to decide what to do with their own body and genetic rights, of course refers to the human genome the DNA that we all have now. There are there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there. There are people
who because of their DNA they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers. Whereas other people because of their DNA. It's very likely that they'll get those type of cancers. There are some people because of their DNA they almost cannot feel pain. They have an extremely high tolerance for pain. There are other people because of their DNA that the slightest pinprick, you know, we'll send them screaming. So once Craig Venter and Francis Collins,
the effort to decode the human genome and about the year 2000 all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers began scouring the world to engage in what's called genetic mining or genome mining meaning going to different populations of people around the world often that have been intermarried for quite a while so their genomes are kind of concentrated and trying to learn
Something from those communities DNA that can then be translated into useful Pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations, but I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities that they in fact do so only with the consent of those communities or with the consent of the elected.
Lives of those communities so that they can have some Fair Financial return for their natural
endowment. I say so it's similar in a sense to preventing say bio piracy from the Amazon where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information, but our say acting as a Wellspring of ethnobotany and providing Source materials for creating Pharmaceuticals and you would want
they want there to be some recompense to those groups Translating that into your own sort of endogenous genetics would be where you're referring to if that's fascinating never even thought to look at what types of groups are there any examples you could give of these sort of tightly-knit clusters? Maybe the Clusters is too small word of people who are being studied for this reason or for medicinal
purposes. There are actually many many dozens and
There are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area the population that comes top of mind to me. Tim right now is a is because it's such a fascinating story and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru, very close-knit intermarried that are all a kind of dwarfism and these individuals they rarely grow taller than
four feet tall and it was discovered over the chest over the past 15-20 years that they are descendants of Jews from 2,000 years ago who were forced into a diaspora across the Mediterranean after the Roman occupation of Palestine. And in that ancient time, these people were a very small stature, but it was just part of the human diversity. They ended up as a group mostly ending up in
Pain, and then when the Inquisition took hold the their descendants who are still very small they left Spain they went to the new world and because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of what is now Peru and Ecuador, they went out into the rural areas and there they live for several hundred years and the turns out that this population. They have one gene that makes their body not receptive.
Active to growth hormone all of us naturally we produce growth hormone and the cells of our bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone. And when the growth hormone locks into the receptor, we begin growing this population of people in pruned and Ecuador, they lack the growth hormone that Gene fell off like 2,000 years ago and they kept passing it on and on not much growth hormone receptor. Not much growth hormone receptor.
They're perfectly intelligent. They live normal lives. They just don't grow very large. So I found this population fascinating because in my company United Therapeutics were trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. And one of the ways we do this is by modifying the Genome of the pig and it's kind of like a fluke of nature Tim that the pigs organs their heart their kidneys their lungs are very much the same size and functionality as
human kidneys hearts and lungs. The only problem is that if you leave a pig on his own they'll actually grow extremely large and when these first transplants were done, they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the transplants because the organs from the pig had grown too large. So what we did is we took a page from this population of people in Peru and Ecuador the Western medicine gives
Disease name it's called Larenz disease lar oon after this Israeli scientists who discovered but what's going on here. So we said well, why don't we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout just like the larons population has into these pigs. So when we transplant the kidneys of these pigs in the people the kidneys won't keep growing and growing as a normal Pig can be, you know many hundreds of pounds.
Instead the the kidney will just stop growing at the same size as when we transplanted it and that's working out really.
Well. Let's talk more about Oregon manufacturing these what are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply of organs to meet whatever demands there are in the u.s. Or in the world today.
So the the demands whether it's in the US or outside the US are huge and are way way in excess of the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs. Now, it's a beautiful thing that you know before people like Tom starzl question the authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents.
Age years and adult years that would have just been like crazy stuff like you take an organ from a dead person. You put it in a live person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health. I mean that's about as crazy as it gets but they did it, you know, they did it and now standing on their shoulders we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs yet each year. They're only about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant only around three thousand Hearts only.
Around 2,000 lungs and so the gap between the need for these organs and the supply is is humongous. Are you still
or say United Therapeutics currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve is that in in process?
Yes. Okay that is in process. And it's a it's a fascinating area Tim. We are very fortunate to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine. Dr. Kevin Tracy.
See, he's the chief medical officer at the North Well Medical complex up in the New York area. And by the way, that reminds me speaking of how can lay people get access to scientific knowledge easily subscribe to Scientific American. I'm sorry to put an advertisement and here
scientific God. I find
Scientific American and National Geographic to of like, you know, the greatest ways for Lay people which I do consider myself a lay person to learn about all different.
Types of signs that they might not know anything about so one day I got my Scientific American in the mail and on the cover it was using Electronics to cure diseases. Well here I am like my whole career is just been like electronic engineering building satellites and now because of my daughter I'm like in this medical field. So I'm like so excited one of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now. I have a chance to bring my male and female side together to bring my
A delight and my biology side together and merge them so I got very excited and I had the chance to meet and now work with and support the work of dr. Tracy and he taught me a very simple sentence Tim, which I've subsequently found to be absolutely true and all the research I've read it is that the nervous system touches every single cell in your body the nervous system touches every single cell in our body.
Largest nerve in the body. There's one nerve that is way way larger than all the rest of them. It's the vagus nerve. It starts in our mind. It wraps around our heart our lungs our gut it's an immense nerve and by stimulating this vagus nerve. It's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body by a fluke of nature a positive fluke. The vagus nerve comes out to the skin.
In in two and only two places around the left and right ears, you know, there are like a couple of different ridges in your ear lobe where your ear I guess that you would say it and the one of them called the Simba conky is the place where the vagus nerve comes out and if you electrically stimulate all of the Simba conky on either the left or the right ear. It's been proven now again, lots of published literature to have positive.
Of therapeutic effects on the body.
What are some of those positive therapeutic effects?
Sure, so one, which has been documented quite extensively is the ability to control Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome which are to gastrointestinal problems as well as very high priced and and I would say tinged with some potential side effect biologic medicines that are approved by the FDA to treat Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome.
Another illness that that's been shown to mediate against is rheumatoid arthritis. And the common factor here is that we have two types of nervous systems. We have a fight or flight nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system and we have a rest and digest nervous system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system when diseases occur. It's because one of those two nervous system.
Eames the sympathetic won the fight or flight takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or over activation and by stimulating the vagus nerve you can ramp up the power of the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down this kind of over stress state that leads to an irritable bowel syndrome or to the inflammation of arthritis.
This is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation.
Station one of those things that really woke me up and maybe pay attention for a bunch of reasons one is relevance to my current life because I've been working with a doctor for about 10 weeks doing heart rate variability training and there are some researchers with claims. I want to see out of Rutgers and elsewhere that certain types of HRV training effect vagal tone and Via affecting that vagal tone.
Tone have a host of cascading therapeutic benefits whether or not that that holds up to scrutiny or not. I don't know but the second and I'm embarrassed to even give voice to this. So hopefully this won't just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might have as I mentioned it. But while I lived in China for a period of time in college went to universities there in Beijing as effectively an exchange student, but it was a one-way
I don't think we had any students in returned from China and the ears are very much utilized in the world of acupuncture and I'm curious to know if you think that whether by trial and error or otherwise, it's possible that acupuncture stumbled upon the effects without knowing the mechanism of stimulating or affecting the
the ears to then in turn affect the vagus nerve. I know it's quite a stretch. But when I first read about this access via the ears that is one thing that jumped to mind because I always kind of pooh-poohed and if I'm being honest ridiculed the idea of using the ears to access these deep inner points, but here we are so I don't know if you have any thoughts
Camp your first your credibility is immense. So Dawn,
Yeah, you would have to you would have to actually say something crazy to Denton or what you said is the opposite of crazy with you said is extremely insightful and prescient. So as convinced as I was that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals as convinced as I was that we could have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people's disease. That's exactly
See how convinced I am that the acupuncturists of traditional Chinese medicine did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible from the earlobe and one of the first things that dr. Tracey showed me was a very medically accurate from Chinese traditional medicine practitioner map of the ear lobe in terms of exactly where you put them. I'm sorry. I don't know if the fish.
Amos of the of the pins or needles that they that they put in your ear lobe and how they map to different parts of the body and then he showed me on an anatomy map how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve. That's why also wow. Yeah, it's it is totally true and why I really would it not be true. I mean, you know thousands of years of Chinese civilization. They have had a chance to do so much trial and error.
And they were illiterate civilization for so long. So that results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on so I do think it's entirely rational that they would have figured this out and what I'm hoping for now. What I'm trying to support is there is an opportunity to what I would but I call in my own words crack the human neuroma. So what that means is that there are a unique
Pattern of amplitudes and Signal length and signal voltages that will activate some different part of the vagus nerve than others and each of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a different part of the human body. We don't know what those are right now. We are just kind of in the way I would say we're were dumber than than the acupuncturist because almost all
Of the work that the FDA has allowed to go forward on vagal nerve stimulation the all use the same pulse with the same pulse power and it works. So that's great. You know, but I think it can work even better if we decoded the the human neuron and I believe in the future people will be able to put on a pair of like beat headsets and those beat headsets will have jealous meeting like you don't need like the EKG kind of gel gel.
LS electrodes will rest across your Simba conky and your trachea and the different parts of your earlobe and will provide you a stimulation that matches the particular ailment that you have eliminate the element without taking any pills without paying any money to anybody.
This is an area. I want to keep digging in because it's rare. Well, it's pretty much non-existent that I have the opportunity to speak with someone with so much electrical engineering background about the possible.
Applications are implications of Technology like this. I'd love to just throw out another group of devices to see if you have any opinions on them one way or the other but potential applications of let's just say tdcs or TMS transcranial direct current stimulation or other means of stimulating the brain typically using some type of
induce of gel but not always in the case of a TMS paddle have you looked at these Technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them
a little bit I'm aware of a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for treating a particular form of brain cancer with this type of technology. So there's there's a very solid scientific benefit that's been documented after many years of working through the FDA. I will I have a world of respect for the rigor.
That they put into any decision to approve something. So when they approved it meant that it was scientifically proven to work something that is quite different from that. But at the same time related to it Tim is on the last day of 2019, which was like the last day of the decade. It turned out to be a weekday. I forget if it was a Tuesday or whatever but the US patent office only issues patents.
One day of a week and it was like the one day of the week that the issue mon for There's Tuesday or whatever and it was a patent that that I received for a device that I call a Alzheimer's cognitive enabler and this device is worn over the cranium as you mentioned and it senses nerve impulses inside the brain it is connected to a computer with a visual recognition.
And a speech comprehension system so that if a patient with Alzheimer's is not able to adequately communicate and appear to recognize the people who are coming into their room the computer vision recognition system and sound recognition system will talk on behalf of the Alzheimer's patients say, you know, hello son. Thank you for coming to see me and it is actually being triggered by recognition.
That are deep in the Alzheimer's patients mind so that more people will come to visit the patient. The patient stress levels may be lower. So I believe this kind of bridging of electronics and the mind is is really right around the corner what inspired
putting the work into that research and filing that
patent. I think part of it was was seeing my mother-in-law suffer pretty badly from
um somewhere on the spectrum between dementia and Alzheimer's was never really completely clear where she was at that and she would she would recognize us coming in but she couldn't communicate and it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate my own mother is more or less in at that point right now as well. Secondly the work on the bina48 computer showed me that it was really possible.
For people to strike up a meaningful relationships with the digital version of Bina the bina48 robot. And so it was just like, you know, a very short step from instead of putting all of bina's or even a good portion of her memories and her personality into this computer why not actually have the computers interaction capability input output capability triggered by something like on
Neuro Sky type of EEG brain interface and the last piece of it was I was I was given a Christmas present by a friend of mine, which was one of these neuro Sky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with your thoughts by controlling your EEG signals. So that's a consumer product anybody can buy and it really works.
Well, you just conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have Alzheimer's disease is very prevalent on both sides of my family and
It's both sets of my grandparents deteriorate to the point where at least some of them couldn't recognize immediate family members and was recently re-watching segments of a documentary. I saw called alive inside and the subtitle is a story of Music & memory and what struck me most about this documentary is that not that they could play music from someone's youth to
I'm through headsets and watch them come alive in some really spectacular ways both physically write in terms of Kinesiology moving around but also psychologically the most impressive part to me is that they would play music for say a handful of minutes five to ten minutes from someone's Youth and then turn off the music and that person could have a perfectly coherent reasonably fast speed conversation, whereas prior to the administration in the music they were
From the outside catatonic basically and it makes me wonder what music is doing. I'm sure there are people who study this and probably have a better mechanistic explanation and how it could be incorporated into therapies intended to counter Dementia or Advanced Alzheimer's disease things of this type
Tim. You see like just in this conversation we are in covering like so many, you know vast new oceans of opportunity for people to learn and study about
Music to me music is the foundational human technology. Because the first thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mothers Hearts while we were still in utero and that beat that's a rhythm. Okay, and after we're born, you know, people may have better or worse Rhythm but there's nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move to it and then all the different
Types of Melodies and chords that build upon Rhythm it's just fancier and fancier forms of music. So I believe that there's tremendous therapeutic properties to music. It's just been scratched. They even scratch. It's been kind of like blown on like
you
and it's there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up growing up with more music than ever before to begin to apply this great.
Human cultural technology of music to the biggest mystery in the entire universe, which is the human mind.
I want to come back to the mind or more accurately conscious Ness in a moment. But first this will seem like a left turn and it is I was reading a piece in the Washington Post that the cupboard quite quite a lot of your life and there was a segment on love night. I don't know if that's enough of a
A prompt but can you tell us what love night is?
So when do you know my partner and I got married we each had one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of and then we had two children together and we were kind of trying to build a blended family that would feel like nobody was a step-mom or stepdad that everybody was just like in one family and in fact we cross.
Each other's kids from our previous marriages. So I was taking the kids to music classes. All of the kids were in the Yamaha music program where they learn piano and violin instruments like that and we would practice songs and I was brought up Jewish where every Friday night was something that was special. It was the Sabbath and the family sat down together and had dinner and set a
couple of prayers. So beenin. I tried to think how can we like merge all these things together the Jewish tradition the need to create a blended family the music that we were all enjoying from watching the kids learn to play piano and violin and we decided to every Friday night have a special family ceremony, which we would call love ninth and we sang a song which the melody was actually based on.
Of the kids song that they have learned in the Yamaha music program the words were, you know, very simple and affirming and at love night the core of Love night was that each person around the table would have an opportunity to say what love meant to them during the past week during the week from the previous Friday to this Friday. What does love mean to you and you know
Gina and I as the adults we would say something either sophisticated or simple like I love being I love Martine. I love the kids the kids started off just saying like what love means to me is like our dogs are more, you know, very basic things but there's the Grew Older they came into more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love until you know, after a couple of Decades of this I have
Herds, all of them are all of us have heard thousands of different things that love can mean to a person now, I'd like to fast forward and sorry to be in a little riff here. But the one the fast forward to the current covid pandemic our kids are all adults. Now. They've flown The Coop they have their own kids and suddenly we are in a situation where we can't all gather together in anyone house for love night. You don't want to travel you don't want their like
sure people so on and so forth. So we decided to continue the love my tradition but on Zoom or to be fair Google meet so every Friday night from my son who's a captain in the Army in Iraq to his wife who's on a base in El Paso to my other son with four grandchildren and Florida to my daughter in Brooklyn and her kid and her husband and be than I
We all get together on Zoom plus friends have all of art the kids were not embarrassed by love night. In fact, they wanted to share it with their friends and their friends were saying like, whoa, this is crazy this beautiful and so we get together every Friday night. We sing Our Love Night song and now there's about 20 of us. You know, we go around virtually what love meant to US during that previous week and I would say love night is one of the most beautiful parts of my
life. I'm so glad that I asked.
A question and love night. Could you give a few more examples of possible answers just to give people a flavor for how people might answer this question because I for instance would love to try this with my girlfriend with some of our friends family Etc. But I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have the ability to kick things off effectively.
So
Every morning being in my partner goes out for takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends who lives a few houses away and that best friend now joins our left night and last Friday. She said what love means to me is every morning going out for a walk with being in the dogs last week our youngest grandson Saturn. He's you know is born in 2010. So he's 10 years old. He said
What love means to me is this and he pulled the piece of paper? He said I got a 95 on my math test and he was just so proud of himself and and and shared it with us. So those are typical examples of I think I last time said would love means to me is sitting down at the piano and playing different songs from memory. So Jesus is
a
Skipping class consists a skipping Stone, but I think I'm getting my metaphors mixed up. I say launch pad a lily pad pick your pick your choice to Consciousness. Do you think that we will be able to as I've heard you put it once recapitulate or recreate Consciousness synthetically and
Does that mean we'll have machines that can love for instance in the not-too-distant future? What would it mean to have created
Consciousness? Sure. I do believe it's possible and a great book that I would recommend that goes into this subject and beautiful detail is called the emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky and Marvin. Minsky is often thought of as the father of artificial intelligence.
A chance he was a professor at MIT for a great many years. So in the emotion machine book, he really describes exactly how you would go about creating a computer and the type of software that it would take in order for the machine to feel what we feel when we say that we love somebody and II think it's likely to occur Tim because it's hard for me to think.
Gov any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had sufficiently advanced technology one of my favorite sayings from another role model Arthur C Clarke is that you know, magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. So I think just like we have been able to create an artificial hip artificial knees or
Official heart I'm in my own company. We are building lungs and kidneys people are creating artificial nerves people like Elon Musk has formed the whole company neuro-link where he's working on downloading a human whole human brain. I have little doubt that humans will end up being able to replicate a human mind now whether or not the rest of society accepts it as a human mind or not.
And I think is going to be a long pitch battle and that's what is the subject of my book of virtually human it that whole book is talks about how and when will Society accept digital Consciousness as being as conscious as a human but even if that digital Consciousness is not yet a human level what happens when it sets a primate level or at canine level or even at rodent level if you
Can get to any of these levels you could kind of see how it's the same old human effort of keep making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level where I think that the individual live today that has the best understanding of this topic is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil. He's a director of engineering at Google and what I love about Ray is he never tires of pointing out that this
Digital human consciousness, it's human. You know Consciousness is a is a human consciousness is a human phenomena. So when we create a digital analog or doppelganger or simulcram, whatever you want to call it when we create a her that her is human. It's not US versus them. It's one it's we will have been able to move our mind into a digital.
Straight just like if our knees give out you move it to a mechanical substrate or if an organ gifts out you transplanted with another
organ. Where would you if you had to kind of Price is Right style put a timeline on this. When do you think we'll have rodent or canine level Consciousness plus
intelligence? Yeah. It's pretty hard to say Tim because one thing I am not is I'm not a soothsayer or not a profit. I'm not a Visionary any of those.
Those things I'm just a humble technologist and all the projects. I work on they have five year time Horizons because I have difficulty really seeing Beyond five years. So every technology I'm working on it's like I want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years. Also. I am totally a believer in this adage that futurists usually over promising the near term and
Under promise in the long term. So what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of futurist saying, oh well have digital rats or digital dogs or digital people in 10 20 or 30 years. They have probably over promised in the near term what they have under promise in the long-term is in not 10 20 30 years, but in say eighty ninety or a hundred years, there won't be just digital rat.
It's digital dogs and digital people but most people will be digital
exciting and I suppose for some people very terrifying at the same time What are some of the most important ethical questions or considerations related to technology as we move into future decades in your mind.
Yes in my mind. The biggest problem with technology is that people only think
About the rights to implement the technology and they don't think about the obligations. They have as somebody creating a technology and by what I mean by that is you know, there was this great philosopher of the twentieth century Isaac Berlin believe he was German and he had a real simple message. His message was that for every right? There is an obligation. It's again. It's a very Alan Watts Ian.
I think he's coming back Alan Watts. But it's a very Island Watson point of view that a right only means something in the context of its obligation. So for example, if I have a right to be a parent which we think everybody, you know has a right to be a parent you only have that right to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation to be at least not a horrible parent. If you're a horrible parent, you will have your children taken away from you and you'll no longer.
Bird that sense we apparent so with regard to technology. I think there is a point of view that anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology but I dispute the ethics of that perspective. I think that every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation to have the consent of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology. So for example,
Example my right to build an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant some place and I'll just have that right that right is coupled to an obligation that I have to have the consent of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation of that technology and it comes into this domain of in my own field. Say the transplantation of genetically modified Pig organs.
In two people for me to have a right to do that technology. I have to have the consent of the larger community that that's a safe thing to do in a democratic country that consent is issued on behalf of the country by the government and then the field of Health it's issued by the FDA. So before the FDA permits us to transplant these genetically modified Pig organs into people they
want us to demonstrate to them that there is no risk not a small risk, but no risk of any kind of animal virus seeping into the human population as a result of these animal transplants. So in summary, I believe like an amazing field for the future a field that will probably in the future have almost as many people with this career as our web designers. Today is the field of techno ethics everybody who wants to create it.
Technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of
consent if we look at the science over. Well, we could look at it over the last few thousand years, but let's just say the last few hundred years you mentioned earlier that as I think you were discussing the structure of scientific revolutions how these breakthroughs these massive scientific leaps forward seem like complete Madness at the time to the vast majority.
T and we don't have to go that far back to find say surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants mean this is not the Dark Ages is you know less than a hundred years ago. You see some some really appalling things that were taken as best practices or common practice and one of my friends who's an outstanding doctor likes to repeat this I suppose adage that you here among good.
Which is 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50% and that seems to always be true. So we Flash Forward 10 or 20 years and I know you're not a prophet or a soothsayer, but I'm curious or even or it could be five years as a technologist. What do you think?
Are any of the things we're doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd or viewed as barbaric or crazy or naive in the near future.
Well, probably probably a lot of things. Yeah since a lot of you know what we look back in the past that seems to be barbaric building on top of your example of the tortuous procedures put onto neonates.
People forget that the founder of the American Medical Association. The first Doctor Who was the who created the American Medical Association his name was dr. Gross and he lived in Philadelphia and he did not believe in asepsis at all. And so he would do all of his procedures right in his street clothes infecting everybody and
countless women lost their lives because of having those type of quote unquote doctors helping with the delivery of the children and ending up, you know, creating a septic condition in the mothers and one of the most famous painters in American history Thomas eakins painted this picture of the Gross Clinic where dr. Gross was teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure and you see dirt and his shoes and scuffie hands.
Then he was followed the second President of the American Medical Association was a dr. Agnew who was the student of gross and he had read about the research of Lister in England and became a believer that even though we can't see these things germs they're real and we need to practice, you know strict septic procedures before we do an operation a few years later Thomas eakins painted the add new clinic and you
you see that the doctors and white smocks and everybody is you know, looking super sterile and clean. So these type of revolutions can occurred just like one generation to the next it's not something that takes it takes a long time. I think that you know looking at what's going on today in our world. I think the fact that we burn our own house will look to be absolutely Bonkers. People say well, let me get this right you've
Like, you know super thin atmosphere. I mean you guys saw that from space since the 60s at least this atmosphere around your planet is super thin. You have a undeniable record of measurements of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere going up year after year after year and you continued to just spew without limit greenhouse gases into this atmosphere despite the fact that you know, people are dying on the shorelines die.
King of diseases, etc. Etc. I think they will think we are as stupid as somebody who would light a fire in the middle of their house to try to keep warm and not bother with the smoke that they were choking on. Hmm. Yeah, and then if I could add an addendum to then you can see what what happened. Did you guys know that the Earth receives 10,000 times the amount of solar energy Falls right on the earth each day, then it uses 10,000.
Times the amount of energy it flows and that's not to talk about the wind and that's not to talk about the waves and that's not to talk about the nuclear energy. I mean the I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid to be so scared of nuclear energy, which has killed a few dozens of people that we went ahead and just you know, stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people.
'well that will seem ludicrous to them
think. This is a and I won't keep you too much longer, but I think this I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to comment on or describe your own engineering projects with carbon neutrality or zero emissions as as an objective because this is not just kind of idle hand waving for you. This is something that you've taken a key in engineering mind to and I think that was not mentioned in your body.
Even though it's yet another one of these examples of your sort of extreme curiosity and capability that could you just describe what you've done and that Arena,
please so this is another area that's that gives me immense enjoyment again another kind of like lightning bolt to my soul is to try to create infrastructure buildings and cars and planes and things that have a zero carbon footprint.
And I look at it as an intellectual challenge when I read that people said well, we cannot have a zero carbon footprint Society until 2050. That's what the authorities say. You know already Tim. I'm going to say why why not? Why not? Why not? I'm going to question that Authority. So about three years ago. We undertook to build a new headquarters for company in Silver Spring, Maryland. That would have a zero carbon footprint.
Not in the best climate Maryland. It's got its Good Seasons and it's bad Seasons right in the middle of a city Silver Spring Maryland is a built-up suburb of Washington DC and for the manufacture of medicines and stuff, which is a somewhat of an energy intensive activity. So we built them a hundred and fifty thousand square foot zero carbon footprint building which turned out to be the largest zero carbon footprint building in the entire world and
We inaugurated did a couple years ago. It turns out we produce more energy than we use each year and now two years running we did this by just thinking carefully about energy and and how to manage it. So, for example, we have underneath the building 50 Wells Each of which go down 500 feet and they exchange a heat from the building with the coolness of the Earth in the summer. Bring the coolness back.
Back up and in the winter, they exchanged coolness of the building with the steady temperature of the Earth in the winter to keep the building warm. The sides of the building are clouded with solar panels. The entire building has a brain that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow natural ventilation. It's a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and Engineers have come over there. Another example is in the delivery of
Our organs when we right now, we refurbish organs lungs and particular that decedent has donated or the decedent's family has agreed to the donation. But when the transplant surgeons look at that lung they say it's two months full of fluid and mucus. We can't use it throw it away. So what United Therapeutics says is give us your lonely unwanted unloved lungs fly them to Silver Spring Maryland. We will refurbish them will show through
a high-speed digital Network to the transplant surgeons all across the country that the organ is good as new through this digital Network and bronchoscope and X-ray and all that stuff and then we fly the lungs back out to them and we've saved over a hundred fifty lives this way Tim. How do you refurbish a lung? You you first you have to remove it from the dying body a dying body is a terrible place to be so we remove it from the decedent. We cool it down. So we kind of give it a
I won't say we freeze it but we cool it down very very low temperature. We fly it to Maryland and we put it in a glass Dome. And in this glass Dome, we have tubes. We have a kind of artificial blood and that are pumping. So we've made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung and we have expert technicians who work these sorry don't know the exact name of the equipment, but that sucks out mucus and and the the operate on the lungs
I like it was a person but it's just isolated pair of lungs and the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida where ever they tell us through the the digital screen and the voice put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side to go further. Give me a they see this and they know what they want. So our technicians know how to do this and within four hours in almost two thirds of the time we are able to take What was a non-compliant?
Dead piece of tissue and turn it into a nicely breathing lung. It's so beautiful to watch Tim. The lungs go in and out like a butterfly's Wings going up and down. In fact, you could see a video of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning and then we cool the lungs back down and we fly it to the transplant surgeon and 100% of the time that they have accepted these lungs. They have had successful lung transplants with like I mentioned over a hundred fifty people walking out of the hospital.
No, but I mentioned this because this is a lot of flying around fine here fine there, you know helicopters going back and forth planes and if I'm going to make an unlimited supply of organs and you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning of the call, the hundreds of thousands of people who needs these organs that is going to be a humongous carbon footprint we could have said to ourselves. Well, we're doing such a good thing. We're saving all these lives we could be permitted to foul our
Atmosphere because it's balanced by the good things we're doing but instead we like to ask ourselves like the challenging question. How can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time? How can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint and the solution came from the technology of electric helicopters, which are powered by renewable energy that can fly these organs from one place to the other.
And without adding any carbon footprint at all, and I will be a little bit of a soothsayer here. I am absolutely convinced that in this decade the 2020s. We will be delivering manufactured organs by electric
helicopter. I love it. I have I will say one I made sheet and sneak in one or two more but that question
was talking with you
likewise. This is just endlessly endlessly interesting so many
So many different Pathways into the Labyrinth, but I need to make sure I suppose since my job is supposedly interviewer that I can find my way back out. I have read that Alan Watts will show you the way Alan Watts will show you the way he does have the most seductive and hypnotic voice for those who haven't heard. I recommend iíve read that a favorite saying of yours is quote identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them and quote. Can you
Please speak to that or explain what that means for
you. Yeah, so identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them means to try to find a put it in business terms a market area that is ignored a unmet need and but that doesn't really have to just apply to Medicine it can apply to any area of life and the way I would phrase it Tim and just like, you know a very natural almost.
Flourish way is that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond then a small fish in a big pond in the business school back at UCLA. We one person we studied a lot was the experience of General Electric under Jack Welch and he had an adage which from a business sense was. I think very very smart. He said if you can't be number one or number two in a market don't even try because you will have to
spend an amount of money equal to the revenues of the number one or number two in that market to become the number one or number two in the market. If you're not the number one or number two, you will always struggle to be profitable. But if you are the number one or number two, your profitability is assured. So what that means translated to all of our activities is if there's an area like for example a number of people have said
You know, we should get involved we when I say we my company night Therapeutics should get involved in creating a vaccine for covid and to me. Well, you know, it's not a corridor of indifference. There are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for covid. So that's not what we would want to do. It's very unlikely. We'd ever be successful on that. Somebody else said well, how about these people that covid long haulers the people who have survived from a
Very difficult course of covid and they've got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and likely years after the effect. I said, yes, that's a corridor of indifference. Nobody is thinking about the long haulers the people who now have you know, chronic lung problems because of the Havoc that covid wrapped in their lungs. Let's develop some medicines for these chronic long haulers
makes a lot of sense.
That makes a lot of sense and On a related maybe a related note in some respects. And this is this is a question doesn't always work. So I'll take the blame if it doesn't but if you had a billboard.
Metaphorically speaking to get a message a quote a word and image question anything out to billions of people. Let's just assume they all speak English for the sake of argument what might you put on that billboard.
I think Apple computer and Steve Jobs got there before me think different think different. Hmm.
Why is that important?
Because the solutions, you know, Albert Einstein said, you can't solve a problem on the same level that
Was created you have to solve it on a different level if we all think the exact same way. We will never get out of the ruts that were in the only way to get out of the problems that we face is to think differently to go down the corridor of indifference to question authority to be diverse. Thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist
today, you know looking back at everything.
A thing we've talked about and looking at all of the copious pages of notes for prep in front of me. It strikes me that you forged many paths for yourself and help others to do the same by thinking different but also thinking brightly coming back to Alan Watts yet again, right the the yin and the Yang and seeing the positive looking for the positive in different circumstances different.
Do you have any advice or recommendations for people who struggle to do that who are may be mired in a sense of hopelessness might be too too strong a word but those who tend to see the glass as half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see half the spectrum of options or
Solutions. It's a really difficult question to answer Tim because everybody's situation is so unique and so different and I do not doubt.
Out that for many many people. It is just a bad life whether it started that way or ended up the way and it's almost impossible to see a way out the perspective that I take is that I try to stay in touch with my ancestors. I think about the great grandmother's who had to, you know, bear children in the worst of possible circumstances, I think about
No, all of the like my partner being has great grandmother's who were picking cotton as slaves and had to work all day being bitten up by bugs burning in the sun feet deep in mud and then bear a child at the last moment. So whether it's like, you know, my great grandparents from Eastern Europe or hers from the African diaspora. They had nothing to look forward to other than just the hope that they were going to
have some children and that maybe those children might have a little bit of a better life than they did and if not their children their children's children so their only purpose in life their only hope in life their only joy in life was to make a generation and that maybe that generation would be better. Now here we are in America are really most any other country in the world where the point now were like eight out of 10 people have a smartphone with access to
All the world's knowledge and information with access to countless amounts of music and and training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire circumstances, but the vast majority of people are doing better than people of ever done before in history. So I say to myself and I would ask, you know, somebody else looking through the world Darkly right now looking at the glass half full I would say how much worse it must have been in the past.
Passed what do I owe to my grandparents and great grandparents and great-grandparents who suffered and toiled who barely managed to survive to produce another generation. What do I owe the them I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life and that's what I'm going to do.
How dim Marty and I'm ready to get out there and get amongst it. I have so enjoyed this conversation. There are 79 more hours we could do just in
One I won't subject you to that and I'm so grateful that you were willing to make the time to have this conversation. Thank you so much.
My pleasure being with you Tim.
And is there anything else you would like to to say to suggest or ask of those listening before we bring this to a
close two of my best friends and people who I think are the smartest most creative?
Most happy loving people. I know Paul man and da Wallach both said to me that your podcast is the best and Martina fifth Tim Ferriss invites you on your on this podcast you have to go on it. So thank you DEA and thank you Paul.
Thanks to them also for me I have for many months. My whole team knows this been hoping to have you on I had High Hopes coming into it you exceeded all of those high hopes.
Which seems to be a pattern for you, and I'm just very grateful and happy that we had a chance to connect. So thank you again. And for everyone listening you can find Martine on Instagram at trans binary Twitter at Sky biome. We will link to everything in the show notes that have mentioned in this conversation the books and everything you can imagine that we
Discussed will be available in the show notes at MDOT blog for such podcast and until next time be kind practice love night. Think different think brightly and thanks for tuning in.
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