#849: Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating "Software" for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. My guest today has been years in the making. I'm so excited to have this conversation and share it with you. His name is Dr. Michael Levin. He is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and Director of the Allen Discovery Center. We cover so much ground in this conversation, and I think a few years from now, even currently depending on the scientists you speak with, but a lot of folks are gonna look back and say, wow, Michael Levin got it right. He and his lab, the people working in the lab, did such important research that redefined how we think about biology, how we think about cancer, how we think about the ability to reprogram the human body using bioelectricity, and it goes well beyond DNA. That's part of the story, but it's not the full story, and we get into a lot of it. His background is in computer science and biology, and he has been developing a framework for recognizing and communicating with unconventional cognitive systems. We'll describe and define what all this means. Applied to the collective intelligence of cell groups undergoing morphogenesis, these ideas have allowed the Levin Lab to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression. His lab also produces synthetic life forms, for instance, xenobots and anthropobots, that serve as exploration platforms for understanding the source of patterns of form and behavior in a wide range of natural, artificial, and hybrid embodied minds. Okay, what does that all mean? We'll get into it. Don't worry. We define everything. You can find his blog at thoughtforms.life. Highly encourage you to check it out. And then the lab website is drmichaellevin.org.
And on X, he is drmichaellevin. And just one quick disclosure, I did invest in a startup based on some of Michael's research in 2023 I've been interested in his work for longer than that. But we don't even really get into discussing the startups. And my hope in sharing this conversation with you, because it's really the first in-depth conversation he and I have ever had, which is wild, is to explore what I think I suppose the future looks like. We're peering around corners. It combines very well with my conversation that I had with Dr. Brian Tracy, and thinking about sort of microchips and electricity over pills and potions and things of that type. And it's not necessarily either or, but man, I do think there is an incredible new world and future ahead of us within medicine. And honestly, it extends beyond that into how we think about cognition and even consciousness itself. So all of that having been said, without further ado, please enjoy a very, very fun, I had a blast conversation with Dr. Michael Levin.

**Dr. Michael Levin** (2:55)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:00)
Can I answer your personal question? Mike, very nice to finally connect. Yeah, wonderful. Thanks for making the time.

**Dr. Michael Levin** (3:22)
Of course. Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:24)
We have lots of ground to explore and I thought we would begin with a book that had a spot on my bookshelf when I was a kid. It seems like you and I may have found it at the same time, but you did a lot more with it than I did. The author is Robert O. Becker. Is that enough of a cue to tee it off?

**Dr. Michael Levin** (3:45)
I think it is.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:46)
What is the book and why is it relevant?

**Dr. Michael Levin** (3:49)
I'm going to guess it's The Body Electric. That's right. It's very relevant. I discovered it in an old bookstore that my dad and I visited when I was in Vancouver, Canada for the World's Fair in 86 I found this thing and it's a patchwork of a number of different things.
He was into applied field dangers and things like that. But I was just stunned with all the references to prior work that revealed to me that the kinds of things I'd been thinking about were actually real and that people had investigated it.

**Tim Ferriss** (4:21)
In that book, I guess, Dr. Becker was an orthopedic surgeon, and he was effectively penning a scientific memoir, describing experiments involving salamanders and other animals, exploring the role of electricity and many, many different aspects of biology. How would you define for folks bioelectricity? What is a helpful way to define that term? And then we'll probably hop to the video in a sense that introduced me to your work, which I will not be alone in citing. But let's begin with the definition. Bioelectricity, what is that?