Human 2.0: The Cyborg Revolution Is Here | 1106 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an interview that I've wanted to do since before I had a show. And this is about the potential cyberpunk future. You guys know I'm a computer hacker. I'm wearing my street credit shirt here. This is a cyberpunk shirt that Tom Bilyeu gave me. And Kevin Warwick is a storied figure from my time in computer science and as a computer hacker. And he is probably the world's first cyborg. They call him Captain Cyborg. Now. The reason they call him that is because he was the first guy to have a chip implanted in his arm the length of a coin so he could open doors and activate lights. And we're going to go into the benefits of this and the risks. So this isn't one of those, you know, let's all become cyborg episodes. But if you're looking at what happens with AI, robotics, biomedical engineering, there's so much opportunity and there's so much risk. And this is a guy who's famous for it and has been living it for, for 25 years. Emeritus professor at Coventry and Reading universities. It's an honor to meet you, I think. You're featured in Wired magazine years ago, right?

There's an article on you on the COVID Yeah. February 2000, if you look. I looked a bit younger then, which I was. But I have to say, in the academic world, it's not normal to be on the COVID of Wired magazine. So it's pretty cool when it happens and you get all academic plaudits. But the Wired magazine cover pretty tops the tops those, I think.

Did you get shamed by other professors for selling out to mass marketing instead of just keeping your academic papers where only seven other researchers read them?

I think you're quite right, as you're pointing out. I don't know. Shame, but it annoys a few academics. So there's probably one or two academic plaudits that, that I didn't get because of the Wired magazine and things like that.

You know, this is something for, for. If you're listening and you're not familiar with academia, it's almost like talking to the public about your work makes your work less valuable, which is bizarre because if you discover something new that's meaningful for humanity, I believe you have a moral, a moral obligation to stand at the top of the mountain and shout it out because it matters. But in traditional, especially European, academia, it's like, no, you have to be very humble and only like whisper it in in Latin code. And then somehow it's going to get out there. I think it doesn't help evolve humanity. But I'm also not an academic.

Yeah, but I really thought it was important to get out there and say what I was doing and why and try and give some explanation and open people's minds. Because I think at the time, first of all, it was technically innovative, and secondly, it was scratching the edges of science fiction as well, which was good fun. But so when you're doing it for real, I think that that surprised quite a few people. But it was getting that interaction, I think, with the outside world that I felt was very important. But it is, you're quite right, particularly in Europe, that you're not supposed to enjoy doing science. You're not supposed to have some fun, which I always like to have some fun doing it. You're not supposed to get to the outside world and start telling people and appear on television and things like that. So I think I did annoy a few academics in how I did things.

It is. It's all right by me anyway. In fact, I think it's great. And we've seen others who've been on the show, like David Sinclair in the longevity field, where I'm really active, he went out there, said, we can reverse aging in cells. And some people got ma and other people said, great, but look, if you can do something magical, then we need to talk about it. And in your case, you know, you did implant something in your arm and you're the first person to do that. And that is meaningful.

Yeah. And I think it's not a normal thing in the academic world. You supposed to take 100 people and do the same experiment on 100 or thousand or whatever it happens to be, and then report statistically on what results you get over there. But this was quite a dangerous thing at the time. I mean, now some of it you can look back and say, well, perhaps it wasn't that dangerous. But at the time it was dangerous because of the technology we used. And we really. When you are the first person to do something, you really are taking a step off the mountaintop. You don't really know what's going to be there. You hope you know what. You hope you know what's going to happen. You think you know what's going to happen. And some things go well, some things not so well, but you hope you're going to be okay at the end of it.

You're a Little bit older and wiser now than you were in 1998 when you first had that implant. I was working in the data center business at the time, teaching Internet architecture in Silicon Valley. And I saw that. I was like, this is really incredible. I was a little bit naive. We built the Internet as we know it today. This was a company that had the data center that held Google when it was two guys and two computers, and the Facebook when it was eight. Computers like, very, very central to the growth of Web1 and information wants to be Free and Bruce Sterling and Cyberpunk and the idea that we're going to democratize information. Over the last 23 years or 25 years since then, I've watched corporate interests and governments use it to create a mass surveillance and censorship platform that's mostly automated. This is not the system that I built. And I. I naively thought that other engineers like me, no one would ever do what the bureaucrats wanted us to do. And I failed to understand that There are some evil people out there. Oh, you want to write a system that automatically shocks people who think the wrong thing? Sure. I'll write that code for $6. There are people like that out there. Do you still have that implant from 1998?

No, that implant ended up in the Science Museum in London, to be exact. But I think that's one thing as a scientist, particularly in the academic world you live with. And some people say, oh, Albert Einstein, if he knew what his results were going to be used for, he said he wouldn't have done the work that he did, which is a load of rubbish really. Of course he did what he wanted to do. And you know, as a scientist, it could be used for good, it could be used for bad. And I think all of the implants that I've had and been involved with, there are two aspects, and that is good or bad. Maybe medically they can help people in certain instances. I've done work with Parkinson disease stimulators, which have an obvious way of helping people, people to overcome some of the problems with the disease. But at the same time, you can use exactly the same technology for very negative effects. So I think you just have to live with it and take part in any discussions that are on the ethical side of what you're doing or whether it's positive, whether it's negative. I'm always open to take part in discussions like that. There's not a lot more I can do, I think I'm not going to do, really. I'm a research scientist and research is taking those steps into not the unknown, but the little known and trying to push forward the technology and the science that we understand and hence could be good, could be bad.

This'll be particularly outrageous for people on both sides of the pond here, But I look at research the same way I look at guns. It kind of depends on what you do with it. Yeah, yeah, they're both useful and they both could be used for harm. And so this comes down to this weird thing called ethics and healthy nervous systems and control systems, particularly on government, that hold people accountable if they do evil things with or without the technology. And I think we have a shortage of accountability in government around the world. World where, hey, you know, you're organizing documents, say, you can't do that, and they're like, yeah, but you can't prove I did it and you can't catch me and you can't enforce it, so therefore it doesn't count.

Yep.

I'm like, you're a bad person. But we don't have things to do with bad people. But if they all had implants and I had control of the implants, I could fix it. Right. So by virtue of that, I should have control of their implants. Doesn't that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

But I think, I think it's the, you know, the, the same issues arise by just about any technological. You take something like the telephone. I'm sure there's a lot of people still at the time particularly, well, this is a very bad thing. All my privacy is going, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you could say, other people say, well, this is a really good thing. I can communicate in a much better way. I mean, certainly it had an enormous commercial potential and the number of people that have had jobs or I've had jobs in the past in the telecoms industry. That's how I started after leaving school. So there's enormous commercial. It changes society completely. So is it good, is it bad? Well, it's a bit of both. And it depends what you want to do with it. Which you were saying, what happened when.

You connected your nervous system to the Internet? Explain how that worked.

Yeah, well, I've still got. I'm not sure whether you can see that there's still some scars on there. That's where it happened. We used what's called the brain gate, or part of the brain gate, which has been used in various paralyzed individuals since that time. It consisted of 100 pins with electrodes on the end of them. And what the surgeons did was open up my arm, found the bunch of nerve fibers going down my arm, cut away the myelin sheath that covers the nerve fibers, and then fired these 100 pins into my nerve fibers. And I was like that for just over three months. For the experiment, I had wires running further up my arm. They came out of my body. There's all reasons why we didn't implant everything. So it was like bringing my nervous system out of the. Out of my body effectively. And we connected myself up to the computer. So I had hardwire or wireless, whichever we preferred to do it. Connection between my nervous system and the computer. And then so we could do a whole bunch of experiments and both monitoring what was going on on my nervous system with hand movements and secondly, firing signals into the nervous system. And that latter thing was interesting because there wasn't an awful lot of work. There'd been work really done on more chicken sciatic nerves, which are not that much like human nerve fibers. And so you're instantly faced with, well, what sort of signals should we put into the nervous system? What should the voltage be? What should the current be?

Level one and level two. OSI model issues. Right. We don't know the signaling mechanism or even voltage that indicates what's going on. It's.

You've got it.

From a network engineering perspective, it's weird because it's not digital. So you solve those problems, right?

As best we could. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, literally having to test things out and seeing, well, how much voltage and current is okay to push into my nervous system before we cause any trouble and things like that. So I didn't tell my wife what I was doing in the day, but we turned the voltage up a little bit, so it was more the power. So in the end, it was microamps. We were putting in current, but I think it was 50 volts in the end that I was being applied to my nervous system.

Since that time, things have progressed a little bit. Some of the things that we do at my neuroscience facility, you can get a signal into the brain just by putting electrodes on the scalp. Tdcs or tdacs through the ears. Even with one piece of equipment we don't use that induces a current. Using magnetics, you can do very, very carefully targeted parts of the brain. And they're doing this for depression with high amounts of electricity. But with small amounts, people have profound mystical experiences without any drugs. And we're nowhere near figuring all of it out. But it's better than 20, 25 years ago. And we were doing it at the target of those nerves you were doing at the ends of the nerves. But doesn't that hurt like hell? I mean, peeling your myelin sheath, this is what happens. You know, myelin sheath degradation is part of Parkinson's and ALS and like, it's nasty stuff. Were you in a lot of pain when you did this?

No, I had. No, to be honest, no. I had local anesthetic for. It was a two hour operation, partly because the surgeons didn't really know what they were doing until they came to do it. It's one of those things. And once the local anesthetic had worn off, I never really felt pain. When voltages and current, you know, when the power was being injected into my nervous system, depends what you call it. I mean, from a scientific point of view, I never regarded it as pain. I mean, it was providing my brain with signals and really I could recognize the number of pulses and the frequency. Essentially the whole thing of signaling to me involved pulses. And it depended how many of them came in the space of time. So one example, I was looking at extending the range of senses. And so I connected up ultrasonic sensors like a bat sense. And as objects came closer to me, so I was receiving pulses of current that increased in frequency the closer the object came. So if something's further away, bing, bing, bing. And if something comes closer, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And that was pulses that my brain was able to pick up. I wouldn't have described them as painful. It was just something that I understood what was happening and could link very quickly. Your brain can link, oh, there's, there's something coming closer or something's further away, or if you're moving around, you're getting close to an object. I mean, it was great fun, great fun.

What was that like? I mean, did you get used to having bat powers?

Oh, yeah. Well, so much so. One of the times we tried to do it in a standard environment because we had to produce papers on what we were doing. So let's try it here, let's try it there. But one of the researchers, Ian, suddenly brought a board towards me very quickly when I wasn't expecting it or anything like that. It was scary. I thought something was coming for me and I didn't know what it was. And it was very much a reactive moving away from it, which amazed me that your brain links these signals to what's going on outside and then respond so quickly. So that that was.

Yeah, that bypassed your prefrontal cortex, which is where you thought you were processing went straight to your amygdala because it was an emergency situation which really did get built into your brain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I. I was. I was sort of a part of the experiment. When I went home at night, I was unplugged, as it were. So I just had to just chilled out normally. But I was in the lab every day. We were doing laboratory experiments, so I got used to it very much.

When you took it off or turned it off, did you miss it? Did you feel like you were less than.

Well, the answer is yes, but in both sort of two ways, really. One, because I'm very much involved with the experiments and we're trying to get as many experiments done as we could while it was all. While I was all wired up, but I was a very much a lab rat, as it were. A guinea pig, whatever way you want to describe it. And to be honest, I think for the whole team, because we'd been working flat out for three months, we were absolutely exhausted. So one of the first responses was just, let's chill a little bit. Let's just relax, have a break. Rather than, oh, I can't live without my ultrasonic sense. I mean, it's nice to know that we can have other senses. Didn't try infrared, but I'm pretty sure infrared would have worked just as well. But it does open up well. How far can we take it? What senses might people like? Would an X ray sense actually do? If we could get that to operate in a safe way, would that work? So, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where it becomes sort of pseudo science fiction. But you're doing it. It's science.

Were you a fan of William Gibson's work?

I think I read all of the. Or watch the films, if that's easier. I loved. I still do. Still do, even time traveling, although I don't believe that so much. But, yeah, no, clearly. William Gibson was an inspiration. Yeah, me too.

And Bruce Sterling is, I think, my favorite. I've been trying to get him on the show since the start of the show, but he's hard to pin down. If you're listening to this, you've never heard of Bruce Sterling. I think he's actually the best writer from the second half of the 19th century, just as a. As a writer for any genre, including historical fiction. His writing about the enlightenment, as well as the creation of the cyberpunk genre, which is strangely predictive of this conversation. Even he has in some of his series that he has humanity in the future splitting in two directions? And one group is called the, the shapers. And these are the people who are changing biology to, you know, allow humans to do things that we can't do today. And then the other group, he calls them makers. And these are people who are adding cybernetic components. And there's kind of like a core philosophical shift that becomes almost two versions of the species. And that's affected my thinking on the world. And, and I, I tend to be we should fully max out our existing hardware and use it elegantly into its full capabilities before we start upgrading our hardware. Right? Like write better code so you don't need a new laptop, but get a new laptop when the code is fully maximized. Do you think that there's room for expanding our existing hardware before we add in or should we just go straight to adding parts?

I think it's both. Why not expand the hardware, software, et cetera, et cetera. And that makes it better when you are all linked up. Hopefully it can work better and the better the connection. I think in a sense it's perhaps not the hardware that's the issue. It's more the connections and understanding the connections like you were describing, more external signaling. And if we can do it without being invasive, great. But can we get the sort of resolution that we can get with invasive? So for me it's not so much maxing out the hardware, but if we can do that, fine, that's not going to be any problem. It can help, whatever. But the exciting thing is more the interface. That's where the problem is, or the interesting bits are.

For me, for me anyway, the interface is indeed the problem. And I did an experiment right when I was starting the show. I hand soldered this device that sat around my ankle and it had little cell phone vibrators and there's eight of them around it and a digital compass. So it would always vibrate north. I have zero sense of direction. Some people have one, I do not. And so I'm a visual reckoner. And some people can just unnaturally know which way north is. I do not know how they do it. So I'm going to teach my nervous system that. And yes, I suck at soldering. So after six weeks it broke and I never fixed it. But for that six week period, I knew north. And after a while I stopped feeling the vibration. I just knew north. Like my, my body was like, oh, that's a reliable signal. And it just stopped. And I get in an elevator where the compass didn't work. And it would go in a little circle and like, whoa. I don't know which way it is. I lost my geomagnetic sense that was really based on the satellite. And I. I still think that if I'd have worn that for a year, I probably would have had a sense of direction because it would have. My brain would have automatically and unconsciously correlated the new signal with whatever signal we're using biologically. Probably something in our pineal glands, a.

Little magnetic crystal, if you found it useful. Probably. I guess if it didn't really make any use of it, it might still have learned it to some extent. But if it found it useful, then it could really have tuned into it. Yeah.

So there's all kinds of ways of getting a signal in. And having done six months of my life with electrodes on my head doing neurofeedback to have better optimization and control of my own brain, I've been fantasizing for years about a tongue printer for feedback because the tongue is such a nerve, a nerve rich. And for blind people, you can have a tongue printer. You can feel individual pricks on your tongue. So you can put something on your tongue and probably control your brain better than you do through your ears. Yeah, but that's a weird interface.

A research student who is actually an undergraduate student that did that experiment and. Correct. Connected up a little array. I can remember him. Ashley, his name was.

Really?

Yeah.

That's awesome. Wow. I would try that.

No, he connected little ray put it on the tongue and you can actually. And it's very fast. Very, very fast response through the tongue. And you can send little objects and letters and all sorts of things that the brain very quickly learns to understand. So Quite amazing. But when he first did it, he wasn't sure again what electric current to apply so that his tongue was okay. And I think the original argument was whether it should be milliamps or microamps. And I suggested using microamps first of all and seeing how it went. And he came back in next morning to tell me how it was doing. And his words essentially were something like.

The downside of tongue.

True story. Yes. Yes. What. When you're experimenting, how far you go to start with, switch on the lower.

Current and work up the same thing comes with optostimulation. I used the very first infrared brain stimulator, which was handmade by a guy who sold a hundred of them on Yahoo groups in the 90s. I put it over the language processing part of the brain and I left it there for a little too long and for the next about four hours. I spoke in garbled tongues at the time. I made my living giving keynote presentations about computer security. Like, I just seriously effed my brain beyond belief. And it came back probably stronger than it was before. But it's not like problems don't happen, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So live with them.

Okay, well, let's talk about some of the other problems. Since I've written big books on mitochondrial function, New York Times, science books and stuff like that, I recognize that life is simultaneously, at least, within the body. We're communicating with chemicals, which is the predominant view. We're also communicating with electricity, which we're kind of figuring out. And with magnetics, which is provable. And now finally with biophotons, which is also measurable, quantifiable. Is not science fiction at all. There's one photon every 40 seconds from your DNA. So there's multiple signaling networks within the body. And with the Longevity venture fund that I'm working with, we're actually looking at investing in a company that's using single photons to place signals. We're hacking the communications network between cells or cell components. And it's cool. But what I'm interested in is something called voltage gated calcium channels. Are you familiar with those?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I have noticed in my own experiments on myself, and certainly from reading lots of literature, mostly out of Europe, it seems like certain forms of EMF are not good for cell membranes, particularly because of that voltage. They induce voltage on the cells, more calcium comes into the cell, which causes cell swelling and mitochondrial dysfunction. It might be like the dark side of tech. What I think this is a. Was this like a neuromancer to go back to stuff, to cyberpunk, where there's the black shakes that everyone gets and. Or is that Johnny Mnemonic? That was Johnny Mnemonic. Anyway, they get the shakes for a while, right? So are you worried about EMFs with implants?

I've always thought of the body more from the electrical point of view. That's just my background. So it's a bit of an issue with sort of doctors and medicine, which, as you've said, is chemical. You have a headache, you take an aspirin or parasite, you take chemicals anyway, and, well, why can't we do it in terms of the electrical side of things? Just apply and do exactly the same thing, but from the electric. So it's all right. I will compromise and agree with maybe electrochemical, an electromechanical chemical. We can stretch it because science really has been historically Put into little pigeonholes. I know when I first did at school with valences and things like that, how many electrons are on this? And realizing doing it in chemistry, it was one thing, and then you do it in physics and it's the same thing, but it's looked at in a completely different way. And how you're looking at the same, particularly with the human body, it is a whole mixture, electrochemical, mechanical. It's all the different things together. And learning what chemical effects an electrical signal have, has. It is only through experimentation that you can do that. And you've got to be a bit wary of it if you're applying it too much or too little or whatever. But if it's not going to work, if you don't apply enough, then you have to turn up the volume, as it were.

If you knew that you had an increased risk of Alzheimer's or cancer from the work you were doing, would you have done it anyway?

Yeah, oh, yeah, no question. Well, I mean, I respect that. I'll give you a direct thing about. There was a team of four neurosurgeons involved with the experiment. And the main one, Peter Teddy, took me to one side about three days before we actually went ahead with the implant and said, look, this could go wrong. If it doesn't work very well, you could lose the use of your hand and you don't have to go ahead with it. And he wanted to be sure that I understood what risks were involved. I mean, as it turned out, it probably could have been worse because we were sending signals into my nervous system. It could have affected. Maybe it did affect my brain in a way that makes some problems more likely and so on. We don't know that. But as a scientist, I wanted to find out, yes, it could cause something and I would accept it. I man up and say, okay, yes, I brought that onto myself doing the experiment. And you can't be sure. It's like the Jekyll and Hyde as a very good science fiction thing. Would Dr. Jekyll have drunk the potion before he became Mr. Hyde if he'd have known what was going to happen and. Well, of course he would. That was the whole point. He. He wasn't too sure. He thought one thing might happen. He. It was. That was part of the experiment. And it's. It's nice when you're faced with a sort of Jekyll and Hyde moment yourself. Yeah, of course you'd go for it. That's. That's what you're there for, despite the dangers. Yeah.

What do you say when someone looks at you and says, but it might not be safe?

Well, and really, boy, you do get it in the university when you're about to do something like that, the insurance guys. And what's the university going to be liable for? You've got to sign these documents to say you're not going to suddenly come at them. Almost surely it's not going to be. Be safe. I think you take it that it's not going to be safe. Anyway, you've got a decision. Am I going to stay within the bounds of what we already know with the safety involved, or am I going to push the boundaries a little bit? And what you, I mean, that, that's, that's the sort of science scientist I am and was, is somebody who tries to, to push the boundaries a little bit.

And I love that answer. Learning new things isn't safe. So, you know, you try and make.

It as safe as you can. I mean, you try and learn exactly as best you can. But with the nervous system and the brain, there is so much that we do not know. Okay, We've got a basic understanding of some of it, but even nerve fibers, there's so much more we need to learn exactly the sort of things that you were talking about. How much voltage can we apply, how much current can we apply, that is, that is safe, and so on, so forth. And you take other parts of the body and we're still in a mist of lack of knowledge.

I've gotten to the point where if someone says, what if it's not safe? What if it's stagnant? That's the opposite. So my, my new brand of coffee is called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do. Like you have to take a risk. You just take a calculated risk. That safe enough because it's worth it.

Yeah, And I think that's it. It's a calculated risk. Yeah, yeah. But you don't know. I mean, it's calculated in a, in a sense it's a bit like that because you don't have actual numbers that you can say, well, this is 20% safe or 40% or it's 50, 50 chance of working. You don't really have that. You think you should be all right from your knowledge, the scientific knowledge and other people's experiments as much as possible. The more people. And that's one thing with the Brain Gate experiment that I'm a little bit disappointed to. Although the same implant has been used to help people who are paralyzed and so on, there's not been A more enhancement type of set of experiments with the same sort of implant which from a scientific point of view you want, that you need, that's where you get your citations from and so on. So I'm still waiting. So maybe yourself, or maybe one of the listeners today, if they fancy going for it, get on with it.

The idea of human enhancement is something I've always believed in. I've been taking cognitive enhancers for 25 years. I've formulated some. And the other thing is, I do run electricity over my nervous system and I've done that since. Geez. Over my brain starting in 1998. Actually, I'm using Russian tech that was developed for their space program. So you needed less sleep. And the results are interesting. My nervous system is better myelinated than most humans, which means I have thicker insulation on my nervous system, which means electricity conducts more quickly with less resistance over my nervous system. It also means. Are you familiar with P300D, the EEG measure?

Not, not initially, no.

So this, this is a, a lag time on reality. So for normal humans over 30 or so, there's about 350 milliseconds of lag time. So if you clap your hands, you think you hear it, but you don't, your nervous system gets it. But the first EEG signaling that your brain hearing centers got a signal that there's a third of a second, that's your body, decides whether it's worth showing it to you or not, decides whether you should be startled, and then it hands you the sound and, and it gets slower as you age. Well, I'm still at 240 milliseconds, which is what the average 18 to 20 year old has. Right. So my response is you bragging about.

It at the moment.

Well, it's, I am a longevity guy. It's one of the many measures where my biology is, is healthier than it was when I was a 300 pound computer hacker. But what I'm saying is that external electrical stimulation can be an enhancement. And what you're proposing is that internal stimulation with Brain Gate could also be an enhancement. So I'm just drawing parallels between those two. And yes, I'm bragging.

For me, the big one looking at enhancement is communication, which when you consider how we as humans communicate at the moment, and it's really pathetic in terms of what it could be possible at the moment. I have lots of thoughts and you have lots of thoughts, images, ideas, colors, feelings, all of that sort of thing, emotions. And when we're communicating, we convert them to mechanical signals, pressure waves or movement or whatever it happens to be, which is very slow and error prone. And then it gets converted back again for communication over wireless networks or wires or whatever. So the possibility of with connections linking your brain up to the network directly or your nervous system, if that works to communicate, was always one of my desires to investigate and beliefs that, yes, we're going to be able to do that in the future. So future communications will be by thoughts or by brain to brain communication. It was one thing my wife had for the experiment. Two electrodes pushed into her nervous system. And we did send signals, simple signals like being open, closed hand, and like a sort of Morse code type thing between nervous systems. And that worked fine and it was great. It felt, interestingly, felt quite intimate, more than I had imagined. When we actually did the experiment, we could feel something between the two of us. In fact, hey, it's really quite special. But I do believe that in terms of enhancement, for me, the big one, the goal to aim for that would change how we are to simply regard us as humans. If we could do that, would be very difficult. We have something a lot more would be communicating directly between brains.

There are ways to do that that certain groups have done since the 80s without having to tap directly in. I'm an external signals guy, but there are ways to get a signal off of a brain and then show it to another brain via existing senses. To the extent that I actually don't do that with almost anyone at my neuroscience clinic. Because when you do that, it's hard to have a firewall. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You pick up the other person's trauma, you pick up their preconceived notions, you pick up their judgments. So if you could do it with, you know, an enlightened guru, that would be good for you, but bad for the guru because he'd probably pick up your crap and then have to go, you know, meditate for a while or whatever the guru did to become a guru. Right. So it's kind of like unprotected sex. Right. Like you want a brain condom if you're going to do brain computer interface with another human. And right now we don't have to do it. And if we did know how to do it as a computer security professional, like most of our security systems aren't that good. I don't know that I want a brain computer interface. Because seriously, Mark Zuckerberg is going to be putting spam in there, or at least listening to what I do. If not the nsa, right back to.

The negative side, you using the technology for something you didn't want. I'm thinking in terms of what I was describing from an academic point of view, let's do the research, let's make this happen. Because I think it would be fantastic. But, yes, it opens up all of the negatives you could potentially imagine. Yeah.

In fact, in one of. I think it's a Bruce Sterling story, one of the characters. Which one was this? One of his epic ones, probably Neuromancer. One of the characters notes that people are going crazy because they got malware in their eye implants and they were just seeing ads 247 and they would commit suicide because they just couldn't get away from spam. And I'm like, oh, yeah, spammers would do that. Right. The same guys have been clogging our inboxes for both your and my entire lives of having inboxes. Right. So I'm hopeful that as we look at this, we look at the risks in a way that I didn't when I was younger, even when we were creating cloud computing before it had the name, what are we going to do with this? And I think all of the tech has ultimately helped the world, but it's also created a chance, in fact, a probability of a dystopian future unless we address leadership and transparency issues in society. Have you looked at longevity? Like using any of your tech to make yourself live longer, have a really sharp brain when you're 120? Do you play around with those ideas?

Well, in a sense, no, but in a sense, I mean, one other bunch of experiments we did had that in mind, and that was taking brain cells, which we did from a rat, which was easier, and then putting them in a little dish and letting them grow, culturing them, feeding them, keeping them in an incubator. Because the reason I'm saying this. Sorry, I jumped ahead a bit. For me, the key for longevity is the brain. I think we can look at all the other components and starts, okay, we can come up with an artificial heart. We can. If there's problems and we can replace this. We can. But the brain is the critical one. And if that changes, is it really you that is living longer, or do you become some other creature over time? Can you stay as you. As it were, keep your brain going? So it was looking at what happens when brain cells die off. Can we add brain cells and. Which we were doing in a little dish just to see if this little robot, which had rat brain and rat brain cells live as long as human Brain cells. So could we replace them? Let's kill them off in this region here. Let's apply some new ones. But then the rat has lost the knowledge of what it was doing, of avoiding this thing coming towards it or whatever, which was interesting. So it was to do with what you're describing. But I'm jumping ahead there and saying the key issue for longevity for me is how the brain survives and what, what mode it survives in. Is it still you?

Certainly if you lose your brain, you've lost the game. And the more I've studied, the more I, I, I realized that 80% of the nerves from the heart go into the brain. And the heart is a sensing organ much like the eyes. And so you look at cases like Donald Rumsfeld, you know, one of the most celebrated war criminals of the recent, while he doesn't have a heartbeat, he has a mechanical heart that is a continuous flow heart. And I just wonder if that's connected to some of the crazy ass stuff that he's done. I don't know. But what I, what I do know is that the, the heart, body, mind, gut connection and the brain, there's a lot going on. Like we know that protons spin in the brain, changes direction every time the heartbeats. So there's a quantum entanglement that's in another signaling mechanism that's faster than light that's also going on. So it feels like we haven't cracked the code enough to know that it's the brain. But it's a good assumption and we know that the brain goes, the rest of it isn't worth it. But we don't know that if you only have the brain, it's going to be enough. So I would want to academically pursue that and figure it out. I just don't want to be my brain in a jar trying to talk because that might suck.

Yeah, I had a few years ago a catheter ablation. I had atrial fibrillation going all over the place at different times. And the catheter ablation, which was, it's sort of pathway to what you're talking about, the treatment was going into the heart and zapping different pathways in electrical pathways in the heart to stop it fibrillating. I found it absolutely. I hadn't really, didn't really know about it until I had it, which for me it worked just fine. But the way the heart is operating electrically rather than mechanically or chemically or anything else was absolutely fascinating for me to find out firsthand. First heart, I guess.

Yeah. The timing systems. There's so much interesting cross systems talk in the body that I think with AI it won't be that hard to untangle a lot of it. Back in 2018, biohacking was added to the Merriam Webster's dictionary as a new word in the English language. And people call me the father of biohacking because I started the movement in all years before that. And you in the same year in a TEDx talk said that biohacking was an entry level point into cyborgs. Talk to me about what you meant. What do you think about that?

I think it's more of a philosophical thing than a technological. Maybe a bit of both. You can have different concept of cyborgs. I'm not one who believes that you have somebody who has part technology and part human and it's got to be a cyborg. Otherwise you get just wearing glasses or riding a bike, you're a cyborg. So I'm looking at a cyborg as being something that maybe a more science fiction type of cyborg that has abilities that humans don't have that does involve a more semi permanent or permanent connection between the technology which is integrated into the human, or the human which is integrated into technology. So it's something like that. So that's how I would see biohacking as being a sort of an entry level cyborg. You're starting to get into it and you can do some things. And if you have an implant or you have something connected into your body as you were describing, with learning where north is and so on and so forth, then that's how you're getting in that direction, but in a basic way. But ultimately it is more the science fiction, the Arnold Schwarzenegger type version or whatever it happens to be, or the neuromancer and so on.

Yeah, the Six Million Dollar Man I think was like kind of the first TV show I knew that had that kind of stuff. There's. There's some interesting questions that come up around what happens with cyborgs, because in the biohacking movement. So I started it in 2011 was the first blog post with the definition. And the first conference was like 2013. 2014 maybe. Yeah, 2013. So all of that, you know, it's progressing. And then a group called Grinders came out. And these are mostly like people who do tattoos and body piercings. And they started making their own implants. And I thought about getting a Mac magnet, one of my fingers, because you can actually sense electrical fields. Like that'd be really cool. But I did start a medical testing company in 2008 that looks at immune rejection of implant materials. And I recognize my body is magnetic. In addition, like, I don't know the unforeseen consequences of having a magnetic finger. I think I'm going to wait on that one. What's your take on the grinder movements? Are you part of it and is that where you see biohacking going?

I don't really see myself as part of anything like that, but I'm interested in it. I know there's a group in Pittsburgh, if any of you listening in. Hi, how you doing? Which, I mean, some of the things I think that they do are highly dangerous. And I think you must be crazy putting that into your body to find out. But that's their forte. But other things I think is very interesting. And even getting things to light up into the skin and. And so on. It looks pretty cool to me. So I'm interested perhaps more from an artistic point of view than a scientific point of view. Some of it, good luck to them. Power to their elbow or whatever they're highlighting or whatever. And I think where we're failing at the moment is for guys like that to pull that in somehow into the academic world, because I'm sure they're getting some really good results that have scientific interest, but we're not pulling them in there. And that's not them physically. It's the results I'm talking about. We really need. There should be a biohacking, a journal of biohacking or something like that, so that people can come at that journal, perhaps from an artistic, perhaps from a medical, Perhaps from a scientific forte or background and get results from experiments like that. And it would have to be a more experimental journal and reporting on things like that, but we don't have that. So, no, I'm interested in what they're doing. I mean, some of them. I think I'm Facebook friends with a number of guys down there in Pittsburgh, so. And other places. But I don't see myself. I wouldn't classify myself as being one of the grinders or anything like that.

You're adjacent to them, and I just.

Do what I do. And if they might have made me an honorary grinder or whatever, then fine, go for it. Yeah.

It's your new title. Honorary Grinder and Emeritus professor of Emeritus Grinder.

I think that's. There you go.

The. The idea there. Same thing. I don't. Having had enough surgeries and enough medical issues in my life, I don't really like the idea of having more implants. And as a computer hacker, if there's a computer in there, it can and will be hacked, right? It's inevitable. And you might not like what happens if you can't get it out. And there are cases, you've probably heard of a few people who have electronic eyes that replace their eyes. These are people who were blind and the company made the eyes went out of business. And so now they have unsupported hardware in their eyes and no way of getting it out. And my, my call would be for lawmakers in whatever country they're in. And I don't believe there is a global law or that there should be. And anyone who tries to do that is probably not your friend. But in, in each country there needs to be something that says if you have implants, that you are selling your source code. All of it must be placed in escrow. And if the company goes out of business, it automatically becomes public source. This is why it's called biohacking, not some other word, because hackers are willing to create Linux, which is what's driving our conversation today. So we don't like it that Microsoft won't tell us what's under the covers. We'll just make our own operating system. So if I'm going to have any implant ever, full source code access, nothing hidden on the cloud, nothing that I can't change, because then I will know if I've been hacked and if it's not under those conditions, there was no way in hell I'm going to do it. And because of the EMF problems, I think I'm going to wait a little while because the evidence is mounting more and more that having especially WI FI signals inside mitochondrially dense tissues probably doesn't lead to good outcomes. I think it's a hackable problem. We can enhance our biology to be resilient to that. We can turn it off. We can actually change the signal so it's a beneficial signal. A few companies I'm working with do that, but until those are solved, I don't want stuff in my head or anywhere else in my body. But I kind of want a laser eyeball because it'd be cool.

Yeah, no, I agree with you with the source code and the technology involved. And it's exactly with what you're saying. There's got to be some way of having backups or replacements or whatever it happens to be. I've been involved with surgeons with the deep brain stimulation, which is a commercial product. They do to an extent. They do have some of that. But the companies that involved, perhaps financially, seem to be pretty sound at the present time. I say that, and that's probably put the death knell on them. But it would be an issue, I think. I think it could be a problem even in that field, if the worst was to happen and there were company problems. So it would be good to have exactly what you're saying when you've got something implanted, when it's life dependent or who you are dependent, that you need to have some regulations in place to make sure that this can't happen, or they can't just close down, whatever, and the technology's gone.

It feels like in the US this is the sort of thing that's like a constitutional amendment level protection in my home and Canada Charter of rights situations where, number one, the source code is available, and number two, no one.