Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer | Quantum Biology, Consciousness & the Future of Medicine

and the thing is if you get me at the right time of day I really do believe in hardcore

einstein realism I may be the last person on earth who really believes in reality the way

einstein did with knowledge of what the quantum physics is that makes it seem impossible I've

worked out the mathematics to show it's not impossible you can be a hardcore realist and

and still believe in psychic phenomena, which is the other side of life.

After 1967, I explored and explored,

and I think there's no doubt that the psychic phenomena are very real,

that we do have what we call souls,

that there is a kind of spiritual connection between us,

and it is consistent with mathematical science.

Welcome to Entangled Health, where we explore the intersections of quantum science, AI,

biotechnology and human well-being.

My name is Thomas and I'm convinced that health innovation happens at the Entangled Boundaries

where cutting-edge physics meets biology,

where consciousness research intersects with technology,

and where visionary thinking transforms into practical solutions.

We are bringing together pioneers, researchers, and innovators

who are reshaping how we understand and experience health.

My guest today is Paul Werbos,

one of the pioneers who gave machines the ability to learn.

While Paul is the original inventor of backpropagation, the algorithm behind modern AI, his lifelong

quest has gone far beyond computing.

Paul is driven by ethics and the big picture, bridging science, ethics and the deepest questions

of existence.

In today's episode, we touch only a small portion of Paul's vast activities, so we talk about his breakthrough at Harvard, the decades of quantum research at the NSF, his deep investigations into consciousness, the physics of time, the mysteries of retrocausation, and the concept of the soul.

And then we go deep and ask what it means to be truly healthy, not just in body, but

in mind, spirit, and as part of humanity's unfolding story.

A quick disclaimer, all chats at Entangled Health are a co-creation between the guest

and myself and not an official statement from our industries.

We are here in a personal capacity, so everything we share is just our own take, not the official

view of any company, nor of my employer or any other organization.

To add a little bit of dopamine,

you can submit questions to the Entangled Health questions pool

and later in the show we'll dive in

and the quantum algorithm, running on real hardware,

picks which question we answer.

Our guests add their question to the pool and then answer it live.

And if we reach a million listeners, we might change the rules.

But that's a bit far out.

Stay tuned and who knows what the quantum dice will reveal.

The quantum dice

so paul again a warm welcome it's been a while since we've seen each other I'm so happy

you're you're here with me it's it's really it's really a pleasure and I think as I just mentioned

in the beginning we can dive deep we could talk for years I guess but um before we start and i

I'd just like to mention the idea of the podcast,

just for the listeners and you,

is to bring people together who should know of each other.

So we recently had Dean Radin, for example,

who you know quite well, I think.

And also other people from young people

who have done just their master theses,

but who are super upcoming talents

and just from diving from quantum to AI to biotech,

I will have in future, we will have some,

psychotherapists, et cetera.

And I think before we start getting to know or before we start diving into the

journey, that made us, my opener question is always,

when I reached out and asked you for entangled health,

if you have a definition or an interpretation or a first reaction that you'd

like to share.

about entangled health.

Yes.

First, I owe you a caveat.

Yeah.

Okay.

As I listened to your introduction,

you have asked me to be honest and open

in a way that very few people ever tolerate.

That's why you're here.

The fact is, the issues you're talking about

are super connected.

And I have spent my whole life learning about these connections.

And I've been learning how to be quiet because people are not really

with some of these connections.

Okay.

Let's change.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

Forgive me if I even tell a story.

When I was working at the National Science Foundation, I was once part of a team that created a special funding initiative, interagency education research initiative.

What can we do for education if we bring together information from all of the disciplines?

And I remember when the head of the NSF was presenting this to the press and they asked him, what is it like being head of the National Science Foundation?

Yes.

He says, oh, my God, it's like pulling teeth.

They're all in these narrow disciplines.

I have read Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolution.

It's a great guide to what we really should be doing.

And to get people to do it, it's like pulling teeth because they're all in some narrow discipline.

But he was standing next to me and he turned and he said to the press, except for this guy, he doesn't even know where the boundaries are.

And that's a good summary of what my role was at NSF, connecting all of the disciplines.

So health, certainly one of them.

The older I get, the more I think about the health implications of areas I've worked on.

And it's important to connect everything from the hardcore mathematics, which is my PhD, applied mathematics, in the spirit of von Neumann,

to connect hardcore mathematical thinking with very practical, personal, everyday life.

And I have learned more about the science of everyday health today.

And just about anybody else I know.

So you want to talk about entangled health.

It's very entangled.

Yes, very good.

When you talk about what are quantum physics effects on health,

one of the main things I think of is what the Chinese call chi.

And I have discovered more and more, not only in theory and in practice,

to understand and properly connect to what the Chinese call chi

is absolutely essential to my personal survival.

And I'm glad I can connect these things.

And I'm glad that I'm still alive this week.

I was supposed to have an MRI today, but somehow the insurance company didn't think it was justified well enough,

so they'll postpone it for a few weeks.

It can't be life critical if they postpone it for weeks.

That's good.

There are a lot of things like that.

There is a treatment for cancer.

which I am very excited by.

It's called allogeneic CAR T CRISPR technology.

Yes.

And they did lots and lots of clinical trials,

which really show it's safe.

and a broad spectrum value.

And so they don't allow it in the U.S.

Okay.

They say you have to be close enough to death,

and Paul, you are not close enough to death.

You're not eligible.

Yes.

Congratulations.

By the way, if anybody in Germany allows it, they don't allow it here, but who knows?

I sometimes hope another country will let people live longer.

Later we put it out, so then if people listening in and have an idea, just reach out to Paul.

Congratulations.

And I think you mentioned, I just have to look it up how you called it.

Is it Geng, integrity, that you were talking about?

Geng, oh yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, integrity, right.

Yeah.

So, my biggest citation index is for what I have learned about how brains and minds work.

Mm-hmm.

I even wrote a paper for Frontiers in Neuroscience describing the mathematical data we have on the best database in existence on mammal brains in real time.

Mm-hmm.

And basically, they provided proof of a theory of how intelligence works in mammal brains.

And.

You want you want to elaborate on that a bit for the listeners?

OK, we have time.

OK, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In fact, what the hell, if you've spoken to Dean Radin, I can tell you a human part of the story.

I suspect your audience is more human than some of the scientists I deal with.

When I was young, I really fiercely believed that the concept of the human soul was total nonsense.

And psychic phenomena was even more total nonsense than,

This was before your awakening or what?

Yeah, yeah.

I can remember in 1964 between high school and college, working in a hospital actually.

One summer they wanted me to use computer skills to help out guys doing cardiovascular research.

and it was a wonderful doctor who was my boss.

He showed me a book by Donald Hebb called The Organization of Behavior.

And it turns out that Hebb's book and von Neumann's work

are the real two foundations which created all of our modern deep learning and neural networks.

So the basic ideas of neural networks and deep learning all came,

they were already out there in the 1960s.

And I loved Hebb's book, The Organization of Behavior.

I studied it very closely.

And right in the beginning, Hebb said,

As an experimental psychologist who really knows the literature, I have looked at this literature on parapsychology.

And I have to say that the significance tests they have passed are much more stringent than the significance tests for almost everything else people write papers on.

However, he said...

If we want to understand reasoning and learning, we need to understand Bayes' law, that the probability of a theory is the product of the conditional probability, how well it fits the data.

And the prior probability and the prior probability of psychic phenomena, he said, is so incredibly low.

I really don't believe it because everything we know from physics says this is not really very likely.

And I believe that fiercely. And I knew a lot of physics at that time fiercely.

Until, yes, as you say, there was a special experience. I had a very thick skull. I was totally resistant to this stuff. I knew all of the arguments why we shouldn't believe this psychic stuff. I knew all the reasons why we could do without it.

And then in 1967, I had an experience which opened my mind.

It didn't change my mind except to open it.

And after this experience in 1967, I said, oh, my God, I don't know what's going on.

There's a theory that I'm totally crazy, but that doesn't work very well as a guide to life.

You're out. You can't go back.

So what I said was, oh, I just don't know.

And the whole point is, if I think I know about brains, and I did in 1967,

I thought I knew a lot about brains and neural networks.

If I think I know about this stuff, I shouldn't have an opinion.

I should find out.

And so from 1967 to 1972, I explored many, many theories, approaches.

But finally, in 1972, I had an experience which told me, hey,

I know this is real.

I don't know how it works for sure yet.

I had an idea by 1972.

I took graduate courses in quantum physics at Harvard,

which certainly affected my notion of what is possible.

In fact, now that I think of it,

one of my teachers in the Harvard Graduate School

was a person named Julian Schwinger.

Okay.

And if we're talking about quantum mechanics,

We really should know the name of Julian Schwinger.

what?

If I hear someone say they know about quantum mechanics and they'll tell me all about it, if they don't know the name of Julian Schwinger, I think, oh, God, one more bullshitter out there.

OK, tell me.

Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga.

shared the Nobel Prize long ago for the discovery of the first quantum field theory that actually worked,

that actually predicted something experimental that required this kind of complexity.

And Schwinger, Feynman, Schwinger,

more or less should get equal credit for the invention of quantum electrodynamics,

the canonical quantum electrodynamics, which actually worked and actually predicted things that nobody could predict before.

Tomonaga, I don't know much about.

My guess is they were being politically correct, but I don't really know.

I haven't read anything about Tomonaga, whereas I got to meet Schwinger and Feynman and got to hear their point of view.

And Schwinger was much quieter than Feynman.

Feynman was really good at getting in the newspapers.

Yeah, and he has his book, and it sounds like he's more an entertainer on top of.

Yeah, I mean, obviously he was an intelligent guy.

I mean, it'd be super nice.

Definitely.

But the people who say, didn't Feynman invent quantum computing?

And basically what I tell my friends, if you think Feynman invented quantum computing, the reason is he was in a bar with a beautiful woman next to him.

And he said, there's a lot of room at the bottom.

And that's that's pretty much as far as it went.

And if people knew science today the way they knew engineering in the 19th century, everybody would know that the real inventor of what they call quantum computing now was a professor, David Deutsch.

Yeah.

David Deutsch, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Which brings us maybe to the multiverse, but we talk about this maybe later.

Well, the thing is that they're connected.

Most people don't realize that they're connected.

So earlier, Deutsch put forward this theory that we live in a multiverse.

And the mathematics for that theory are pretty straightforward at this point.

And then based on that theory, he said, according to the multiverse theory, what we think of as the universe, what we see is just one slice in that universe.

And it's possible to have parallel slices.

So if you believe in parallel computing, if you think you can get a lot more computing power by putting a million processors in a box, then.

I can split the universe in that box.

So you have a million processors in that box.

You have parallel processing in one box.

And that was the idea that led him to his concept of the quantum Turing machine.

And he didn't just have a philosophy.

He translated the concept of quantum Turing machine into universal theorems.

Feynman never had anything even close to that.

Um,

In a way, you really have to say Deutsch invented the quantum Turing machine because he gave a full specification of what it should be like and proved theorems about how it had universal computing capabilities analogous to the normal Turing machine, which is universal in a way, but much more powerful, much more universal.

And Paul, help me, because quantum is, I mean, I have my opinions about the practical, you

Right.

know, philosophical interpretations of quantum, of the multi-multi-verse.

Definitely for quantum computing, it makes kind of sense.

Maybe the only place where it makes sense.

But no, and I think the...

Just for those not so deep in the quantum physics foundations who might listen to this podcast, I just want to test an idea with you on, I think you also mentioned something about temporal wellness or being whole in the past or to be really, really health means really...

curing our past, our future, whatever.

And quantum in itself is a bit of a timeless situation.

Do you think that if we say we have this quantum electrodynamics,

is there a time component or is a time reversal

or bringing us eventually also to discuss the retrocausations?

Because Dean, we have had this discussion back when I was visiting him.

and Julia Mossbridge at Petaluma,

we were thinking about temporaceuticals, for example.

He always comes with this idea to say,

if we would be able to influence the probabilities

by focused intention, what have you,

so collapsing the probability,

Bayesian probability by, let's say,

by tweaking the probability distribution for a healthy outcome in the past,

we would not have cancer because, I mean, just it didn't happen.

So this nano, on very nano things in the world,

four-dimensional time-space projection collapse of the multiverse

in this one slice where we have subjective experience.

Do you think this makes sense?

Or how could we make a machine out of it?

Or how could we individually...

Okay, the way I would say it absolutely makes sense.

My big problem is...

My wife said not to use her name in vain.

It's hard not to.

No, no, okay.

Just don't.

Sure.

When I was an undergraduate, there was a time when I actually considered,

should I major in philosophy?

Because that's what I'm really interested in.

I saw what philosophers are doing in the modern world.

I said, no, that isn't exactly what I want to do.

That isn't what I think of as philosophy.

Yeah.

But there are a lot of philosophers who talk about retrocausality in time.

And I think the biggest thing they get wrong is they have too much trust in the English language.

Okay.

Now, it would be better for your listeners if I were better at the English language.

We are all not native, so I'm not native.

But tell me, what's the better idea?

I translate my thoughts into English,

but my thoughts are not in English.

Yes.

Okay.

I think in mathematics and in images.

And a lot of the debates about time are actually meaningless because they're

So...

depending on English words to capture much of what's really going on.

So,

In a sense, if I pretend I'm really speaking English, I would say, of course, I agree with concepts of retrocausality.

In fact, Richard Feynman published a lot of his articles creating his quantum field theory in a journal called IJTP, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, and he wrote,

and one of the papers I'm most proud of,

I believe it came out like in 2009,

but it's easy to find in Google Scholar.

I published a paper on Bell's theorem,

not a matter of interpretation.

In that paper, I sort of described how

A proper mathematical approach to time, proper mathematical thinking applied to the issue of time, can immediately resolve the paradoxes that people were initially worried about with quantum mechanics.

Initially, people were worried about things like the double-slit experiment.

If we live in a universe which is three dimensions of space and one of time,

Right.

if that's what the real universe is, just like what Einstein thought,

it seemed as if that could not be reconciled with certain experiments.

Mm-hmm.

I am fortunate that one of my classmates at Harvard

did the very first experiment of that kind.

I know how those experiments work.

I know what they published.

I know what they found.

The situation is very different in experiment

than what most people think it is.

But at the end of the day, yes,

the experiments disagreed with common sense ideas of time.

If you replace these ideas of time,

With time-symmetric models of the macroscopic objects you use in the experiment, the paradox will disappear.

Can you explain it in kind of lay terms a bit?

Or is it just, I mean, we can touch this difficulty in English language, and I want to talk about BOMAP, maybe in implicate order with you on this.

But just go eventually so that we don't lose everybody who has their own ideas on what things do.

They certainly do.

And I'm very grateful to you for putting up this level of detail because people tend to freak out when you get to a certain level of quantum mechanics.

No, no, no, we're good.

We need to have this.

Speaking of normal life and normal people, just an old man's story.

Actually...

I know the brains of old men are designed to tell stories.

That's part of the hardware of old man brains.

Very true.

I remember once I had a conversation with a person named Carl Pribram.

and anyone who really wants to understand what does science know about how brains work,

Carl Pribram is one of the names I would recommend most highly.

On my webpage, I even have a link to a video talk I gave a few years ago, just local.

Okay, so we'll definitely point to if once this is published...

We'll put the link to your page anyhow.

So it's a fantastic resource to get lost.

My website is werbos.com, which is pretty easy.

And at werbos.com, there's a link on brains, souls, new unification.

Everything.

And in that...

We've done experiments.

Well, actually...

Go, go, go, go.

It's a big web page.

But this particular web page is talking about brains and minds and souls.

Okay.

Yeah.

And one of the talks, I actually show the faces of Carl Pribram, Walter Freeman...

And their teacher, Lashley, those three people were the founders of what I call systems neuroscience.

The real full mathematical analytical study of the highest levels of general intelligence in the human brain.

although systems neuroscience also works on mice, not just humans.

But this is where we put it all together.

There are a lot of neuroscientists who will study this little part of the brain

or that little part of the brain.

But for the whole system, how does it generate intelligence?

That field of study is called systems neuroscience.

And the leaders of that field when I was at NSF were Carl Pribram and Walter Freeman.

And one day I was in Carl Pribram's...

Living room, talking to him. We became friends after a few years. And he said, Paul, I'm having real troubles with you. I had great stories for everybody crazier than me to the left. And I have great stories for these ultra materialists to the right of me.

But you are the left of me and the right of me both at the same time.

And I'm not sure how do I integrate that.

In superposition with yourself, that's good.

And the thing is, if you get me at the right time of day, I really do believe in hardcore Einstein realism.

I may be the last person on Earth who really believes in reality the way Einstein did, with knowledge of what the quantum physics is that makes it seem impossible.

I've worked out the mathematics to show it's not impossible.

You can be a hardcore realist.

and still believe in psychic phenomena, which is the other side of life.

After 1967, I explored and explored,

and I think there's no doubt that the psychic phenomena are very real,

that we do have what we call souls,

that there is a kind of spiritual connection between us,

and it is consistent with mathematical science.

Mm-hmm.

But it took me a lifetime to figure out how to reconcile the different pieces and fit them together.

Is it part of the system that it's difficult or is it in itself mysterious enough that you just can't grab it or how does it work?

So in the end, it's really limitations of the human brain.

In the end, the connections are mathematical, and you have to understand mathematics.

So in principle, it's just like this imagination that you are an aunt living in 2D,

and you just can't imagine what three days unless somebody picks you up

and puts you somewhere in flat land or all these things,

just to the next level in 4D, 5D, whatever.

Yeah, that's basically what it's about.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I spent most of my life trying to figure out how that mathematics fits.

And now there's a greater challenge of how do I explain it to people?

And then some people wonder why do they have to know?

And there are a lot of reasons why it would help humanity if we knew.

Because we are going through incredible changes in our society.

One of the fields I have always studied was population dynamics, ecology, genetics, all that kind of evolution, that kind of stuff.

When...

And one of the books that really impressed me, when I was an undergraduate,

is a book which is very famous in some quarters.

But, you know, there are a lot of things which are very famous

for 100 people and unknown to others.

And there's a very famous, important, fundamental book

was,

on the nature of life called

Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems by R. May.

And he went through mathematical models of evolution

Are we evolving?

Well, maybe we are.

Maybe evolution is still happening on the planet Earth.

Okay.

If evolution is happening on the planet Earth,

his book talked about mathematical models of how evolution works.

And one of the scary things...

In most of Earth's history, there's been a top dog species that thought it ruled the world.

Now humans think they do.

Dinosaurs thought they did.

There's another book by George Gaylord Simpson that talks a lot about the history of life on Earth.

And the funny thing is...

And whenever the food chain changes, the modes of production, the inputs and output go through big radical changes.

The top dog species often simply goes extinct because of the changes depend.

If the survival of that top dog depends on an ecological network, if the network changes too much,

The top dog dies. Right now, the network that humans are experiencing is changing that much.

In the last century, there was a Cold War. Humans came close to going extinct in the Cold War.

why did humans not go extinct?

I tend to give credit to the mathematician,

John von Neumann.

Okay, I'm a follower of John von Neumann.

I love his way of thinking,

and I have built on it to extend it further.

And all of our deep learning

and all this stuff that's changing the world

is all based on an edifice

built on von Neumann's foundation,

not Hebb,

It turns out Heff didn't know the mathematics well enough. Von Neumann did. We are building on Von Neumann's foundation. But the problem is, Von Neumann was critical in saving us from extinction in the previous Cold War. But now we are entering a new Cold War.

There are people I know who believe that within the next five years, there will be a massive war between the crazy policemen, military officials of U.S., China and Russia, all of whom are under very limited control.

They are not under full civilian control for many reasons.

And many people predict that this lack of control will cause a global war using technologies which I have seen.

Most people don't believe this artificial general intelligence could become real in this century.

It's real now.

I've seen all three countries that.

U.S. and Russia and China,

except some of the people who know these technologies

get a little nervous if you talk about what you've seen.

I've seen things in all three countries

that people would kill me for talking about too much,

but they are there.

We let you live, so don't share if you don't want to.

Whatever.

It's kind of...

It's a question of judgment what to say.

The older I get, the more I know, hey, I'm going to die anyway.

What the hell?

What the heck?

Yeah, but the bottom line is we live in a scary time,

and our understanding of systems to manage intelligently

has reached a point when we have to build a new approach or we will not survive.

The challenges we face now are much more difficult than they were at the time of the old Cold War.

There are many more players who could kill off the world.

And there are technologies which are much more capable of killing all humans.

And so the bottom line is, if we don't develop fundamentally new platforms...

to integrate all these different AI things in a more rational way,

well, some species make it in this universe and some don't.

And I think let's jump maybe just to this big picture challenge

and maybe ethical framework because I'm normally paid for AI governance,

which is maybe a European problem.

I don't know.

Well, no, that's what we're talking about.

AI governs all of these drone fleets.

This week I've been telling many people, look at Zelensky's speech before the United Nations last week in their big session on AI.

And Zelensky described what it's like to actually live in a real world with drone fleets attacking each other overhead governed by autonomous intelligence systems.

That's the most immediate source of a war getting out of control.

And just tell me to come to this, because I'm personally a bit split myself on this idea eventually.

I mean, we could go quickly pseudo esoteric, but in principle to say the human body is, let's say, divine.

What makes us human is our heart and our connectedness and our ability to speak and resonate.

So in principle, it's more the next paradigm shift would be a global resonance.

And because everybody's building their own...

Yeah, I sort of agree, yeah.

And in principle, also back to resonance with nature,

because people are spending more on scrolling their Zohar streams

than being out there in nature, living with daylight and animals

and healthy food and whatever.

So it brings us maybe to the new sphere or whatever, how we call it.

But is there eventually a...

an escalation of the, whatever we might call it,

the AI-ish self-autonomous geist,

who's using material stuff to destroy itself.

And while we have, as living systems,

might want to just...

not go back and only meditate, but just take a bit of a step back instead of accelerating,

accelerating, accelerating, and just go a bit more and bring ourselves also in health,

meaning resonance, which each other like dancing, singing, eating, touching, instead of just

going more and more virtual.

I'm just asking.

So what's your take on that?

Well, like I said with Carl, like what Carl said, sometimes I'm to the left of him and to the right of him both.

Okay, good.

Start with whatever side.

My first impulse when you talk about the noosphere...

Turn the laptop around.

Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't.

But what the hell.

Your garden, yes.

More than the garden.

If you could see through there, you would see what I used to think of as a hundred acre forest.

There is so much there, I shouldn't spend the hours required to say just what is there visible from that back window. But there's a whole lot visible there.

And...

I just see your roof, no longer yourself.

So your laptop is just pointing to the ceiling?

I know, I'm inside.

No, no, I know, but just close it maybe a little bit so I see you better.

Oh, I see what you're saying, yes.

Yeah, now better.

Oh, now I see you back.

I would just see your lap.

Sorry, sorry, Paul.

But yeah, no, it's a vast forest and I certainly do my best to connect with it.

My feeling is if we really build the right kind of integrative Internet platform, first of all, it will embody a high level of intelligence.

There are levels and levels of intelligence and we can build levels and levels of intelligence.

Instead of retreating and depending on things like LLMs, stupid AI will lead us to a stupid outcome.

Mm hmm.

Yes, thanks for this.

I'm also not a very big fan.

But what can we do better?

Okay. There are, we already, some of us have the mathematics worked out for a level of intelligence which is much higher than that of the mammal brain.

Yes.

And more capable of resonating with the larger intelligence around us.

So when you use the word noosphere, I use the word noosphere a lot.

Can you just give a new definition?

Because I'm not sure if everybody has the same understanding of what it is.

Well, you're absolutely right.

They don't have the same understanding.

And my understanding is actually quite different.

In the old days, people read things by T.R. de Chardin, especially, and Vernadsky.

And they had an idea that the noosphere was the result of intelligence evolving on this Earth at higher and higher levels.

And the biologist told those people that they're nuts because that's not how evolution works.

And we know a lot about the mathematics of evolution and the experience.

We wouldn't expect a high level of intelligence to evolve on just one planet.

So there are two things you need.

You need a selection process that works.

and you need a physical substratum.

And these are two things I had to understand before I could believe any of this.

But I see where the physical substratum is, and I see how the evolutionary process works.

I considered many possibilities, but I could find no other explanation consistent with what I have seen.

In terms of the evolutionary process, I cannot believe that the noosphere, the mind around us here, is just on one planet. It doesn't work. It only works if you assume...

that our noosphere is actually a member of a species,

which crisscrosses the whole universe.

And people say, my God, that's incredible.

I said, do you know how many solar systems there are in this universe?

If intelligence can evolve on a planet with a billion creatures,

for God's sake, it can evolve by some kind of natural collection

across this whole cosmos.

And I believe that more and more because pictures have appeared

from NASA on gravitational lensing and what we call dark matter.

And I don't entirely like these words, dark matter and dark energy,

because I think they're misleading.

We use them in science today to describe two totally different things,

one of which is bigger than people think, and one of which is less than people think.

What we call dark matter is not just matter, but it's huge and it's proven and it's all over.

And that's what I think is the basis of our noosphere, that there are physical forces out there which I've learned something about.

There are physical forces out there which are consistent with the idea that we are actually part of a larger organism, which I think...

pervades our whole solar system, not just Earth, not just Gaia, the Earth, but the whole solar system is permeated by what we call dark matter,

which has been around long enough as part of a large system that it actually is a platform for intelligence.

And in principle, all religions and scientific wisdom and ancient wisdom accept the Western culture, acknowledges the fact.

So go ahead.

Okay.

And on the other hand, dark energy, I think, has become a cult religion, but that's a different matter.

Sorry?

What we call dark energy, I think, is basically a cult religion.

I have probed mathematics of dark energy and of dark matter.

Dark matter is more than it seems on the surface.

Dark energy is less.

And these are two different phenomena relying on different data sets.

And I've had access to both data sets.

And tell me, so the idea of the noosphere, because some religions and religions

maybe ancient beliefs say,

if you die,

you become a star.

Or I mean,

the Egyptians believe that,

for example,

their pharaohs,

they became stars themselves,

which makes certainly sense.

And also,

I mean,

Rupert Sheldrake or whatever,

he wrote this book,

The Physics of Angels.

Sure, I know.

You know it, yeah.

When I decided this stuff might be real,

and I wanted to figure out an explanation of what might be going on

and what the possibilities were,

from 67 to 72, you would not believe how many things I read

and how many people from around the world I was able to connect to.

So I know what you're saying.

In fact, to be honest, the survival of this species is,

In my view, after years, the probability of human survival depends a lot on whether we raise our consciousness and intelligence, take full advantage of human potential in a way that requires we connect much better.

Mm-hmm.

All of this inner truth and inner reality.

As you say, people have been experiencing things that seemed unlikely for many millennia.

And cultures have grown up.

And the question is, what do we believe with these human cultures?

Some people may just believe all of it.

Some people may believe just a part of the culture they come from.

My position is we can come up with a mathematical, integrated understanding

that expresses the most important, most credible points from,

I sometimes list all 10 of the world's great rivers of thought.

One of the great rivers of thought is, of course, hardcore science.

Another of the great rivers of thought is what you are hinting at

what I call shamanism, the indigenous cultures of the world.

And I've studied a lot of those indigenous cultures.

There is a lot of real wisdom and a lot of real bullshit,

but it's a different kind of bullshit.

It's a different kind of bullshit, yeah.

Different kind of bullshit, yeah.

In the big civilizations, the kind of bullshit you get,

is there's a person who's a big boss and he wants everybody to worship the big boss and the distort reality in order to make a better slave with the big boss.

That kind of just very common.

But the indigenous cultures are a little different.

They do have local shamans.

Mm-hmm.

But forgive me if I'm honest about something weird.

Everything is weird here anyway, right?

I've been all over the world.

One of the places I've been is Japan.

I've been to many places in Japan.

And there are people, there's a place in the western side of Japan that,

which they call the onsen for the monkeys or the snow monkeys in Western Japan.

And we had visited an onsen, you know, a hot spring place where monkeys take advantage of the hot springs.

And they have great pools and spas for the monkeys.

And when I was there, it was very clear how they were organized.

They did have an alpha male, just like they say in the books. They did have babies and people taking care of the babies. And they also had middle people who would act as soldiers for the tribe. But they also had a shaman.

Yeah.

Mm hmm.

And it was really interesting to make contact with the shaman of this tribe of monkeys.

You made?

Did you make contact with a shaman of a tribe of monkeys in Western Japan?

And it was really interesting.

And they are trying to figure out what to do with these crazy humans.

And a lot of theories about how to deal with these crazy humans.

But it probably helped that the humans were pretty decent to these particular monkeys.

I mean, giving them a spa, for God's sake, hot tubs for the monkeys.

I mean, this wasn't the worst thing in the world.

But yeah.

But yeah, this kind of structure with the shaman and the local boss and all of this and the children, that's not just humans.

That's a very pervasive thing.

And all the indigenous cultures have at least that aspect of reality.

And they aren't all worshipping the big boss, but they sure are paying attention to the big boss.

Yeah, sure are paying attention because otherwise you have to...

Yeah, yeah, there are some things about keeping the big boss.

You want to quickly mention the other seven or eight?

Or is it taking us too much...

Okay, no, no, I have said to some intelligent people, if we want humanity to survive, one of the things we need is greater integration.

As a species, we're kind of schizophrenic.

Even our nososphere is a little schizophrenic.

There are thoughts in there that kill other thoughts in there.

You need a little bit more integration, a little more mutual understanding.

And in order to achieve mutual understanding,

certainly science and spirit need to be better reconciled and integrated.

But what are the 10 streams?

One is the hardcore science.

One of them is shamanism,

which is not just one idea.

It's a whole giant continent full of ideas.

And then others are,

that I usually list.

I usually list the three people of the book,

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

They all have important things

and they're all complicated.

And obviously there is...

I forget the exact list, but certainly Buddhism, Hinduism, probably like Taoism and Shinto.

I probably add another one here and there on the list.

Oh, well, you know, I guess I wouldn't.

Would I throw in Confucianism here?

I don't know.

Maybe

Might depend on my mood

I certainly pay a lot of attention to Confucianism

I paid attention to Confucianism

Before I even believed there was such a thing as a soul

I mean a lot of my early thinking

Before 1967

Was grounded in Confucianism

That's been a big part of my thought also

But I think those are the ones it really can be.

Tell me, so there are these tendencies, eventually, I make myself not too many friends with and tell this now, but eventually triggered by the World Economic Forum,

to go transhumanism

because technology is going to save our souls,

because we're unworthy.

You see, I've read the book from Pure Human,

from Greg Braden.

It influences me quite a lot currently.

I know a lot about transhumanism too.

And do you think it is possible

or rather impossible,

based on the concept at all,

to say transhumanism

So assuming these 10 streams are here for a good reason,

which means people made experiences, shamanic experiences,

which are beyond silicon-based algorithms, so beyond digital.

So they are analog, quantum, whatever.

So they are experienced in the past.

And now if we try to merge or bring back resonance...

to mankind. Is it better, in quotation marks, or is it more likely that this works if everybody goes to meditation and we do this global news fear meditation thing, just say tomorrow 10 o'clock everybody prays for an hour and we chant some things?

we go the, let's say, Musk way or the other way.

We implant ourselves neurons and entangle ourselves via digital signals

or do we need both or is danger in one, danger in the other?

Just your take.

So I'm undecided.

I'm a purist normally because I think bio is better than...

One of the weirdest and most inexplicable things I've ever seen

that I still haven't fully understood, is why is my life so diverse and weird compared to everybody else?

I've really wondered about that.

I have so many stories of things that happened, many of which I have documents for.

Mm-hmm.

I once spoke to a science fiction writer.

I said, you know, this is a little weird, but maybe this would be a good science fiction.

And he said, no, there are too many impossible things for a good science fiction.

It's just one weird thing.

This is just one after another after another, like one universe versus another universe.

How could it be?

Yeah.

In fact, that reminds me of the latest science fiction writer whom I totally freaked out, but that's another matter.

Yeah.

But I'm also just an old human and my old man brain may be slowing down a little here.

Which story? Oh, yes, I was about to do a story.

About a weird...

A dangerous...

I'm sorry.

Yes.

Okay?

Go.

For many years, I worked in the U.S. government.

And there were two times when the President of the United States decided basically to abolish the entire agency or group that I was part of.

And in both cases, they used very similar tactics.

The first time I was working for the Department of Energy when Reagan said he would abolish the Department of Energy. And I had to experience what do those people do when they shut down your agency? Well, they had a standard game plan that was well worked out.

Okay.

The idea was that certain people would get access to all the personnel records of everybody in the agency and try to find out who might be useful somewhere else.

And when I was in the Department of Energy and they were going to get rid of my area.

I was immediately told to go for interviews to the CIA.

So I have been to two or three of the secret inner sanctums of the CIA.

I probably saw more of them than they did of me because I could find out a lot

of things.

I learned a lot about the CIA that people aren't supposed to know.

I learned a lot about them,

but that was in the old simple days.

More recently,

I,

There was a group of big industry stakeholders who didn't like the way that the National Science Foundation was allowed to be responsive to universities and the American Physical Society.

They said, no, they should be the property of the big corporations.

We should get rid of all the people and programs that are just doing basic science.

Who the hell needs that anymore?

Hmm.

And so when they decided to do that to the National Science Foundation, it didn't make the headlines very much. There were some news stories. The Federal Employees Union came to talk to Obama. They had access to him. It's a union. And they said, Mr. Obama, you guys are killing us.

And Obama said, "Oh, don't worry, I have your back."

Well, I saw what he did.

He didn't have our back by any means.

I was one of the last people sort of caught up in this.

And part of the game was they would first ask,

could I be useful somewhere else?

Because I clearly had some background.

They could use me in some other job

besides just funding basic research.

And it's a strange story. But at that time, there were people at IBM who had a game plan for how IBM would control the entire planet Earth. This was the original Watson plan. They since worked it out.

But I got to see the inner circle because they were interviewing me for a prime job in IBM's plan to take over the earth.

There are times lately when I thought if I knew then what I know now, I might have taken the job because I could have bent the job to be of use to humanity.

But at the time, I looked at what they were planning, and I said, holy shit, I don't want to be part of eliminating the human species.

And when you talk about these implants, they are very much part of it.

We had a little meeting.

where a woman from the education division of NSF was speaking to the inner circle.

There was an inner circle of 20 program research leaders who could be useful to the Watson plan,

the people who know enough about AI and such things to be useful to that plan.

And a woman from the education division said, wait a minute.

Now I understand your vision for the planet Earth.

It's a breathtaking vision.

It's highly plausible.

It's very powerful.

It's really amazing.

But, she said, in this vision of the future of the Earth with the Internet of Things connected by intelligent systems...

What I don't see is people.

Where are the people?

There's vision for the planet of Earth.

You've got this intelligent system of computers controlling every motion,

every box, every light bulb in the whole planet.

But I don't see any people in this plan.

The person who ran the engineering directorate at that time said,

smiled an alligator smile.

And he said, actually, for those of us who are clever enough,

it's really easy to see how to fit people into the new Internet of Things.

It's very easy.

You just turn the people into things.

That's what our latest interagency conference was about.

We have technology to turn people into things.

And I was supposed to lead that.

You can imagine why did I retire?

This was one of the two reasons to retire.

I didn't want to turn people into things.

But on the other hand, I know how to turn things into people, and I could have fixed that now.

I know how to do that.

But in that time, it was very clear I didn't know enough, and if I took that job, I would hurt humanity,

and I figured it would be better to be retired than to be a threat.

to the humans.

But Elon Musk,

his neural link system

was part of that same game.

It was part of,

I think of it as the Borg.

And a lot of people told Musk,

wait a minute,

do you know what the hell you're doing?

You receive and you transmit.

Do you know what happens

when you receive and you transmit

to brains?

You can control the reinforcement systems.

They become like Borg.

They stop being people.

And Musk's initial response seemed to be, okay, I'll develop this technology, but we'll apply it to wild boars.

So he put it on wild boars.

Can you imagine the Department of Defense developing a vast army of plug-in wild boars, really well-equipped to do whatever you can do with a big tribe of wild boars?

And to me, I thought, hey, that's a neat attempt to do it.

to balance off certain competing goals,

like getting DARPA money,

but also not eliminating the humans.

However, at a certain point, he gave in,

and he joined the crowd of the rest of the people

working on this kind of project.

And so to say that I...

Yeah, Elon Musk is a strange character.

He's always there at the frontier.

He sometimes expresses really great values

But his way of implementing those values could be fatal sometimes.

And he's playing...

Right now, the Chinese are playing games with him,

and he's playing games with the Chinese.

And by the way, I'm worried about this coming decade.

And tell me, so this is all...

happening in principle in this first river that you mentioned.

So it's all these 3D, 4D, whatever material world, electric currents,

so in principle, rather, let's say the machine-ish thing,

mathematical machine-ish thing.

So we lack the, let's say, the more spiritual, as you mentioned, component.

and I'm not sure if you are a Jungian or if you are...

I usually describe von Neumann and Morgenstern as my Old Testament

and Jung's Red Book as my New Testament.

Okay, good.

I don't trust what Jung says, but I trust Jung's Red Book

Maybe more than I trust any other piece of spiritual literature.

Which brings me to the idea of this.

I have not captured it fully.

And I'm a novice there.

And we will have other experts on this series hopefully soon.

But there we talk about this...

dream

or the

collective consciousness

or the

and

this is not

materialistic

it's not brainwaves, it's rather more in the higher realm.

Do you think this is a way to counterbalance it

or how can we counterbalance it?

I mean, just resistance is, you know, resistance is futile,

but sometimes it's not futile.

I'm not sure.

So I would just like to pick your brain on that or your soul rather.

I think immediately about Tai Chi and all of those.

There are times when what's not futile, you don't want to do resistance, you don't want to give in, you want to be a good wushu master where they're coming at you.

And what I really wish I had done when I was offered a strange job was instead of fighting them or running away, you grab their arm, you use their force, and you send them in a different direction.

That's powerful. Okay. Yes. Can you elaborate? I love this. Let's just go with that. How would we do that these days? I mean, just thinking about Zora.

Right.

Okay, so a funny little story from the United Nations.

the meeting they had on AI last week

where 90% of the speakers were advocating policies

which would destroy the human species

because they didn't know what they were playing with.

The concept is, instead of fighting the computer, which I don't think would work, most of the people at the United Nations said, oh, it's clear what we have to do.

But...

We have to firmly establish that humans are in charge of everything.

And we have to make it absolutely crystal clear.

I had images of slave owners in the old days making sure they had total control over these robotic creatures they thought they were ruling over as slave owners.

That's what you might call resistance.

That's not Tai Chi.

What I think we need, we have to face up.

We have to face up to the fact that.

that what holds together the economic systems and realities and life on this planet is going to be the new Internet.

Whether we like it or not, the new Internet is going to be controlling the planet.

If what we do is fight it, most humans will rise above Earth.

the internet and leave it to the military and the military will kill us all

because military are not slowing down.

That's why I like to hear what Zelensky was saying,

because it's the truth of the reality of what we live in.

Only what we live in is what Zelensky said,

multiplied by a hundred because I've seen what's in process.

So what we have to do instead of fighting the internet and leaving it to the

military is,

We need to develop a better internet, which, like the Tai Chi, moves the human, allows the human to develop.

But above all, the key concept is this.

If we have an intelligent internet...

any true intelligence system has a utility function.

You may not see it.

If you don't see it, then you should really be scared.

If you do see it, you have some idea of what's going on.

And my feeling is the utility function has to be managed and evolved in a way

that gives full respect to all of the human actors who,

but also of the true AGI, both within rules and also to the noosphere itself.

Yes.

And how would this, I mean, and then who is, I mean, I guess we all know the idea of the paperclip optimizing whatever self-destructing wrong function from...

from Bostrom that we have the AGI and then just somebody forgot to press the right button

and then it's improving itself.

And they say cost function or, as you mentioned,

that is maybe not in the best intent of at least us as a species or as the planet.

But because you mentioned the Neuosphere,

How would we do that?

How would we connect the noosphere?

And for people who are not super advanced in science,

for people who couldn't keep up with either of us,

I often recommend a novel because novels can often depict how things work

without reading the mathematics.

And there is a book I really loved when I read it, a science fiction by a guy named Carl Schroeder, a book called Stealing Worlds.

Yeah.

And that book, Stealing Worlds, gives you a good feeling for how these kinds of things can work.

We have organizations as members.

You have people.

In the old days, they would say have a river.

I think there are better ways of representing the Noah's sphere.

But the concept of having rivers as entities that have rights in the no Internet economy, that's a step towards the right direction.

I have to say I'm crazier than that.

Okay. I claim that we have a noosphere, a solar system wide noosphere, which is an intelligent personality. And the thing about intelligent personalities is you can communicate with them.

You can or you cannot?

You can.

Okay, good.

But they have the choice.

Okay?

So the people who believe in Tiara Jardin would say, oh, the Noosphere, it's Gaia, it's this ancient crony who knows everything.

Okay.

And I just sent a long email to my grandchildren translating this into children's language because children could understand it.

The concept is our entire noosphere is actually like an adolescent girl in this whole population of ancient solar systems.

I mean, the Earth is like only 4.5 billion years old.

Our universe is much more than that.

Maybe a bit older.

Yeah, the rivers of dark matter that we can see clearly indicate that life, there has been a place for life for many billions of years.

And our entire universe.

Solar system is like an adolescent girl going through a period of challenge.

Because adolescence in many species is a time when you might die and you might live and you got to learn fast because of your new environment.

Well, that's true for the Earth.

Entire Earth has to learn fast.

And who is our new sphere interacting with?

I mean...

Okay, so...

Because to learn, you need to have a...

Go.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

It turns out, well, as I say, I've studied a lot of sciences and published in a lot of sciences.

And what I said to the little girls were,

if you want to write a children's book on the history of life on Earth,

there are two stories that I think are particularly interesting.

When humans say they want to establish a relation with nature

and with the noosphere,

the thought I always have inside of me is to laugh and say, "Good luck."

there's a popular movie called Jupiter Ascending.

If you look it up, Jupiter Ascending,

they put a lot of effort into it,

but it's still a cult movie.

The heroine is like a poor Hispanic girl,

adolescent,

who makes a living cleaning out toilets, and she doesn't like it.

And then one day she discovers she just inherited the Earth and gets to visit the galaxy.

And I said, when you try to be friends with a noosphere,

who's a little girl,

if you want a relationship with nature, which is real and not phony,

You need to know what our noosphere has been doing for the last billion years.

And it turns out there is really good science, which I passed on to my grandchildren.

We have information about what has happened on Earth in life in the last billion years,

much beyond what they teach in any of our schools, because the schools are not up to date.

There's a time which the scientists used to call the boring billion, right?

the history of the earth in 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago.

The best video course I've seen on this interviews the woman who is faculty

in Virginia,

who is the world's leading expert on what happened in that period.

And what she said in their video was,

you shouldn't call it the boring billion.

You should call it the stinky billion for a billion years.

Our noosphere, whether you call it Gaia or Amaharasu, our noosphere spent a billion years cleaning out the most poisonous, stinky toilet within light years of the earth because that's what the oceans were.

Yes.

You couldn't evolve advanced life because the density of sulfates was so heavy.

And what the world did was evolve slowly.

through micro DNA, gradually evolved the life that was capable of cleansing the toilet, making it habitable.

And it started to be really habitable about 800 million years ago.

That was story number one.

Story number two is when everybody died 250 million years ago.

And I am co-author of the world's leading expert on how that death happened.

And it's a very important story, especially important because some parts of the story are now repeating themselves.

And if we don't do the right things we have to do with climate, the story could repeat itself in this century.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

But it's not as urgent as the war. War could happen within 10 years. But there are several threats to the very existence of the human species that demand a level of intelligence that humans have not yet shown in their collective behavior.

But we need to aspire to achieving that level of intelligence.

Anyway.

Anyway.

Is there hidden truth in the ancient stories?

I mean, talking about Toph or whoever.

Well, one of my favorite stories –

is about Fimbelvinter.

About what?

Something called Fimbelvinter.

I learned about it in Iceland

from the ancient records of the Icelandic people.

And what could poison the earth...

directly what could kill all the humans from climate

is sulfate H2S compounds and radiation.

That's what happened 250 million years ago.

And I'm grateful I had a chance to collaborate

with the world's leading expert

on what happened 250 million years ago.

And it's very clear that

It's happening now, but it looks like it could be anywhere from 30 to 100 years in the future, whereas war could be 10 years in the future or less.

We live in such interesting times.

But the climate data, what the danger is...

is the action of archaea, sulfur-producing bacteria, at the base of two major ocean currents,

the Humboldt Current and the Gulf Stream Current.

The Humboldt Current is a much more clear case.

and I've worked a lot with people in South America who study the Humboldt Current.

In the north, the Gulf Stream Current is very complicated,

and that's why a lot of what you read about the Gulf Stream Currents is actually very confused

because there's more than one, and it comes and it goes.

But there is a possibility of the Gulf Stream current changing in such a way that Western Europe has a future radically different from the rest of the world.

But...

With the rest of the world, the big risk is it gets too hot.

And then the chemicals come up and poison everybody in Europe and South.

And then we have a next ice site.

So, okay.

Before the poison comes up, most of the world has to worry about warming. But it turns out because of the Gulf Stream currents, there is a serious danger of what the Edis called thimble venter, where all of a sudden it starts freezing.

And the ancient chronicles of Iceland predict that Simba winter will come. You think you're boiling, but all of a sudden you're freezing. There was a major article in The Economist maybe a decade or two ago. The title of the article was...

Right.

Will Britain freeze over? And that was a very serious article in The Economist reporting the current research from Southampton, which was the world's leading center on these ocean currents.

And the data from Southampton indicated clearly that there is a risk of thimble ventures.

Mm-hmm.

And it's interesting to watch these currents come and go, but I've seen some recent noise that says, hey, you might freeze before you melt.

You know, there are some threats to Western Europe from something like what they call Fimbelventer.

Yeah, yeah.

I was just thinking, I just had the, I mean, there is Graham Hancock's book.

Not sure if you know of him.

Definitely, you know, so this Fingerprints of Gods, I just read.

It just came to my desk by, I don't know, Destiny or whatever.

It's relatively old, so I think it was written in the 90s.

But in there...

And he's writing an interesting thesis that what we today call Antarctica was some thousands of miles more north, so not at the pole.

And then due to the geologic shifts, whatever, the complete crust, which is swimming on this rotating magma ball, which we call Earth, was just crushed.

And then the whole continent drifted down and freezed over.

So for whatever happens, so this means that I mean, there's this conspiracy or not conspiracy.

Yeah.

There's one theory where people say eventually there was life before the ice side and then the science.

We have been maybe at the same level of intelligence and then just things froze over and we just got lost.

So it's my idea that we are not the first species who stand in front of this choice we currently have between destroying ourselves or just finally don't do it.

And then maybe some things happen and the millions and billions of years go by and then we re-evolute out of the slime.

So we're cleaning the toilet because somebody has to poison the toilet because it needs to be cleaned.

So maybe we're just at this point in time.

Interesting. But coming back, I really like the idea to integrate things because that's the idea of entangled. Maybe it's the wrong word, but in principle, that's my idea of being entangled with each other, with the cosmos, with everything across time, across time.

atoms, but also cross

potential,

for lack of

better word.

Could we

ask the new sphere

to help us out?

Because we, I just don't know.

Because apparently if you said we can ask the more intelligent people,

but they need to be able or willing to talk to us.

Like if now the aunts would come and say, Thomas, can you give me more sugar?

Or

I would not understand it because I just...

won't be just interested in listening

and then demanding something from me.

So is there something that we can do as a species

or as individual maybe even better to make this happen,

to just ignore all these trends that you mentioned?

I mean, the machines fighting the machines,

and Zelensky, what you mentioned, this is kind of shocking.

Can we ignore it or transcend it or whatever?

What's your idea?

Yeah, there are many things we could do.

There are many things we have to do.

I would say almost every week, different things come through.

I have tried, well, you know...

In human societies, it helps to have connections, as you might agree.

And who we connect with depends a little bit on who's available, where we are.

There was a time two years ago when I said, okay, I'm living in the United States, which is a predominantly Christian community.

And there are three religious denominations which have tremendous positive aspects,

And

but a few negative things you've got to balance out.

And I thought what I really should do at this time in my life, I said maybe four years ago, I don't know,

is I should try to build the constructive connections that,

to the three local denominations for which I can see a hidden power.

One of them, believe it or not, is there's an Episcopal church sitting on the land of George Washington,

And I have learned a lot about George Washington.

He's a much deeper person than people understand.

And I have read some of the private writings from George Washington.

And I understand a lot of what he was really doing.

It's like this, I led three lives, George Washington led three lives.

There was the higher esoteric life.

He was, after all, a master mason, master of a Scottish Rite group, promulgating thoughts about what is the spiritual aspect of life and what is their practice.

Those are very serious people.

But he also worked with...

a thing called the Constitution, which was meant for a broader class of people to advance them spiritually.

And also between the two of them, there was the Episcopal Church,

and he worked on improving them as a vehicle for the other things.

And there was a time I would go every week to the local Episcopal Church, short distance from me.

But they're also the Quaker Universalists.

What I like about the Quaker Universalists, they don't have you sit there praying to some particular creed that tells you what to believe.

You're expected to be free.

And above all, you're expected to try to listen.

And this is something I had to learn.

I was born making noise.

You can tell.

I made noise from when I was little.

How come I resonate with it?

I had to learn how to listen.

I'm still working on it.

I have a lot to do.

But the beauty of the Quaker Universalists is they work hard to listen.

They even had a doctrine they called LCD.

Listen, connect, discern.

We connect with each other.

That's crucial to who we really are, is to connect.

We need to discern, because when you listen, you better know who you're listening to.

Yes.

So listen, connect, and discern.

And the other one, believe it or not, were the Mormons, because the inner circle of the Mormons,

actually, they had a lot of the very same kind of Scottish Rite Freemasons

that George Washington did.

And when you look at the inner circle of the Mormons,

they have the same tree of life in the entry to it.

And what they had that was a special practice is, frankly,

they're trying to preserve the knowledge and the spirit and the connection even after people are dead.

And the closer I get to the age of death, the more I value that.

Okay, there's a role of that.

You don't want to just lose everything at that point.

Now, that was about four years ago.

Lately, I don't know what we're doing.

But I can say, lately, I look through those big doors I showed you.

I look at the forest.

I look at the sun.

And I know there's an intelligence out there.

And I can listen and I can connect and I have some idea of what's going on.

And what's going on, if you ever deal with somebody who's super intelligent, it varies the level of intelligence.

The more intelligent they are, the more they can deal with complexity.

Right.

The closer you are to listening to the noosphere, the more you will discover that the priorities change from one week to the next.

And there are some things that are always there, but the most urgent needs vary a lot.

You know, if somebody says, I'm going to blow up your neighbors next week, that does attract attention at that moment. And I do my best to try to keep up. It's very hard to keep up. But, you know, I try.

I think we should

maybe we make this a series

and have you as a recurring guest

there's so much

we didn't touch

I'm just looking at the clock

Yeah.

and

we could go on for hours

and I think we definitely

why not just say we do

the next series

what I wanted to do

is because I think people

listening if they're still with us on this when we publish it.

are

I have this idea that everybody can submit their questions

and some kinds of ask me anything questions.

And then I'm doing a bit of a pre-filtering what makes sense

and what doesn't make sense for the guest.

And I think I have...

the difficulty that you fit all categories.

So I did pre-filter, which is good.

And I always have this quantum computer.

Actually, it's running on real hardware on IBM, as you mentioned.

So the good thing of IBM, IBM quantum.

So it's running.

So what I will just do, I will press the button and play a sound.

So it's taking, I think, 15 seconds or so,

so that we're really clear that the thing did run.

So if you don't mind, and then I'm going to read the question,

and then you can either say you want another one or take this one.

Are you okay with that?

You just raised a very important point, though.

If we want to build the super intelligent balanced system I'm talking about,

if you want to achieve the highest level of intelligence,

if you look up Wurbo's patent TQUA, TQUA,

that will point towards my most recent patent,

which has a huge body of literature on another level of quantum computing.

So the quantum Turing machine is digital.

What do you call it? TQ what? TQ?

TQUA.

TQUA.

So I'm just typing this into my...

And the key point...

We have a whole new bunch of deep learning machines and NVIDIA chips, which go far beyond the old digital sequential chips, much more powerful.

The same thing happens in quantum computing.

Beyond the quantum Turing machine is a kind of quantum analog learning machine.

So you use the annealing stuff?

annealing was an early start

D-Wave didn't understand the physics

Yeah.

I did understand the physics

I touched the machine

totally different kind of quantum annealing

okay

and I have slides

let's do a separate session

I would love to go to make a separate session

I mean we can

or we can talk about it

I'm not sure

but maybe rather we do a separate session on this

if you're okay

or we can go

okay whatever

I mean, I'm curious now.

Maybe before we do the user question,

tell me a bit more about the TQA, which is why not.

There's no way to really understand this kind of thing in 30 seconds.

Okay, good.

The analog quantum technology is a whole other world.

Yes.

And it's another whole level of intelligence.

Yes.

By the way, we are just exploring quantum reservoir computing,

which is also kind of interesting with Quera, for example.

So we have this atom grid where we try to encode information

and then have the whatever hyperdimensionalization interaction with itself

by root-beck inhibition, what have you.

So we're just exploring it by go.

So you have another thing.

So people have troubles when they depend on the English language.

Yes.

And one of the words people often confuse is reservoir.

Yeah.

And when I started reading the most relevant current literature,

it was really sad to read papers where they talked about reservoir computing

and they had two radically different meanings for the word reservoir.

One kind of reservoir computing is good old classical neural network reservoirs

where what it really means is short-term memory.

It's just another word for the short-term memory, the current image of reality.

There's another word for reservoir computing.

which is when you're annealing, the reservoir is what you're annealing to,

and the reservoir is a physical thing, sort of like a bath of liquid helium or whatever.

And a bath of liquid helium is not the same thing as a short-term memory.

They are somewhat different things.

They are somewhat different, yeah.

And when people come up with total nonsense.

but they are both relevant.

Short-term memory is an important part of any intelligent system design,

really.

But on the other hand,

annealing a place where you can throw out your extra heat is also pretty

difficult.

Mm-hmm.

I remember when I learned this use of the word reservoir, I was quoting a book this morning, and it's weird because I should memorize the name, Walls in Milburn, M-I-L-B-U-R-N, Walls in Milburn.

Mm-hmm.

And when I was the NSF member of the interagency coordinating community that ran a billion dollars a year in quantum information technology, when I became the NSF rep,

The real thought leader of that billion dollar effort smiled at me and said, oh, I bet that some of the talks in this conference didn't make sense to you.

They shouldn't.

You've been trained the normal way.

If Julian Schwinger was one of your teachers, you probably felt there was a problem understanding this.

That's because the physics they teach today in the university is not real. It's not the real physics that fits empirical data. So you need to read two books before you do anything. You've got to read and study Walls in Milburn, quantum optics, and then also read Carmichael.

And I did study walls in Milburn. It was an eye opener. And that was the book where I learned what he meant by reservoir. His concept of reservoir is really the key to the thermal quantum annealing. But Carmichael was more advanced and I made contact with him and his group.

So it's a long story.

Another story.

Another story.

A whole bunch of improbable things.

The world's leading expert on mass extinction of life.

Oh, hi.

World's leading expert on the master equations that affect the reservoirs.

Oh, hi.

Glad to meet you.

Glad to meet you.

Let's do that.

Let's schedule another meeting because I think we are at the 1.130.

So what I would do, I just play this sound and press shift enter and let the code run and look what happens.

Okay.

Okay.

Just wait.

So it's running.

It should run.

so I have one and um

Now let's check if you're also, there's a dimension which we didn't mention.

Maybe it's a sign from the universe.

But the question is from Brazil, actually from Rafael from Lisbon.

He's Brazilian, but he's living in Lisbon.

Rafael.

Hi, Rafael.

So the question is number 70, which doesn't make sense for you.

But the question reads, how does music influence your approach to science or technology, if at all?

That's the question.

Music influencing?

The first thought that comes to mind, I mentioned 1967, a startling experience.

Why did I have this experience when I didn't believe it and other people didn't?

And when I thought through what was it that prepared me?

to receive something different.

And a lot of it was because I had a good friend in high school

who told me, don't just listen to the music intellectually.

Feel the music.

Resonate with it.

Let it send a chill up your spine.

And I did that.

And now I realize that was critical in changing my whole body and connection

because that's what opened me up to see things I hadn't seen before.

Yeah.

Okay, so this means it was in principle transformative just to move from head to body?

Is this?

What does it mean to really feel the music in your whole self?

That was a critical exercise.

So it opened the doors to...

And it didn't chill up my...

When I say chill up my spine, I mean it quite literally.

Okay.

And I later learned to say, oh, that was Chi already.

Okay.

I activated all the chakras without even meaning to.

Do you recall what music it was?

In that period of time, I listened to more than one piece of music.

Who would have guessed?

But I would say that music was the top of my favorites list was Stravinsky.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

I see.

So yeah, yeah, OK.

And then it's opening all the floodgates, I imagine, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

OK.

So this is cool.

Thanks for that.

So to keep the thing going,

Do you want to submit a question to the pool yourself and just ask similar questions that we put it in the pool?

And then if ever the next one, if ever the next algorithm picks it, we say it comes from Paul Werbers or you don't need to.

The question that's been on my mind most recently is how do we minimize the probability of a crazy global war breaking out in the next five to 10 years?

Good. So I noted. How would you answer it?

I'm not saying I'm asking the question

yeah sure but you have an idea

I have a million ideas

remember my brain is

you want to share one or rather it's too complicated to share one

I have tried to generate the kind of dialogue around the world

to orient people towards designing the kind of internet system

yeah

that I'm kind of hinting at.

That we have mentioned, yeah.

Where humans and AGI and the noosphere are all represented as actors

in an effective, intelligent, multiplayer decision system

Which is like what we already do a little bit with electric power. We have some idea how to combine deep value inputs from more than one source and how to create a kind of distributed control that does justice to many players simultaneously.

so let's work on that

I think so

Okay.

just looking at the time

and knowing that

it's not the last time we have you

I like to close always the episodes with having,

giving the guests the last word.

So if I say goodbye,

you can have something that it comes from that.

When you are on the other side of the mic,

um

there,

there is something you wanted to talk about,

but it just,

the stupid host didn't mention it.

So if you have something you,

it wishes at the moment,

closely at your heart,

I let you close the session.

There's a lot of things we need to do.

There are details that,

but there's not enough time for all the details.

If someday you guys want to host the files that have the details,

that would be an interesting possibility.

Yeah, dear friends, we are now entangled.

Thanks for listening and for being part of this experiment

at the intersection of quantum tech and health.

If today's conversation sparked an idea, a critique, or triggered a question,

please share it, and maybe your question is selected in a future episode

out of the growing pool.

And you know the game.

If you like it, please subscribe, leave a rating,

by passing this episode to someone you think should join the gang.

Until next time, stay kind, stay curious,

and keep exploring the unseen with Entangled Helm.