 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our fifth Enlightenment Salon. And this is a favorable coincidence. We have five participants in our fifth Enlightenment Salon. Yes. And in order, John Burrietta, Bobby Rich, James Cohagan, Bill Andrews, and Gennady Stolier of the Second, welcome to everybody. Now, three of us, James, Bill, and I were present at Rad Fest 2018 in San Diego, California. This event occurred from September 20th to the 23rd. Bill and I were both speakers at Rad Fest, and this was an event to essentially share information about the latest developments in science, activism, and the public discourse on longevity. So I'm curious as to your impressions of Rad Fest, Bill, given that you were one of the highlighted speakers and also you're one of the organizers of the event, what are your thoughts? Well, now you're biased, maybe. I do believe that Rad Fest is the absolute best conference. And I don't like how long a conference, because it's actually a festival. It's the best place for anybody to go and learn everything they can about staying young and healthy as long as possible. It's got the world's greatest experts. You know, we handpick who the speakers are. We make every effort possible to keep the charlevans out, so almost every speaker. And I want to say we make mistakes sometimes. All of them come across as being authentic, but we have probably the best set of speakers on the planet for knowing every aspect of how to beat death. Excellent. And James? I was very impressed with a lot of the speakers. Some of the Rad City sponsors and such, not as much after investigating, but the speakers and the science was solid. And I really enjoyed that. Especially, I believe it was the third day where... Who was the lady who had her telomeres extended? Liz Parrish. Liz Parrish. I especially liked her presentation with that. And I learned a lot behind the scenes talking with these people. Like Descendants Research Foundation's how their projects are going. Yes. Indeed, the Descendants Research Foundation had a booth at the Rad City Expo for the first time. Has done a lot of other new biotechnology startups. For instance, PyCorp, Biotherapeutics, was there for the first year. And they are essentially a spinoff from Descendants Research Program. But they're doing research into macular degeneration. They've raised, I think, around $20 million already. And they're just one example. Aubrey DeGray gave a speech that described some of the emerging startups and the areas of research they're specializing in. And it's interesting how Aubrey runs a philanthropic organization. Essentially, Descendants Research Foundation is a research charity. They fund basic research and they fund intermediate research that often gets neglected in academia. But that private investors don't always want to put money into because there's not an immediate return. But now a lot of these research areas are emerging into that stage where now some entrepreneurs think there's a promising business opportunity there. So hopefully that will continue to expand. And during your presentation you discussed how you've been diligently working over the past year on developing essentially a safety protocol for the gene therapy trials with Mabella gene therapeutics and how you've managed to essentially forestall or prevent the key failure points that could arise for patients. It's been a lot of work because a lot of mice have been treated with gene therapies. A lot of humans have been treated with gene therapies. Everybody presents it as a very safe thing to do. So when you read the fight for it, you find out that a lot of these people and animals got sick from immune responses most notably the cytotoxin T cell response. Now that can kill a person and I'm sure a lot of mice died from the cytotoxin T cell response. But they don't report those. So I became really aware that we have to, and the clinical study that Mabella is doing, has to really figure out a way to overcome this potential immune response. And so I spent months researching everything I could, talking to the world's leaders in immune treatments, and then attended a conference on gene therapy and talked to the experts there. And during all this time I learned of a way that actually looks like it's working. And I'm not at liberty yet to describe that because I would be in breach of contract with Mabella. But I'm very excited about the fact that we have a protocol that we believe will completely eliminate any immune responses that anybody might get during their treatment. And that's really the only side effect that's ever been concerned to anybody because telomeres have been shown to be safe in all animal studies. The gene therapy vector has been shown to be safe, except for the immune responses. No animal or humans have ever developed an immune response against telomeres since it's already broken from the inside of us. And so I'm very optimistic. So as soon as I decided one day to declare that I am done figuring out how to do it and we can proceed, then it's all become terms of talking to governments in various countries about getting regulatory approval. Now, we can be like a lot of other people and just go to Mexico or somewhere and do a clinical study without any approval or something like that, but we won't do that. And I've been insistent on Mabella. They're not doing that. But I'm totally opposed to it. They're totally opposed to it. So we're actually going through every country, including the United States. We're actually working with the United States through this new program called ARMAT, or MAT, which is designed for special privileges, I guess, for getting approvals and getting approvals of new clinical studies using G-Dare. But the countries that are actually moving the fastest are Colombia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Tokyo. And so our first studies might be there. I just returned last week. So after Red Fest, I returned from Luka Romanga, Colombia, where I met with the Medical Review Board of Colombia to go over the clinical protocol that we had submitted for approval. It turned out they had a bunch of questions. They didn't understand everything. I had to go down and explain. I spent eight hours in front of the board explaining everything, but they were very happy with everything. And unfortunately, because they only have medical review boards for three to three months, as a result of that delay, we won't be able to treat our first patient on December 10th, as I had announced in the Red Fest. That new date is now January 15th. But our first patient is a 76-year-old person who's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's 5 and a half years ago, announced in five years and six months ago, or seven months ago. So the sooner this person gets treated, the better. The clinical study will be focused primarily on treating Alzheimer's. And because clinical study is going to be so expensive, we're going to try to get every marker measured possible. And, you know, you mentioned at Rad City, there were some things that you didn't exactly like about Rad City, but I did meet a very interesting doctor at Rad City, Dr. Sandra Kaufman, who actually wrote a book. She wrote a book called The Kaufman Protocol. And after reading that book, I was so amazed at how well she's understood and got everything together that we've now asked her to be a co-investigator on the study. And she's also going to be in charge of designing all the biomarkers that we're going to measure to make sure that we don't leave any stone unturned. So I'm very excited about that. But the, I'm trying to think of anything new. Right now, we don't know exactly where. Ben and Watu Island is also a place that might occur. The clinical study might occur. But we don't know, it depends on which government comes first, but we're ready to go as soon as somebody approves it. We've got the hospitals all set up. We've got everything else set up. All we need is the governments to say go for it and we get our first person treated. And where that will actually be, we don't know, but we're right now scaling for January 15th. I hope you get at least one of those governments to approve the trial quickly. And I'm glad to hear that there has been progress. Now, you mentioned the ARMAT process in the United States. And because this is also an event for the U.S. Trans-EU in this party, we are interested in the regulatory policy developments that could perhaps streamline some of the approval processes for clinical trials. What have been your impressions of the ARMAT program? I'm actually, that's not my part. So I'm focused on science. I know that the other people in LaBella have been really focusing on getting the ARMAT process going through. I hope that BioViva is going through ARMAT. I also hope that Teal site, my fossil is going through ARMAT. I think that's going to be a benefit to everybody. And it's not a race. We all need to be curing our own agents. I'm just hoping somebody can do something really fast. Yes, that's the key. That some breakthroughs are made. It's not as important who makes them as long as they're made available for the benefit of human beings, hopefully in time for as many of us as possible. The unfortunate part is that gene therapy will never be cheap. So at first only the super wealthy would be able to afford it. But I'm looking at it as a proof of concept to justify doing further research to develop other means of reducing telomeres to length of telomeres. And I believe we can get that cost down with 10 cents a dose, at least at our cost to produce it within the next three or five years. That would be amazing too. I'm a bit confused about that because part of the reason gene therapy has been so widespread in recent years is because of CRISPR protocol. Part of the reason CRISPR is so amazing is because of how cheap it is at being, last I checked, $49 per. So how is that? Okay, so first of all, let me say CRISPR is not the first gene to edit anything. It's Sangamon that has had zinc fingers going on for 25 years and there's also talons. But they're all fairly inexpensive to treat cells in a petri dish. So you can buy kits to treat things but if you want to treat every cell in your body that's going to be a major obstacle and nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. They are experimenting with Sangamons that we've been doing for a long time experimenting with the same gene therapy that we are called admin associated parts. But it's still very expensive to produce enough of this gene therapy to be delivered to every cell in the body. And even when you're delivered to the lung tissue in the body it's still super expensive. Just producing the gene therapy in its own in the biorectric is super expensive. Now one of the individuals mentioned already in this conversation is Liz Paris. She was a presenter at Radfest and Bobby and John you had an opportunity to interview her recently. I know that you'll be publishing the video of the interview on your channel, Science Based Species but what can our viewers look forward to in that interview? Yeah, I thought it was a great interview. She's so awesome to talk to. She discussed some of those promising treatments that she has right now, that her company is doing and she got very passionate about extending lifespan but also not only reversing aging but helping children in curing their diseases. I definitely look forward to publishing it there's some great information in there and we talked a little bit about Radfest John and I couldn't make it to Radfest this year but we're certainly going to be there next year and she also talked about how great Radfest is because it's not just they have some of the best scientists and people working on extending lifespan but the audience members are very receptive They understand this technology very well so I think Radfest would be great for lay people to go to because even if you didn't have a chance to talk to one of the experts there's plenty of people to talk to that know what they're talking about. Absolutely. It was really nice to be able to talk to her about the kind of research that her company does and the things they do. We got a topic on a thing I just want to mention I think I might have mentioned it before but I can go to it in full detail because we were talking about epidural stimulators and that's the looks to be the next big thing for spinal cord injury. I was at my physical therapy the other day and the guy who I worked with just finished working in a workshop in the University of Louisville in Kentucky and he actually got a training on this new technology what it's going to be like and they say it's pretty much the next big thing for spinal cord injury. They started this research in 2011 and it's essentially a little pacemaker almost like a TENS unit that goes on the spine where the injury site is where the scar tissue is and it sends a little bit of milk and that allows the signal to transduce and have the person move his foot. They were only going to do it for pain killing because a lot of times you get chronic pain or apathy but they found people were actually able to restore voluntary movement. It's very simple right now we got moving away engaging trunk muscles standing, we aren't walking yet but it's a through more research and through more funding we're going to definitely have a means to get people walking again and that's very promising because it's very tangible, it's very real and I guess in this parish it's working with people with spinal cord injuries one of the persons on our board I guess is in a maybe a pair of what's really cool about this the really cool thing about this device is it's already been FDA approved for pain so that goes in your body it's a little risky to surgery but it's pretty low risk but what the greatest thing they're finding out now is that they don't even have to put it on the derma, they can put it on your back and send the signals through that way and that will actually start to do it and they do you with training and the most craziest thing I have to pay to read it again but I read it four times because it was just so crazy is that with four months of training with the shock on your back your brain creates new neural networks and now you no longer even need the shocker anymore now you can walk or move your legs right now but what's really cool is that it's kind of like a pacemaker for people with heart problems or like an insulin pump for people with diabetes but it's like an electrode it's a stimulator for your spine and it's restoring people's ability to walk and not just walk they're having better control of their blood pressure better control of their temperature valve, blood, sexual function all this great stuff is coming back and it's really something I've been very passionate about the thing that Liz said I'm going to ask her if I can patent is that it's only fair that we get you out of that chair yeah, we're hoping that in our youtube channel maybe like the 50th video or the 90th video John is walking again so he'll start getting his chair so that would be great I've been working with Liz Perishford six, seven years now I think she's one of the most resourceful people I've ever met she's really making things happen I think the future is going to be a lot better place because of the effort she's been I'm really looking forward to seeing what she and BioV are pulling yes, actually at the last Radfest I was privy to a conversation between Liz and Zoltan Istvan the founder and former chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and at the time he was just there as a speaker providing some historical context for his presidential campaign but there was a reception afterward and Liz and Zoltan were speaking and they're both extremely genuine people about their view that aging disease involuntary death need to be defeated within our lifetimes and they were also expressing frustration as to the general culture caught onto this yet they pointed out that from their individual backgrounds they're not let's say the most distinguished of experts, Liz Parrish is a mother who became concerned about the way the medical system treats children with chronic conditions and so she got into the activism that she got into the science they attended a lot of sense conferences and she became one of the leading voices for life extension advocacy in the world and Zoltan started as a journalist he read a lot of philosophy books he traveled throughout the world he was in a lot of conflict zones and he nearly stepped on a landmine in Vietnam and when he had that near-death experience he essentially realized that he could have almost lost everything and that really impelled him to realign his priorities and devote much of his life from that point to date to promoting transhumanism and life extension and trying to change cultural perceptions so the way they spoke to one another and I just happened to be an onlooker really drove home the point that there are two people who consider themselves at least to be a fairly ordinary background but through the realization of the importance of these endeavors they became leading advocates and I think that's a lesson to everyone watching this that you too can become a leading advocate for this movement just educate yourself be aware of the latest developments and communicate to people in a way that they can relate to that these are the most important causes of our era so along the lines of longevity earlier in this discussion before we turned on the camera we were talking about long-lived organisms there are various long-lived plants and animals and they have some similarities to humans and Bill you had mentioned that for instance jellyfish and long-lived trees have some significant dissimilarities to humans and other animals jellyfish are actually really not one organism they're actually a mixture of organisms you can break off a piece of the jellyfish and that will form a new jellyfish it's humans aren't like that so that anybody trying to figure out a way to stand lifespan in humans by mimicking the jellyfish is not going to get anywhere because we are not jellyfish but the same is true for like trees like the briskel and pines and things like that they talk about how these trees are like 2,000 years old but when you go look at the tree you see one branch way up high that's alive the rest of the tree is dead as adorned I don't think we want to be considering ourselves alive if one of our fingers is alive and the rest of us is dead those kind of things that are allowing those jellyfish and trees to live longer are not something that's going to really benefit humans as far as I can tell something could surprise me but I do think that as species closer to humans are going to be providing some information and getting a little bit closer we now know that lobsters and clams humpback whales tortoises some birds and some fish they all have no detectable aging process people never start asking how long animals live until the time of Darwin about 150 years ago and now some are finding that the only way to tell how open the organism is is to find it when it's first born put it into a cage or an aquarium and watch it some of the animals 150 years later are still showing no signs of aging and the thing that I like about that is that they've been showing all these animals they have telomerase produced in all their cells their telomeres don't get shorter they have no detectable aging and they rarely get cancer in other diseases and so it's suggesting that plankton telomeres, the thing I'm trying to do with humans has got a lot of optimism for believing that it's kind of really big difference now I did say that you can't tell how old an animal is unless you are there when it's born because they don't have rings on a tree like trees do but clams actually do have something like that every year a clam gets a new stripe on its shell and now people have found clams that are over 500 years old and it's all because their telomeres don't get shorter because of the telomeres and so we aren't all alike in fact getting even closer to humans when we start looking at mice we find out that mice really aren't very similar to humans at all in terms of aging one of the most remarkable studies that I've ever seen has been produced several times 20, 25 years ago is that when you take mouse cells and human cells and grow them in a petri dish they both reach what's called the haplic limit or called senescence but in the mouse cells you can overcome that senescence with antioxidants when you try treating with telomeres the length of telomeres it has no effect the cells still go into senescence the haplic limit humans are the way around when you treat with antioxidants it has no effect they still level off and go into senescence but if you treat with telomeres the length of telomeres it obliterates the haplic limit the cells just never enter senescence this is a major difference between mice and humans which makes me wonder how much mouse data is really good for humans and so if we start doing animal studies more than what we did when I was at Geron Corporation we would probably start using a primate most primates have been shown that age-like humans in fact I should mention that the animals have been tested at the University of Texas southwestern the only animals that have been shown that age-like humans are dogs, cats, horses, sheep, pig and deer and also other non-human primates and engineered mice engineered mice like what Robert Pinnell used in his mouse cells all the other animals they don't age like humans they have some other aging process coming out so I'm looking like because of the fact that our research with the gene therapy is so expensive I'm looking I spent a lot of time looking for what's the smallest primate in the world and I found out that that small primate is called Medan Bertha's mouse lemur and it's only found in Madagascar so I've already been in contact with officials and other scientists in Madagascar and started human studies on this primate and that one is the size of the human thumb in fact, there's a very famous picture of what's it? Shaquille O'Neal sitting there with one of these primates in his hand and the primate's just barely the size of his thumb so it's but that would be that would allow us to do studies on aging in an animal model that what animal that ages like humans do that wouldn't cost the absorbent amounts I would be concerned because at least for mice as soon as the studies are stuff they're affiliated with unless there's a continuum they're put down afterwards I would be concerned about what would be the fate of these primates so am I and I'm glad you said that because one of the reasons we don't do animal studies is that I just cannot stand the fact that animals are just put down apples when I was doing research psychological research at University of California, San Diego we were given rabbits and pigeons and things like that we were told that at the end of the experiments all the animals had to be exterminated you can believe me I get a midnight rage and rescued my animals and took them home with me but the that's the first time I ever confessed to that so I hope you see San Diego doesn't throw me in jail for doing that but apparently it was the worst but in all the conversations I've been having with people and Madagascar and stuff I've been saying I would like to use lemurs or primates that are pets in people's homes okay and I would like to go to that home treat the pet and then watch it let the pet run around and just keep track of it things like that I do not want to see any harm there I don't believe in harm nobody should ever get harm in trying to develop a treatment that's not an issue to you and you're only interested in money so that's what I'm hoping that we can set up a study like that where the animals benefit tremendously from the treatment I agree with you completely Bill I think the law requiring experimental animals to be destroyed after the conclusion of the experiment needs to be repealed and indeed the transhumanist party in its platform is opposed to the euthanasia of healthy non-contagious non-dangerous animals especially if a trial is investigating lifespan and effects of particular treatments on aging one would think one would want to keep these animals alive for as long as possible because setting some artificial cutoff for the trial would defeat the purpose you're actually successful in extending lifespan but your trial is only up to X months you don't know how successful you've been unless you let those animals survive as long as they would have survived without your intervention I'm also a big believer in compassionate use so even if you have a placebo control as soon as you see that the experimental sample isn't working you treat the placebo system like half the people just get screwed there's a lot of clinical studies where that is the routine right now as soon as the drug starts to show the effect that the placebo group is treating to absolutely absolutely because it is very difficult to perform a precise controlled experiment with humans anyway but we have to keep the goals of the experiment alive and if the goals are not just to find out knowledge but to achieve an effect improvement in health or saving someone's life then yes, compassionate use should be the default practice so I also wanted to ask you James you perform studies in pre-fish populations could you discuss your research a bit most of it is preliminary watching data because believe it or not there's not a lot of data in pre-fish and the stuff there is is mostly centered in Europe and even that sparse and scatter there's an occasional thing more vibration patterns but very few population studies so there's actually not a lot known about them like there's distributions and things and where they're supposed and where they're not but it's a very unknown creature despite it being in both common use and culinary practice and scattered all over the globe so what I'm doing is just a plain population study for just a baseline I'm taking measurements of water quality average length average average weight and of course weighing each of them the whole population size and seeing if anyone wants to go from there or just continue my work on to my graduate studies how much is known about the life spans of pre-fish I don't know I've looked it up there is probably somewhere but I have not seen a single reference to their age online well if they're all related to lobsters and you're interested I would love to do a collaboration with you if you can provide us some tissues without burning the pre-fish provide us some tissues that we can culture cells from we can do things like measure its walmer's activity measure two in their lengths find out if they have to reach a eight foot limit just because lobsters don't reach a eight foot limit they have two walmer's produced and all their cells they have no two on the shore but pre-fish or anything like lobsters that would be very interesting fun I could bring you some lunch ones if you want yeah I don't know if we have somebody right now that could fire the tissue from without burning the animal but I don't want to pull off the leg I don't like that but if there's some way that you know somebody who knows how to stick a needle into one and remove tissue without burning the animal that would be suitable and we could do that put an exciting PhD dissertation that would be good I could ask the UC Davis lab up in Sierra Nevada Colors see if I can get some because they're already testing one of the ones although you wouldn't be able to use that one because A they've been dead for a while I think and B they might have pestilence in them so that wouldn't be a good baseline anymore but let's work on it yeah okay perfect this is an example of the kinds of possible collaborations and cross-disciplinary discourse that we encourage here at the Enlightenment Salons and it's interesting too in the year 2018 we have advanced far in terms of our scientific knowledge but still not far enough there are still many common areas of life in the world about which we know surprisingly little and Bill as you mentioned the serious study of lifespans of any non-human organisms really began in the 19th century and many of the longest lived organisms were born before that time so even not enough time has passed to truly ascertain the maximum lifespans of which those species are capable of I read recently there were studies of Greenland sharks showing that they could live to 400 or 500 years and they never did cancer they just correlated with dealers I think the sharks have been some of the fish that I was talking about that have been shown to have tolongers producing all of them the sharks were previously already very cancer resistant so a lot of products that right now aren't shark extracts that people take to try to find their cancer they work and it would be surprising that humans are still different from sharks at least the mechanism of action would help us design better ways to do it and if it's just one thing to do I'm already doing that yes and wouldn't it be nice to have an entire society where gaining that kind of knowledge is seen as a priority for the culture just like we learn in elementary school what are the planets of the solar system how do you do basic arithmetic where the presidents of the United States or famous historical figures in whatever country we happen to be brought up in wouldn't it be great in basic educational systems to have lessons on life spans and what are the life spans of various organisms what don't we know how can humans live longer I wish I had had that kind of education but I didn't need it because I was so focused on it anyway it really moved me ahead forward the problem with schools and for younger children they don't emphasize healthy lifestyles and that's your lifestyle begins when you're a child what I just mentioned talked about the number of fat cells the person has in their body changes with your lifestyle up until you're about 13 years old then it stops that's the rest of your life you've got the same number of fat cells and there are changes there's a reason why people might be wanting to focus more on lifestyle or the younger kids I would be a fan of that I would be a fan of that and you guys got to read it and it's interesting too one of my distinguishing projects in the field of life extension activism has been death is wrong the illustrated children's book on life extension and I try to inject a bit of that early childhood education by discussing long-lived organisms and I do mention personal compounds and pterotopsis dornii jellyfish which are dissimilar to humans but the point that I make is if these organisms are capable of having these life spans then there's not some immutable law of nature that says no organism can that humans cannot for whatever reason that is to say it's just a matter of figuring out our biology and how to control it and how to prevent the damage that occurs over the course of a lifetime but if more kids were exposed to those ideas and were interested in doing further research the entire field could advance dramatically I think if there were an updated edition of death is wrong published today we could include expanded content including for instance a mention of the Greenland Sharks as well as research advances that had been made over the past five years and I think if children were motivated to find out more about this we could see a cultural shift see better lifestyles and see better scientists all over the world and you know, Johnny you're a pioneer in this area with that book that you've written I don't know if anybody else has ever written a book like that I would encourage you to write more books on stuff that seems possible and get them more used at school I think it's very important and if I can help with that I will well thank you Bill I'm honored by your good words for that offer and definitely something to explore in the coming years it's interesting too because this field keeps rapidly evolving so new start-ups get formed new research breakthroughs get announced every year and even in animals that are dissimilar to humans like mice scientists are finding ways to reverse the symptoms of certain diseases and to lengthen life spans one of the things that could help I think is to have more purely life span oriented studies on any organisms including mice what I see in some of the recent studies is there is this cut off point so scientists will say well we prefer staging but then they don't monitor the mice the cut off point what if they continue to monitor them there are studies where they have monitored all the way until the mouse died Maria Blasco and Ron both did that even though they didn't have to sacrifice a few of the mice to look at the brain to cut the head both of the brain but they did let them go until they died and recorded the day that they did die now there's a thing that a lot of people seem to overlook when they talk about mouse studies and that's Richard Covell after Richard Covell published papers 40 years ago on oxidative stress and stuff and he found out that humans have 100 times the level of superoxide dysmetase as mice do it's 100 fold higher and so humans don't actually have the oxidative stress problems that mice do and that's why mice tend to succumb to oxidative stress in the country this much so another subject that I would like us to venture into in light of recent events is that of privacy and in particular data privacy which will become increasingly important there was a recent major Facebook breach where essentially there was a vulnerability in the view as feature where you could view your Facebook profile as a friend or a member of the public and see what they would see but apparently that feature had a loophole in it where an external party would use the view as feature to actually access somebody else's account access somebody's private account information so I was actually one of the people who Facebook had automatically logged out as a precaution and essentially it was a good idea at the time to reset one's password and make sure that if one's data had been accessed that the hackers couldn't log back into one's account then very recently Facebook published a feature on its help center saying what's data it suspects might have been accessed from one's own account and I saw that yesterday fortunately none of my private information was accessed according to Facebook so they logged me out as a precaution but I encourage others to take a look especially if they had been logged out in the past there was also an announcement recently by Google that in the Google Plus social network they had inadvertently allowed some of the developers of the applications that use Google Plus to access people's private profile information and generally that would be information like names, email addresses, locations not financial information as far as they're concerned and they're not aware of any actual misuse of that information but because Google Plus has struggled to acquire as wide of a user base as Facebook they essentially use that disclosure as an excuse to announce that Google Plus was shutting down and I don't think that's quite their genuine reason for shutting it down but suffice to say these data breaches have been happening quite frequently and they have been high profile and they have resulted in a lot of adverse public reaction to the point that a severe enough data breach can bring down a social network and that speaks to the importance of protecting and safeguarding individual privacy something that the transhumanist party strongly stands for because as we increasingly utilize connected devices connected computers phones, smart home devices sensors in the future that's going to be an even more significant part of our lives if we have devices embedded in our bodies medical devices for instance or devices that could enhance our brain function what Ray Kurzweil who might have interviewed at Radfest was talking about the neural cortex in the cloud there are going to need to be extremely good safeguards to make sure there's no unauthorized access to tools that essentially become vital, literally vital to the functioning of human life so this is an ongoing discussion of course but I would be interested in all of your thoughts about individual privacy and data ownership and how we can move from the status quo to a world in which people don't have to worry about somebody illegitimately acquiring their most private details I guess I'll start now it's very complicated depending on what's possible because there's been a lot of preliminary work such as being able to identify what people are thinking about not necessarily exactly what but a certain concept with some consistency there's no real data on whether or not it's actually possible for a full brain uplink yet or something like this so that one I will put my preconceptions aside the fact that I do not want my brain hooked up to the internet at least not directly at all to the side until more data affirms it but when it comes to data privacy like say personal rights things I'm an absolutist on the subject meaning that they should have to disclose what they're doing with your data where they're putting your data or you should be able to say hey I don't want you to use my data and whether that doesn't allow you to use the site that's totally fine but it should be completely what's the word I'm looking for transparent with this like it's why I deleted my profile with 23 in May because I did that like a few years back and got the raw data but after a point I'm like I'm hearing some of these breaches and things like that it's like no so did deletion and I'm still two years away from them because there's some archaic law that had to do with the human genome project that was passed in like the late 80's that said you have to keep your data for like four years they pointed to it and I'm like but um after that I'm going to be very very cautious going forward with my personal genetic data oh indeed, indeed now I'll point out when Google Plus announced this impending shutdown in about 10 months they also linked users to a site, a service they have called Google Takeout where it's possible to actually export to your computer in a zip file or multiple zip files all of the data that Google has on you across multiple services so I actually did that in preparation for the shutdown of Google Plus because I didn't want to lose my content I don't want to post anything particularly private or sensitive on Google Plus but I posted a lot of links to articles and videos a few pictures over the years and I don't want to lose that maybe now that I have all of that information I could recreate it on my own website and have an archive of my Google Plus activity just so that that is not lost simply because of a decision by the platform Bill I know you had some thoughts on individual privacy I just for years I've had this feeling that someday in the near future we are not going to have any privacy it's something I think the world is evolving in that direction that we're going to be knowing everything about everybody and I think we're going to be really surprised to find out how common certain traits are that people usually keep quiet and stuff like that things are going to be a whole world change it's going to be people accepting things that they didn't accept before because it turns out 90% of people were doing it anyway you know I don't know I can't even think of an example where I've felt my head is private it's I just think we're going to have to face the fact that in the future there is not going to be any privacy I agree with you at the present point though let me just say that before you start I don't put anything in Facebook it's not published even on my website so like my phone number my email address around my Facebook post profile but there are also big letters on my website so I'm not worried about anybody when I got when they shut my account down and I had it restarted I wasn't worried at all about anything that I still have in my Facebook page I was going to say in the beginning everyone kind of lived together really wasn't like privacy long time ago and there was privacy and now it seems like there's going to be no privacy again it's like it goes back to what it was I don't see the security getting any better at preventing these breaks I just see them happening more and more and more and yeah essentially you look at someone and they'll be like through your eye lens and they'll be like all this stuff about him the biggest concern I had was people being able to read each other people being able to read your thoughts that's a little I can't wait I don't know I don't know but I don't know if that should be some other people's autonomy you sound like people 20 years ago when the worldwide web was first being created people said they didn't want anything to do with it it would be too complicated it would be communicating too much mostly too difficult to do yeah I know it would be cool to think instead of having to speak but then like for a person in a year every thought is kind of like if you're able to think through your thoughts think what you want to say and put it out there so it's just kind of autonomy I'm not ready quite to give up self-driving cars can be like it's not going to be comfortable at the beginning but we're all going to get used to it self-driving cars can see like a beam those things can see like everything almost everywhere that's fine I heard Robert Fritas I watched an interview with him in Ray Kurzweil and he's discussing about privacy and hacks with really advanced nanotechnology and he said something really interesting which was we're going to need to get rid of privacy really that's the only way to prevent these sort of hacks or dystopian futures with nanotechnology you're going to need these things everywhere in trees inside cars inside human tissue to have mass surveillance to make sure that there's no sort of dystopian future with nanotechnology so I have a bit of a different perspective this is actually itself a dystopian future you definitely see what's wrong but that's what I heard and talked about and I think it's really important it didn't sound like something he necessarily wanted it sounded more like something that wasn't necessary for life to exist without nanotechnology this is a point of disagreement between me and Zoltan Istvan who founded the transhumanist party when he was chairman he made certain statements about the disappearance of privacy in the future but since I became chairman we adopted a platform playing essentially emphasizing our support of individual privacy and various conferences since we've crossed paths and we've had that conversation also in the discussion was José Cordero who took a bit of an intermediate position but Zoltan also articulated the view that he thinks privacy is becoming obsolete I articulated the view that we need to figure out stronger protections for privacy in the technological age not rejecting any of these technologies or ways to become interconnected but really emphasizing the absolute individual ownership of data and the fact that while we may disclose more about ourselves than we would have in the past we need to be the individuals who have that discretion who choose to disclose or not to disclose because different people are comfortable with disclosing different aspects of their lives so it's not going to be one size fits all but I think privacy in the future is going to be modular in the sense that we decide we own our data and in many cases we should get paid if somebody else uses our data for financial benefit the social network certainly have made a lot of money on individuals data but what if every time they make money say by selling advertisements we get a fraction of that revenue and that could also affect individuals incentives about what they're comfortable sharing because there would be a much more concrete benefit cost trade off that people could see so it would certainly be an interesting future and thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts today. I agree with everything you said I just don't believe it's going to happen I just believe that the future is going to be where all privacy is gone not that I like the idea but I think that's what's going to happen so you see Bill at least from the standpoint of my cultural upbringing I very much belong to that slimmer of time when the privacy of the individual was the default expectation and it was interesting because the right to privacy was first articulated in the late 19th century Louis Brandeis had a famous article in 1890 about the right to privacy the right to be left alone and this very much emerged out of the norms of the Victorian era which had really moved societies toward what we see as contemporary middle class life people living in single family homes, people having their home spaces distinguished from their work space, people having their realms of private thoughts which may be different from what they choose to share in public so I am very much culturally of that time and I would hate to see the advantages of that disappear I agree I agree totally these people as you mentioned in the 19th century I don't think they ever envisioned what we are talking about yeah, big data oh yes back then you could especially if you were fairly well off be say on your estate in your mansion yes you could have servants you would have people who would know but they wouldn't be the general public you controlled who would know exactly and then there was brave New World in 1984 and numerous governments seemed to be using those as instruction manuals yes and that is unfortunate but Huxley and Orwell were prescient in their own ways about anticipating the erosion of privacy but I think the dystopias they wrote about don't have to pass I do think it's up to us as individuals to affect that outcome through what we accept, what we don't accept how we use technology and the expectations we set society why for the use of technology because we certainly want the benefits of interconnectedness and if people want to share something they should be free to share it with as many others who are willing to access that information but at the same time in the future I hope we have a kind of hyper pluralism of individual lifestyles where those who want to keep certain things to themselves will also have the freedom to do that in any event thank you very much everyone for attending our 5th Enlightenment Salon and for an excellent discussion today thank you thank you thank you