(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, see how two local restaurants we visited during the height of the pandemic are doing now.

(Kelli) A lot of most of my prices that I've been purchasing post COVID have at least doubled.

(Tom) And up close and behind the scenes, look at the Raptor Free Flight Program at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

(Amanda) The birds are the boss.

They do pretty much whatever they want the whole time they're out here.

(Tom) And meet University of Arizona professors who are tackling some of the biggest mysteries of the universe and the mind.

(Stuart) I've come to the conclusion that life, even very simple life, needs consciousness.

Otherwise, why have all those purposeful behavior?

What's the point?

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You know, four years ago, during the height of the COVID pandemic, students here at the University of Arizona were still mostly attending classes online.

And back then, we introduced you to two local restaurants that were struggling to stay open.

Well, next we catch up with them to find out how they adapted, survived, and what normal looks like now.

This story is about perseverance, creativity, and the realities of running a restaurant in an altered world.

It's the second installment in our series, "The Long Road, How COVID-19 Changed Our World."

(Kelli) You know, five years has gone by pretty quickly and we've had ups and downs.

Sometimes I was wondering why we stayed open instead of just taking the government-funded check.

We would have made more.

But it was more for our customers.

A lot of people don't have any other place to go.

They're single.

(Isamar) Yeah, it's all very connected.

Like I felt a big sense of duty to my family and to our employees to keep doing this.

When customers came and then they felt that same duty to us, it's like it was a big part of what got us through.

I never thought there was a time we would shut down.

It was very difficult having, you know, to make our own decisions with not a lot of guidance.

We went almost a year and a half past the city mandate.

Just for family concerns and community concerns.

It was really personal choice, more than a business choice.

For safety, we have to remember like it is a family restaurant.

Our concern is the family, the employees that have been with us a long time.

And we just didn't think that it was worth one of us getting sick.

I mean that's another big part of why we stayed close.

Like this is a community spot.

We didn't think it was responsible to reopen up.

When we reopened in the end of 2021, it was just full steam ahead.

We had, we'd never been busier.

(Kelli) It's been tough with inflation, with minimum wage increases, with different taxes that have been put upon small businesses.

It's always hard to be a small business in Tucson.

Everybody stayed through COVID.

They worked one, maybe two days a week when we were just doing to-go orders.

They just come in and then once we were able to partially open, they stayed.

And our customers are very generous because they know my staff.

They're like friends.

They're like family.

So I have pretty much all the staff we started COVID with.

So we were able to retain almost, well, all of our full-time staff.

And then once we started opening up slowly, then we could start rehiring people.

(Kelli) There's a certain generation that's always gonna work.

They've always had to work.

There's a generation where it thinks that they're all gonna become famous YouTubers.

That's why I have three senior citizens back here.

And I tell them, I said, "If you guys all retire at once," I said, "I have to close because I'm never gonna find [ LAUGHS ] more employees."

I have a problem raising prices.

I know you have to.

A lot of my customers are on such fixed incomes with Social Security and Medicare and what have you.

(Kelli) With this huge increase on minimum wage though, there's nothing we can do about it.

With inflation, with egg prices, and especially breakfast places who makes their money on eggs and potatoes.

Well, we've always raised every two years.

I've tried not to go overboard making sure we make a profit on something.

It just doesn't seem, it's like not what we're in this business for.

(Isamar) When there's a minimum wage hike, you know, kids have more money to spend.

I know other businesses might think that they have a hard time with that, but we find the opposite.

When minimum wage goes up, sales go up.

So it all evens out.

(Kelli) A lot of most of my prices that I've been purchasing post COVID have at least doubled.

It is what it is.

I'm either gonna go broke because I don't have any customers because our prices are too high or I'm gonna go broke because I can't pay anybody.

Might as well just give it a try.

I think that shutting down everything really did a disservice to just communities in general.

You know, it was interesting because when we reopened from COVID like at 50% and we had all our dividers and stuff like that, it's like people would walk in with their mandated masks.

I don't think it made any difference.

(Isamar) We don't have guidance from the CDC or your county health department.

They don't know a lot.

They're figuring it out as they go.

So we, you know, we over compensated a lot by over cleaning things and being overly cautious in that way.

But it's like at the time we thought that's what was the best thing to do.

Really proud of how hard the team worked and how they bought into, you know, what decisions I was making.

(Kelli) Yeah, I think that whole thing was a bit over the top.

So if it happens again, I think everybody should just be able to, if we could, just stay mellow and just work through it.

(Isamar) This is like a Tucson restaurant.

I know it says Mexican restaurant out there, but it's like it's a Tucson restaurant.

We have regulars that come in every day, sometimes twice a day, six days a week.

When somebody doesn't show up for a couple of days, we get worried.

And we've had to do a couple of welfare checks just to make sure.

Going through the past five years is to reevaluate the things that we were doing that to really consider what purpose this restaurant has in your community.

For the neighborhood to be able to come in, for people to have the connection that this is like a Tucson landmark, that it reminds them of their family or their grandparents, that's important to me.

That's worth working hard for.

[ RESTAURANT CHATTER ] The Raptor Free Flight Program at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum allows visitors to see owls and hawks and other Raptors literally fly free, sometimes only several feet overhead.

So next we take you behind the scenes of this decades old spectacle.

♪ CHILL ROCK (Amanda) One of our goals is to surround the audience with birds.

So a lot of bird programs are, you're the audience and the bird show is happening on a stage.

We really want people to be more immersed and like have that emotional reaction to the owl going right over their head.

When the owl comes across, when people in space are just like, that's never stopped being fun.

We are here at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum Raptor Free Flight Program.

We fly up to four species of native birds.

We often fly Chihuahuan Ravens, Great Horned owl, Crested Caracara, and a family group of Harris's, but it is always up to the birds who feels like coming out.

Raptor Free Flight started back in 1996.

It was originally envisioned as a loose, informal interaction.

You come around a corner down here and find just someone hanging out in the desert with some Harris's hawks.

It was so popular, it became happening every day at this time.

And then from there, it grew.

I actually had worked with birds before I started here.

I started in wildlife rehab as a teenager, raising pigeons and things you find around the neighborhood and then got doing it a little more professionally.

Everyone has favorite birds, right?

If you don't tell the birds who's your favorite, but everyone's got favorite birds.

Honestly, kind of a favorite always has been the Harris's hawks, just because they are unique.

They are sort of hardwired to be cooperative.

So they're kind of playing along with you in a way that most other hawks aren't.

And then ravens are just straight up fun.

They are a flying four-year-old with pliers for a face.

♪ AMBIENT MUSIC ♪ We do work with birds from wildlife rehabilitation backgrounds.

So a lot of times, we have to rebuild their trust in people because maybe they were getting grabbed up and medicated, or maybe they were stressed out being around people and kind of like reshape those interactions so that being around people isn't scary, and it's fun, or it's interesting in rebuilding those relationships.

The owl we flew this morning, her parents had made a nest in the top shelf of a Home Depot up in Oro Valley.

Wild owls will defend those nests against everything.

They were dive bombing the visitors.

They had to move the nest outside.

Parents abandoned it.

The chicks were so used to being around people, they weren't deemed releasable.

It makes for a great ambassador bird.

She's incredibly comfortable around audiences.

She's been seeing people literally her whole life.

There's a lot of captive breeding of raptors.

Another institution breeds a Harris hawk because they need one more Harris hawk and they end up with four more Harris's and then they can list it and say, we have extra Harris's who would like one and we can trade birds, basically.

It's a little bit like Craigslist without having to meet in parking lots or anything.

We're all on little radios.

Whoever is usually calling the demo is talking to at least two co-workers, four volunteers, and then we're talking about what the birds are doing Shoot, somebody call Rudy because, you know, there's five Harris's out, they all have names, we can tell them all apart, and they all have little personalities.

So like, that one's going to start trouble, and that one's going to go flirt with the girl, and like keeping it all kind of on track is what we're talking about the whole time.

The birds are the boss, they do pretty much whatever they want the whole time they're out here, and we're just kind of like fine-tuning what direction they're doing it in as far as like over the audience and keeping it all flowing.

Everything is positive reinforcement based.

What we're feeding them is little pieces, it's basically the commercialized version of what they eat in the wild.

So farm raised, mice, quail, rat.

We chop it up so it's kind of generic on site.

We don't want to be putting up mouse heads to show up in people's photography later.

The birds do enjoy that, and they get that in other parts of their diet, but we don't put it up in front of the cameras.

The reason why they don't just fly away is kind of rooted in the natural history of a lot of birds, so it's really tough to make a living out in nature.

Locally, as much as 90% of young birds don't make it out of the nest if we have a bad year of rain.

After millennia of surviving those kinds of pressures, they're really kind of hardwired for an easy living.

So if they have reliable food, water, and shelter and nothing bad is happening, they don't have a reason to just pack up and go to visit Mexico.

♪ CHILL ROCK The reason we have all the pockets is we are carrying diets, telemetry, gloves, you know, your own cell phone.

We usually carry water bottles.

Whenever we're doing demo, we have to be ready to basically walk into the desert at any time and maybe not come back for a few hours.

So being 100% ready when you start demo makes the rest of your day a lot easier if it goes off track.

And the reason we have to walk off in the desert if one of our birds gets spooked off or goes hunting, then you're on a freestyle hike about for a little bit.

We get into February and early March when all the Harris's are really hormonal is usually when we're doing that for an afternoon.

But as of right now, knock on wood, it's been pretty low-key.

People get to see an animal up close, realize that they have these in their backyard, and they actually have control over that little part of their life to help wildlife and that they carry that forward into their space.

♪ CHILL ROCK (Tom) Two of the most profound mysteries of science that remain unanswered are that of consciousness and the origin of life.

But right here in this seemingly nondescript building at the University of Arizona Astrobiology Center, researchers are developing a mind bending new theory that might solve both of these mysteries at once.

Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and astrobiologist Dante Lauretta have teamed up with Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Roger Penrose and together they're searching for clues in quantum physics and ancient asteroids that could radically transform our understanding of consciousness, life and even reality itself.

Please introduce Stuart Hameroff, professor at the University of Arizona, active in the Center for Consciousness Studies.

So Stuart, you are on the cutting edge of quantum physics and consciousness.

Yes Greg, I think quantum physics is the key to consciousness.

You know going back to the Greeks there's been this controversy between whether the brain produces consciousness or some part of consciousness is out in the universe that we access.

And quantum physics allows us to sort of bridge that gap and actually favors being able to access parts of consciousness and the essential features of consciousness which are present in the universe by working through the brain.

♪ INSPIRING MUSIC Consciousness is the only thing that matters.

If you don't have consciousness, you don't have anything really.

You can use words like awareness, phenomenal experience, qualia, subjectivity, first person point of view.

Everybody has a term for it.

I don't think it can really be described in words.

♪ UPLIFTING MUSIC I'm Stuart Hameroff.

I'm a retired anesthesiologist and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

I'm currently working as a research professor in the Arizona Astrobiology Center, looking for the origin of life and consciousness.

♪ GENTLE MUSIC I actually got interested in consciousness in a cancer lab studying cell division - mitosis, how cells divide and the chromosomes are pulled apart by structures called mitotic spindles, which turned out to be microtubules, which I'd never heard of before.

They're basically polymers of a protein called tubulin, and they will spontaneously assemble into these beautiful cylindrical lattices.

At that moment, microtubules were discovered to also be in neurons, so the brain was full of microtubules, and they're uniquely arranged in parts of the neuron, the dendrites and the soma, completely different than they are in all other biology.

I went on to move to Arizona, met the chair of the anesthesiology department.

He said, "Come to your residency.

You can investigate how anesthesia works to selectively prevent consciousness, which nobody understands."

And he handed me a paper by a friend of his showing that anesthesia depolymerized microtubules, which are the structures that I'd become interested in.

One thing about anesthesia that's really interesting and hard to explain is that it only affects consciousness while other brain activities continue.

And my work in anesthesia has shown that anesthesia works pretty much the same on all animals and even plants.

So that tells me the consciousness is probably biologically the same.

(Narrator) An interesting question is if anesthetics can have an influence on plants like this Venus flytrap?

(Stuart) Most people would say, most people in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, would say the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons.

In a computer, you have enough bits of one or zero.

You hook them up by connections, put in input and get an output.

They're not realizing or don't consider that a single cell organism doesn't have any synapses.

It's not in a network.

It's not in a multicellular system.

It's just one cell.

And its microtubules act as its nervous system.

And I think the microtubules act as the nervous system for all cells.

So if a paramecium or amoeba can be clever, I think it's an insult to neurons to say that they're a simple one or a zero.

And then in the 80s, several prominent books came out like this book by Roger Penrose.

The first half of the book argued against the idea that consciousness was a computation.

Roger argued that this meant that things like understanding needed something outside the computational system of the brain.

And for that, he brought in quantum mechanics and quantum physics.

At small scales, particles can be waves.

So a particle can be in two more places at the same time.

It can be here, here, here, here, like a wave, or just here and here, in what's called quantum superposition.

But Roger said that the separation in space time is unstable, and after a time given by a very simple equation, the uncertainty principle, it would collapse to one or the other.

And when that happened, and here was the kicker, it would give a moment of conscious experience, a proto-conscious experience.

And it's happening not only in our brains, but it's happening in the environment, in the table, everywhere, at a very microscopic level.

But one issue we have in consciousness is, how do we have something at a very, very tiny scale, scale up to one collective conscious thought at a time, as opposed to a gazillion different things going on?

And I thought of it as kind of like, if you go to the symphony before they start playing, all the musicians are tuning their instruments.

♪ BAND WARMUP To a non-musician like me, it sounds like noise.

♪ BAND MUSIC And then they start playing, Brahms, Beethoven, the Beatles, whatever, and it's music.

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC So, the difference between the proto-conscious noise and the music, is what the brain does to these objective reductions that are everywhere in the environment.

And for that, you need some kind of instrument, something they can organize or orchestrate But Roger said I don't know what it is.

And I read this book and I said, "Damn, he's talking about microtubules.

He needs them."

And I wrote him a letter.

I told him about microtubules, and I said, "I'm gonna be in England for a meeting.

I'd love to come by and talk to you about this."

He said, "Please do."

So I got on a train from London and went to Oxford and met him.

And we just started talking about microtubules and consciousness and developing our theory.

[ TRAIN RAILS ] I invited him to the first consciousness conference I was planning, the Science of Consciousness, which I've organized for the University of Arizona for the last 30 years.

This was the first one in 1994.

[ BACKGROUND NOISE ] (Roger) But what about consciousness?

What do I mean by that?

Well, I'm not going to attempt to define it because I think it would be a mistake to try and define it.

(Stuart) If you go into the microtubules and into the quantum world, then you get non-locality.

(Roger) There is something outside the computational laws of physics.

(Stuart) People say we've got to define consciousness, but we also have to define life.

[ TYPING ] I'm also interested in life and evolution, and I've come to the conclusion that life, even very simple life, needs consciousness.

Otherwise, why have all this purposeful behavior?

What's the point?

And I wrote a paper about it, and about two years ago, I got an email from Dante Lauretta, who had been in charge of a NASA program called OSIRIS-REx.

♪ HEAVENLY MUSIC (Announcer) Status check.

Go, Atlas.

Go, Centaur.

Go, OSIRIS-REx.

10 seconds, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And lift off of OSIRIS-REx (Dante) OSIRIS-REx is a mission in NASA's new frontier program Where we built a spacecraft to rendez-vous with a near earth asteroid named Bennu.

Survey it in great detail.

Collect a sample from its surface and bring it back to earth for scientific analysis.

(Announcer) "O-REx has descended below the 5 meter mark.

The hazard map is go for tag."

"And we have touchdown!"

[ CHEERING ] (Dante) And on September 24th of 2023, that capsule landed in the Utah desert, and I could finally start to think about the amazing science that we were going to get in addressing some of the deepest questions that we ask ourselves.

Where did we come from?

And I went back to our original proposal and I read the line that said, "Analysis of this material will provide unprecedented knowledge about the origin of life."

And I thought, "How am I going to do that?"

So I went to work.

I started reading through the scientific literature and I came across a paper called, "The Quantum Origin of Life."

And I looked at the author and it was somebody named Stuart Hameroff.

And I got online and I researched him and I was like, "He's at the University of Arizona.

He's literally right across the street from my office."

I emailed him right away.

I said, "We need to talk."

And we set up our first meeting.

- Hey, Dante.

- Hey, Stuart.

- How you doing?

- Good to see you, man.

Come on in.

We've got some exciting new results from the OSIRIS-REx samples.

What I came to realize is he's talking about life using quantum information to give it an evolutionary advantage.

And if that's the case, could that be the secret to the origin of life?

The first biomolecules arose out of the din of the chemical background because they were able to process quantum information.

Going up and around.

And you get these little cores inside the serpentine, the clay minerals.

When we look at the samples from the asteroid, what jumps out is when you hit them with an ultraviolet light, they are fluorescent.

They're capturing those photons, and they're releasing it back as visible light.

That right there is a quantum process.

Looks like a galaxy full of stars.

We've got all the nucleobases.

All the letters of the genetic code are in this asteroid sample.

We have an enormous number of amino acids, including the ones that are central to the quantum information in these microtubule proteins, the aromatic amino acids.

And there's three of them, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and the one everybody's familiar with, tryptophan.

And it seems like tryptophan is the secret ingredient there.

It's the most complex amino acid.

It has a double ring.

It can enter into multiple quantum states.

And it has a very familiar structure.

It's at the center of all the major psychedelic compounds.

They all have that indole ring, which is central to the tryptophan amino acid.

And I was like, OK, well, that's a clue.

So the red in that map is just telling you the distribution of carbon.

And so what I started to talk about with Stuart is maybe life and consciousness might be two sides of the same coin.

That's why these molecules might start to self-organize.

Now all of a sudden, they have agency.

You think we could test the consciousness first theory?

(Stuart) Yeah, we could then see if the fluorescence is inhibited by anesthesia proportional to anesthetic potency.

One of the things that Dante is real excited about are nanoglobules.

So in the samples, he sees these globules that are encrusted and hollow inside, and they're fluorescent, which means they have aromatic rings inside.

I mean, you can tell it's highly concentrated in carbon.

There are these little spheres of organic material.

And when we look at them in cross-section, we can see they look very much like a cell membrane.

Sometimes they have fluid inside of them.

Sometimes they have fibers of minerals.

And they look for all the world like what we think a basic protocell would be.

So here you have a critical step in the origin of life, encapsulation.

What really struck me about this one is it looks like it's going through cell division.

If we could link it to quantum information, collapse of a wave function, and maybe even the origin of consciousness, that would be an amazing discovery.

(Stuart) Which is actually a pretty viable idea because it makes more sense about life.

- I agree.

♪ INSPIRING MUSIC Thinking about consciousness and working in this area has enriched my life tremendously.

I can't imagine a more interesting and important topic.

In our view, if you have consciousness by this very simple process, that will happen in space-time geometry everywhere, then consciousness is part of the fabric of reality.

(Dante) This would say that every living thing has some sense of consciousness, a sense of self, a sense of agency.

And for me, that just rings true.

(Stuart) And we're part of it.

We're part of nature.

I think all living things have microtubules.

They're all resonating and have coherent entanglement and we're probably connected to them in some way.

So I think we're resonating and in tune with the universe.

♪ GENTLE MUSIC Wasn't that story a great reminder of the gift of consciousness?

You know, we hope in some small way it helps you appreciate the experience of being alive.

And of all the things you could have been doing, thank you for watching Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.