 Thank you Liz and Melissa it's awesome to have you both here and what we're going to try to do for the next half an hour is engage in more questions with the audience but also we're going to work a little bit at trying to engage the two of you with each other. You come from very different backgrounds, have very different experiences, talents, abilities but hopefully you'll notice that we find that what you both do is very synergistic to our interests and so watching, listening to you to maybe respond to each other's opinions and perspectives would be something that I know we would all value. So as we as we take some questions if you have thoughts on what Liz or Melissa says then please please share those two as we go along. Alright so let's go ahead and open up for questions that you haven't been able to ask yet that you would like to direct at us up here. Yeah absolutely so that's a really good question so what are we doing? Well we're doing a couple of things. One thing is we're giving access to gene therapies now so that we can ignite the area we can ignite investment so whenever you have a nascent technology whether it's the first supercomputer or the first electric car it costs a lot of money and that's what we see right now we need to get a therapy built for someone GMP and it costs an enormous amount of money but it's a one-off therapy but we know that if we can get 10 candidates signed up at the same time we can bring down the cost significantly like sometimes up to 70% so one thing that we're doing is expediting the use of the therapeutics so we ignite an industry to get everybody interested in it and the second company an LLC for manufacturing and in that way we can build in large amounts and not only that just cut the cost down significantly and stop this this huge profit off of the top of an area of medicine that is significantly important to humans. On a related note you mentioned earlier in your talk the doctor may tell a 73-year-old that they're healthy but they're not really when we talk about health generally especially as we start to enable access to a broad range of people to become more healthy is there a point at which there's sort of a extra healthy or so forth that would be optional I mean how where do you kind of draw the line and what what we would consider healthy generally seems like especially in a transhumanist vein there are there are therapies that would then go beyond what we would consider normal health right and I'd love to know kind of what your thoughts are yeah so people often you know talk about what is the difference between enhancement and preventative medicine so they're kind of synonymous if you take an immunization you're enhanced you're enhanced against getting a disease if you take antibiotics you're enhanced to probably survive the the bacterial infection that you have so it will definitely slur the lines in those two areas and I don't mean to insult people as we age that we're not healthy but we need to come to the path of understanding and starting a conversation and actually I think that's where you play in significantly is the minute you insult somebody you actually shut them down to a conversation and what I really like about what I've seen here is this idea of a movement of what Micah called the super organism that we have the potential to affect people and by a multitude of different mindsets and different ways of communicating with one another and having different people going out there do it I can't do it on my own we can actually reach more people and create critical mass so but as far as biologically what are we looking for in a human well when you're an embryo you know by the time from an embryo to the time you're born your telomeres go through 3,000 base pairs of attrition and up to 10,000 and you only have 5,000 more attrition left before you're generally diagnosed with an end stage disease correlated so we need to become more than what we are even born as okay so don't get development mixed up with biological aging you're biologically aging from the point of conception to the point of your death development is just a stage of you know growth hormones and things like that that create a young organism to an adult organism but the aging process and damage is happening throughout there and scientifically we can actually now see in some people signs of Alzheimer's in their 20s signs of atherosclerosis around the same ages we're going to become better and better predicting what's going to happen to you down the road but integrating the whole situation here is we need to have a conversation you know on that note I'm wondering Melissa how do you think that the people in the true Jesus Church would react to Liz's presentation today well they probably tell you to pray really hard this really interesting story so there was this I guess it's a different kind of medicine but there was this a lady in 19 the 1930s and she was a nurse a trained nurse and in the city of Wuhan in China and she was also member of the true Jesus Church and one day some guy came into the true Jesus Church and he was sick and he was looking for someone to heal him and she'd never done it before but she put her hands on his head and he said he cried out and he said why is it when you put your hands on my head my whole body burned and then apparently he was healed now on the other hand Wei and Bo the founder of the true Jesus Church was theoretically miraculously healed of tuberculosis in 1916 and then he unhealed himself or he died in 1919 so it's always hard to kind of you know it is it's not really apples to apples when you're talking about you know religious healing and medical healing I actually have a question I'm not a question but kind of just a comment I know how it feels to have to have something going on with your body that's deeply frustrating and that it's like I have cancer right now actually and I've still got my port installed I think I'm technically a cancer survivor because I'm past chemotherapy does that make you a cancer survivor I don't know how long it's going to last so I know like that feeling of what's up with you body you know like you're young healthy I took care of you and what's up with us and then I guess one question that I have though is that like the process of having cancer has made me feel you know has like provoked all the existential questions that you see in the good place and in some ways it's been really good for my writing I guess it's been actually great for my right I've like written a book manuscript because because it's you know provoke those questions so I guess my question is if we get older and older well that somehow I don't know not not diminish the meaning of life but does it if we have more and more control over life then is that sort of a sort of illusion like if we have control over our health there are a lot of other things we don't have control over I mean how does that how does that affect the meaning of life what do you think about that that's a good question I think that right now what we do is we live historically by a lot of myths and so what we do is we construct reason and purpose around our situation right so when my son got sick I I needed to have purpose I needed to help kids and then I went out there and and so it can be constructive or destructive depending on on the outcome and I think that living I think that world will always have problems okay and I think that living by the myth that aging creates some sort of meaning in life that that Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease creates meaning I just I cannot believe that that that is possibly true I think that we fall into time really well and when that's not a problem just like when infectious disease wasn't a problem we will fall out of the necessity for the rituals that we had at that point and again I am not against religion at all even though I wasn't raised religious I have almost no understanding of it but religious people are the original immortalists you know the rest of the people are just kind of living day-to-day so I have a high respect for starting at the level of that we believe in health and happiness and and I see Jesus as this great player of curing disease and then I see him persecuted and prosecuted for it and and it perplexes me and I had a lot of questions about that today two different groups that I sat with that I would like to understand but I don't see this as a movement of one group I see this as a movement of all of us and actually it is a natural phenomena when people become diagnosed with something that they're actually freed up because we spend a lot of time worrying about what's going to happen and it has been written about over and over again how empowering it can be to get a diagnosis become very productive around that and then I hope you are in complete remission and we you never have to face cancer again and that you live so long with me that when you do we will have a fast fix for it because those are coming you know so that's all I can do. I have eaten a lot of ice cream. That sugar and cancer are too bad things. I like whatever. Ice cream. Life is short. I guess the point is life will always be short. I mean because one of the kind of major kind of premises of Mormonism is that the purpose of having a body is they kind of have the deep frustrations that come with the body and I feel like in some way I never really understood that because I had a healthy body. I ran marathons. I was you know frustrated when I injured my knee or something but that's like not the same thing as being frustrated because you have cancer. So I guess I guess I'm not you know just get your chart of how you know the ways we die has changed. I guess I'm not frustrated because I have tuberculosis and measles or those kinds of things. I guess we can just all be frustrated in different ways. There's always going to be some way to kind of come up with challenges and go against them. But I guess I'll go ahead. I see you. Well yeah you just you you provoked a thought. You know in Mormon scripture we have the image of God weeping. So being a God in Mormonism is not always hunky dory. And in Mormonism also God is embodied. And you mentioned a perspective on the purpose of embodiment. And I'm interested if you would elaborate on those two things I just pulled out in in relation to what you said about the purpose of embodiment. In Mormonism God has a body. Is God experiencing embodiment for the same purpose that you feel you might be. Right well you know there's all sorts of deeply painful and frustrating things about you know different conditions that people have. But I guess what I would say I think you know Latter-day Saints believe that God's power comes from you know overcoming challenges. And it's not about you know life is not a competition. Lots of things happen to you. And I guess what I've discovered is that you know we think about God as this kind of all powerful being who has all this you know capability and is kind of impervious to problems. But what I've noticed about just kind of experiencing sickness myself is that like vulnerability is very very it's very powerful. It changes the way that you talk to people. It changes the way you think about life. And I think it increases your capacity like in a strange way like that. Like the emptiness you feel gives you capacity. But what do you think about it? I 100% agree I think that there's there's no place in the world for ego anymore. And I think that when we don't have things like cancer and heart disease and whatever else we're going to still have people starving and we're going to have humility. I think we should be humiliated. I do not think that we're you know on the path to becoming gods and goddesses. I think that we're on the path to at best upgrading the human and understanding ourselves better and the world better. And I think that it should be a process that we take quite seriously. And I don't think that there's room for egos here. I think that humility is a really important thing. And I feel like I experience it on a daily basis. And sometimes very strongly and sometimes not. And I try to take it as as an important part of my life. And as as you do, and as a way to open up and to see our imperfections. And I think that it opens me up to criticism in our company has always been open to criticism, criticize us and help us fix the problem. Help us see what the problem is because we have to do this together. I cannot do this alone. I cannot stand alone and in and try to create a world of safe therapeutics. I have to you know, people have to help me and and whether that's safe therapeutics or or communicating with people and sharing your your your experience and which is is incredibly powerful. And working through your networks and me working through mine, we kind of have to work towards the same goal. And which is a, a benevolent society that has a reason to live much longer with each other. Because if we all have a zero sum game, that we're just looking for our own endpoints, we're going to lose or end up with a world that we don't want. So this is maybe a silly question. But so so I guess you're talking about how we can live longer to prevent certain diseases like cancer and atherosclerosis and, you know, kind of like the big the big ticket items. What about things like, for example, bad knees and bad eyesight that you can't completely fix? I mean, have you seen the good place? So you know, like, how there's that lady in the middle in the middle place, where she has like all the videos she wants, but they're all the certain kind of show. Or like, you know, she's got, you know, she's got complete freedom. But like in this one place, you know, like, what if you like have a really long life, but you have bad knees and bad eyes? And you know, like, how does it solve everything? Well, I mean, this is this is the first inklings that we really had that we could move regenerative medicine forward to the whole body was because the work they're doing on knees and eyes. So in gene therapy, one of the big advancements has been with congenital blindness and now macular degeneration. So these are like kind of the first therapies. Well, see the eye is immune privileged and in order to treat the eye, we can actually target most of the cells in the eye, whereas we go for a whole organism and you can see biology is rough, right? The bloodstream is going to only hit so many cells and we're going to have a hard time. But when you work with the eye, it's actually a closed system and the immune system will not attack it in your body. It's immune privileged. So these are the areas that we actually got the first glimpse, no pun intended, that we could actually regenerate a whole body. So yes, it is in all of those little things and building up from those little things. So our company right now, one of the things that we're looking at is using regenerative gene therapies in Oregon specific. And by doing that, it's the first time we can look at a gene therapy that won't cost much more than people who go and get stem cell work or get plastic surgery or something like that. It's around 20 to $65,000. It's in that range. And the reason that we're doing that is because we want to regenerate a whole organism, but a whole organism is so difficult. And yet we've gained so much interest from eyes and knees and joints that we think that this is the place to start. Because if we can regenerate a kidney or a liver, now we're on to something continually trying to transduce a whole organism with gene therapies that we really don't have the right delivery methods for yet is costly and only for the people who really, really need it. But yeah, looking at Oregon specific is exactly where we need to go to make cost effective therapies and to prove that we have some evidence. And they're already doing that and achieving it. Because in my mind, I had this kind of like idea like whack-a-mole. The game of whack-a-mole just lasts longer, right? Yeah, that sounds really difficult. So if you imagine if we can use that power of the knees or the eyes and create a therapy for the whole body in the next five or six years, that at least slows the process, then we're on to something. Now we're on to tangible, you know, we're not having an argument or whether this will work or won't work. We actually have evidence. Liz, if we lived in a world where we had solved a lot of these problems and we were living a lot longer, what do you think would be the kinds of experiences that we would be having that would generate purpose and meaning in life? Yeah, so I think that that has to deal with how we build the bridge to the other side of the mountain. So what do we view when we view getting over there? Do we view it? It's all about me and now I can, you know, amass all of the things I want or are we going to look at a society as a whole? What kind of world do we want to live in? And I think it's an incredibly important question that we need to make sure that we're vetting because, like when the gentleman was talking about AI, I really, everything he was saying actually was referring to humans. We don't know what you're thinking. You may be having benevolent thoughts. You're going to hide what you're actually really trying to achieve. This is all a very, very human thing. And we're already dealing with it. So, you know, how do we create tangible societies? Well, we have to start working towards things and we have to realize that humans right now are only humans until we can become better than this. We are limited by our desires, our lusts and things that are really actually quite short-sighted. I think the human of the future is not only robust and regenerates as fast as they degrade, but they actually will have some sort of control over our hormonal system so that we're better thinkers. We're smarter. We're working for each other instead of just for our own means. And anyway, I'm not sure if I answered the question, but I just think an important part of looking forward is actually looking at bigger pictures and how do you get involved in making the world a better place and not just waiting for other people to solve the problem, whether that be the environment or feeding the world or helping patients who are going through cancer therapies have the support that they need right now in order to get to the next stage. Well, we're always going to need that sort of support. We're always going to have problems, but as humans we fall into time really well. Look how we fell into increasing lifespan by three times for most people, just out of doing some what at that time was very technologically advanced, but very simple things. And yet we still complain about time. So as long as we focus our time then on constructive societies that have a network like you do that are working towards something better always and not ever saying we're done, I think we'll be okay. Thoughts on that, Melissa? Do you want to take questions? Yeah, unless you had something to say and we'll go to questions. Let's go to a question, right? Who had their hand up first? Be honest. We'll go right there. So the China, as I understand, is way ahead of us in certain gene therapy genetic engineering. And I'm wondering if this is something you can full speak to, is do you think the different culture of China is enabling these things, maybe their lack of Christianity, and if you want to cross into reference to the typing rebellion as part of it, that would be great. I don't know how I can make the typing rebellion into everything. I do try to work into a lot of things. There are things in China that are medically possible because of the culture that aren't possible here. You can get an organ transplant in two weeks. How does that happen? Where does the organ come from? I don't know that much actually about gene editing or gene therapies in China. It is true that there's a different set of kind of ethical and ideological constraints there. China has a kind of layered ethical system. The bottom layer is the idea of Confucian values, the idea that the most important thing in life are relationships and inhabiting a certain role correctly. And then layered on top of that you've got Marxism, which is a kind of utopian ideal about it getting to new places really fast through great new technologies. They could be health technologies, they could be agricultural technologies and so on. This idea that ordinary people have this power that you've got to unleash. So I really can't speak to the actual genetic therapy is going on in China right now. But the culture is really different in terms of is it okay to do things to human bodies, to do experiments with human bodies, to try things out. And I think that it's true that there aren't the same, you don't run into the same ethical problems, you also don't run into the same political problems. If people started creating super humans in America tomorrow, there would probably be some sort of outcry. But there's less outcry in China as well. So I think that's obvious. That's why I didn't want to let people record the video that I... Is that obvious? No, all that I'm here to record is enough. So there's just a lot more regulation of the media. And there's no outcry over the fact that political prisoners' organs are harvested and sold to people who run organs. That's problematic. Family medicine has its roots here in America. It's just now starting to come to China. It's having more of a special care in general medicine. But as a family doctor, we see prevention, especially primary prevention, life vaccines, public health, to extend life span as a major part of what we do. And we totally agree that we shouldn't spend our money worrying me. What you're proposing is more of a... I don't want to use the word but I think I'm going to write more of a cattle gear sort of thought. A lot of times I know the risk. I'm willing to take it to further the cost of science. And so having smaller groups to do more invasive and more potentially efficacious stuff, going in and doing the risk, I'm assuming this, that they're well informed. Of course there are statistical issues with small police. Is the group data to support the recommendations and how to cut it. The regulatory agency set up is really, I know it's a dangerous to farm, but it has probably saved countless lives. There are probably many people who are safe and healthy today because those harmful substances are screaming out from that ring. So I know they're never false, but there's also a lot of that isn't that's a risk to take. How much risk are we willing to assume? And how do we compensate and care for those people or even pursuit of this better human? Right. So humans are vastly risk adverse. And actually it has slowed science nearly to a stop because you can actually create a lot of really what seem like sound arguments that actually don't hold water. So for instance in bioethics we say a drug should be safe before it's given to humans. And yet we pass unsafe drugs all the time. For instance statins have the potential to help one in 164 patients. But one in four will get type 2 diabetes. And one in ten will suffer from dementia. And in the list goes on of the detriments of the drugs that we already have. We're looking at gene and cell technologies that really in small cohorts should be a hit or a miss. And not only that we're only doing pre-preclinical data. So remember these drugs still have to go to the regulatory service. What we're offering is a glean of how powerful the substances are that we're using. And in everybody is taking a risk. So if we choose to not let people have access to these drugs. Who will account for the 40 million people that die every year waiting for access. So we cannot slow things down because of risk aversion. People are dying. And they are going to continue to die until we have proper therapeutics. And the only way to vet them is through human bodies. All of the doctors that we work with have no intention of hurting a person. Anyone can die for any one of reasons. But moving that technology forward I think is more honorable than going toward a fight for a resource that we no longer need. Or a variety of things that people already swim with sharks and jump out of airplanes. So we choose to take these chances. And I think that every one of these persons is a hero. And every one of them is informed. They have consent. They have multitude of documents they have to sign and they need to talk to medical doctors before they go through it. But I would not discourage people from coming up and taking a stance because again like I said we're 100% guaranteed to die of the diseases that I showed you. And once you get a diagnosis staring down the barrel of a gene therapy is nothing in comparison to the grief that those diseases cause. So yeah we're going to have to stand up. We're going to have to get tough. We're going to have to reanalyze bioethics and what they actually are. And we're going to have to let people do informed consent treatments that may or may not turn out to be the best outcome. So is gene therapy, does it matter what a person's race or gender is? Or is it just the humanness of them? Because I know for example that certain drugs will be tested. They'll be tested among a white population. And then they won't work for like an african-american population and they'll actually have adverse effects on them. Is it universal? So when we look at the human genome we're almost identical down to just a few percentage of our genes but those genes do make a big difference. And so you know as we understand the genome more we'll understand better how things will relate to us. But the gene therapies that we're starting with remember they have animal data and they have human toxicology data and some human use. And they're universal genes. Increasing muscle mass and lengthening telomeres is the same gene therapies for everyone. But then as we work into populations and we start to look at well things that they're already looking at like monogenic disease, hemophilia B, sickle cell anemia, lipoprotein, lipase deficiency. We see those running in certain groups and that's when the gene therapy of the future is we be able to deliver a couple of genes that we would deliver to the whole population to make them more robust and then we would deliver succinct genes to you depending on you know what the weakness of the system maybe was. Like that term succinct genes are they like verbose genes? There are actually different alleles of genes and so and genes code for the same gene now we know can code for a multitude of different proteins. So actually we can cut it down to just code to the protein that we want it to make. So it's getting more and more interesting but just to give you like an anecdotal of how far away we might be there is a group in Finland and they all share an allele and they all get heart disease really young and so you know science was sure that this allele was like the driver of heart disease and now we better look out for it but then a group was found in Malaysia that don't get heart disease or get a very very late late onset that have the same allele. So we are long ways from understanding but actually by doing gene therapies we can better understand even how the genome works because we'll see how we're affecting the methylation of different genes and how the cells may behave differently just like when you exercise it it epigenetically changes your cells and I don't think anybody is asked but maybe everybody already knows what gene therapy is because I don't think we even explained what we're doing but anyway gene therapy is a huge umbrella that encompasses a lot of different types of technology whether that's putting one gene in as an exosome where it just it lives outside of the chromosome encodes for a gene or we can integrate where we actually put it into the chromosome or now what you're hearing more and more about is editing even though editing has been around for a while CRISPR technology makes it cheaper and more viable than ever more accurate than ever so so gene therapy is many things so you know in generally how we deliver gene therapy now is through a viral capsid so it's what used to be a virus but we take its ability to make you sick out and we use it because it docks with a cell really well and delivers information which is the genes and so this technology is a bit limited right now and we're hoping for better technology in the future that will make the proliferation of gene therapies throughout your body much easier but right now the viral capsid just the part that docks with the cell is the best way to get it in because you basically have to be able to signal to a cell to put something into it so other things that are being looked at are lipids and sugar molecules because cells like to suck those up so we need something that the cell likes to bring in to bring the DNA material in so just in case I didn't clarify that. Thank you. We're not good. Trying to be gods or goddess. We're actually all okay with that. Make the point that it's one that you can make it out loud that for us is beyond beyond paying in fact they might be the most pain filled entities in the universe so it's a deal on the downside as well as the idea of love and compassion it can maximize it's hard to make in other words who would want that if I can't handle it you know I'm trying to say God isn't this being for us that is platonic ideal beyond all because it's very human emotion as well. Yeah I understand better now I sat with a group during the breakout sessions and the the topic was do we become gods and goddesses or whatever I say goddess I love all the goddesses and I just my take on it was no immediately because that's something bigger to strive for something integrated or a consciousness that but different people had different ideas and really where we all when we didn't come together it's because we didn't have a definition for it and so me especially having no definition for it I'm at an impasse so I would love to sit down and have you describe to me what that is and maybe for everyone it's different so I don't know Melissa what is God I feel connected I mean that's how I ended up here was through meditation and is that I don't know you know for me meditation is was is moving through fear and coming out the other side I mean I was terrified and I was locked up and I was a person who wouldn't let my kids do anything because I was so scared of everything you know and when my son was diagnosed I just didn't know what to do and through meditation which may be similar I just sat and I watched my son die over and over again and I watched my head be torn off by a shark and I watched my daughter burn in a fire and I sweat and I cried and when I came out of it it took me days and days and days and it's still a process I was just I just felt unstoppable I felt like I had you know touched something that let me let it all go just let me see let me see every one of my fears let me move through them and then on the other side what am I supposed to do now and it's not like I heard a voice I just felt like I had to move towards what made me feel better and the only thing that made me feel better was being actionable and having faith in myself that regardless of what anyone said or just how they discredited me that I could make a difference and so maybe that's touching on something but I don't know I really don't know what is God I think we'd say that God is a being with you know infinite capacity and I think feeling like your like you've moved past your fears and feeling that kind of that power to do stuff is what God does I think God is the ability to do work and we just believe that like instead of building houses God you know makes planets and people and bodies and things like that but you know I think I was on Randy's note about you know God God who suffers or God who loves I remember I was I was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan and I was in this one area for about nine months so I knew the people in the area and the church really well and at the end of this when I was about to leave you know I was speaking to the congregation and I looked across the whole congregation and I knew everyone like I knew them all and I loved them all it was this amazing feeling it was like a superpower feeling and I had it for about like two weeks after I came home from my mission and then it was gone but I feel like that feeling is like how kind of it feels to be God to have this you know this infinite unstoppable capacity to love people as well it's also a form of work love is a huge form of work and you allude to that with you know like like the fear that you that you feel when you think that someone that you love will be taken from you you know just to to hold on to them is a form of work and also to consider letting them go is also a form of work thank you to the panel sorry we're out of time