The Cyborgs Commeth - EP 69 Connor Glass

When somebody says controlling something with their thoughts, that's a very like loose and simplified way of how these things actually work. But yeah, essentially we do the same thing that Neuralink does without the need for brain surgery. So our implant goes under the skin in your limb or an amputation stump for an amputee, for example, whereas Neuralink's implants go into the actual cortex itself, are injected down into the brain.

Brain surgery.

Which has issues that come along with it. I mean, any, any time you implant something into the body, like you have to be careful and there's a risk to reward ratio. That you have to meet.

Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance, and today we're joined by Connor Glass. Glad to be here.

Hey, thanks for having me.

We know each other. We've met a couple of times. We filmed in Texas with you guys for an episode that will be coming shortly on our YouTube channel, which you should like and subscribe. And you are the— you're the CEO and founder or co-founder? Founder. Founder. Founder of Phantom Neuro, which we're going to talk a lot about today. But yeah, we got to know each other and you're a cool cat. To set the scene for people a little bit, I want to talk about— this will sound big and heady, but this is where we're going to go— the future of humans, the merger of humans and machines, and where humanity is heading. Yeah. And then along the way, we'll fill in some details on that. Yeah.

Excited.

I assume you might, because you are based in Austin, that you're in town for— this is going to date the podcast— but for JPM, which is like this big biotech extravaganza. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

It's a conference that like everybody dreads going to, but everybody goes to. It's just a massive sea of people. It's crazy.

I think I've only been once because I try to avoid— I was a tech trade reporter for a long time, so I went to just too many conferences and now I do my very best to avoid them. But JPM is hilarious, especially for what I cover. I have had so many— the podcast brunneth over this week and it's just like the amount of Meeting and dinner and party.

That's exactly what it is. It's just back to back to back to back. And it's like, it's almost like speed dating, right? Yeah. During these things. And it's, it's crazy. You can't even find a step to sit on. Yeah. Have a conversation. You're like crammed inside these hotels.

So somehow this like financial firm just sort of became, this thing became a biotech, like, uh, when, you know, there's like multiple conferences going on kind of at the same time, right?

They piggyback off of each other and kind of compete. And it's very interesting.

Okay.

Yeah. I don't, I think like JPM started and then these other ones like hitch their wagon dug into it kind of as a competitive thing to start having, you know, their own showcases and things. And then it just grew into this behemoth.

It is.

It's a monster.

It's quite funny. Um, all right, well, you've led— there's all kinds of places we could start. I think we should give people a general idea of what Phantom Neuro does, but I— you, you've led a very interesting life and, and have— I appreciate that. I really wanted you to come on the show because we have these great chats about, about sort of sci-fi level tech. But I'll describe for a second and then you tell us what's actually happening. But when we went to Austin, I mean, we got to go to your office and we got to hang out with a dude named Alex. And so you guys are making— well, you take other people's prosthetics like we were doing a lot with a robotic hand. And then you have a device which goes under the skin and it kind of connects. It's— people may have seen like a Neuralink patient controlling a mouse cursor on the screen with their thought alone. And, and these are people who are controlling a prosthetic with their thoughts, essentially.

Yeah. So, you know, when, when somebody says controlling something with their thoughts, that's a very, like, loose and, uh, simplified way of how these things actually work. But yeah, essentially we do the same thing that Neuralink does, uh, without the need for brain surgery. So our implant goes under the skin in your limb or an amputation stump for an amputee, for example, whereas Neuralink Links implants go into the actual cortex itself, are injected down into the brain surgery, which has issues that come along with it. I mean, any, anytime you implant something into the body, like, you have to be careful, and there's a risk-to-reward ratio that you have to meet. But when you put something under the skin, uh, that's pretty simple. And it's, I think, in line with kind of where, um, just everyday sensing is headed for the human body, right? Even continuous glucose monitoring eventually is going to be something that you just put under your skin and your arm, and now you don't have to put on like this Dexcom and injection thing every single morning and then worry about it getting caught, you know, on your clothes and all of that. So everything's moving towards smart implantable sensing electronics. And, and that's kind of what we're following.

Just to describe it a tiny bit more. So Alex was this great dude we hung out with. Everyone will see him in the video. But he, he was— he lost his arm, I think, from kind of the elbow down or just—

so he lost it just, just downstream of the elbow, right? He actually has quite a small residual limb.

Yeah. And then you guys put a device in that.

So we didn't— he has not been implanted. Okay. Right, right. We used a surface version of the technology that we have, which we can get into kind of some applications of that later on in the discussion. But we have a surface kind of stick-on technology that mimics what the implant would be like. So you can do testing without having to implant somebody. And so we've been able to do testing on him and other individuals that have lost their limbs to allow them to control these robotic arms as if it's their natural limb.

Yeah, so we were with him. He was twisting his arm, his hand around and around and picking things up and doing all kinds of stuff. So, and I know you said it's, I was simplifying things, which I was, but in order for that process to take place, we have motor neurons like in our body. And then something like a Neuralink is going into your motor cortex, into your, the neurons in your head. So how, what is the process of how your technology is connecting for that, that intent? Intention of the person and translating that right into action.

So, so at its most basic core, the way that all of these technologies, uh, work for the most part today is that they take electrical activity being generated by your body, typically by the brain, spinal cord, nerves, or muscle, right? And they're all contiguous. So the electrical activity starts in the brain. You want to close your fist, let's say. The electrical activity starts in the motor cortex associated with your fingers and everything, and then that electrical signal via neurons, propagates down your spinal cord, and then it goes out your nerves, and then from your nerves it goes on to your muscle. And all along the way, all of those different biological tissues are generating electricity, and they're doing that by having charged ions basically going across cell membranes. And so at the end of the day, what's happening is that you have a metallic electrode, uh, that is sitting on or close to, uh, some cell membrane and that metal is actually able, via the electrons within the metal substrate itself, able to pick up like these ion fluxes. And then that gets propagated to electronics that then get sent out the body. So Neuralink's doing that by picking up the ion fluxes, the electricity in the brain. We pick it up at the muscle. And so a person that's lost their limb actually still has all the upstream pathways intact. And when you lose your limb, your muscles actually run the full length of each section of your arm. And so if I lose my limb kind of midway through my forearm, the muscles, a significant portion of the muscles are still there in what's now your amputation stump. And so when I think about closing my fist, if I'm an amputee, those muscles that are still there, the portion of them that are still there, they still flex because everything from brain to motor neuron to muscle is still intact. And so we pick up the electricity associated with them trying to do these different movements., but directly from the surface of the muscle. And there are all kinds of benefits to using muscle, um, rather than the brain. But of note, actually, the way that a lot of people, or most people that have these brain-computer interfaces, the way that they actually control something is by having electrodes in their motor cortex. And then they're actually trying to do the exact same thing that an amputee is trying to do. They're actually trying to close their fist or point their finger, move a physical mouse around. Now they're paralyzed, so they can't actually move, but that's how they generate the electricity in the brain. So someone who's quadriplegic and someone who has limb loss are actually functionally experiencing the same thing. Yeah. Regardless of where the technology is targeting.

And so one obvious benefit of not having brain surgery is not having brain surgery.

Sure.

Neuralink at the moment is the most aggressive BCI in terms of the surgery and how many electrodes are going in. There are other BCI companies that are trying to be outside some of the protective layers of your brain. There's others that are even trying to be outside of the skull. There's different approaches, but for sure, You guys don't require any of these, these kind of tradeoffs or these, these questions. But, but you mentioned there's a number of benefits. I mean, what would be the other bonuses? And just—

yeah, so, so this electricity from the body is really hard to detect, right? And it's very noisy and there's a lot— even environmental noise, power line noise, all these things get in the way. So the bigger the signal is and the cleaner it is, the easier it is to detect and the easier it is to decode. And it's the exact same with speech, right? If someone's whispering to you in a crowded room where there's a lot of people talking, it's going to be really hard to hear them. That's kind of the equivalent of a brain implant. You got all these neurons that have teeny tiny signals, very crowded. So you have to have a bunch of electrodes, really low noise in your electronics and so on and so forth. With the muscle, the signals are actually close to 1,000 times larger in terms of amplitude of the signal. So it's more the equivalent of someone yelling at you.

Yeah.

And you have less muscles. Than you do neurons like in your brain around in the motor cortex. And so you're in a less crowded room with someone talking much louder. And that means there's just a whole lot easier to use those signals to do interesting things than it is with that, than with a brain implant. But also putting something under the skin is a very simple procedure, right? That's like surgery residency 101, you know, day one. And so you don't need a specialized surgeon in order to put something under the skin, your limb. You don't need general anesthesia to do that. You can even do it with local anesthetic. Interestingly, you can do entire limb amputations under certain circumstances, just with local anesthesia and nerve blocks, right? Where you don't have to use—

Towel and a bottle of Scotch.

That's exactly right. Like the olden days. No sterile procedure, no nothing. That's not where we're trying to head, by the way. But you can do a lot of things with the limbs in a very safe and scalable way. So it can be like a 15-minute procedure where you just insert this thing under your skin. And, you know, that's scalable. That's low cost, overhead cost, you know, all these different things. Whereas with brain surgery, obviously you need a specialized neurosurgeon, you need a formal operating room, you need recovery, you need all these different things. And it's very expensive and time-consuming.

So it's been, it's been a couple months since we were together already. I forgot where you guys were at in terms of this external device versus the surgery. Yeah. Where are you and how many people? I mean, Alex is one of how many people that have been working with the device?

So, and we've worked with, you know, probably tens of patients, I would say, at this point, right? So there's similar with quadriplegia and spinal cord injury and all that. Like, there's not a ton of people walking around to grab, to pull into your office to use this. So we've worked with, I would say, tens of patients using a non-implanted version of the system that we have that, again, just mimics what the implant does. The implant we're actually implanting at the beginning of this year, which will be really exciting for our first implantable clinical trial. So the technology itself is pretty much done for the first phase, right? You're constantly improving, but it's ready to be implanted. And then basically it's now just finishing all the different preclinical things and things you have to do.

If an external device works, the implanted version, the advantage is just you get a much better signal or— Yeah.

Yeah. So people have tried to make wearable sensors work for a really long time. And so the Meta armband, right? So Meta just released their new AR glasses with an armband that goes along with it, a neural armband, which grew out of The startup Control Labs that was doing motor neurons. That's exactly right. So Meta acquired Control Labs for something like $500 million to $1 billion, right? And then it took another 10 to 12 years, however long, from the acquisition to them actually having a product to be able to deploy. And actually it's turned out to be a pretty good product. It works reliably. Now, whether or not somebody wants to use it to control these AR glasses or something as a viable product, that's an Another story, I don't know. But the technology itself actually works really well. And what's interesting is you don't have to calibrate MetaSystem, meaning that you have an algorithm. And typically what you have to do, and this is what we do, is you have to feed data from your own body into the algorithm to make it work for you, to recognize your signals. With MetaSystem, you don't have to do that because they got data from a gajillion people and were able to find commonalities across those people. That's really the superpower.

I used it like 7 years ago. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's changed a lot over the 7 years, right? Yeah, yeah.

I had this big—

Right. That's exactly right. —device that sat on my wrist. Exactly right. And they turned it into like this really elegant, you know, wristwatch that looks kind of like a Whoop and a really nice form factor. And it works pretty darn well. The problem with surface sensors is that they, they don't work well under challenging conditions, meaning if you're sweating a lot, if you have a lot of movement, If you're swimming, no chance, right? So these surface sensors are dependent upon having really good contact with the body that doesn't change so that you can get really clean signals and be able to decode them reliably into control outputs. So if you don't have a reliable human-machine interface, you know, sensor-human interface, if it's constantly moving around, the sensors are moving all over the place, if you get water in between, like sweat or something, that changes what the signals look like., and that means that it becomes really, really challenging, uh, to be able to decode these signals into something useful. And so that's fine if you're talking about like walking down the street while you're walking your dog and you're scrolling through, you know, Instagram or something. Nobody gives a shit. Yeah. If that, you know, malfunctions sometimes. If you're talking about somebody who worked in a machine shop who lost their limb, who's returning back to a machine shop or who's holding a really hot cup of coffee or using scissors or whatever it might be, right? You have no tolerance for something to malfunction. Yeah. And so you have to have a really stable, interface with the body. And that's why you implant sensors, uh, so that you get a really stable interface. And so it's a lot more convenient also when you have to put on these sensors day in and day out and like calibrate a system or whatever it might be. Uh, that's a big barrier to entry. Yeah, for people. So there's a whole bunch of reasons that you implant something, but it has to work really freaking good for somebody to be willing to, to get the implant, right?

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I think, like, definitively. Right. It's pretty incredible. We got to—

we got to sample. And so you see all that. But anyway, whatever form this runs in, I'll put some video of of watching his hand in action. I mean, all this is amazing. Also, the hands themselves are— you guys don't make those, but they're really cool. It was from Psionic, I think, the one. Yeah.

So the primary hand that we've been using, we've used a whole bunch of them at this point, but the primary one that we mess around with is a company called Psionic out of San Diego.

Right. And it's really cool. I mean, it's five-fingered. Yeah. Really has great— I don't know what the word is for all the dexterity. Yeah.

Yeah. All the bendy bits. I love that. We'll call them bendy bits. No, no, no, no.

But it's, it's really cool, you know? And Alex was, was, Alex was doing all kinds of stuff with it. And, and, and so obviously, I mean, people could see where this could go. You've, you've had some difficult injury. Uh, you're, you know, his, his regular, um, prosthetic is, is just, it's a kind of just a very basic hand that doesn't, doesn't really—

No, the one that he uses the most. Yeah. It's purely cosmetic. Yeah. It's a, piece of artwork basically that is meant to look as close to a natural limb as possible. It has no movement whatsoever. Yeah, it just sits there and it's a dummy of an arm, so to speak.

But it's interesting.

So the hand that we used was Psionic, but the wrist that we actually used is from a different company. And so you like take these pieces from all these different— I'll get this hand on this wrist and this elbow and so on and so forth. And it's like this weird amalgamation of companies that are all kind of playing together in the sandbox. And it seemed like the innovation here was pretty—

I remember going to Iceland once. I think there's a company named Össur. Össur. Exactly. And they've been making— Yeah, they've really fantastic.

The robots have been around a long time.

This is what I was gonna ask you is like, are we, because there's all this work going on with humanoids now, and then you've obviously technology's always progressing and getting better. I mean, are we, are they still, are they still something of a letdown or are they getting really, really good?

They're a letdown. They're a letdown. Not necessarily because the robots themselves aren't good, but because the control interface and the equivalent that I would give is let's say that you have a laptop. In front of you, right? Your laptop's capable of doing incredible things, or a cell phone or whatever piece of technology. And let's say that you only have 2 buttons that you can press to do everything on that laptop. Yeah, right. So on a laptop you have like a mouse cursor currently and a keyboard and like all kinds of different things, and you can do hotkeys and so on and so forth. But let's assume that you just have 2 buttons to press to do all of that. Well, that laptop's become— going to become a whole lot less useful to you when you have this really shitty human-machine interface, which is the 2 buttons. Yeah. And so that's currently the most common way to control these really complicated robots is with two buttons. Functionally, you have two sensors and you can like flex down or flex up. Those are the only inputs to do everything that the robot you would want to do. And so ultimately the experience is really terrible for patients because they're like, yeah, this is like a really cool, sexy, fun to show off robot, but I can't actually control it. Where's shit? Yeah. And so it's actually like much heavier than these other hook robots and I have to worry about recharging it. And if I break it, I got to send it in and It's expensive. I got to fight with my insurance provider to get them to reimburse it. There's all these issues that come along with it. So most people end up abandoning them despite them being like really cool robotic pieces of technology. Yeah. And so the most important thing to solve is that two-button problem. How do we allow somebody with a disability— and this is the same problem for quadriplegia and all of that— how do we allow somebody with disability to still have access to the full keyboard and the mouse cursor and all of that so that they can get the full benefit out of this really complicated and beautiful machine that somebody that's able-bodied can get as well. You know, when somebody that's quadriplegic is trying to, you know, type text or whatever, communicate out with the world, like you have to wait a really long time for them to be able to do that, right? That's a very frustrating system. And so when it's like a life or death situation, that's the only way that you can communicate out to the world. You'll put up with it and you'll utilize it. But for an amputee, they're able to say, the hell with it, I'll get rid of this hand and I won't even use a prosthesis. Like, I'm not going to spend half of every day dealing with the crap that's required to control this thing.

And so we saw with you guys, I mean, so you're adding more control, right? And, and, um, you, like you said, I mean, you, you train the device on, on the person, and then you're getting— and, and the hands are better, right? Like the Scionic has—

yeah, the hands are getting much better, and a lot of that is because of the humanoid robot boom. Okay, that we're seeing.

Okay, this is— okay, this is my question though, is like, how excited do we get? Because I cover all this technology. I did want to ask you a bit about— there's a company called Onward that's in Switzerland that does spinal implants. I've been in many ways blown away. You're with somebody who's been paralyzed for 15 years. Suddenly they can take steps again with this implant. But it's also— I'm not the one living through this. So this is my perspective. It's frustrating because you can't walk like you used to. It's a very gated walk. You're very limited. You're standing again, you're walking. I mean, I don't want to undercut that. But, and so, you know, when I see what's going on, when I was with Alex and I see what's going on, it's like I'm trying to gauge, you know, how— For sure.

Yeah. What, what, 10 years from now, actually. And then imagine the patients actually who have to like figure out how to gauge this, right? First things foremost, like any demo that you see of anything, whether it's Figure AI or Phantom Neuro or Neuralink or whoever it is, like you're getting the best possible moment in time of that demo, right? Tightly curated. Yeah. For everybody. And so whatever you see there, like assume that that's the best. That's, that's probably like the top of the top at that given point in time that they, that that company was able to achieve. And there's a lot that goes into achieving those things, right? That a lot of people don't see behind the scenes. I'm not saying that it's disingenuous what anybody is necessarily doing. Some people it is, right? Like it's straight up, man. Like some of the humanoid robots, it's like, oh, there's actually a person like using an Xbox controller controlling that. And they're saying that it's autonomous. Like, that's lying. Yeah. But in this space, like, if you see somebody doing really crazy stuff, you know, with their limb or with Onward, like walking flawlessly without a walker or maybe with a walker or something, you should have a bit of skepticism about what you see until you see like a live demonstration of that. If you see somebody And even then there might be someone behind the curtain, you know, behind the scenes. But if you see somebody walk out onto the stage and do something live right there in front of a crowd and it works, then you can be like, okay, this is probably like pretty legitimate. And that's something that we hope to do as a company is give real like live demonstrations and things like that. And you even saw with like Meta's demo, right? When Mark Zuckerberg went on stage to demo the neural wristband, it all malfunctioned. It all broke down. Even with Meta, that's infinite money, infinite time, spent all this time doing that, even then it still doesn't work flawlessly in the moment. And so I think you should be skeptical at baseline, but I think you should, and I think you should understand that these are, at least for this human-machine interface, like, this is a really freaking hard problem to solve. Really, really hard. And you have a lot of well-intentioned people and a lot of money going in to do it. So people in this medical sector, I think, have the best of intentions, but I would expect that these things, in order to achieve like true human performance, uh, in terms of like full limb movement or somebody running with a spinal cord plus brain implant or something. Yeah, that's gonna take a really long time. Like, that's not in the next 2, 3 years. Uh, I would say that's over the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years that you can expect. Now, right, but you're not breaking the laws of physics by doing any of those things. Like, they're achievable, uh, endpoints, I think. So this is—

okay, this is kind of my question. The I've been with you guys and Onward and Neuralink in non-scripted conditions. It's all— it's like amazing. Yeah, you know, it's real. Yeah, it's real. But then, you know, that was actually my question is like when I, when I look at Onward, I mean, I've been in tears with these, these patients and then I think they have 12 electrodes on the spine like you mentioned. Now they're connecting to a brain-computer interface as well. So you don't have to have some like external iPad or something that you're poking on. But then I had no way to calibrate is actually what— and to give people a sense. I mean, again, we have videos on this stuff, but when people use the spinal implant, they're walking in a really gated way. It's hard for them to pick up their legs and move, but they are walking and then they can take a limited number of steps. They get very tired. I mean, they haven't walked in years. Oh, yeah. And you have all this muscle to build up. But then in my head, I was just like, Does this ever actually get to— to—

I think with enough time, money, and like dedication, these things can reach that endpoint. Now, what can happen though, is that people lose interest or, you know, you don't achieve great enough results fast enough for you to be able to get the next round of funding or for anybody to care about the technology. You could get these patients that say, oh man, this is so cool, this is so exciting and sexy at the beginning of it. But then, you know, a year, 2 years goes by and they're like, I'm so tired of coming in and working with this company every day and doing this. Like, the hell with it. And actually, if you talk to a lot of people who have spinal cord injury and quadriplegia and all of that, really, they're much more worried about actually using their arms and having like some sense of dexterity back to be able to manipulate their environment, much more worried than they are about walking again. If you talk to almost all of these people, just because I've been interacting. So like their priorities, may shift. There are all these reasons insurance providers might decide, hey, that's really cool technology, but we're not going to pay for it. Yeah, right. For whatever reason, like it's an incremental improvement or it's a quality of life improvement and we're not so worried about quality of life. Yeah, there are so many factors that can lead to the death of a technology, even if it's on a trajectory to accomplish something amazing. Now, a superpower that Neuralink has, for example, is they have infinite, infinite money and infinite ability to hire people and, you know, throw resources at a problem. And so that's one where they probably will stick around long enough to do really incredible things at scale where you can see it live right, right in front of you. Will they be able to achieve like this bidirectional stream of consciousness, you know, and all of that? I don't know. I don't know that that's possible.

But I mean, it is this weird thing about this technology where whether it's what you guys are doing, what Onward's doing, what any of the BCI companies are doing, the first people to get these devices are people that have had some terrible event in their life or an illness. And so it's essentially a medical device. It's being— it's a clinical trial. You mentioned insurance companies. Somebody has to pay for this stuff. And the value, the value of that startup, that company is quite different to one that's making a consumer device and completely. And then but lots of these companies are being pitched as we are just a stepping stone towards every human having this stuff. And so there's going to be this chasm, I think,— it's going to be— it's— first of all, insurance companies are kind of assholes on this stuff. They— just because you can stand and it makes you— totally changes your life, it makes you feel happy and like you're face to face with your friends. If it doesn't show some drastic, you know, medical outcome, then they're not going to pay for this thing, which I think is kind of insane. And so we're going to have this really weird moment, I think. Yeah. Well, so like who can survive this, this chasm between these two worlds, right?

And I mean, it requires a lot of capital. So here's what's crazy is when you're talking to investors, your technology has to be for everybody. It's going to change the world for literally everybody. It's going to do everything. And this is going to be like a multi-trillion dollar company. Yeah. If you go to an insurance provider, you have to say this is for almost nobody. There's only a really small demographic. Like it's going to be cheap. Like you don't have to worry about us coming in asking for $100,000 for every patient because they don't want to cut a lot of No, they don't want to cut a lot of checks. But if you go to them and you're like, hey, this is a relatively small demographic, here's, you know, it's a relatively affordable price. And, you know, we're not asking you to pony up $1 billion for our technology. You know, we're looking at something else. So you're pitching two totally different things. Yeah. And what's most important early on is that you raise capital. And so all these companies go out and talk about how it's going to be for everybody and. Right. And that everybody's going to be getting their brain implants and like, you know, a WALL-E scenario where we're all just kind of like sitting in our chairs, yeah, stream of consciousness, consciousness going out, uh, to the world. Uh, we also are kind of pitching that right now. I think— not that I'm biased at all— but I think like we actually have the potential to do that. And maybe we could talk about that, what we're actually working on, like some of these, uh, non-medical types of scenarios. When you're talking about, you know, a procedure in the limbs or something like that, that's way less invasive. The modern-day cosmetic plastic surgery that people are lining up out the door to get, right? Like breast augmentation, tummy tuck, facelift, you name it, liposuction. What we're talking about is like dramatically less invasive than that. And so you can see how that can become something that's elective to somebody. Now, also, you have to be able to reach— if you want it to be for everybody, they're going to have to pay out of pocket, right? If this is going to be an elective consumer thing, like they have to pay out of pocket for the technology. And so while you may technically be able to get your brain implant, are you going to have the capital to be able to pay for your brain implant? Right. I don't know. And so there are multiple sides to this.

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All this is to say that like, I think for neurotechnology, there is great promise, just like there is for artificial intelligence and humanoid robots and you name it. And people should have, you know, a little bit of skepticism, but also be excited about, about, yeah, what's possible over the coming decade or two.

Okay. Well, let's, let's get into like where you really think this is going and what got you into this in the first place. If I remember right, because I'm from Texas, you're from Oklahoma. Yeah. Which part? Tulsa.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, where all great things come out of.

Born, born and raised or?

So I was born in San Antonio. When I was 3, moved to Tulsa. Okay. Grew up there until, you know, going on to college. Went to Texas Christian University, a nice Jewish boy. All right.

Was your family like in the energy business or anything?

No, my dad was a healthcare lawyer. Okay. And so he was, you know, general counsel for some medical systems around Oklahoma. Yeah. And that's really how I got a window into medicine was all of my dad's closest friends were doctors. And so I had a great opportunity to be able to go out and follow neurosurgeons and other individuals and get this window into what it looks like to be a surgeon. Or a clinician and ultimately found my way kind of towards doing that.

Yeah. Which high school did you go to?

I went to Holland Hall.

Have we talked about this?

Maybe we did. I went to St. John's. Okay. Yeah, there we go.

We used to play you guys in sports.

Yeah. Yeah. These tiny, tiny schools. Yeah. Just—

I don't want to bore people, but yes, these are like the—

Who doesn't want to talk about, you know, Central United— Texas private schools.

Yeah. But they were quite, quite snooty, difficult school. Ours was kind of like a crunchy—

Oh, was it? A little bit hipstery kind of a vibe. I graduated with 72 people, you know, real small.

I went to Rushmore, if people have seen it. That was literally my school. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay. And then you end up becoming a doctor. Mm-hmm. Well, at first, before you became a doctor, I mean, at some point you flirted with getting into the military, which sparked some of this journey.

Yeah. Yeah. So I really wanted to do Special Forces, right? Nobody in my— my grandparents, my grandfather's were in the military, but my dad wasn't. My mom wasn't. None of that. My brother wasn't. But I grew up in Oklahoma, was patriotic, you know, individual. And I thought that, you know, you can make an impact on the battlefield and that that's where history was made. Now I have a different kind of belief on all of that, but at the time that's what I thought. And so I wanted to go to one of the military academies, almost got in there but didn't get in, almost enlisted in the Marines, ended up going to school and doing ROTC to just try college out for a year to make my mom happy and ended up getting recurring shin splints that led to stress fractures. Right. Not a sexy injury, but it's one that kind of takes you out of doing all the physical activities and had this recognition that I wasn't going to be able to do these really intensive physical career paths, I would say. The only other thing that I was interested in was surgery. It gives you a kind of immediate return on investment in terms of helping somebody. You can have a dramatic impact on people's lives. It's a really cool profession that you'd be excited to wake up every morning. And so wanted to be a surgeon, but now had like this newfound appreciation, I would say, physical, uh, disabilities or physical injuries that prevented you from doing what you want to do and then could imagine, you know, well, gosh, what if you lost your limbs or you had spinal cord injury or, you know, you get blown up by an IED or something like that? If you can be a surgeon that can reconstruct the human body in order to give people their function back, what an incredible career path. And so that's really what I sought out. So I ended up going to medical school at University of Oklahoma, which ended up being fantastic, and then did a research fellowship after that in plastic and reconstructive surgery out of Johns Hopkins, focused on neuromuscular reconstruction, microsurgery, implantable sensors, and ways that you can connect the limbs to machines in the setting of disability.

And the company grows out of this. It kind of started at Johns Hopkins, right? It started—

100% started at Johns Hopkins. So I went there, full intention was I'm going to be a plastic surgeon who does these really cool operations and like creates cyborg humans and be the surgeon that does that. I was under the impression that all the technology was was already figured out. I had seen incredible demonstrations on YouTube, 60 Minutes, uh, you name it, whatever, the news, um, and thought, wow, I saw these demos, right? I was like, oh man, like, it exists. The time is now. I can go be a surgeon. What year is this? This is, uh, this was back in 2019, I want to say. Okay, 2018, 2019, something like that. Um, this was like in the— so basically this entire field of neurotechnology spun out of DARPA. DARPA put in literally like billions of dollars across our top academic institutions to say, can you take somebody with an injury, a severe injury, tap into their nervous system from head to toe, uh, and allow them to control machines, right? But this is the Defense Department, so really the intention is, right, can we start with people with disabilities, and then what are the implications of that downstream for humans in general?

But can I pause you there for one second? Like, they're trying to they're trying to make cyborg soldiers in, in that moment. I'm sure they— I know DARPA, I'm sure they're trying to make cyborg soldiers, but like in that moment in time, they were trying to kind of help people who had been injured and get the most out of their life, or—

right, okay, right. So they were trying to take people that had spinal cord injury, brain trauma, uh, nerve injury, lost their limbs, the full gamut of function-limiting injuries, I would say, uh, and they're their task was like connect them to machines to give them their life back and figure out, try every possible way to do that, from wearable technologies to implantable technologies. Uh, and so they put a ton of money into that.

Like, into your point, I mean, just, just BZI, I mean, they invested, made a lot of this happen.

No, they made all of it. Like, Neuralink would not exist without it, from the surgical robot to the actual threads that are going into the brain to our implants to you know, onward type of technologies, none of it would exist without DARPA funding spurring that because it was such— it's such a hard problem that like you could never be a startup that says, I'm going to go from 0 to 1 in terms of like I'm going to connect somebody's nervous system to machines because it requires like literally billions of dollars and a ton of fundamental research to figure out, is this even possible? And that's not a venture investable.

Okay, okay. So they're, they're backing the stuff. So there's interesting stuff out there, right? They're making investments. But then when you go survey the field, you're disappointed, right?

So, so I was very fortunate to end up at Hopkins where people were working on the full gamut of technologies, like the most advanced brain-computer interface study was taking place there. The most advanced muscle-based, EMG-based control was taking place there between this place called the Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins, the institution, as well, even though they're related. And so I got to see the full kind of scale of technologies that people were working on, and it was just at a time where people were starting to think about, well, how do we commercialize some of this? And that really was all focused on brain implants. And so, you know, I mean, I saw behind the curtain of what actually was required to enable the results that frankly tricked me into thinking that these were commercial commercial-ready results, um, and recognize that like nobody was really focusing on anything other than brain implants. And I don't want to live in a world where the only solution to everybody is to go put something into your brain. Yeah, right. And there's actually like much better ways to do it for the majority of people, and that's by targeting the limbs, and in particular muscle. Much safer, easier to work with, all these different things. But nobody was working on a commercial product for that. And so I decided that I I could, or I believed at least, that I could have a greater impact on the world, for whatever that's worth, by creating technology and working with my surgeon buddies who could probably do a better job at me than the surgery than I would ever be able to do. And they really set out on a journey to create this like minimally invasive, muscle-directed human-computer interface.

And okay, so this starts from all this foundation of you, you know, you went through all the pain and suffering of becoming a doctor. You wanted to help people for all the reasons you outlined. We've already hit that this technology can go different directions. As you're starting the company, was it— I, I know that's the focus, but I mean, like, what was your— what do you want to do, you know, in 20 years' time with all this?

Like, where do I want to go in 20 years' time?

Always medical-focused, and that was— yeah, it's completely 100% what you're about. Where were you?

So So part of the reason that I was interested in this through the lens of plastic surgery is the plastic surgery walks the line of like medical and, uh, elective, right? And I fully believed at the time, and now even more so believe, that these technologies are the future of human capability for sure. Like, we have hit the apex of biological evolution in my mind, and now it's about, about merging with machines in order to to hit the next level and stay competitive. And so I think technologies like we're working on absolutely will ultimately do that. Now, my passion is medicine, right? And helping people with disabilities. That was the core focus. But I found early on that, you know, you couldn't have like a niche focus and get venture capital. You really have to bite off a big chunk of things. So I started off just pitching like upper limb amputation to Y Combinator. Of all places.

Wait, like elective? No, no, no, no.

Well, we can go into that. Like elective amputation, uh, it will be a thing. Okay. Very, very soon. Um, convinced of that entirely. But no, I, I, uh, focusing on that is the demographic.

Like, I thought for a second you said you have to, you have to get these VCs.

I've got that great product for you. We're gonna— I'm gonna chop off your arm. I'm not gonna give you anything.

I was like, well, I'm just gonna tell you, you work for it, but you Because I guess I was just picturing in my head that that market wouldn't have been big enough to get them excited, or especially if it's just like, um, yeah, elective.

No, but like the upper limb loss community. Yeah. Even though this is utter bullshit, right? Like when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, there's no logic associated with how people look at market size. I'm convinced there are about 400,000 upper limb amputees in the United States alone. There are like between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals with quadriplegia. In the United States. Yet like VCs look at brain-computer interface that are almost entirely focused on quadriplegia or, God forbid, locked-in. There's hardly any people with locked-in syndrome or ALS or whatever, right? These are— that's even more niche demographics. Um, but it's like this promise of, well, okay, you have to start somewhere. And so if you tap into the brain in order to do these things, the natural progression is going to be that you're restoring sight and that you're getting rid of Parkinson's and that you're like allowing AI to just directly communicate into your brain. So I started off just talking about upper limb amputation, and that was not viable in terms of like somebody giving my money, giving me money. So then started talking about lower limb amputation and all the other potential use cases of this technology. And that's really when we started to get some traction in the venture community was being able to explain the downstream implications of this and that you have to start somewhere, you know, for something. Yeah. For everything. And so we're starting with upper limb amputation. We're still doing that. That remains kind of the core thing, but really have taken a much higher view of kind of what the technology can do and what we're like actively working on as well.

Okay. All right. I want to walk through some of the weird scenarios. I mean, so if I'm— if you're developing this technology, for example, when I've seen it controlling the hand, it's obviously this this robot hand? I am probably— you're saying maybe one day we would have elective amputation, but outside of that for a moment. Well, how would I augment my body if I'm not— how would I put something on top of one?

Let me give you a scenario though of this elective amputation thing before that, just so no one thinks I'm like totally crazy. So there are all these medical issues. Let's take rheumatoid arthritis, for example, that are commonplace that are just like a fact of life and you just got to live with it and take medications and like not be able to use your hands, right? I think we will quickly enter an era, uh, where people with these progressive debilitating diseases of the limbs, uh, will elect to have amputations. Diabetes is like the main one. Progressive amputations of toe, one toe, then multiple toes, then part of your foot, and then your ankle, and then this. Well, now you got all these comorbidities and you have no wound healing and you ultimately are going to pass away from this. We are going to do proactive amputations. Maybe that's a better way to say it. Proactive amputations for these different ailments because prosthetics, amputation prosthetics is going to be a much better outcome than living with these rheumatic hands that are functionless and painful to you, or these progressive amputations that will lead to sepsis and ultimately you passing away. People will want to use prosthetics and actually elect to have amputations. Now, excuse me, you asked about about human augmentation and what you can do with this. It's the same kind of thing, I think, with what Elon talks about, which is how do you increase the bandwidth with which you communicate with the machines around you? They'll reach a point where like the typing in a keypad or using mouse cursor or using, clicking on a mouse, that is not a high enough throughput means of communicating with machines in order to to get the most bang for your buck out of them, right? We have these incredibly complicated and capable machines, and the more seamless you're able to communicate with these machines, the better. And especially when you have multiple machines in an environment that you're trying to communicate with, the more seamlessly that you can communicate with them, the lower cognitive burden there is to do that, the more efficiently you're going to be able to harness the power of these machines to make your life better. So an example is, let's say that you have like all these different machines that today would require all of these different physical handheld interfaces to interface with them. So let's say you have a drone here. So I'm going to pick up my drone controller. I'm going to tell it what to do. I got my, you know, household humanoid robot over there. I'm going to go get the iPad that controls them and type on that. I have my smart home Alexa. I'm going to talk to Alexa and yell at it and tell it what to do. You're running all over the place. What if you could have just like a central universal controller where you don't have to talk, you don't have to type, you don't have to text, you don't have to do any of that, and you can just control those technologies, or more rather task them, tell them what to do without having to pick up anything or do anything, right?

So you're talking about, you're talking about a brain that would be connecting.

Well, it's essentially how do you connect your brain so to speak, really dumbing it down. But how do you connect your brain to these machines so that they know what you want them to do as you want them to do it? Yeah. Without having to like pick up these handheld controllers and do all of those things.

I mean, okay, this reminds me, I've hung out with Nolan Arbaugh a ton, who's the first patient to get the Neuralink BCI. This just reminds me of him a little bit because sometimes we'll be talking to each other face to face and then I peek over and he's playing chess on his laptop while we're talking and he does it. It. Like, it's, it is like the Force from Star Wars. He's like, you would, it took me a minute to really cotton on to what was happening because he's gotten so used to it that he's having a full-on, pretty quite engaged conversation. And then, and then you look over on the side and you're like, you dog, you're not even. Yeah. And, and so I, I think I get the gist of what you're saying is if all this stuff got good enough, I'm, I'm kind of cruising through my house and I'm, I'm force, I'm using the Force all over the place. Right.

But, uh, it, it, it's all about like efficiency. Yeah. Of how you do things throughout your day. Right? Like I talked about, the extreme version is that you have a really complicated robot and you have two buttons. Uh, and it's like so inefficient that you say the hell with it. Uh, we are quickly going to reach a point where there's so many machines that you want to do so many things with where we do not have the means to interact with them and do that. You know? So Nolan's able to like hold a conversation with you and then you're boring him, so he plays chess and you know, all of that.

You're like, I, I wasn't as engaging as I thought. Yeah.

You're like, wow, I should question I'm doing with my life. So we are quickly entering that period now within your everyday life. That's like hard to imagine. You know, you're sitting today, that's hard to imagine. Now, there are scenarios, though, where this is a real problem today and where you do need to have a better way to interface with machines as you're in really complicated environments.

I can only imagine a couple. I mean, one is like a factory where maybe you've got a bunch of robots, right? And you just— I mean, I guess for the most part they're probably doing automated stuff, but maybe every now and then you want to, you want to get them all going in one direction or just, just kind of keep an eye on things and then, and then shift them around. So, and it's one person is controlling, right, 20, 30, 40.

So that's, that's a great— so let's, let's like imagine that, uh, you know, there are way less humans in a manufacturing facility because now you got all these robots. And so now maybe you have like a floor manager manager who's in charge of 100 different robots that still has to communicate amongst different floor managers and the management. So he's busy, he's got his walkie-talkie and he's got his notepad that he's talking on. And then if he wants to control these different machines, he'd have to have all these strapped on controllers and things attached to him and he'd be fiddling around trying to find, oh, I want to tell this robot to go over there. Let me find the controller for that. That's a very cumbersome thought experiment of an experience. What would be much better is that, you know, he's able to have his walkie-talkie and his, you know, notepad to take his notes on, and his body is just the controller. And he can, you know, click his fingers or think about something or whatever it is, and he's just like able to tell these machines around him what to do without having to fiddle around and figure out which device he's supposed to be clicking to tell that robot to go do that thing.

This next part will probably either bother some people or spook them, but since DARPA funded this and since I spent a lot of time with Andrew, and sometimes I'm sitting in front of Andrew's Lattice Software, and part of its job is to go from a world where it takes 12 people to, to essentially control a drone and make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be, to launch it, do all this stuff, to one person in front of Lattice that is, is monitoring 20 autonomous systems. And, and they're on a mission and they're doing their thing, but now this person has to keep track of 20 things, and you want to be able to react pretty quick if, like, things are probably going to go okay, but, but if you need to switch things up and make sure you got to adjust, then, you know, now this person used to have 12 people in charge of one thing. Now you got one person in charge of 20. That's exactly right. And so you kind of want that to go well. And I, you know, I could imagine DARPA, I could imagine a soldier where you're, look, I, well, we already see what Andrew's building with these headsets of the future with Eagle Eye where you're getting, which Palmer announced right here, I believe. And, and badass.

It's pretty cool.

And and you're monitoring, you've got the battlefield in front of you, you're getting imagery of troops, of communications, of all the weapons in play. I mean, it's like this crazy video game. And so, yeah, if you could go at the speed of thought alone, or have more like a Nolan-like intuitive feel for all this, you do get to this weird Force magician sort of wizard thing.

So more technology is not necessarily better. Unless you have, unless you're scaling the efficiency with which you're utilizing that technology at the same pace, right? If you throw 50 different machines to a warfighter and say, you know, this drone's going to go do this, this little mini tank is going to go do that, this EagleEye is going to go do that, and this is going to go do that, like figure out how to integrate all those into your workflow and like go out in the battlefield and just control them all and make them all good. They're going to be like, like, what the hell do you want me to do? It's complicated enough that I have to be proficient with my weapon and be able to communicate with, you know, my fellow soldiers and do all of this. Like, how do I integrate all of these different things? And what am I going to have, like, a rucksack that's already totally full now full of all these different handheld clunky controllers and, you know, these Pelican, you know, cases and stuff? Like, uh, you have to figure out how to make it as seamless as possible. And they call it cognitive for, for these warfighters? How do you reduce the cognitive load for bringing in more and more complex machinery into the ecosystem? And so with that, you have to reimagine the human-machine interface, how the human is interacting with these machines. As long as the human is still dependent on physical touch interfaces and pressing buttons and having these big clunky handheld controllers and like big screens and all of that, that, you're going to be extremely limited in what these soldiers are actually able to integrate into their workflow, especially in like a chaotic environment where they're under fire and like actually just trying to like survive or accomplish the goal or whatever it is.

And to get anywhere near this wild scenario which I was laying out, then you would need to— you would need to train up our, our knowledge base on, on how all this— how this works and how the body works and how it would interact. And so part of what you guys would be doing then is yes, you're helping people in need right now, but you're gathering data on how, how our body is interacting with these devices. And essentially, just like we hear about all the time, I mean, you'd be, you'd be training up a model more or less.

Yeah. So exactly. So these things are inextricably linked. That's a good word., you know, what you create to help people with disabilities automatically has potential implications, not necessarily going to, but potential implications for able-bodied people. And usually the early adopters are the military. They have the money, they have the need, so on and so forth, right? And so with a system like ours, yeah, you would have this kind of universal controller where it takes signals, it knows the signals from your body in particular,, and you have the flexibility to use those in whatever way you want to control whatever various machines you want, right? So we have these special operators that are so good at what they do, uh, and have a very specific way of, of doing what they do. And you have these really complicated environments. And so giving them the ability, uh, to harness kind of a new way to control machines in a way that makes the most sense for them based on the mission and what it is that they're doing, uh, is a positive. And so technologies like ours ultimately will have implications for, um, how warfighters are able to harness the systems around them in order to allow them to amplify their ability.

So you wanted to be a doctor— no, you wanted to go in the military, and you're like, I'll do good in the world by being a doctor. Now there's this weird almost fusion of these two things. Yeah, this is a roller coaster.

It's a roller coaster, but that's the beauty life is that you just follow it wherever the hell it goes, uh, and try to do good. Now, um, so I want to help people. Like, my core focus is to help people and make the world a better place. I wish war didn't have to exist, but there's something about our monkey brains that forces us to fight each other and kill each other. Yeah. Uh, I personally believe that the United States is a shining beacon. It is so far from being perfect, of course, but I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Technologies like this exist Same with AI and general intelligence and all of that. All of these things are inevitable. They are going to happen. We are not the only people working on them. And so you better hope that we're the best at doing it. We are absolutely the best at doing the fundamental research that determines whether or not something is feasible. We are not the best at actually executing on those technologies and turning them into commercial products. China is the best at doing that. And so I believe that this stuff is inevitable. I want the United States to be the absolute best at it. And so, you know, I think it's a positive thing to be working on the full gamut of technologies, ensuring that, you know, hopefully we don't have to go to war and it doesn't have to be necessarily utilized for that use case. But again, I think I'd rather us be the best at it. I'd rather play a part in being in control of how this technology is applied. Uh, and so yeah, that's what we're doing.

Did you see any of these stories where China's started like a brain-computer interface city now?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's like—

I don't know that I've seen the institutions next to factories next to— Oh really? No, I haven't seen—

I haven't seen that. That's— I mean, I, I know that China is working on, uh, these technologies at a pace that the United States probably is not, right? And, and also All of this is so intertwined, like, it's really complicated because, uh, the majority of the workforce that's actually doing the fundamental research here in the United States at our academic institution, uh, are Chinese nationals. It's just a fact. So all of our top academic institutions, uh, have Chinese nationals. They are doing the fundamental research, a lot of it funded by DARPA and other institutions. And these are incredible individuals that are highly capable, great people, stole everything. But they're very transparent that, you know, they're ultimately going to go back to China and they're going to, uh, take their lessons learned and they're going to spin up a lab or a technology or whatever it is. It's not stealing, it's just what they're doing, and they're totally transparent about it. So I don't think we have any ability to be upset about them doing that. I think we just need to be competitive. Yeah, how we do that. Uh, the other side of this is, is the medical, uh, regulatory environment. The US is painfully slow at, uh, approving clinical trials and allowing new medical technologies to go out in, in, into the general population and be tested. China is incredibly fast. I mean, you can do incredible things there with lightning speed. And so we've got a lot of red tape and a lot of problems that we need to solve. Um, and of course, like, we shouldn't have a free-for-all medical environment where, like, you can do whatever the heck you want. There needs to be regulation, red tape, but it should be a common sense approach where it's not like prescriptive.

I mean, there's countries like Australia, which generally come across as pretty sane, and they're going much faster. We do all— we do all our medical trials in Australia. We're doing—

we're doing our first implantable trial in Australia because the United States is simply not competitive, uh, for speed to doing that. And Australia gives you a tax benefit, right? They give you like 43%, uh, of your R&D expenses in Australia back to you in the form of a tax credit.

What do they want in return for these trials? I mean, they're just hoping that the technology— they've turned it— they've—

so they, as part part of it in general, you have to set up like a, uh, entity within Australia. They hope that you'll still stay there. They hope that you'll approve your, uh, device or pharmaceutical or whatever it might be in Australia. And so it ends up being like a pretty good business proposition for Australia because they're getting all this amazing talent and companies and technologies coming there where they otherwise would never— like, it's so hard to get to Australia.

Why else would you go there So when you were looking to set up the trial, I mean, this seems like common knowledge now because I've seen so many companies do it. So maybe you didn't have to dig that deep, but when it's easier to set up there, do you have a sense as to how, like, they're just quicker at approving the paperwork? There's just less paperwork to do.

So in the United States, if you want to get a trial approved, especially if it has— if it's of significant risk, you have to go to the FDA and you have to submit a whole bunch of data to the FDA showing that, uh, this trial makes sense, that it's low risk, that you've done a whole bunch of preclinical testing to make that happen. And it's very prescriptive, right? They just have a way of doing things and you better have the money and time to do it, otherwise, like, good luck. In Australia, uh, you don't really have to go to the central authority, their FDA equivalent. You get to do local boards like at hospitals and things. Made up of like engineers and doctors who look at your proposition in terms of what the trial looks like, what preclinical testing looks like, and all of that. And then they determine, are you good or are you not good? Right. And they have a lot of autonomy to approve those things on a common sense basis. And so you can do less preclinical testing. You still have to do the preclinical testing to show that it's safe and like things like that. It's not a free-for-all by any means. It's just much more common sense., and you're able to have like a more free-flowing dialogue with them about it. Whereas with FDA, it's much more black and white. Uh, and then when you put on top of that the fact that you're going to get close to half of your R&D dollars spent in Australia back, you can move faster, you can spend way less money, you can use the data to feed into the FDA to get approval for a clinical trial. It's an absolute no-brainer, no pun intended, to go to Australia, uh, for your early clinical trials.

This is the FDA okay with this at this point? Because Australia is such a close partner, it's like, okay, whatever, let's let them They're right.

So because this—

how long has this trend been on? Because I feel like this just hit me like a ton of bricks over the last year because it's just every single company I talked to is doing it. I don't remember that being the case 2, 3, 4 years ago.

I think it's so Australia really got its start. Maybe this is not that interesting, but Australia got a start in the cochlear industry. So they were pioneers in cochlear implants and they formed out a lot of know-how an expertise within cochlear implants, which were some of the first like smart bioelectronic devices. Yeah. So they really became front runners in terms of developing medical devices. And then that kind of spurred this ecosystem of medical device and testing and all of that. And then they became super friendly and decided that they were going to use that as a business development platform to bring companies into Australia and really spur spun out from that. So I think it's been, you know, decades. Uh, now it's becoming more and more commonplace. Um, the people at the FDA are amazing. So I've had like an incredible, a shockingly incredible experience with FDA. I meet with them once a month. We got this thing called breakthrough designation where we could have to say, talk to them a lot, and not to brag or anything, God, we're awesome. Um, and, uh, no, I don't, I actually don't have to say that the FDA is awesome. I just got, you know, I don't know, uh, they truly are actually awesome. And I think that the people at the FDA are also frustrated by the red tape. It is a massive machine in which there are a lot of cogs, and they don't have the ability to change, you know, how they do things. And I think that the people at the FDA, for the most part, are doing the best they can within the environment that exists. And in particular, the group that we work with, which is the same group that like Neuralink works with and others, man, they're having to wrestle with some real really difficult things that nobody's had to think about before. Like, for example, if I want to go from controlling a robotic arm, having an amputee control robotic arm, to him controlling a laptop, do I need to go back to the FDA to get approval to do that other thing, even though the only thing that I'm changing is an API in the software to communicate with the laptop rather than that? That's kind of a murky question. Like, is there a different risk associated with that? How do you not bottleneck innovation for companies like us? If we want to change our algorithm, algorithm, right? Let's say we make groundbreaking improvements, uh, in our control schema, our algorithm. How do we go about actually, like, implementing that? Because you can't just automatically upgrade the software like a Tesla remotely. You have to go through these channels through the FDA. And the FDA doesn't want to, like, stifle innovation and slow us down, but they also want to protect the safety of patients. And so they are trying to be, I think, as thoughtful as possible about how they do that. Now, are they They're gonna, you know, strike the right balance. TBD, we'll see. But it's complex and I don't envy them.

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Hashtag Brex. There you go. There you go. Very smooth. That was smooth.

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That's fine. Didn't even have to fast forward past that one. Okay, so there's been all these BCI companies. One reason I love talking to you is I feel like you're always, you know, you're balanced on this stuff and give the real deal. So by the time this podcast airs, Sam Altman Ashlee Vance's new BCI company will have been announced. And Sumner Norman works there as a longtime friend. But part of their thesis is going to be that all these devices that require surgery or anything close to it are not going to ever get to, or probably will never get to the type of coverage we need in the brain. And so anyway, the thrust of this is they're putting into question this this BCI boom that has happened over the last 10 years, which in large part thanks to Elon and the attention and money he brings, is we have about 20 startups that want to— crazy. Yeah, to poke your brain or get near it in some way. And they're saying, we kind of think this is flawed, we're going to go about it a different way. You know, is BCI as it has come to us in the world— and again, I know there's different levels of invasiveness, but this general idea of we're gonna read something out of your motor cortex or— and get very close to your neurons as we can. Um, yeah, like, does— when you look at any of these startups that have appeared over the last 10 years, do any of those feel like a general-purpose type device to you, or do they all seem like you're trying to fix a pretty specific problem for somebody in very bad circumstances?

So it depends on what you're trying do. So the first thing is that most people don't realize, I think, is that reading, sensing from the brain or the body, and writing, stimulating the brain, are totally different, completely and entirely different. Neuralink has only demonstrated, at least from in humans, what we've seen, uh, reading, sensing from the brain and all of that, uh, putting thoughts in someone's head, recreating vision, treating Parkinson's tremor, treat depression, all of it, that's all stimulation. That's an entirely different modality that's like way more risky to a patient. If you're sensing, it's passive and, you know, fine, you really have the problem of I'm putting this thing, this foreign body in someone's brain. If I'm stimulating now, it's like, what happens if I stimulate here and the thing goes haywire and it, you know, stimulates all across the body? And what about the fact that like when you're stimulating electrodes, it creates these ion changes that lead to basically like hydrogen peroxide in the body that can like tear, destroy the tissue around it if you're not careful. There are all these things with stimulation that make it a much, much harder problem. I could go on for days, right? Uh, and so for stimulating the brain, like the furthest we've gotten in general for like a, uh, stimulator that works as a commercial product is what's called a deep brain stimulator, uh, primarily used to treat Parkinson's tremor. And that works pretty freaking well. Yeah, that's like Metronidazole, but this is like one or two massive electrodes that get stuck way deep into the brain. And there's another problem, which is Neuralink is only getting like the half-millimeter, you know, superficial cortex outside of the brain, the covering the brain, right? To treat like Parkinson's tremor thing, you got to get really deep in there. And so like, how exactly is that going to work? How are you going to get the threads down in there and all of these things? And, you know, how's Optimus going to be better at doing it than a neurosurgeon in 3 years, apparently? And all of these questions. So stimulating the brain, I think, is going to be like a really long time before that's a compelling technology that can even be like applicable to a general population of patients for something like sight restoration. That's really freaking hard. Sensing from the brain, it's almost, it's really hard to have like a general purpose thing for that. Now, if the purpose is, that I want to control technology around it, the first question would be like, why are you— for an able-bodied person, why are you targeting the brain? Shouldn't you be targeting like something way, way safer? But the second one is, well, you're going to have to hit like the right motor cortex location for every single patient. Everybody's brain is a little bit different, generally organized the same way, but you have to do a functional MRI on every single patient to see where their specific individual finger, you know, locations are in their motor cortex for support that. And you have to put them there perfectly. And then you have to calibrate it specifically to each person. It's a really hard problem. So all this to say, a brain-computer interface being like this walk-in, walk-out, works instantly, mass consumer device type of thing, in terms of an invasive one, is a massive challenge that maybe is surmountable with enough time and resources. But that is certainly not like a tomorrow type of thing, right? Yeah. A wearable system that's non-invasive, people have been trying to do that forever. The reality is like it's really freaking hard to get something out of the brain. And in order for it to be reliable, like if you go get an EEG study because you have epilepsy or something from the surgery, they put all these gel electrodes and things all over and like it totally screws up your hair and it looks awful and it's like a really burdensome thing to do that, right? That is not a scalable thing. Then you had Kunal, right, who tried to create like this cap that you could wear that would be like this universal brain cap and all of that. Well, who wants to wear like a massive, uh, helmet on your head all the time, you know, to go do rudimentary things? Um, it's a really big problem, but there's a lot of money and smart people being applied to it. So my take is it's going to be a really long time before these things are like mass consumer devices, whether they're wearable or not. They may be for little niche things, like, you know, assessing your focus or maybe playing some simple video games or doing some diagnostics or something that will be seen.

But okay, okay. On the pro or open to, very interested in transhumanism spectrum, where do you fall? Are you— are you— are we going to become a new species? Are you— are you pro new species? Pro new species.

Pro, pro. I'm pro-human. But I'm pro cyborg. Like I think, again, I hate the cliché example of like everybody has a cell phone, we're already cyborgs. That's kind of bullshit. But I guess kind of. I think that now it's about how does technology move away from like these handheld things that you got to carry around with you and actually merge physically with the body, whether that's through wearables or implantables. To me, a similar event was Dexcom becoming like a mass consumer device. Really, the most, most similar thing was probably breast augmentation, going from something that's reconstructive following a mastectomy, usually for cancer, to a pretty invasive surgery that people are lining up out the door to get, you know, these devices, so to speak, put in them. Um, so we're already on the spectrum towards transhumanism and like continuous sensing from the body, and I think it will start with like small smart implants under the skin for a convenience factor to be able to do that. And then over time, I think it will get more and more extreme in how we do this, where different— like I said, where you can make a decision about, you know, I have these legs that don't work very well for me. Does it make more sense for me to get amputations, believe it or not, and then use prosthetics, or to use some form of an exoskeleton or something like that? I think things like that, um, are very much on the horizon, uh, soon. Now, this broad human-computer interface where, like, we're communicating together streamlined and, like, artificial intelligence is being tapped directly into our bodies or brains or whatever it might be, like, I don't think we're anywhere near that. We don't know nearly enough about the brain, uh, in reality. I don't know one medical professional who is like, oh yeah, that's on the horizon very, very soon, right? That just defies logic. Um, but it's a sexy story.

This is my other question. Yeah, because I'm covering AI quite deeply, BCI quite deeply. These things are in some ways in a race. It's like we're gonna create an artificial brain, and then on this other side, it's like we're trying to understand the human brain. And not only BCI, but we're doing all this connectomics, all this stuff that's advancing. These two things are interplaying off each other a lot now, although it strikes me in some ways I feel like the artificial side is still ahead. Totally. Yeah. And so, you know, um, when I hear you talk and when I— when I— whether it's Connectomics, which are these people that are imaging the brain, or the BCI stuff, that all still feels to me 5, 10, 15, 20 years off for the next wave of massive breakthroughs. When you talk to some of the AI people, not saying I believe all them, you know, whether on some of them on more of like a year, 2-year timeline.

I just like, uh, I've found in life that if something feels too good to be true, yeah, it usually is, right? Uh, and look at the incentives for people to say things different. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's different. I mean, like, what insanity is like listening to the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Yeah. Um, Yeah, I'm, I think I'm much more tempered in how I think all of these technologies are going to impact society. I think there will be sectors where they have monumental impacts. I think that in healthcare and in defense, they're going to have dramatic impacts in how, you know, what the status quo is. And in healthcare in particular, it's going to be a beautiful, amazing thing that helps a ton of people. Is it going to change all of our daily lives dramatically? No, I don't think so. Right. Like Meta's wristband came out, Neural Band. Which is the first, I would say, somewhat interesting human-computer interface. Who talks— I mean, nobody talks about it. Nobody's utilized— I've never seen a single one being utilized out there, right? These things already kind of exist and are happening. I think humanoid robots are way far away from being implemented in our daily society. I think AI, You know, it's already started to take over a ton of jobs. The world hasn't changed all that much. I think it's a scary time to be coming out of college and figuring out what you're going to do with your life. But right, like, you still got to build a company and now you just hire a little bit less people. And humans were incredibly adaptive and were very, very complicated. And I'm not convinced that we fully understand how all of this works. Yeah, right. I think I feel like there's something something special to us, sort of in the consciousness, in the con— right, like this starts to go down the consciousness rabbit hole. But I think there's something special about us, uh, that you can't easily recreate with these different types of technologies. And I think we're going to be competitive, uh, for a lot— a long time.

Is that coming from a kind of religious place or a scientist place or a just that feeling we all have?

I think I don't Um, I'm not particularly religious, uh, but I think I know there's a lot that I don't know. And, you know, the— so when you, when you look, go into medicine and you learn about how the human body works, how a single cell works, it is ridiculous to think that those— that it actually exists. Like, it is so complicated and elegant, and frankly, you think like, how in the world could evolution ever lead to something this complicated, right? Like, where's the evolutionary benefit of this protein being folded in this way for this specific thing that would lead to it being selected? Um, there's just something about it where I don't think we're capable of understanding, uh, what exactly our place in the universe is and how, how all of this works, uh, and, and all of that. Um, and I think that anybody that thinks that they understand that hasn't looked enough into biology and chemistry to go down the rabbit hole to see just how complicated we are. But also, I think, hasn't necessarily maybe experienced enough or learned enough about different religions and all of that to have the humility to know that there's a lot we don't understand.

Just haven't eaten enough mushrooms. That's it. You said it. What happened? If the AI does go a lot faster, in like 3 years from now, we're just waking up and man, they're running the world really, really well. It's, it's kind of like, it's, it's pretty great. And we kind of like don't really need to merge with the machine, you know, because it's totally possible. You guys are doing great. But, but humans, some group of humans would still want to like get in there.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, and I do believe that the humans that chose to merge would have a dramatic benefit compared to people who chose not to merge, right? Which leads to the classic haves and have-nots and how all of that works. But there's a lot of things with artificial intelligence and ways that we're predicting that it's going to change the world that don't necessitate that we merge human and machine in order to do that. AI can help us a lot by staying where it is in our computers and our cell phones and not physically really being attached to our bodies or our brains. And I do think it's just going to make a really exciting, amazing world where the barriers to creativity and creating are so low that everybody can do it.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Connor Glass, you have passed the Parax Intelligent Finance lightning round. I love that. Well done. So For this next year, here we are at the start of the year. So you, I mean, big year for you guys. You got the, you got the trials starting and then pushing forward.

It's like, oh, this is, this is the future. This is like the make or break year, right? Like this is either we put up or shut up this year. Okay. Uh, so lots of exciting things on the horizon. Okay. All right.

Well, thank you so much for coming in. Um, I'm glad you're surviving JPM and I wish I knew exactly when this is running, but yeah, people are gonna love this. Our, our episode in Texas kicks ass. Ass. This episode kicks ass. I can't wait for it. Like, we had fun hanging out. We got to try to match. Kindred spirits for sure. We got to— I got to watch a hand do things I know a hand could do.

I mean, a detached hand holding, spinning around, that's pretty cool stuff.

Yeah, yeah, um, it was awesome. Well, I've had fun getting to know you, and, um, good dude to hang out with. And, uh, yeah, well, I wish you guys tons of luck with the trial. I'm sure we'll be covering it so, um, people can, can check in and we'll keep them updated.

It. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

All right, man, thanks for coming in. Appreciate you. Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylie Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Mickelson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and E1 Ventures for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.