Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party's question and answer session. Today is October 21st, 2017. My name is Janati Stoleroff II. I am the chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party, and author of this book, Death is Wrong, which is an illustrated children's book on indefinite human life extension. I would like to point out also, October is Longevity Month, so as a result of this, our Q&A will have a Longevity and Life Extension theme, even though we have two hours scheduled for the Q&A, and we would be happy to address other topics as well. Next I would like to introduce our other participants thus far, and perhaps we will have more of our officers joining. Right now we have Martin van der Kroen, who is our director of recruitment. Welcome, Martin. And Sean Sing, who is our new director of applied innovation. Welcome, Sean. We are pleased to have both of you participating today. And before we start with addressing our questions, I wanted to give a brief overview of our activities and our successes over the past three months. Our most recent Q&A session was held on July 15th, 2017. And since then, the transhumanist party's reach has expanded dramatically. We were represented at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas in late July, as well as at Radfest in San Diego in early August. And furthermore, I gave a virtual presentation to the Vanguard Scientific Instruments in Management, or VSIM, conference in Ravda, Bulgaria in September. And all of these events contributed to a tremendous increase in public awareness of the transhumanist party and an extremely positive reception by those who were in attendance, whether they were transhumanist life extensionists or other interested individuals who are keeping an open mind about these issues. Furthermore, we have greatly expanded our contingent of officers. And Sean is one of our new additions as director of applied innovation. We also have a new director of publication, Kenneth Allam, who has been adding new articles to our website and trying to feature content that informs the public about new scientific advances, as well as scientific concepts that people should be aware of if they're interested in transhumanism and life extension. We have a new director of visual art, Emmanuel Iral, whom I hope to see later in this Q&A session. And he is tasked with spreading paintings, graphic design, other visual content on the website of the transhumanist party and on our social media to cultivate a new aesthetic of the future. Then we have a new foreign ambassador program that was established recently, about a month and a half ago. And currently, we have foreign ambassadors from a decent number of countries. We have foreign ambassadors from Bulgaria, from Brazil, from Chile, from England, from India, Nigeria, and Scotland. And we are looking to finalize the appointment of our foreign ambassador from Egypt as well. And the purpose of the foreign ambassadors is to ensure that the transhumanist movement is solidified internationally because although we are the U.S. transhumanist party, we also believe that the advent of indefinite life extension and the technological improvement of the human condition is best achieved through the cooperation of people everywhere. Anyone who can contribute, scientific advancements or philosophical ideas or advocacy or art is a worthwhile ally. So ultimately, we seek to transcend the distinctions of nationality or country or boundaries and join with anybody who is willing to assist in our efforts. So with that, I will add two more achievements that we have recently accomplished. One is the publication of our FAQ, which is quite extensive and it is found on our website at transhumanist-party.org. The FAQ can be readily navigated by individual question and this is a compilation of common questions about what the transhumanist party stands for, the organization of the transhumanist party, some of perhaps areas of curiosity that members of the public have raised. We try to make it reasonably comprehensive. We can't answer every question, but we hope it does answer many common questions. And then the most recent development has been the announcement of our sixth platform exposure period, which will occur for 21 days until November 11th. We have 19 new Plank proposals and three proposals for amendments to existing Planks, which is going to be a new process for us. And we invite public input suggestions for alternative wording, anything that you think could improve our platform with regard to these issues. And that could include comments of support or comments of opposition for particular proposals. We have democratic elements to our governance, multi-democratic elements, so we will take guidance from our members and we encourage all of our members to vote when we open up our seven-day voting period, starting on Saturday, November 11th. So with that, I wanted to open up the opportunity for our officers to give any overviews that they might have of recent developments. Let's start with you, Martin. What are your impressions of how the transhumanist party has evolved recently? Well, first off, we're gaining more traction on Facebook, which is awesome. Especially recently, I think we just hit what are the impressions called, page views, if I'm right, what are they called? I always forget. I see the number, but then I forget what it's named. Post-reach. Post-reach, yes. And we recently hit post-reach of almost 12,000, which was a new height after, I think, our highest reach was around 8,000. That is really awesome, and I think that is in part due to solid contributions from Kenneth, our new director of publications. So that is really awesome. What else? Well, indeed, we have the Google site, which was directly from the get-go, was viewed very intensively and so much so that I had trouble keeping up, but has been a good place, a good forum, if you will, to debate various questions, including the short, mid, and long-term goals of the newest transhumanist party. Also, many questions regarding religion or lack thereof and how we treat religion, and of course, there are various opinions on that particular subject within the transhumanist community at large, particularly because a segment of it is atheist, and some might be, for lack of a better word, pretty hardcore atheist, and that is everyone's own right. But then you get heated debates, which I very much like as long as they stay civil. And that was awesome. And what else? We just hit 250 followers on Twitter, which goes up and down a little bit between 248 and 253 or so, but I hope it will increase all the way up to 500. Not sure if we will reach that before the end of the year, but that would be amazing. And indeed, I do hope that every one of our members will go and vote for the platform proposals, and indeed, when it comes to the amendments to existing planks, that members will provide their input also beforehand. We already see some interaction and comments on the website to suggest edits or changes to not only the amendments, but also the new proposed planks. And I hope that that continues on, because we need the dialogue also between ourselves and to continue as something I'm particularly stoked about is the foreign ambassadors. That is awesome. Not only from the point of view that the US transhumanist party and so on and the ideals of transhumanism might spread and that we may communicate, interact and cooperate better with foreign countries and foreign nationals, but also from the perspective that they look at the US with a different view, and in particular to foreign policy, which is something that might affect people from other countries, and as such, I'm not saying we should base our policies on what they say, but it is valuable input to consider overall. To view if it might work or not, and I think that is a really cool aspect where foreign ambassadors and so on can have valuable input, in essence, diversity of thought. Yes. Anyways, that was me. Sorry that it was long and dwindling. Well, thank you, Martin. And those are excellent remarks. In terms of diversity of thought and inclusivity, you wrote a great statement in response to the debates over religion that occurred on our Google group, essentially welcoming people of various perspectives regarding religion or lack thereof, as long as we can all stay civil and tolerant and we share the aims of improving the world through the progress of science and technology. And along these lines, we have a few comments in the chat, Open Source Temple, I think that's you, Sean, mentioned the Neo-Buddhists, and Steve Hill mentions the Christian transhumanists and says that they generally seem like good enough folks, so I would reiterate we welcome people of those perspectives and other perspectives as well, for instance, Jewish transhumanists or Islamic transhumanists or Mormon transhumanists into the US transhumanist party in terms of engaging in dialogue with them, seeking policy suggestions from them, seeking content from them, and also exploring areas of common ground.  I am not a militant atheist in the sense that I'm not seeking to de-convert anybody, but I am seeking to change the world, the physical material world in which we reside by advocating technological breakthroughs that can reverse human aging, that can greatly reduce material scarcity, increase people's liberty and leisure time, prevent conflict, prevent accidents, prevent natural disasters and other causes of needless loss of life. So anybody who supports those goals, whatever their philosophical foundation would be an ally in terms of working toward those aims. So then Steve Hill also has shared his perspective. He says, I'm an agnostic scientist. It's the leaf way. And leaf, by the way, is the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, one of our allied organizations, which has been doing great work. They run Lifespan.io, which is a crowdfunding platform specifically devoted to longevity research, and that's the first of its kind. They have completed their fundraising goal for the Mousage Project. And that project aims to use artificial intelligence in order to run essentially virtual experiments on virtual mice so that real mice don't have to be sacrificed in lab work. And I've been aware for a number of years, unfortunately, of the tragic loss of mouse lives, even if mice survive a particular experiment. Sometimes they're discarded, they're euthanized because of lack of resources. And for me, that is extremely unfortunate. It should be prevented if at all possible. If there are ways to glean the same knowledge or better knowledge more rapidly without doing that, then that would be an excellent goal. So, Leaf, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and Lifespan.io are great organizations to support through the good work of Kenneth, whom you mentioned, Martin, we have published several articles from Leaf on our website, including by Steve Hill. So I encourage everyone to go out and read them. Then we have... Thank you, Steve Hill, for writing them, by the way. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, it's really good stuff. Yes, and Steve responds, yes. And thank you to the US Transhumanist Party for their great support. It is appreciated to have good allies. Wonderful. And we have two comments from Keahi Angarika. As long as you believe in the transhumanist ideals and are willing to help build the world where we all live better, it doesn't matter over much, whatever else you might believe in. I completely agree with that. He... I don't care if someone would be a Satanist or Scientology or something, anything. It doesn't matter if they respect other people. Yeah, respect other people to be as they wish to be. And they accept values in the sense of increasing longevity and healthy lifespans and so on and so forth. It's all awesome. Me, it's like... Absolutely. And then... That's the audio. Sean, I think you are trying to say something. So let's see, are you able to speak? I can hear you, but barely. Yeah. I guess I'll just try to hold this really close to my mouth. So, yeah, I've been wanting to say some stuff, but I wasn't sure if it would be interrupting or if you could hear me or not. So one of the questions I've had or I've been contemplating is what we consider to be under the auspices of life extension? Because we talk a lot about the longevity of lives, but I'm not sure if we've really had the conversation about the quality of lives sometimes because, I mean, you can live 100 years, but if it's 100 years with the last 50 years is a vegetable that's questionable. Despite the fact that we have that technology. So I've been wondering about things like a lot of diseases that we have that are related to our diets that result in... I guess they have metabolic diseases, is how you could say it mostly. But things that can oftentimes result in things like heart disease and Alzheimer's disease, but mostly gerontological diseases is what I'm focusing on as I know we've had a lot of, let's extend the telomeres on, you know, sorry. Yes. I guess what I'm trying to do is get beyond the length of the lives of the individual cells and try to look, in some case, I'm obviously this is not kind of contrary to anything that you've said so far, but I don't know how much of our messaging has been quality of life messaging because a lot of it has been about longevity writ large, which is kind of vague in itself. And I also don't mean to diminish any of the achievements of lifespan that I owe. And I totally agree that we should minimize the suffering of lives of animals in general, but I do sometimes question how they manage to, legend is that they run in the computer are similar to an actual mouse. It seems really complex. I know we've totally decoded the genomes of mice and create mice with green feet now. I actually saw this really interesting thing about CRISPR where they actually bred mice with green feet and then use CRISPR after the fact to remove the gene for the green feet from the mice. And then eventually the skin cells fluff off and whatever and they stop being green. And it's how they determine the precision accuracy of CRISPR, which is super interesting. But I am wondering how they would do something that complex without using actual mice. Yes, and those are good points. Now, Steve Hill responded to your first point, Sean, the aim of rejuvenation biotechnology is to increase healthy lifespan, the aim is quality and quantity here, which is a deviation from current medicine which often keeps you alive but sick. And I think that is in a sense implicit in the pursuit of life extension that the life extension would need to be healthy. It would need to be youthful life extension because without making the body and the cells more youthful it would not be possible to meaningfully extend maximum lifespan beyond where they are today. And most super centenarians, even record-setting ones died at around 115, 116 years. A few have lived beyond that up to 122 years, which was the record set by John Calmont. But there is, right now, of course, no way to just extend frail lifespan beyond those maximums. If we want to exceed those maximums, then we need to turn back the age and clock. And of course that would be essentially more youthful years of life. So I agree, not a good idea to spend more years with Alzheimer's disease or with heart disease or with great vulnerability to cancer, but aging is kind of the common set of causal factors that precipitates most of those diseases to this degree that somebody who is biologically young is hundreds of times less vulnerable to them than somebody who is biologically old. And Steve Hill expressed agreement with that. He says, yeah, no point in giving people another 20 years in a wheelchair. No one wants that. Speaking of which, advances in prosthetic technology, exoskeletons, artificial limbs will help people also get out of their wheelchairs and recover from paralysis, which would be another wonderful set of developments. If I may add is I agree with Sean on the part that we have focused a lot on longevity. Obviously, well, at least to us, obviously, longevity comes with being healthy and youthful. I do think that the general public might not naturally make that connection as we do in the sense of that we could advocate them for longevity, which already for the vast majority of people is a complicated term because they usually just say they usually just say a getting old. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But they don't necessarily make the connection that it would be useful. They think, okay, they want us to get older, but what they think is that with that, you automatically become more frail. And instead of we want you to become older because we want to make you, we want to keep you healthy and youthful. And I think that is something we could make an improvement in communicating that. Yes, we do want, we would like to give you the option of being able to get older, but not without the precondition of being healthy and youthful, maybe we should actually focus on keeping people healthy and youthful, which then automatically, over time, become the mindset of if we're healthy and youthful, the chances are we get older. And Keahi Angarka says in response to that, such as the popular media portrayal, I think in reference to what you described, Martin, and Aubrey de Grey calls this the tithiness error. Tithiness was Greek Titan, I believe, who was the lover of the goddess Eos, who begs Zeus to give him eternal life without giving him eternal youth. And he became increasingly frail and he shriveled up into a tiny size. And yet, so this has been a kind of popular conception over the ages, Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels wrote about the strolled brugs, which was a population of humans that never died, but they did senes and they became very frail and very unhappy to say the least. So I think this idea that getting older necessarily means getting frailer. One, it originated in a time when medicine wasn't able to do very much about that. And moreover, it originated as a kind of comforting thought. People who encountered this mythology would think, well, yes, we're mortal, our lives are finite, our lives are short, but maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile to live much longer because see what happened to tithiness, see what happened to the strolled brugs. And yet, I do agree it's important to correct that error because that's a basic factual error that people have about rejuvenation biotechnology. That's not even say a moral disagreement or a political disagreement. That's a misapprehension of what the goal of the life extension project would be. And Steve Hill remarks, we always pitch from the following. One, cures for diseases, two, health, three, independence. Longevity is a possible outcome, but we have found the public react best to those three points. So I do think it's worthwhile to emphasize what one can do with extra healthy lifespan. And by the way, we have B.J. Murphy joining our conversation here. B.J. Murphy is our director of social media, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Apologies, having some spotty issues over here with the wifi for some reason. Oh, no problem. So the conversation that we are having right now relates to the presentation of life extension to the public, and it has been remarked, a lot of people in the general public don't understand yet the connection between increased longevity and increased youthful and healthy lifespans, and they commit the tiffinous error, which I described. We've had a few more comments on this. Super Fin Guy says, not to mention that in the media, mortals are almost always portrayed as evil, and Keahi Angarika says, we should use that term more often as a way of approaching it. After all, we usually refer to it as a definite life extension instead. And yes, a definite life extension has been the term of art to use for our goal. Several people, including Aubrey de Grey, don't like the term immortality because they think it presupposes certain religious connotations or invulnerability, and a definite life extension is not invulnerability to all causes of death. But there are other perspectives on immortality. For instance, Michael West likes to use that term, biological immortality, when referring even to existing organisms like germline cells within mammals, which are essentially biologically immortal in the sense that they can replicate indefinitely without their telomere shortening, without becoming damaged over time, which is how each new generation of animals isn't born frailer and more decrepit than the previous generation. So the term biological immortality is also used to denote that, the capacity to constantly rejuvenate an organism. So BJ, what are your thoughts? Yes, Sean. There was one point that I really wanted to make, like 20 minutes back, but so we talk a lot about how the cells, you just talk about how the cells rejuvenate. And I was talking about something slightly different. And this is why I felt like the difference between longevity and wellness was kind of modeled and used as a fallacy. But when I was talking about the things that people, things that cause disease, Alzheimer's isn't caused by cells ceasing to replicate properly. Alzheimer's is called by improperly folded bacteria, which accumulate in the brain as plaques from basically people have shitty diets sometimes. And there's also things that can be in those diets that cause cancerous formations. More to the point, it's during the normal process of generating energy in the brain, if you use really crappy inputs, you know, the crappy diet that we're talking about, they will cause the buildup of certain types of plaques. If you literally don't eat certain types of foods, those plaques either don't build up or take vastly longer to build up. So this is the difference that I'm talking about, where it has nothing to do with the biology's way of renewing itself, but in fact has to do with the agents that you put into your body, you know, the food that you eat, or the nutrition that you don't get, that can cause misfolded proteins in this case of Alzheimer's, which then leads to Alzheimer's disease, which actually doesn't have anything to do with telomeres lengthening at all. And that's kind of what I was trying to get to was that we have a lot of diseases and heart disease is another one, what this has to do with the types of fats that are in your diet. When you have the types of fats that are, you know, specific mostly to junk foods, but not specific to whole foods, even though they both have fats, this is a whole argument of what is fat and what's good fat and what's bad fat. I know this is a strange educational health eating type of thing, but the point that I'm trying to make is that, gerontological diseases are totally the body failing to renew itself properly, but what I'm talking about is toxic toxins from the environment that are introduced into the food supply unknowingly through real shooting quality control and sometimes bad science, which is, I'm not sure if we want to have that conversation about what constitutes as bad science right now, but the point being that I felt at least for our international groups, one way that we can really help them gain popularity is by distributing literature as such about common mistakes that people make in their diets, which can lead to rapid aging by having highly basically toxic diets. If you wanna look like that, you know, when you look at alcohol in the brain acting the same way as high fructose in the brain, except you don't have a natural system for telling you we've had too much high fructose, then that leads to quite a few metabolic disorders and like nobody knows this and then at the same time, all these countries that we have international ambassadors don't know these things, but they are where the cheapest and crappiest foods go and then, you know, we end up having a bunch of followers that are idiots. Well, now, I think it's incontrovertible that diet contributes to health and premature death is often caused by problems with people's diets. You mentioned heart disease. However, also in terms of later in life, the problems that you discussed with protein misfolding are actually addressed in Aubrey de Grey's taxonomy of the seven principle types of aging-related damage and what's interesting also is when Alzheimer's disease manifests itself by I believe age 85, about half of individuals who survive to that age have some symptoms associated with Alzheimer's disease. So at the very least, biological senescence is fertile soil metaphorically for the emergence of these conditions and likewise with heart disease. So a person who is 30 is very unlikely to have a heart attack, even if their diet is atrocious. A person who is 60 or 80 is more likely to have a heart attack even if they live generally healthy lives because the overall defense mechanisms of the body are beginning to fail. So super thin guy says in response to this, not entirely true, the body has defense mechanisms against residue buildup that increasingly fail as we age and with regard to this, Steve Hill says, this is also addressed in the hallmarks of aging, a similar repair-based approach to aging inspired by sense. And one other thing to consider also is diet tends to be still a somewhat controversial area in the sense that apart from the basics, like don't eat 5,000 calories a day unless you burn that much, don't have a diet entirely composed of Twinkies. There is very little agreement, there's very little agreement even among scientists, among nutritionists about what the appropriate diet is. My own view is diversification, especially in the absence of detailed knowledge about the provenance of each food is probably the best way to protect oneself along with moderation, having a caloric balance unless one is actively trying to lose weight or to gain weight because that way one doesn't get too much of any one thing if that one thing ends up being harmful. And that being said, other people have different approaches. Some people follow a kind of paleo diet, some people actually favor carbohydrates or are vegans or vegetarians. And really in terms of the outcomes, there's a great degree of variation. But ultimately I think the amount of variation is still within the parameters that we observe today. So it would be very uncommon for a diet alone to extend someone's lifespan by 20 years, say. And what we're trying to do is get technologies made available that could even reverse the effects of that diet on people because yes, it would be ideal if everybody ate in a healthy manner, but even for those who don't, we want to save them if at all possible because they have valuable things to contribute to the world and their lives are valuable in themselves. I want to go to BJ to see what he has to say on the set of issues that we've discussed. Yeah, well, let me just first bring it back to the discussion of the sort of controversy of using certain terms and describing what exactly we're aiming for here, whether it's indefinite life extension or immortality. In my own personal view, for the longest time, I've sort of been opposed to the term immortality, specifically for the reason that it always came off as this sort of authoritarian terminology where to be immortal is to be unable to die and to be unable to die relinquishes that individuals decision in the matter. And for us as transhumanists, for those who aim for indefinite life extension, we're not here to dictate what each individual will decide upon what their ultimate longevity is, whether they wish to live up until they're around 80 years old or 100 or 150, maybe they want to live like in Thucila or the mythological character at 1,000 years, that should be up to the individual. It should be seen as like almost as an extension upon what Dr. Jack Kivorkian did by bringing a decision in the matter for patients who wish to die at their own behest. We're simply adding life at the end of this.  So immortality was always just didn't seem accurate in what exactly we were aiming for as a movement and as individual members in this community. As for methods of achieving indefinite life extension, as people have been talking about, diets can be great. They're all different sorts of ways a certain individual can help lengthen their lives up until the point where technology reaches that moment where we can begin reversing the aging process in and of itself and diets can help. I have a great deal of respect for people like Maria Kanavalinka who had written the longevity cookbook which she tried doing the most scientifically accurate cookbook as possible for people to try and follow that to a certain extent adhere to a strict science-based diet, one that wasn't flooded with any of the popular food fads that sort of biased a lot of people's opinions, whether that varied from the paleos to the gluten freeze which isn't to say these weren't positive things for individuals but in terms of a general population these food fads really didn't do anything other than be what it is a food fad. It was nothing more than populism and trying to keep an observation of how food affects us and our means of achieving longevity. It needs to be strictly science-based and if anybody's interested they should check out the longevity cookbook that might be of interest and have helped them as well. Yes and I understand that the longevity cookbook is currently in progress but the first chapters have been released. There was a crowdfunding initiative several years ago that was successful and the first few chapters are available for free online. People who helped with the crowdfunding such as myself are at some point going to receive an entire version of the longevity cookbook. Hopefully, hopefully. I'm looking forward to that and I also think it's important with regard to diet to consider in essence to what extent there is just a response to the paradigms of the day as you mentioned, B.J. There was at one point a low-fat craze that was fueled by the USDA's food pyramid and then in response to that there was the Atkins diet and the Paleo movement and some people found that to be helpful. For other people it didn't do very much but I think those people who found it to be helpful to a certain extent found the discipline or the let's say limitation of caloric intake through a reasonable amount to have the greatest effect because if somebody just ate whatever and then they shifted to some system and that system has some good elements about it whether they're arrived at scientifically or just through say trial and error or through some sort of common sense for strength. Yes, they're going to see a benefit from it and to the extent that we can offer advice as the transhumanist party I think it should be advice that is kind of a big tent in the sense that we recognize there are many different approaches. We're not going to take aside say in the Paleo versus vegan debate because that's like a trench warfare issue and the people who are really invested in it are not going to be convinced one way or the other but what we can say is people should take care of themselves and one of the ways in which they should take care of themselves is through good diet again to help themselves survive to the point where longevity, escape velocity is possible and where medical treatments might reverse any of the incidental effects of what they happen to have eaten in the past and in response to that we've had a lot of discussion here I wanted to go back a bit to a comment that Rich Lee made he said, I think the public would get behind life extension 100% when broken into components hair that does not graze, skin that does not wrinkle bones that do not become brittle muscles that regain strength and that's an interesting thought because we see a lot of people today pursuing what one would consider cosmetic improvements people who dye their hair people who apply various lotions to their skin and they want to look younger biologically they don't become younger by doing that but at least they preserve a certain appearance and also people who exercise who keep physically active later in life which does affect their muscle strength it does affect their endurance it does affect various other vital metrics so that definitely I think improves health another thing I think, sorry for interrupting there I think that is something that could gain attention is that over time we will be able to genetically alter or perhaps through gut bacteria I don't know but in the sense of life extension is to lower the possibility of obesity or lower the average percentage of body fat at all because if we like with technological advances over time we will probably be able to engineer a genome or a piece of DNA, a piece of DNA a chromosome whatever to ensure that yeah people basically can't get more than 10% body fat that's it, that's your limit and everything else will just be shed off by your body or in the sense, yes muscle strength there's a huge difference in how much muscle one can make between different individuals if we take for example, Flex Wheeler which was a, I think it was Mr. Olympia not entirely sure on that one but he participated in the Mr. Olympia contest this guy could eat pizza right before a competition and he would have like practically zero body fat he needed a trainer not because he wasn't gaining muscle no, he was too lazy that's why he needed a trainer everyone else needed a trainer to actually make the maximum amount of muscle and he was actually gaining muscle pretty fast and he wasn't getting fat while all the other bodybuilders were eating brown rice and broccoli he was eating a salami pizza or whatever and something like that, if we can well not exactly that everyone becomes Mr. Olympia or Mrs. Olympia for the matter I don't think there's Mrs. Olympia but whatever, but that we can naturally or through DNA changes we can make people automatically more healthy in said process that it's easier to gain muscle or it's harder to gain fat and so on and so forth that would help another thing would be digestion like the digestive system of a human is about 70% effective or efficient that's not particularly good at least not if we compare it to vulture which has like a 99 or 98% that would actually save us a lot of food on the planet imagine a 20% increase of energy, use, efficiency that would, we would have to eat 20% less that alone will probably save the planet if we go on like with eating less we need less land to raise crops, so on and so forth just in that sense, I think that diet and later on genetic modifications combined with diets might help a lot in keeping us healthy. Yes, and these are good ideas by the way as an aside, this is another reason to like vultures now vultures have a bad reputation but they are eminently useful animals they are essentially the janitors of the natural world then they clean up unseemly scenes but they don't actually kill anything so they are very benign creatures compared to the creatures that have let's say a lot of admiration and popular imagery like eagles and hawks and lions who are vicious carnivores vultures don't actually hurt the creatures that they eat they just come in to clean up afterward so this is a good word for vultures but I think we'll make sure there are mascots they're ensuing as pepper alleys by the people running around it'll be great Yes No, what Mara was talking about is this isn't, people need to understand that these types of possible solutions aren't as far as ways people may believe like here recently, it was like a few months back there was a story that was making waves throughout the scientific community it was a new study that was coming out of the Columbia University Medical Center where researchers were they created this medicated micro needle skin patch where on lab mice and what the skin patch was doing was turning energy storing white fat into energy burning brown fat while raising the body's metabolism and what this did was not only treat obesity but also combat it against diabetes and regret that this is on specifically mice so it's in a limited regulated setting but the fact that they were able to achieve something as significant as this does tell us that we are aiming in a direction where we can start treating these types of issues that doesn't necessarily have to be as limited as they are today where people are saying well you gotta eat a certain way or you gotta work out this amount of time in a given day we're providing actual technical scientific solutions where we can address this here and now just like we would address the common flu. Yes, and this is where the transhumanist party is distinctive and can offer perspectives that at the very least complement sound dietary advice but we have a lot of people giving dietary advice today and some of it is good some of it is perhaps untested or conflicts with other dietary advice but what we can say is through technology we may get rid of the problem whereby so many people even have to pay as much attention to diet we can imagine a future transhuman organism where perhaps let's say it has nanobots in the bloodstream and those nanobots can go and clean out any of the junk that accumulates from eating any particular type of food so that at that point food essentially becomes an activity perhaps for sensory enjoyment only and in terms of nutrition maybe people will take a pill that will give them the daily requirements as customized to their individual bodily makeup and then food might become something consumed incidentally in addition to that if somebody wants to have that experience or maybe there would be a haptic simulations of food where once taste buds might be triggered in a certain way that corresponds to consuming a particular food item but one wouldn't actually be physically consuming it so those are the kinds of possibilities that I think transhumanist thought is uniquely situated to explore I wanted to also mention certain comments that were made along these lines in terms of how the public sees the pursuit of life extension Keahi Angarika says that he agrees with Rich Lee but also believes we need to make it something the public can get closer to currently it is just something abstract for most people and an idea of restricted to lab spaces and I think perhaps the antidote to that is to point out more of the advances like the ones you were mentioning BJ where there are specific technologies on the horizon that could reverse effects that most people would commonly recognize as bad like if there was some device that you could put on yourself to metabolize blood sugar and effectively render diabetes no longer a problem I'm sure tens and hundreds of millions of people are going to be attracted to that concept that would dramatically change their quality of life and having that relevance articulated I think is very important at the same time making sure that these technologies are affordable to people as well because there's also that common fear of well what will these technologies be available to everyone will they be democratized to everyone as opposed to as Freeman Dyson would say simply become new toys for the rich and I think there's going to be an evolution in terms of the availability of those technologies right now even if you're wealthy it's difficult to access them because they're an experimental stages so they may be used on mice or one has to be in a clinical trial group one of the aims of the transhumanist party is to accelerate that process between the development of the treatment and its deployment for the general public and right now one of the biggest obstacles in the US is the approval process with the Food and Drug Administration where it takes on average 10 to 15 years for a lot of treatments to get from the stage where they're developed to the stage where they're available to consumers so anything that shortens that timeframe also accelerates the advent of the day when most people in the general public would be able to get an affordable treatment but I agree it is a concern it took them 18 years to approve genetically modified salmon so that alone it shows just how slow the process is of something as innocuous as a genetically modified salmon that allows it to be a bit larger than its predecessors imagine what it's like for common drugs that can actually help people Yes, yes and I think a lot of the problem is with the mindset of the precautionary principle that something should never be approved unless you know that it's not going to cause harm but one of the ways in which we find out the effects of a particular substance is by having empirical data it's not possible to foresee in the abstract every conceivable harm that could resolve and in order to gather that empirical data I think we need people with various risk tolerances and people with various circumstances in life some people who are terminally ill or suffering a lot from a particular disease are going to be willing to take more risks than you or I would in a healthy state and I think as part of respecting their autonomy their freedom of choice we need to allow them to take these treatments and then by virtue of taking these treatments they also generate data that scientists could use to understand any side effects understand ways to improve the treatments so that by the time they get to the general public it's not just the results of the few clinical trials that will be known it will be the effects on a large subset of the general public and there are countries that are moving in that direction Japan recently enacted reforms that would essentially allow drug manufacturers to market substances before they've passed the final clinical trials for efficacy and as part of that distribution of the substances they gather data on efficacy that can later be used to finalize the approval process so these kinds of reforms are highly promising and we do have some proposed planks in our recently released exposure period that do address these issues so let us continue with the conversation that is in the chat Kayaki Ngarika says some citizen science and more opportunity for engagement would be a huge boon to the entire movement even biology majors at the university cannot work out how to get involved and I would say perhaps the best person to offer insights into that is Rich Lee who is our biohacking advisor who is participating in the comment thread right now because he has knowledge of efforts in the biohacking arena he shared with me some news recently and hopefully I may be able to integrate them into a more general statement of support for this kind of citizen science one interesting development and we still don't know what will become of it has been the self administration of an HIV vaccine by an individual in association with Ascendants Biomedical whose founders I've actually met and conversed with at some length but they're trying to make these experimental treatments more widely available to people and this was a recent milestone but with the increased affordability of the materials for conducting such experiments we are seeing a lot more citizen science and outright biohacking where people are modifying their own biology or creating certain technological augmentations to their own bodies and again talking about risk tolerance some people have more of it some people have less of it the people who have more of it are conducting these experiments they're generating data for the rest of us to consider and that's how science advances and that's how medicine advances and we wish them all the best in terms of the new abilities that they might gain or the diseases that they might be able to cure or ameliorate We're gonna be able we're gonna see a lot more of that as well though cause it originally well I'm not sure I would say originally but it really started gaining speed when Liz Parrish first announced that she was gonna be patient zero for the first ever gene therapy or anti-aging gene therapy where she administered onto herself that was a revolutionary at the time and then here recently we had with the HIV injection alongside Josiah Zainer who released a DIY CRISPR kit for people to use and he injected himself for myostatin and that right there is gonna be opening up the floodgates for a whole new citizens-based genetics revolution that we haven't seen in the history of our species or any species for that matter we have full control of what's gonna take place in our genetic structure and our biological code and that's gonna open up a whole in terms of science and in terms of participatory science that's gonna be a big step for our species Yes indeed and speaking of other emerging technologies on the horizon Steve Hill points out Cenolytics is the number one imminent technology now in human trials this has potential to treat many diseases and people are starting to get excited about them so there's the connection to essentially getting the public on board and engaged and in terms of what you mentioned before, BJ Steve Hill notes, yes, the number one fear we have found recently is cost it used to be it cannot be done now it can be done but we won't afford it only the rich will afford it Steve Hill also points out Better Humans is running a series of N equals 10 trials for Cenolytics so I believe that means there are 10 participants in the clinical trial Keahy-an-Garica points out that the concerns or the skepticism about life extension is worsened by the general fear of the public most GMO crops are still not accepted in Europe despite decades of data for safety and efficacy this is actually one area in which the United States is far ahead of Europe in terms of scientific and technological progressivism in Europe and a lot of countries GMOs are banned and in the United States essentially trillions of portions of GMOs have been served to the general public without discernible adverse health consequences and if only people could overcome common prejudices and fears and look at the empirical data and look at the actual genetic modifications and questions that were made they would recognize that there is no basis to fear genetically modified organisms now Sean, do you have thoughts in relation to the areas that were discussed recently? No, I mostly agree with the sentiments that have been given Okay, great, great So now we have a bit more to follow up on richly jokes that the one true diet ordained by God is bugs I wonder if there are any people who seriously hold that particular perspective It's interesting when I was at Mokefest I believe it was 2015 perhaps? In fact, Richly was there as well we were both doing the same conference with Neil Harvison and them and as being a guest there as guest speakers we were given these little packets of whatever things books and one of the things that they gave us were these cricket bars and it was fascinating because it was the first time I ever was gonna try insects and I was like, okay because I had the cricket bar with the soylent drink next to it I was like, okay, I'm gonna definitely experiment with it and surprisingly the cricket bar wasn't that bad it actually tasted like a sweet mushroom almost so if you're into mushrooms it had a nice taste to it I was like, okay, I couldn't see myself eating crickets in the future, maybe and so long as it keeps tasting like this I'm okay with it It's interesting too because to a certain extent at least from a moral standpoint insect death is far more acceptable than mammalian death in terms of at the very least the emotional impact that it has on us yet from a cultural standpoint most of us are far more comfortable with eating say cows or pigs or chickens than insects and that includes myself I will eat a hamburger I will eat chicken I will eat fish I would not at this point eat a cricket but it's interesting Oh, come on Janali, lay what one and I say at this point because the events of my life if they've shown me anything they have shown how radically uncertain the future can be and that includes one's own future so I don't rule it out but I wanted to make the comment that it seems to mostly be a cultural aversion as far as I'm aware that is to say consuming certain insects at least doesn't seem to carry adverse health effects but of course one with any new food should tread carefully and learn about it and investigate what it could do now Keaki Angarika says he notes there are many trials but they take so long and he asks why is it so slow and well I think part of it is science is hard and discovery is hard and it takes a lot of trial and error to get to a treatment that works but I think the FDA approval process and the artificial increase in expense that it entails is also one big reason another big reason is the lack of public support and the lack of funding which scientists like Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey have repeatedly lamented and Keaki Angarika says the insect bars are great and really show what you can do to make things more palatable they don't look or taste like cricket which is a good stepping stone so okay if there are if there's let's say an incremental way to get into insect consumption for those who are interested then the insect bars are a way to do that we seem to have lost Martin but he joined us back so hello Martin once again oh no problem do you have any thoughts on insect consumption or anything related to the discussion thus far well I think it depends on a lot on culture as well I mean for many people in the world horse is a no-go this is not for all cultures Italians are not refers to horse meat neither are touched by the way although we mostly only eat it on bread but for example and Alexander might know about this is Kazakhs eat a lot of horse meat but not only that they also well I mean it's not a standard not anymore but they also drink fermented horse milk I mean most of us don't even know what like wouldn't even consider regular horse milk a thing let alone fermented horse milk and so on so it's very cultural thing I mean in China you can eat snake and it's not a big deal if you serve the snake in Nevada in a restaurant you're gonna raise an eyebrow well in Nevada it's interesting because let's say there are a lot of people with an experimental disposition in many circles I would be considered highly conservative in Nevada but I mean you could probably go to Las Vegas and find snake being served somewhere probably yeah but that's just because they want to be obscured good luck trying to get people convincing people to have a horse meat here in the United States that's a big no-go apparently we're okay with cows but when it comes to horses we're not very in favor of it we had that there was like the scandal not that long a few years back with Taco Bell where they got one of the brands was they got in trouble because they were using horse meat as an alternative and that caused the big fuck big ruckus over it and for me personally I was like well you know as much as I want to try and alleviate as much harm on non-human animals the horse meat wasn't that bad so I can't complain but still I can understand why some people might find it a bit problematic as you said there is certain cultural issues to it as well and people just don't have they just view certain animals and differently as we do yes and go ahead Sean and what I wanted to make is I have been known to be a picky eater but I've never really cared about the origin of what I eat as much I mean other than trying to eat less meat in general but what I mean to say is I've always focused on things like texture which is I know a bit of odd but and this is kind of how I want to tie it back into the horse meat thing is like so what it means is for a really long time people were eat well for some amount of time probably more than a year people were eating no horse meat and didn't know what it was well they didn't know that it was horse meat and they were fine with it and this is how I kind of approach the insect as food issue when it's turned into a bar or a powder or something else that doesn't actually physically resemble an insect I don't think most people would have an issue eating it unless they knew it was actually insects but even then for me the thing that's been making me not want to eat insects is the fact that they tend to just hey let's just throw a couple of these into a pan and fry them whole and it's all crunchy and sharp that you can feel on your tongue I was like so yeah no powdering them is a great idea just like how McDonald's gets away with pink slime because no one knows what it is and it's just reshaped it to something that looks like chicken nuggets yes and those are the point that's important to be with the presentation and the consistency of how it tastes in your mouth rather than the origin of the actual foods those are very good points and I will say I have some affinity to that perspective Sean because I want I am a meat eater but I want my meat to resemble as little as possible the animal it came from so that I do not have to think about death when I consume my food of course I wrote a book called death is wrong and I not only have a moral and philosophical aversion to death I have a visceral aversion to death I do not like to be in the presence of anything that looks like it is dead so when I eat my meat I also wanted to be as consistently textured as possible I wanted to be in nice geometric shapes I do not want it to look like an actual animal and some might say well it's because I'm trying to perpetuate a cognitive dissonance maybe I am but suffice it to say if lab grown in vitro meat becomes readily available even if it's a little bit more expensive I will happily consume that over meat taken from actual animals and I do think the point regarding the presentation of insects is well taken I would not want to eat something that looks like an actual dead insect either I will also say Keaki Angarika says rattler is a tradition in parts of the west so apparently they do eat snakes horse meat on the other hand would probably be taboo in Nevada because there's a large wild horse population especially in northern Nevada especially on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and there are a lot of vocal advocates for the wild horses for protecting them because the BLM has sometimes been rounding them up and even killing them in mass and a lot of people are upset over that so I would say a consumption of horse meat out here would be taboo snakes maybe not so much anyway B.J. you wanted to say something well I was just going to make note of you know I agree with the idea of presentation as well and it's an interesting point because it's one of those things that it's one of those interesting criticisms that over here in the United States we have a tendency of receiving where in if you travel around Europe and you eat their dishes there is a great sense of presentation in the way that they produce their food and how they present the people and make it palatable for people here in the United States we don't really emphasize too strongly on presentation all that much we you know we focus on all these other menial aspects of food that are honestly irrelevant to what exactly we're looking for we want to try to make it as healthy as possible and as palatable like visual-wise as possible but for some reason we tend to focus on the exact contrary and that makes it a bit more problematic for us in how we provide food and present to people and try to convince them hey this is the future of food but if you can't even give them a good presentation of it it's a bad first impression so it's one of those things that here in the United States in particular where you have to work on especially yes indeed now I also think one of the issues that we have in essence is and this relates to the entire array of subjects we discussed for most people they have a certain let's say horizon of possibilities that is accessible to them and people can make different choices with regard to food with regard to physical activity with regard to what products they purchase in the store but say with experimental treatments they don't know how to access them they might not be aware of exactly what is out there what is being tested what they can do to help and I do think that is a barrier because if you could buy say a patch at a store that could help you metabolize blood sugar and you could just stick it on and it reduces your probability of getting diabetes by 90 percent I'm sure most people buy one especially if it were inexpensive but right now maybe they don't see it on the horizon so what can be done to enable them to see it and this is an open question to anyone who wants to tackle it well they're when I was doing work with planetary resources for those that don't know that was the that's the asteroid mining company that was founded by Peter Diamandis the one of the things that we ended up doing was for mostly funding for a space telescope that they were working on at the time but we ended up receiving a little bit more funding which we used to help bring about what was called asteroid zoo and that was a citizen science-based project that people go online and they received live data of images of earth's orbit and they would be able to help out and participate in locating possible near-earth asteroids and they presented it in a way again we come back to presentation they presented it in a way where it was not only important but it was fun it was something that you could do in your whenever you have spare time and if you can make science fun again for people to show them that it's not just this boring monotonous thing that you have to do in a lab with a white code that science can be fun and that it it can be both fun and important then that presentation of a citizens-based science of getting people involved in the process and gain access to these resources we could probably go a lot further than we are normally we just need to start figuring out the way that we present the citizen-based science projects as well yes and those are extremely good points go ahead Tron one suggestion I would make is find either a a different thing to name them other than insect-based proteins I mean there's so many euphemisms for high-fructose corn syrup I'm sure we could come up with some euphemisms for insect-based protein and then I think the using it as a secondary ingredient in a lot of things like you know you'd sometimes use types of flour as a thickener to increase thickness of your dough or sometimes even dough or other things so I guess trying to use them first off naming them differently and then using them as secondary ingredients rather than primary ingredients into enough things that it becomes a primary ingredient I'm trying to imagine like quarter of crickets or something you know cricket powder or you know utilizing it as a thickener and jello or jello made of cricket powder I don't know but uh yeah definitely that type of and some people might still be thrown off by the idea of a handful of crickets as a part of the recipe and it's interesting also currently existing analogy to what you mentioned Sean is the fact that a lot of gelatin is still made out of horse hoofs and yet for most people that is not a deterrent from consuming gelatinous products now it's interesting also the US transhumanist party in section 24 of its platform does support a complete prohibition on the killing of non-contagious non-aggressive dogs cats dolphins whales elephants horses tortoises parrots and primates for the reason that these are the most intelligent of the non-human animals and there is a hierarchy of sentience and intelligence and Sean you helped draft the hierarchy that's contained in our preamble whereby unaided human beings are at level five of sentience but there are a lot of animals that are for instance at level four and I do think there is a moral distinction between consuming something that is at level four and consuming something that is a much lower level in the sense that if we were to look at it from a purely moral standpoint and get rid of cultural considerations altogether eating an insect would be more palatable than say eating a pig but eating a pig would be more palatable than eating a dog or a cat and there was a debate on the chat between Keahi Angarika and Superfin Guy Keahi Angarika advocated eating more horses, dogs, cats and other species if they exceed the demand for other uses Superfin Guy points out it's not only about social issues but objectively we don't want to kill or eat intelligent animals or even the type of protein that we eat and then they had a debate about whether pigs are sufficiently intelligent to be encompassed within that designation I would say perhaps in terms of common sense or ubiquitous empirical observation dogs and cats definitely need to be off limits as should primates primates should be off limits for health reasons as well since they're too genetically similar to us and I I don't think I should go ahead go ahead but I think the pig is on the same level as the dog and cat yeah that's what I was gonna say and that that is worth looking into certainly and this is one of the problems that in vitro meat can solve because from the standpoint of how people get their sources of protein some people are vegetarians today but I think that's a fairly stable percentage of the population and the people who are meat eaters today are not meat eaters for a lack of vegetarian alternatives that may have been the case 30 or 40 years ago but today one can go to a grocery store and find an abundance of vegetarian products and simulacra of meat of varying degrees of authenticity I eat a lot of veggie burgers and other veggie products myself even though I'm not a vegetarian because I find them to have an interesting and distinctive taste which is not quite like the experience of eating meat but for those who want that particular experience of eating meat I think they need actual physical meat that is grown in a lab that doesn't require the killing of an animal and that's when we might be able to find some good oil turns just for the consistency of the meat Yes, yes I think I think there are a lot of products that can simulate at least certain aspects of eating meat fairly well I would actually say chicken can be very readily emulated through vegetarian chicken faux chicken patties that taste almost like actual chicken patties with beef I would say there are more differences but that's just my personal experience but even that's changing with the that new one that they're doing the veggie meat patty that actually bleeds like a real meat patty and that enhances the flavor in and of itself and actually mimics at least those who've taste tested it have claimed that it actually tastes like meat so there are even advances in that regard as well in terms of actually mimicking meat based products using only veggie based sources so that's interesting Martin Also back to the ranking of animals to eat chickens are quite dumb like you can't cut off the head of a pig and expect it to run around for 20 to 40 seconds So I'm just I think of the mammals that you could eat it is the dumbest and thus most reasonable Well that's my predominant meat source anyway so I suppose that is somewhat of a relief Now in that case we should actually be eating axolotli because we just cut off a piece and they'll all regenerate so we're not killing anything we're just eating axolotli yes we're done Yes so we have some more comments here there is a debate about essentially which are the more objectively intelligent animals and how to define that super thin guy mentions cognitive ability as a criterion for intelligence and of course much has been said about the definition of intelligence what counts as intelligence to what extent do various animals have similar cognitive processes and the similar awareness of their own cognitive processes that we do I think certainly whales and dolphins would probably have some kind of that awareness and I wouldn't be surprised if dogs and cats do given how I've observed them to react and behave and the differences in personality that I've observed among individuals of those species Keohokian Garika says intelligence can be variously defined I don't know that I try to force it too hard to fit specific single definitions but as far as eating I'm up for anything that isn't human and super thin guy states in psychology intelligence is pretty defined Keohokian Garika says as far as growing meat though I do like the idea and highly support the availability of lab meat as a way to decrease cost increase safety and nutrition and solve environmental issues Helen Kenyon says I think our definitions of intelligence speak more to our ability to understand than to any inherent intelligence or lack thereof in any one species and Sean just posted a link internally to the Wikipedia entry on the theory of multiple intelligences I'll just post it in the chat as well so that people have it available and yes there are various dimensions along which psychologists that propose measuring intelligence to what extent do other species of animals have them I think the comment by Helen Kenyon is apropos in the sense that we can recognize when a creature has attributes in common with us or doesn't would we be able to recognize the intelligent processes in an entity that is far more intelligent than ourselves let's say an artificial general intelligence that might develop capabilities that we don't have how would they manifest themselves can a dog or a cat perceive intelligent processes in a human that a dog or a cat doesn't have or do they just think we're very big creatures kind of like them who happen to behave in certain ways that are advantageous to them I'm opening this up to any thoughts you might have I think modeling of human behavior is beyond the modeling capacity of most animals most animals don't have a sense of time or the future there's they're kind of stuck in this eternal now which is one of the things that was kind of implied by the way we rank consciousness but it's not directly obvious that when we talk about that modeling that animals don't have this ability to model the world so they can model maybe them themselves and maybe other animals and they really have a hard time modeling themselves animals don't know what choices they're going to make in the future and they can't predict a choice camps maybe but those dogs and cats aren't making they aren't thinking about the future a dog has two bones the reason to have trouble protecting the inability of the model so I definitely don't think that animals are or cats and dogs are understanding humans to the same degree that humans are understanding cats and dogs for the same modeling limitation and so when we talk about something like what would an AI do we're talking about this type of modeling that's even beyond what we would model and I think some things that people are afraid of or at least have in the conspiracy theory of being at to worry that the models of the AI would be so complex as they would make these minor changes actually have they would be able to control the butterfly effect as it were and make innocuous changes in different parts of the economy that would result in huge changes later on but no one would be able to detect them because the modeling was so advanced that it was unpredictable but I sometimes feel like this is mostly people's excuse for their own failings to predict mistakes and make and it's an interesting point you raised because humans do have the capacity to model other entities so we've kind of crossed a qualitative threshold here on the other hand can we detect yes something that seems to us to be innocuous but can have tremendous ramifications I think in retrospect we can see situations where if some small event at least from the vantage point of that time didn't happen then a large and consequential series of events would have unfolded differently to what extent would an entity with a lot more access to information and a lot more processing abilities than we have be able to anticipate that without resorting to heuristics as human beings often have to because of the extreme complexity of the world in which we find ourselves so that is an interesting question I think we've already seen something although not with the general AI but we've seen it with a specific AI when it came to the the AlphaGo AI from Google that played against Lisa Dahl the current role champion in the ancient Chinese board game Go that AlphaGo made a move in not sure which round but no one understood why it made that move until I think it was moved 39 then it became clear what it had actually done so many moves before and in that sense we might see we might observe something that seems odd to us when if a higher intelligence would do it then we might not understand why it would do it only like later on we might see the results of what it did much as that I don't know an animal might see us throwing stuff on the soil and not have any idea why we're doing it until later it sees the results that brain is growing something like that well yeah it's interesting that you mentioned AlphaGo because AlphaGo was back on the news here just a couple days ago because Google created a brand new AlphaGo called AlphaGo Zero that when put into the tip the difference between this new AlphaGo from the previous one that defeated all the human AlphaGo or the Go players was that this AlphaGo did not rely on any human bias any type of human based interactions in the practice of Go it learned by combating against itself and not only did it learn the game substantially faster when it put it against the AlphaGo Zero against the previous AlphaGo that defeated all the humans it defeated that original AlphaGo 100 to 0 and the amount of rounds so that in and of itself is showing the acceleration of AI this one you know if you put this up against humans in a game of Go it's going to wipe them off the map so we can already see where the acceleration of artificial intelligence in that capacity is already reaching a a point of no return yeah the original AlphaGo was slightly under a slightly over a year ago March 2016 if I recall correctly 2016 and then they had another one earlier this year for rematches for other Go players and even that one it it still hasn't it's not able to keep up with this brand new one which is fascinating to look at yeah yes this is indeed quite fascinating and to relate this to some of the recent comments Keaki Angarka says AI development will give us great insights into animal and human intelligence and I agree by observing a different form of intelligence in some respects and intelligence more powerful than our own we might be able to understand our own and what differentiates it from that as well as what differentiates the animals from both of these forms of intelligence Superfin guy says don't forget about crows crows are also extremely intelligent at one point in time I believe at least when I was a child I encountered a crow that could count just by the number of emanations that it made it seemed to be referring to kind of the number of objects in its vicinity like I would feed the crow I would throw like a little piece of bread to it and it would crow once if I threw two pieces of bread it would crow twice and I think it could count up to three I'm not sure if it could count beyond three but as a child I kind of found found that fascinating Crows are hyper intelligent beings there was that recent story where researchers were a bit baffled when they were doing one of those typical food scheme based experiments where they would have to do a certain thing in order to get food but a certain crow that was in the research field was so intelligent that it started hacking the experiment to operate in its favor and so they had to take that crow out of the experiment because it was going way past what they were expecting so that was fascinating in and of itself that shows this crow is showing a level of intelligence that it's not going to play by our rules anymore it's going to create its own rules to survive and I think that in and of itself is fascinating Yes indeed Ben Westbrook says scale up lab grown beef to industrial scale but tell people it was grown on a tree interesting so that could get around the fears of the unnatural we could have instead beef growing trees or at least the illusion thereof and because they're trees they're natural quote unquote I think that might fall under uncanny valley maybe I'm not sure It wouldn't even it wouldn't even matter because if you have like beef being grown and it's like it has the substance like the the consistency of minced meat you either sell it as minced meat or you sell it as beef patty or something and there's no way you would be able to tell the difference unless it tastes different Yes Once once these technologies become democratized and enter you know the homes of any any one of the general population it doesn't really matter what exactly it is people if there is going to be a demand for something there's going to be that supply of it and it's it's interesting because one of the commentators mentioned that they don't care what they eat so long as so long as it's not human but interesting enough there was that story of well what happens if some if someone were to create synthetic human flesh using the same processes as that of the lab grown meats would it still be considered cannibalism and that it was bringing up an interesting philosophical question of well if it's still synthetic and we are adhering to the argument that it's not actually harming the animals could we then apply to the same thing as that of humans and would people still find it gross and taboo or would it be less taboo and I'm not sure what my opinion is on that matter in particular but it it does raise a certain philosophical questions on lab grown meats in and of itself especially as it becomes democratized and easily access to the general population and so you know what we're going to call it if we eat synthetic human flesh we're going to call it the Santa Clarita diet okay for anyone who's catching okay APJ is catching of course yeah imagine there's a grower on meat at home kit and it has all the parts for replicating the meat and all you do is supply your own cells you're kidding yourself no would you eat the head meat I would like I don't know like unless I really taste bad but that would probably be a very uh uh awkward conversation to the and during the dinner tables just you know galvanizing about just how good you taste yeah I don't think it would go well for a dinner conversation mm-hmm and I think one of the sorry I think I'm I'm lowering the level here or something also I think canadi is freezing up yeah I believe he is he's stuck he couldn't take it anymore at least he got him on his good side anyway but um that that raises some interesting philosophical questions indeed whether whether yeah that would be would be well one would be ethical and so on and so forth yeah there's a dude that's in like Siberia who's claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus now should they take his meat and as part of the Christian tradition you know where they eat the body of Christ should they just do his meat around and then he could become the source of a bunch of well it would certainly raise up uh an interesting new religious principles I suppose in the future uh it would certainly add on to the whole metaphor to it I suppose yeah I don't like yeah but I think that would be more like like a bio theological question possibly thank you yeah not sure anyways wow anyway but um I think I think an adi is trying to reconnect yes I never actually know am I back yes you are audio wise at least but video is back too yes wonderful okay okay hello okay so uh my apologies this is my patchy internet service which uh I have privately complained about and complained about to the internet service provider as well but it looks like we are back up and the video stream was uninterrupted during my absence correct yes yes okay okay so uh I think the discussion was on a synthetic simulacra of human flesh and whether you're consuming that would be considered cannibalism and the point I wanted to make before I was cut off is uh historically the taboo against cannibalism evolved even in pre-scientific times when people couldn't quite figure out exactly what was wrong with it uh because of the adverse health consequences of eating genetically similar material to one's own and various prion diseases have been caused by cannibalism for instance and I wonder if that wouldn't continue to be the case if there were synthetic meats that were genetically identical to one's own meat just in the very act of consuming those perhaps one would be vulnerable to these kinds of diseases and that wouldn't anymore be a moral argument from the standpoint of doing harm to somebody else it would be more of a health argument you shouldn't eat something that would harm you irrespective of how it was obtained even then even if it were the case you know given that level of technology that uh or the power of that technology we would be able to modify it to where it wouldn't necessarily uh mimic our own uh supposed dna or it wouldn't even cause the prions but we would be in a position of power where we could modify to the extent where it wouldn't bring up these sort of issues at best it would just cause more philosophical questions or or at at worst it would just make another interesting uh argument for the conspiracy theorist about how transhumanists are out to cannibalize the entire world oh yes speaking of which uh this wasn't originated in the chat but just as we were speaking there were some comments posted to our google group by the way if you're a member of the transhumanist party you will be added to our google group and be able to participate in these conversations uh but one commenter says a lot of the conspiracy films online including on youtube need to be countered with online discussions that explain how silly the conspiracy stuff is and we can produce videos debunking them and another commenter says given the trend of alarmism in social media and the currents of bigotry and confirmation bias i would be interested in seeing any realistic solutions and these are i think important issues to consider given that social media and the fragmentation of media in our era tend to create echo chambers where people reinforce uh beliefs even when those beliefs do not have a lot of evidentiary basis and one example of that is that i recently came across a video uh that tried to cobble together video evidence suggesting that i am actually at cyborg and i'm serious about this and some of the evidence i'd be honored you know i had a pose law moment for a second there like yeah so it goes a lot where i'm like is this real is this satire i'm unsure please get me off this planet yes yes precisely so there there are a lot of conspiracy theories though that uh especially that revolve around transhumanism and and they do make a point about where we do need to make a sort of serious uh effort to try and address them because as much as we may dislike it conspiracy theories are extremely popular especially uh to younger adults because that is when they start getting involved in politics for the first time and conspiracy theories are really palatable for them because they're in that moment in their uh in their life where they're starting to question everything and that is the very essence of conspiracy theorism is to question everything and it's sort of a beginner's politics uh a lot of people or most people tend to wedge themselves out of it when they start learning uh to discipline the way that they question politics and what have you but then there are still many who still fall uh or at least they're trapped in that world because of paranoia and all the other other types of issues that keeps them in such a crazy mindset and it is never going to have to address especially as a community it's a lack of critical thinking skills so the issue that we're talking about here is that there's a questioning skepticism and then there's a questioning skepticism too much and conspiracy is definitely isn't to the too much where knowledge becomes completely subjective yeah and the tools to be able to overcome that are critical thinking skills which are unfortunately not a part of most standard k-12 curriculums and is actually a specialized course if you actually make it to college um yeah i taught that course by the way anyway sorry yes and it's extremely important uh i agree and i think one of the fundamental problems in the mindset of any conspiracy theorist is the desire to see significance in every incidental aspect like uh one of the reasons why i'm allegedly a cyborg is because in a lot of my earlier videos i have never seen to blink and the reason why i've never seen to blink is actually because of the low frame rate of those videos because blinking happens so quickly that frame rate doesn't capture it but uh to a conspiracy theorist it just seems unnatural so why isn't this guy blinking oddly enough uh some have alleged that my hair couldn't possibly be real and therefore i am a cyborg and i can assure you that i am not wearing a wig and that this is not some sort of robotic character typical excuse genate just come out the closet come on these are views that would make a cyborg fall so not dropping any hints just you don't have to worry about that marmin you're perfectly fine yes but this this is how conspiracy theories originate little incidental conceptually irrelevant facts get cobbled together into a narrative and then they each individually get pointed to as kind of reinforcing the overall conspiracy and somebody who engages in critical thinking can say well there are alternative explanations for each of them but if somebody spends enough time building up the conspiracy they become invested in it and then it's very difficult to debunk even when each individual piece can be debunked furthermore it's a lot faster to assert a ridiculous claim than it is to take the time to go into detail about why it's false and then some would end up buying a water filter because frogs aren't burning gay or something right well we were i was uh when i was uh doing work with the ai company uh humai we ended up uh running into uh one of those situations where we were having to deal with a bunch of conspiracy theorists as well where they were so adamant that uh under humai that it was a secretly a lab that was cloning little children so that we could uh share them with the rest of the community to cannibalize and that was something that they seriously believed and they started targeting people's names and putting up online saying these are the people that are cloning your children and eating them and we had to deal with that for several months and it was it was so absurd that we weren't sure if it was just satire or if there's these people were these were this mentally deranged and weren't sure how could someone address someone that is like that can we even bring them out of that type of mindset or do we need to make proactive decisions on uh making sure that other people don't fall into that that trap uh of this absurdity of conspiracy theorism that could serve as a big detriment to ones of mental health yes yes and i think it's important to understand when communicating with the public we're not really trying to as our foremost objective persuade the people who are deeply invested in these conspiracy theories or any other kind of fallacious thinking we're largely trying to reach the people who are undecided they may be open minded they may just be trying to uh go on with the daily course of their lives but they're trying to figure out what to think about a particular set of issues and unfortunately sometimes a conspiracy theory especially when it's superficially appealing will reach some reasonable people who might not give it a second thought and might just accept the loudest voices in the discussion so uh one big challenge is how to counter the conspiracy theories without giving them too much credence and there are different positions on that for instance in the whole debate uh on intelligent design some scientists who know that evolution exists and isn't established fact believe that they shouldn't even debate intelligent design proponents because that would be giving them a platform and that would be in effect legitimizing their views through engagement but others say well if you don't debate them if you don't debunk them if you don't actively engage them then they're just going to spread their fallacies and they're going to say well these people in the establishment uh they don't want to uh participate in the discussion they're afraid what are they afraid of and we do see conspiracy theorists saying that uh but it's a difficult dilemma because it depends on the conspiracy and it depends on how powerful it would become if it isn't challenged or whether it would just be confined uh to its own little echo chamber we're shown an example of that where the famous debate between uh uh uh uh Bill Nye and Ken Ham where he debated uh intelligent design as opposed to evolution uh and he made uh several great remarks and obviously those in the scientific community saw that Bill Nye was the ultimate victor that he was able to point by point show how Ken Ham was absolutely wrong in every regard in his worldview of history and of the species but then again those who follow Ken Ham uh maintain their point of view and that becomes the issue of is it brings up that same question is it even worth debating these people should we debate them should we uh put ourselves on the front line uh in their place in their time and spend our time uh addressing them or should we just try and help people prevent them from falling in that line of thinking to begin with yes yes indeed and I think there is also another dimension to this which is the emotional or psychological dimension with regard to what motivates people to uh be drawn to conspiracy theories and that is I think a lot of people have the desire to feel special like they have a certain insight that other people do not and getting genuinely new insights that nobody else has come up with before is difficult just like scientific discovery is difficult and for most of our knowledge most of us have to rely on what has been developed and discovered by others and that's the best we can do because we cannot reinvent either the physical or the metaphorical wheel but the conspiracy theorists have this uh emotional high that they get off of thinking well we know something that the rest of the world doesn't know that the rest of the world doesn't want to know we're special and if we can just get the people to see what we know and they don't know then everything will be better or they themselves will be in a position of greater prominence greater recognition greater respect and I think some of the people who are so heavily invested in their conspiracy theories are that invested because the ideas have become a part of their identity and they worry about what would become of them what would become of their sense of self if the conspiracy were false which is why they cling so vehemently to that and the most unfortunate conspiracies are the ones that do real world damage to real people like the anti-vaccination conspiracy where again every single element of this whole vaccines cause autism narrative has been debunked and the original researcher in quotes who started this conspiracy theory Andrew Wakefield has been shown to have conducted fraud in his original study he has been deprived of his medical license the paper he published was retracted and yet the conspiracy theory continues and even with the anti-gmo as well it's affecting where golden rice that provides an enhanced level of vitamin a to regions where vitamin a deficiencies are very much prevalent and it's quite harmful to the general population the conspiracy theories against gmo's has caused a lot of countries that would need golden rice to the governments there are not willing to allow those types of crops to enter their country in fear of what they've heard of them and that brings up more problematic issues of how conspiracy theories pervades reason and rationality it's just one of those issues that we have to take by step by step basis it might be because of just despite how simplistic conspiracy theories are they also have their own level of complexity of what needs to be addressed and what just needs to be ignored yes don't you go first so sure so one of the things I want to point out about the gmo's is there are things that are related to gmo's that are unhealthy and that's specifically the types of pesticides that they use that are catered to specific gmo's but that's not themselves that are unhealthy you're referring to glyphosate yeah glyphosate and there is one other one that I can't remember right now but also me at night the thing that though what the glyphosate though is first of all it's an herbicide not a pesticide but even then glyphosate even though it is it contains a certain level of toxicity where it's not exactly the healthiest I think that you would want to consume you know there the conspiracy theories for one they would use up the general argument they would why don't you consume a glass of glyphosate yeah they consume the glass of glyphosate see if it would prove but the problem is glyphosate is the safest herbicide on the market right now which is the general argument that at this moment right now if farmers are going to be using herbicides they should use glyphosate because it is the safest which isn't to say that it is safe in and of itself it is merely the safest the alternative that we have say that again so here's the issue it's only designed specifically for gmo crops it doesn't work on non-gmo crops because it just kills them because of the the aspect of it that is genetically modified the difference that I'm trying to point out here is that people are afraid of the wrong things they're afraid of the genetic modification when in fact or if you although the WHO says something differently the point that I'm making is it's something that they're spraying on the crops that is the actual dangerous thing not the gmo themselves so this type of this is where critical thinking really comes in important because people are mistaking that it's because they're gmo that they're bad when in fact what people are complaining about is that Monsanto has had control of this media and a lot of other crap that has allowed them to downplay the threats of this type of thing that is specific to their gmo crops and then mistaking that to be true of all gmo crops which is actually false well at the same time also we have at the same time we also have to consider that it's not just it's not necessarily glyphosate in and of itself we have to keep in mind the accumulation of of what the intake of glyphosate you know it's the same thing with topics like radiation and chemicals and toxins when people fear about toxins what they should be talking about is the toxicity rate when they're talking about radiation we should be talking about the accumulation of certain radiation we get background radiation all the time that is isn't harmful to us we receive radioactive isotopes when we eat a banana because it contains potassium and the same thing applies with glyphosate it depends on the the intake of the glyphosate and that needs to have proper regulations of which Monsanto doesn't even have control over anymore because they don't even have the patent on glyphosate because they lost them back in 2000 in fact the biggest manufacturer of glyphosate today is China Monsanto doesn't even have control over that anymore yes and this is interesting i see another parallel here to a practice that is commonly feared by the public and there is some reason for concern and that is hydraulic fracturing but the fear is hydraulic fracturing can lead to both earthquakes and contamination of drinking water but the issue is again one of separating the activity that actually does the harm from the activity that may still be innocuous it is not actually the fracturing itself that increases either one of those risks it is the injection of the wastewater that is a byproduct of the hydraulic fracturing underground so it's the underground wastewater injection that tends to trigger earthquakes along faults or create earthquakes where there is not a lot of natural seismic activity likewise a lot of that wastewater because of the chemicals used in it is indeed hazardous to people's health if they drink it but it's not actually the process of horizontal drilling that extracts fossil fuels from the ground that leads to these problems and if there weren't these wastewater injection wells maybe hydraulic fracturing would be a lot safer so that's another example i think of the need to understand what goes on in a particular process and if there are multiple processes used simultaneously which one of them is actually that that's an important critical thinking skill to have now i'd like to address a few comments about conspiracy theories that have been posted so keahi agarica says perhaps they the conspiracy theorists have a tendency not to question the theories themselves they fall into a similar trap to religious fundamentals and then yes maintaining the conspiracy theory i think requires a certain suspension of skepticism even though the conspiracy theorists think they're the utmost skeptics they can see through everything but on the other hand they become beholden to their own narratives in a sense we say right through you janadine your cyborg ways was i programmed to give the perfect response to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists in general uh well look you should get in contact with uh ben girthsel because he's been designing these uh humanoid robots but i think my design uh could give him a lot of insights into say facial expressions gestures uh how to make his robots more responsive to uh in person conversations uh if he's interested in drawing insights from that we'll work on the blink in problem later i wonder where you have your cyber dying bar code another aspect of conspiracy theories and people need to keep in mind is that uh there are some of it because when i first got into politics i was uh you know myself i was into the conspiracy theories for a little while and over time i got myself out of it uh but the one thing that i noticed with a lot of them was that there was a genuine sense of distrust and those in power and with that there there is a bit of leeway for us to insert ourselves to try and provide solutions to ensure that they get out of that certain mindset and for us here at the transhumanist party we are making active uh ways of trying to address distrust and those in power through the implementation of possible sous valence uh policies that would help bring about a more open transparency between those in power and those of the general population and that in and of itself could help alleviate a lot of the conspiracy theories that pervade us yes yes indeed and some further comments uh kaoki angarka says it would take a great deal of new information to change the facts that have led me to becoming and remaining a transhumanist and i i would agree with that i think uh transhumanism as a philosophy and as a set of goals is based on mainstream facts and potentials that exist within established mainstream science it's just a matter of humankind essentially actualizing that potential taking it a step further transhumanism as a philosophy and as a set of goals doesn't require embracing any sorts of quote alternative facts anything that the scientific community or the public at large would reject as being the case if they understood the existing bodies of knowledge in various disciplines as they've been developed super thin guy says i believe in some conspiracies and believe me they make me very sad not the contrary uh so it's interesting too what he would consider a conspiracy though because prior to edwards noden's revelations in 2013 i think most people would have said the idea that the national security agency in the united states is spying on everybody's emails on phone calls would be a crazy conspiracy theory yet in that case it would have been a correct understanding of the world by those who actually knew the facts so i think in the sense that we're using it a conspiracy theory is one that can be readily refuted by the facts at hand if one took a sufficiently in-depth look at them but the people who are invested in it have created their own echo chamber that makes them impervious to that refutation at least in the short term what do you think about that distinction in terms of what would be considered a conspiracy theory to begin with well the the fundamental difference in my opinion between a conspiracy theory and an actual conspiracy is the fact that an actual conspiracy has a lot of evidence to back it up so long a certain theory of conspiracy contains absolutely no evidence can be refuted using basic rationality and the the evidence at hand it should remain a conspiracy theory and not be given much weight but if evidence is presented where it can be observed and accounted for in in the same way that the scientific process goes in peer review where people further study and can provide similar results and provides similar evidence then the conspiracy theory can then be accepted as an actual conspiracy but until then if it cannot survive scientific scrutiny then it shouldn't be given any notice whatsoever yes and i think right now because we are past the two-hour mark i would like to encapsulate a few more of the comments that have been made and then we could each go to our respective closing statements to summarize and perhaps develop upon the insights drawn from this discussion keaki and garika says every technology we are developing can and will go in a negative direction to some extent humans will use tools for good and ill as they always have however we have every reason to believe that on the whole these things will produce more good than ill and that really is the techno-optimist perspective that transhumanists pretty much universally embrace that on the whole technology will have more good effects than ill effects and yes technology introduces some risks but further technological development combined with rational and moral thinking would be the best way to counter those risks and mitigate if not prevent them and ben westbrook comments on that thread i believe that they will in terms of having more good effects than ill ones unless we have an unusual level of secrecy or proprietary stuff surrounding it or a monoculture of willful ignorance of science which it could be argued we have to some degree and we also have to some degree in terms of various intellectual property regimes at the very least an overly stripped proprietary control of a lot of technologies as we observe with software patents or medical patents for instance uh does anyone else have thoughts on that thread of conversation i suppose then we can move on and uh this is interesting uh kyaaki on garuka says sadly i would agree our general level of scientific understanding is still far too low it is an area that we should put more emphasis on since the transhuman is partly dependent on public support super fin guy says some people say they are against conspiracy theories but they have no problem believing the ones that align with their ideology and that's true we have conspiracy theories that tend to have affinities on the left or affinities on the right for instance i would say more people on the left are drawn to the anti gmo conspiracy than people on the right on the other hand more people on the right are drawn to the conspiracy that climate change is a hoax for instance than people on the left uh and his science his area is you know it has no particular ideology it it seeps its way into every ideology throughout the entire political spectrum you know with the left there is the anti gmo's uh they're the anti vaxxers um with the right wing there is the anti abortion the climate change is a hoax you know what we have to make it an active policy for people that whenever anti science or pseudoscience wears its ugly head we should combat it regardless of what political ideology it hides behind yes and i think the question that should be asked is are people engaging in certain motivated reasoning like if certain facts uh in their view are the way they are does that help them with their political agenda and the correct response to that is to say facts should not be used in that way science should not be misdirected in that way because the proper sequence of considerations is not what do we want a preconceived outcome to be now how can we fit the facts to justify it it should be rather what are the facts and in response to the facts what if anything should be done and for instance on the subject of climate change one can have many different proposals for how to address climate change anthropogenic climate change may be uh impossible to address through some sort of central plan it may be necessary for a say market-based solutions or technologies to develop but if scientific evidence points in a certain direction uh the correct answer isn't to say oh the assertions of fact are fraudulent it's rather to say okay let's consider carefully the policy implications if we don't like carbon taxation or we don't think it would work what are some better alternatives to deal with anthropogenic climate change or one potential position might even be it is a fact it is happening and there is no policy to effectively address that now that's not my view on the subject but it is at least a logically conceivable view that doesn't require a conspiracy theory or an attempt to challenge the science on it i believe that uh ramez nam uh made uh good arguments on this in regards to how do we like how do we effectively introduce uh legislation that would address climate change to those of certain political ideologies uh like uh the right wing who for a lot of them don't even believe climate change exists how do we implement uh policies that would address climate change to them and the way he addressed it was don't focus so much on trying to prove that climate change exists to them introduce legislation that speaks their language talk about energy policies talk about jobs and uh the amount of profits that would come out of green energy sector that would help address climate change all the while getting a more bipartisan viewpoint and policy decision making in the process yes certainly and that could help bypass the issue one of my arguments for transitioning toward alternatives to fossil fuels has been that whether or not climate change anthropogenic climate change exists transitioning away from fossil fuels when it becomes technologically and economically feasible is desirable in any case because of the many other benefits the prevention of oil spills or pipeline ruptures or air pollution that can be damaging to human health oh we're just the sheer inconvenience of having to refuel your car with the liquid uh every so often uh but in any event uh i do think it's a good time for closing comments and let's start with you martin um well i think i i thought this was a really good q&a definitely um was a lot smoother than the first one i mean we had some technical difficulties um luck although you had um pretty small technical difficulty but luckily it didn't crash the the whole life q&a so that was good um and i i overall really enjoyed this q&a i think we we've learned a lot in in terms of um yeah handling questions and and talking through things and we're getting more familiar with how to do it and that that's really cool um obviously i hope this will be inspiring to members and that they might join more of them might join us um here in a next live q&a session and i think there's a lot of good feedback that we can work with too in order to improve how we communicate with the public and our members and so on and so forth and for that i'd like to thank everyone absolutely and i would completely echo those sentiments martin uh shon uh what closing thoughts would you like to offer us uh well i'm pro thorium as for our energy systems um i agree i'm glad i am also glad with the way things went aside from my initial technical difficulties and continuing with my camera but either way or maybe i've technically a cyborg uh i hope we can coordinate more with our international ambassadors maybe get them to uh show up on these chats or maybe actually request them to do specials about their own country or issues they face or not ideas for um but it's a it's getting rolling here it's getting good excellent yeah so and i agree with uh getting the ambassadors involved hopefully we'll start seeing some status reports from them and any events that they organize or host we would certainly be happy to feature and spread to others now bj what closing thoughts do you have uh yeah uh well first for us uh apologies for coming out a little bit late as we've all had to go through our own technical difficulties but this q&a was uh rather than for and uh it definitely provides a lot of answers for us and then certainly provides more questions for us as well to start answering as goes the scientific process itself uh but uh uh you know i hope to see a lot more of these q&as uh in in the near future uh and as a as an aside uh i i would like to at least uh make it uh known for those listening in or those who will listen in uh the united you know the united states transhumanist party have also been uh doing a campaign for foreign ambassadors i would like to uh extend the invitation of people who are listening and who want to come into the q&as and use it as a baseline to determine whether or not they like to uh join us in that capacity if they're from a foreign country uh we would love to have you either i or jenna i can provide you links for that and uh we look forward to seeing more of you join in with these q&as and join us here at the party absolutely and actually in the description of the q&a on youtube there is a link to the application to become a foreign ambassador along with the link to our general membership application uh to become a foreign ambassador one should be a member of the transhumanist party as well even if you don't live in the united states or are not eligible to vote in the united states you can still become an allied member and that application is very straightforward the foreign ambassador process requires more details about who you are what you do with your areas of interest are because you would be representing the party in an important capacity uh but we welcome that sort of engagement and hopefully at some point we'll have a foreign ambassador in every country and that way we will continue to build a truly international transhumanist movement so thank you very much to everybody for participating uh the last comment that i see so far uh from keahi angareka is given the success of this i would suggest regularly schedule h plus i.e transhumanist chats not necessarily ones that revolve around a panel but open to all interested participants and one thing i would recommend is using our google group for that purpose or using our general discussion threats on the us transhumanist party website for that purpose because a lot of interesting conversations transpire there that wouldn't easily fit into a video format but they are also worthwhile and they have a record and we can draw upon that record for further ideas and further discussions so with that thank you everybody thank you to our officers and thank you to our viewers for the interesting questions and comments i hope you have a good remainder of your day likewise