Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer | Quantum Biology, Consciousness & the Future of Medicine

Carlo D’Amore is the founder and creative director of Live in Theater, a New York interactive-theatre company creating immersive true-crime mysteries, trials, and audience-led performances.
In this episode of Entangled Health, Carlo joins physicist Thomas Ehmer to explain how interactive theatre helps adults play again, collaborate under uncertainty, and build connection through shared experience.

What is the difference between immersive theatre and interactive theatre? Carlo defines immersive theatre as entering a constructed world, while interactive theatre makes the audience’s choices and conversations part of the performance itself. At Live in Theater, audiences become investigators, jurors, witnesses, and co-creators as they solve fictionalised or real-case-inspired mysteries together.
Thomas and Carlo discuss why true crime works as a participatory format; how performers create high stakes without a fixed script; what happens when groups must listen, improvise, and take social risks; and why adults often lose the ability to play freely. They also explore a harder creative question: when does protecting an audience from discomfort begin to diminish the transformative potential of art?
Topics in this conversation:
What immersive theatre and interactive theatre mean
How Live in Theater creates participatory true-crime experiences
Audience co-creation, improvisation, and group dynamics
Adult play, curiosity, courage, and social connection
Why uncertainty makes participation meaningful
The ethics of discomfort, care, and creative freedom
Carlo’s Panic in Needle Park-inspired performance and empathy
About Carlo D’Amore: Carlo D’Amore is an actor, storyteller, and the founder and creative director of Live in Theater, an interactive theatre and gaming company based in New York City.
Live In Theater: https://www.liveintheater.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liveintheater
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlodamore-creator/
Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer is a long-form podcast and research-media project exploring quantum biology, quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, consciousness research, and the future of medicine. We distinguish established evidence, emerging research, and frontier hypotheses.
Start here: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/about
Listen on all platforms: https://pod.link/1819364423
Host & Guests

Thomas Ehmer - Host

Carlo D'Amore - Guest

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Chapters
0:00 Immersive theatre as a social nervous system
2:04 What Entangled Health explores
5:02 What interactive theatre really means
9:45 Why small teams solve mysteries better
11:04 How adults learn to play again
12:32 Making the audience feel inside the story
17:12 Uncertainty and live performance (metaphor)
18:12 Three-act mystery structure for interactive shows
20:17 How actors guide every type of participant
23:07 From actor to founder: creating Live in Theater
24:18 Panic in Needle Park immersive work
27:10 Performing addiction in a real New York park
30:14 Why nobody makes eye contact in New York
32:47 Empathy, arrest scenes, and two endings
35:01 Can immersive theatre educate doctors?
35:53 Discomfort, empathy, and understanding
37:43 Audience safety, trauma, and artistic risk
39:46 Defending creative freedom in interactive work
45:09 When the audience becomes the spectacle
47:02 How a neighbourhood joins the show
48:42 Building community through play
50:41 Bringing La Movida to Madrid
51:06 Observer effect and improvised stories
52:57 How the mystery reaches its final act
54:23 When the audience goes off script
55:03 Chaos in the streets: cabs, Chinatown, choices
57:35 Interactive theatre for young audiences
59:16 How Carlo challenges himself
60:25 The practice of being present
62:26 Extreme sports, focus, and live performance
64:59 Holding attention in a chaotic city
67:19 Can interactive theatre work online?
69:22 Agency and attention in virtual events
70:35 Where to find Live in Theater
72:03 Corporate, hybrid, and global experiences
73:04 Take the leap before you feel ready

Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer - We don't simplify for comfort. We entangle.
Submit your questions or propose a guest in the comments, or join the discussion on Substack: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/
If you like it — thanks for subscribing and leaving a thumbs up wherever you listen 👍Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the host and guest speaking in their personal capacities and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their respective employers, organizations, committees or companies.

Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a recommendation to alter medication or treatment plans. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer is a long-form podcast and research-media project exploring quantum biology, quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, consciousness research, and the future of medicine. We distinguish established evidence, emerging research, and frontier hypotheses.
In this episode of Entangled Health, we explore microbial bioelectronics with Princeton’s Joshua T. Atkinson to understand how living cells are being engineered as fast, responsive biosensors for our water infrastructure. Instead of forcing metal and silicon into wet tissue, Josh’s lab asks a different question: What if the biology itself is the wire? We discuss how bacteria move electrons outside their cells, how these pathways can be engineered to detect pollutants, and where quantum effects like spin filtering appear in living biofilms.

Key Concepts Explained:
Conductive Biofilms: Communities of microbes that use shared protein pathways to behave like living electronic materials, capable of carrying current across micrometer scales.

Extracellular Electron Transfer: The biological process where certain bacteria move electrons from inside the cell to external surfaces like minerals or electrodes.

Spin Filters in Biology: The phenomenon where multi-heme cytochromes in bacterial wires selectively bias the spin of electrons passing through them, hinting at quantum effects in biology.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How Josh Atkinson's group engineers Shewanella and Geobacter pathways to turn microbes into active circuit components.
The mechanics of building a biosensor that detects endocrine-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol A in minutes.
The role of multi-heme cytochromes acting as spin filters, and how magnetic fields change electron transfer rates in biofilms.
Why the analogy of "biofilms as doped semiconducting channels" bridges biology and electrical engineering.
The practical scaling limits of living electronics and why environmental sensing is the strongest near-term application.

Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Cold Open: Biosensors for endocrine disruptors
[00:02:15] From deep-sea quorum sensing to microbial electrochemistry
[00:14:30] How Shewanella and Geobacter build living nanowires
[00:26:40] Building biosensors for bisphenol A and breast-cancer drugs
[00:38:15] Spin filtering and magnetic field effects in cytochromes
[00:51:20] Treating biofilms as doped semiconducting channels
[01:05:10] The limits of scale and the future of living infrastructure
Further Reading & Deep Dive:
Read the full web-only Research Companion for this episode, detailing the hypotheses, mechanisms, and failure modes of living electronics: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/p/bioelectronics-living-wires-microbial-electrochemistry

Host & Guests

Thomas Ehmer - Host

Joshua Atkinson - Guest

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

We don't simplify for comfort. We entangle.
Submit your questions or propose a guest in the comments, or join the discussion on Substack: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/
If you like it — thanks for subscribing and leaving a thumbs up wherever you listen 👍Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the host and guest speaking in their personal capacities and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their respective employers, organizations, committees (including IEEE), or companies.

Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. The discussion regarding lithium isotopes, biology, and mental health is based on theoretical quantum chemistry and physics, not clinical medical advice. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a recommendation to alter medication or treatment plans. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer is a long-form podcast and research-media project exploring quantum biology, quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, consciousness research, and the future of medicine.
We distinguish established evidence, emerging research, and frontier hypotheses.
Lawrence Gasman has spent decades tracking the commercial reality of new technologies across networking, photonics, AI, and quantum. But what happens when the world you are paid to model no longer feels like the whole world?
In this episode, we start with the medium-term commercial applications of quantum AI and quantum robotics. From there, the conversation slips into the unexpected. We trace Lawrence’s early encounters with the students of Alan Turing and the philosophy of Gödel, before moving into the raw phenomenology of his own out-of-body experiences and hospital-induced altered states.
It is a conversation about holding the tension between a highly rigorous economic lens and the deeply unsettling realization that reality, intelligence, and consciousness are far fuzzier than our categories suggest. We live inside the contradiction, looking at the limits of artificial intelligence, the measurement problem, and the philosophical legacy of Brian Josephson.

In this episode, we explore:
The commercial trajectory of quantum AI and robotics
Turing, Gödel, and the legacy of philosophy in mathematics
How out-of-body experiences challenge a materialist worldview
The intersection of quantum mechanics, biology, and consciousness (the Josephson influence)
Why current LLMs lack the existential grounding of embodied consciousness

Chapter Markers:
00:00 – Cold Open: An Out-of-Body Experience
01:02 – Host Intro: The Commercial vs. The Unknown
03:50 – The Commercial Reality of Quantum AI and Robotics
09:50 – Manchester, Alan Turing, and Gödel's Theorem
16:03 – Anomalous Experiences and Fuzzy Reality
30:19 – Brian Josephson, Collapse, and Biology
40:53 – Subjective Realization and Shifting Frequencies
01:08:48 – ChatGPT, Embodiment, and the Physics of Information
01:12:17 – Closing Thoughts

Host & Guests

Thomas Ehmer - Host

Lawrence Gasman - Guest

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

We don't simplify for comfort. We entangle.
Submit your questions or propose a guest in the comments, or join the discussion on Substack: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/
If you like it — thanks for subscribing and leaving a thumbs up wherever you listen 👍Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the host and guest speaking in their personal capacities and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their respective employers, organizations, committees (including IEEE), or companies.

Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. The discussion regarding drug use during a bypass operation as a subjective experience. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a recommendation to alter medication or treatment plans. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer is a long-form podcast and research-media project exploring quantum biology, quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, consciousness research, and the future of medicine.
We distinguish established evidence, emerging research, and frontier hypotheses.
Laís Lopes is an electrochemist, graphene specialist, and co-founder and CTO of Qnity, a Brazilian deep-tech startup building a new kind of molecular sensor, one that reads binding events directly at the electron level, in real blood and plasma, without fluorescent labels or amplification steps.
In this conversation, we follow her path from hydrogels to graphene to quantum electrochemistry, and into the lab on a night in 2020 when she took real COVID samples, ran them through her graphene sensor, and couldn't sleep afterwards.
We talk about what it means to detect a molecule at attomolar concentrations, roughly one grain of sugar dissolved in an Olympic pool, and why that sensitivity changes what's possible in diagnostics and drug discovery. Laís's team has already demonstrated detection of an Alzheimer's biomarker in blood plasma, head and neck cancer DNA, and dengue and COVID in real clinical samples. Their next step: a multiplexed microfluidic platform for measuring binding affinity in drug discovery pipelines, where small molecules and fragments currently fall below the noise floor of existing tools.
And at the edge of all of it: a question neither of us could fully answer. If electron-level coherence is what makes this sensing possible — does that same coherence scale upward through biology? Is health, at some level, a coherence problem too?
Laís says she doesn't know. I think that's the most honest and interesting place to leave it.
Topics covered:
Quantum capacitance vs. geometric capacitance — and why the distinction matters for sensing
Graphene, peptides, gold interfaces, and impedance spectroscopy
Detecting Alzheimer's biomarkers in blood plasma without lumbar puncture
Why small molecules fall into noise in standard drug discovery assays — and how quantum electrochemistry sidesteps that
Building Qniti: from academic IP to venture-backed deep tech
The coherence bet: electrons, biology, and the question Thomas can't stop asking

Host & Guests

Thomas Ehmer - Host

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

We don't simplify for comfort. We entangle.
Submit your questions or propose a guest in the comments, or join the discussion on Substack: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/
If you like it — thanks for subscribing and leaving a thumbs up wherever you listen 👍Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the host and guest speaking in their personal capacities and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their respective employers, organizations, committees (including IEEE), or companies.

Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. The discussion regarding lithium isotopes, biology, and mental health is based on theoretical quantum chemistry and physics, not clinical medical advice. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a recommendation to alter medication or treatment plans. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Entangled Health with Thomas Ehmer is a long-form podcast and research-media project exploring quantum biology, quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, consciousness research, and the future of medicine.
We distinguish established evidence, emerging research, and frontier hypotheses.
Quantum reservoir computing, classical echo state networks, and the future of AI in healthcare — explored in this Entangled Health Experiments episode. We trace the path from biological time series (ECG, EEG, glucose, voice) through reservoir computing, NG-RC, and quantum dynamics, asking whether intelligence is something we build or something matter already does. Part of the Entangled Health Experiments mini-series, with a companion six-part Substack series.
This episode is part of Entangled Health Experiments — a special mini-series where we deliberately stress-test ideas in public with tools like Perplexity and NotebookLM as thinking partners. No polished keynote, no finished answers, just live exploration of hard questions at the intersection of quantum science, computation, and health.
In this session, we follow one of the most underappreciated threads in computational medicine: reservoir computing from its classical origins to its quantum frontier and end on a question that refuses to go away: if a bucket of water, an optical fibre loop, a neuromorphic chip, or a handful of quantum spins can process information and remember the past, are we building intelligence, or just learning how to tap into something matter already does?
Read more on substack 6-Part Article: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/p/i-built-something-here-is-what-it
What we cover:
Why biological time series are so hard. ECG, EEG, continuous glucose monitoring, voice, multi-omics — they are nonstationary, multiscale, noisy, and label-poor. Standard deep learning architectures (LSTM, Transformer) were not designed for this regime.
Reservoir computing as an alternative. Echo state networks, liquid state machines, and next-generation reservoir computing (NG-RC) separate dynamics from learning: fix the reservoir, train only a linear readout. Fast, small-data-friendly, interpretable.
Quantum reservoir computing (QRC). What the exponential Hilbert space actually buys you — and where the encoding bottleneck and dissipation requirement quietly constrain it. Seven qubits matching hundreds of classical neurons is real. But the "2ⁿ" story requires careful unpacking.
The dissipation paradox. Why today's noisy NISQ hardware is sometimes structurally better for reservoir computing than tomorrow's fault-tolerant machines — and what that means for the hardware road

Tools used in this experiment:
Guests are "Sheela and Himbert, the famous voices form NotebookLM - as I did not find names anywhere, I named them.
Content prepared and fed to Sheela and Himbert by perplexity.ai
Sheela and Himbert generated via notebooklm.google.com
Mixed with Logic on Mac.

Host & Guests

Thomas Ehmer - Host

We don't simplify for comfort. We entangle.
Submit your questions or propose a guest in the comments, or join the discussion on Substack: https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/
If you like it — thanks for subscribing and leaving a thumbs up wherever you listen 👍