• The channel rejected Zoltan Istvan’s “Three Laws of Transhumanism” as rhetorical trolling and instead endorsed a grassroots DIY-transhumanist declaration hosted at http://diyhpl.us/wiki/declaration.  

• Historical human brain-stimulation experiments (Heath et al., 1972, patient B-19) were dissected to debunk claims that septal stimulation could “convert” sexual orientation, underscoring weak causal evidence and ethical red flags around real-world “wireheading.”  

• Randal Koene summarized current whole-brain-emulation funding: ~$1 M/yr explicitly labeled “mind uploading” (Foundation 2045, Rothblatt, Thiel’s Nemaload grant) and ~$15–20 M/yr for enabling technologies such as molecular ticker-tape sequencing, Zador’s connectome barcoding, Janelia’s FIBSEM, and 3Scan’s KESM.  

• Novena’s open-hardware laptop was praised for its gas-spring screen that flips to expose the motherboard for passive cooling and tool-free access, plus an integrated high-end oscilloscope capable of protocol decoding (I²C, SPI, UART, USB) directly from analog waveforms.  

• A practical project-planning heuristic was shared: model the project as a dependency graph, aggressively test for impossibility early, and re-plan any sub-task whose difficulty distribution exceeds available resources—contrasted with the “fail-fast” approach used in large-scale engineering.  

• SmartPhage, an SOSventures-backed startup, aims to automate the design of custom bacteriophages to combat bacterial infections, highlighting open-source-style approaches to synthetic biology therapeutics.  

• Research on cortisol in breast milk was discussed: higher glucocorticoid levels predict “Nervous, less Confident” infant temperament, prompting broader debate on glucocorticoid signaling, Addison’s disease, and the risks of disrupting endocrine pathways versus maximizing anabolic signaling (DHA, micronutrients, resistance training → BDNF/IGF-1).  

• OpenCog demo footage showed agents autonomously building stairs, bridges, and other structures in a Minecraft-like world, illustrating progress in open-ended, goal-driven construction by AI systems.