#53 - Three Breakthroughs: Tech and Our Brains

A road that can charge your electric vehicle while you drive? All right, we got to hear this.

Innovation here, but we have to execute it and roll it out, or it's basically going to be adopted by other countries who are going to be bolder in making these kinds of decisions.

If we're leading in the research, we should absolutely lead in the manufacturing and implementation of it.

And I think we need to continue to think, even as these AI systems become geometrically more powerful,

Yeah.

And are able to do things, I still think we all want to think of them as tools for us.

Hello there. Welcome back to this episode of The Tech Optimist. This is episode 53, and it is another 3 breakthroughs episode for you guys. So we got a cool one. I can't wait to dive into it with you. So. As always, our speakers for today are gonna be Mike Collins, founder and CEO here at AV, and another AV, uh, member, Mike Perry, a partner here, is also gonna be here with us in the episode today. And then, you know my voice, my name is Sam. I'm the guide and editor for this show. So let's dive into the meat of this episode. So the topics that are discussed today are how some roads can charge electric cars as you drive on them. AI deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson's, and high-tech surgery. Now, all 3 of these topics are so cool, and I can't wait for you guys to hear them. I provided, you know, a few of my own tech notes here and there sprinkled in about some videos that I have found along with them, some articles that I have found. Some of these videos include, you know, the head professor at Purdue Literally talking on the highway about this road that they were experimenting on and building in person. As far as the deep brain stimulation, we talk about a skateboarder in San Francisco and how this treatment has helped him, you know, live his life a bit fuller. And then in high-tech surgery, we talk about how it might be possible someday here in the future. where a doctor could perform a surgery on the other side of the world using something that kind of looks like a PS5 or Xbox controller. Yeah, I know, it's crazy. All right, you're gonna enjoy this one. Let's dive in. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Hello, welcome to Alumni Ventures and our Tech Optimists 3 Breakthroughs podcast, where we get together and talk about things in the news that have us super excited about the future. Uh, I'm Mike Collins. I'm the founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures. And I'm joined by Mike Perry, one of my partners out of our Chicago office. Hello, Mike.

Mike, thanks for having me.

Okay, so you're kicking off this week. What do you got?

Yeah, let's do it. Well, let's talk about a little bit of a journey here. So I want you to imagine a road that can charge your electrical vehicle as you drive. If I were to say that to you, do you think near-term, short-term, never gonna happen? It's one of those where you're like,

yeah, I would say it would sound like that's in a lab somewhere and it's a maybe happen in 5 to 10 years. That would be my kind of—

Yeah, a little bit further than in the lab. So the announcement of research has come out of Purdue University, you know, a great engineering school. And they have constructed the first highway segment In the United States that can wirelessly charge your electric vehicle while you're on the move. So I think it goes without saying, right? Like totally groundbreaking in and of itself. Yeah. But just this notion of being able to charge vehicles without the need for frequent stops or lengthy charging sessions, it not only, you know, reimagines the consumer experience, but I also think it addresses a lot of the perceived obstacles we have where it's like, Can you do electric long road trucking? Right. So the potential of it, you know, no doubt if you can scale this would solve, I think in my mind, probably one of the biggest challenges facing EVs in—

Yeah, no, there's this, there is the perception that, you know, electric vehicles and there's like stranded anxiety. Like I'm going to get somewhere and there's not going to be a charging station and, oh, you know, I've just grown up for 30 years and there's always a gas station.

You hit it on the head. In the article, they were like, it solves the biggest issue, range anxiety.

Range anxiety is the technical term. Yeah. So, yeah. And again, I think we've, a lot of us have become very accustomed now to charging with, you know, just setting our phones on a coil or In our automobile, there may be a place, or there's a place at home where you can just drop your electronic devices and they get charged. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's— we've talked a lot about areas of innovation, battery technology.

Yeah.

EVs, transportation is obviously huge. Driverless vehicles, charging, you know, these things all are coming together, right? And I think they're coming together, you know, in the next decade.

Yeah. And it's fascinating, right? You know, for us as the investors, we see all these things that are kind of like step number one, the reimagined car, whatever type of transportation. What really caught my eye as it relates to this breakthrough is the notion of where that then crosswalks into infrastructure and manufacturing.

Right.

So a little bit about how they think this could work. You could essentially design infrastructure on the highway to have coils like embedded under the road surface. And then these coils will generate a magnetic field.

Yeah.

And you could put receivers in the vehicles, which then convert that energy into electricity. So for me, I was like, man, this is such a cool example of technologies then coming together to say, hey, here is not just the future of EV in general, but it's the future of, you know, manufacturing and construction in America.

Yep.

You know, where cars are going, how we're going to develop the highway systems. Like, I live in Chicago. Mike, you know this. When you come in from O'Hare, you come on 90, you're like, this is a nightmare. Perfect time to say, you know, they're redoing a lot of the bridges right now. And I would love if, you know, some of these bridges were able to charge my EV as I was driving. So just a very cool, I think, sci-fi type concept that we think about, but in the view here, much more closer to reality than we initially thought.

And I think here's one of the issues, which is These kinds of initiatives, driverless vehicles, these kind of battery technologies, recharging while you drive, require pretty bold moves, right? And not our government systems aren't known to do that really well.

Yep.

So I think that this is also an area where Like we have had in space, some private test cases, I think, may be called for. We're seeing that with some high-speed rail experimentation in the private sector, kind of a hybrid. I think it's a hybrid between Las Vegas and LA. Yeah. I could see where this is another case where private industry picks a road of— a stretch of road, Obviously, again, this would be something where you'd look for somebody that's really bold like Elon and Tesla because you've got to have the car compatible. I could see him doing a test section of highway, paving it to prove it. Otherwise, what we're going to see is we're going to see something like this come out of— they're going to take the technology and you're going to hear about it in China or you're going to hear about it somewhere else. Yeah. You know, this is again where the future is, is innovation here, but we have to execute it and roll it out, or it's basically going to be adopted by, you know, other countries who are going to be bolder in making these kinds of decisions. Yeah.

If we're leading in the research, we should absolutely lead in the manufacturing and implementation of it.

Okay everyone, it's Sam. I'm going to interject here really fast. So Purdue recently published a video with a few of the professors and a few of the students on, you know, this wireless EV charging road that they designed. So I'm going to play the video here in a second, but it's the head professor who does most of the talking, and then towards the end, if you're watching this video version, You can see a lot of the imagery of the technology, you know, in place on the road and a highway. So I wanted to share. It's really, really cool. He talks about some really fascinating stuff. So enjoy.

John Haddock. I'm a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University. We're on the site of a test project. It's a pilot project. It's a quarter mile long being built by the Indiana Department of Transportation. Technical name for it is dynamic wireless power transfer, which is sort of a fancy way of saying as you drive your vehicle down the pavement, it's able to charge the battery in your electric vehicle. Why are we doing that? Well, so 2 of the big barriers to electric vehicle adoption, at least for the public, are range anxiety. Oh my gosh, where am I going to charge the battery on this car? And the second thing is And a lot of that cost in electric vehicles is driven by the size of the battery packs that they have to have in order to get you that 250-300-mile range. This system, you'd be able to drive your small vehicle down it, and it would be able to charge the batteries as you drive over the pavement at speed. So the speed limit here is only 55 miles an hour, but you could go even faster and it would charge the battery. What that allows us to do then It means that now there's no range anxiety. You don't have to worry about where you recharge. The road's doing it for you as you drive. Secondly, you know, you can have a smaller battery pack in your car. That's going to reduce the weight of electric vehicles. It's also going to reduce the cost of electric vehicles. So you can see how it takes 2 of those high hurdles for electrical vehicle— electric vehicle adoption, kind of takes them out of play. This is a one-of-a-kind in the world that we're doing here because it's Basically designed to be able to charge fully loaded semi tractor-trailers as they travel down the road at 65 miles an hour, and that has never been done. So it's first of its kind. The way the system works is, is that the coil in the road creates a magnetic field, and that as an electric vehicle with a receiver drives over that, as it crosses into that magnetic field, it's able to take an electrical charge from that field. So it works Similar to the way you charge your cell phone at home when you lay it on that cell phone charger. That cell phone charger sets up a magnetic field. You have a receiver in the back of your phone. When you put it on it, it's able to translate that magnetic field back into electricity and charge your battery. This works in basically that, that same manner. So currently we're due to have the project finished next spring. So around May of next year, we'll actually get Purdue will actually take the project back from the contractor, and when that happens, we'll start doing testing. So Cummins, which is in Columbus, headquartered in Columbus, Indiana, they actually have a couple of electric semi-tractors that they've built. They're actually outfitting one of those to bring up here so that we can test the system using that semi-tractor. So that's what'll be next. We'll do the testing with the truck. We also have a trailer that has a receiver on it that we'll be able to pull over with a pickup and do What we would like to be able to do now is to test the system and try and begin to optimize it. You know, what can we do to, you know, to change it so that it becomes more efficient? We can make it so that it's less expensive and things like that. Driving that towards the future, I think within the next, you know, 3 to 5 to 7 years, hopefully NDOT's going to want to try and take this system and actually put it in an interstate. For an actual trial in the real world.

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Yep. Good one. All right. So, all

right. What do you have?

So I think we're all familiar with the tragedy of Parkinson's disease. Effect of, you know, affected most of us directly or indirectly.

My grandmother suffered from it. Saw it firsthand.

Yeah. My dad had had it. So it's something that definitely hits home. And one of the— a lot of promising areas that we're working on in that space. There's even some areas of some clinical trials related to GLP-1 drugs. But one of the things they do now is they do deep brain stimulation.

Yep.

DBS.

Yep.

And the exciting new breakthrough is some work being done to use AI. And so, it's really be calling adaptive or AI deep brain stimulation, ADBS, where basically the AI system is reading signals dynamically, changing it, and it's much more adaptive. Yeah. So, not only how effective it is, how it evolves, reducing the number of times you have to go back in and get the thing reset or retuned or adjusted in this progressive disease. Absolutely. Again, just a classic case of you— I think of something that's happening now and in the very short term that that's going to be the standard of care for these, for this kind of approach. I also think it touches on this bigger theme that we're talking about a lot, which is we're seeing incredible geometric growth in AI systems, machine learning systems, the power in your hand and in computer systems. And then we have the human brain, which is very old and biological and brilliant and creative and all these wonderful things. But the gap between it right now is— I'm with you. Here's my phone, here's my brain. I'm typing into it. I may be talking into it. But we're starting to see more and more work being done to break down that interface. Yeah. And I think we're seeing that with virtual reality, augmented reality goggles. I think we're seeing that from people working on implants into the brain. We have portfolio companies in that space. that this is an area that is going to be a bottleneck, I think, which is how do we get this stuff even more tightly integrated with the human brain and the silicon brains and knowledge capacity out there?

No, that one's super cool. I mean, it's always been positioned as neuroscience is the next big frontier for us. And, you know, if you draw parallels to exploring the frontiers, right?

Mm-hmm.

Deep space, deep ocean. It's the ability to have, you know, transparent and, you know, fluid flow of data coming back to you or communication. I think what you're highlighting is that exact example here, right? The circuitry of the brain, relatively unknown. We've done an okay job, right? But now if you meld a bit of that brain with AI circuitry and really understanding how it's evolving together, You know, I think that frontier becomes reality very quickly. And these aren't just edge cases that are nice to haves. I mean, these are truly transformational for humankind. I mean, it's super exciting to see that.

Yeah, and it goes to conversations I think a lot of us are having every day of how do we think about AI and how do we think about technology? As, you know, there's kind of, they're, oh, it's this other thing over here. And it's going to act independently of me.

Yeah.

And I really try to encourage people to think of it as a tool, an augmentation, a way to make yourself better and more productive and do more cool things. And again, if you take a step back and you think about it, which is people today, are AI augmented. They are computer augmented. It is just a laptop or a desktop or a smartphone in their hand, but really in your hand you have the world's information.

Yeah.

Right? And so that's a huge augmentation to the human experience that has taken place in the last 20 years. And I think we should need to continue to think, even as these AI systems become geometrically more powerful,

Yeah.

And are able to do things. I still think we all want to think of them as tools for us that hopefully become more integrated with us as humans, but are helping us achieve what we want to achieve in ways that are beautiful and powerful. And yeah, and again, yesterday or the day before, we had another announcement of product coming out of Apple Computer. They had their September product release with their new cool stuff, right? And I think one of the takeaways was the number of times AI was mentioned in the 90 minutes. And number 2 was the amount of energy they went in talking about silicon.

Yeah.

And that these chips are in your phone, in your hand, they're GPUs, they're, you know, the technology is just incredible. Yeah. That's in the palm of your hand or in your AirPods or in your watch. It's really about the custom silicon that's in those devices that are just right You know, in your ear, on your wrist, in your hand, they have the goggles, you know, the next logical— that's about as close to the brain as you can get. You're really close.

Yeah.

You know, kind of thing. But there's, you know, there's a very special barrier between the two right now, but they are right up to the edge on all these different fronts.

Yeah.

Oh

no, very fascinating. Ready?

Cool.

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Now, in August of this year, the New York Times published an article called A Personalized Brain Pacemaker for Parkinson's, written by Pam Bullock. And it's about this man who runs a sort of skateboarding club out of San Francisco. His name is Sean Connolly. And how he, you know, doesn't let the Parkinson's disease deter him from his life's mission, right? And kind of how this new development within DBS and sort of AI machine learning has helped him, you know, live his life a bit better and a bit easier. So there's a section of it that I want to read though. So deep brain stimulation has been used for years in Parkinson's. It's typically introduced when patients have achieved what benefit they can from medications containing levodopa, a drug that combats the deficit of the hormone dopamine that drives Parkinson's disease. Under conventional deep brain stimulation, patients receive a constant level of electrical pulses. While it helps most patients, many eventually reach a plateau, or because the therapy does not adjust to a patient's experience, the stimulation may be too much or too little. little and lead to drastic swings between periods of rigidity and unbridled motion. It's not like we've maximized, optimized, or finalized our abilities to treat Parkinson's patients, Dr. Sheth said. In recent years, neuroscientists have identified brain signals that correspond to phases of stiffness called bradykinesia and phases of uncontrolled movement called dyskinesia. In the new study, researchers use methods derived from AI to devise a personalized algorithm for each patient and a way to detect and respond to brain activity as the patient's systems have fluctuated. The brain changes in its needs moment to moment, hour to hour, week to week, said Dr. Philip Starr, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, and a senior author of the study who has worked on deep brain stimulation for decades. It's been a dream to make these stimulators self-regulating. Dr. Simon Little, an associate professor of neurology at UCSF who led the study along with Dr. Starr, said that electrodes implemented in patients' brains recorded signals from populations of neurons, not individual brain cells. When neurons start synchronizing together, when they start all firing at the same time, They're like a crowd at a sports game, Dr. Lodel said, adding that in Parkinson's and some other disorders, neurons become excessively synchronized with different patterns for different symptoms. Some synchronization is good, but if you get oversynchronized, if your whole network starts chanting at the same time, then that's an unhealthy state because the brain is not really doing much information processing. All right, back into the show.

All right, what's your last one, Mike?

Okay, um, sticking a little bit into the world of healthcare, uh, so I saw a really fascinating article that basically approached this question of like, what if a surgeon could operate on a patient from the other side of the world? And, you know, what's fascinating to me is this— the idea of remote surgery, I think, has been around for years, but, you know, recently in one of the like first successful instances of this, a surgeon was able to successfully complete a surgery over 9,000 kilometers away from someone, literally using robotic instruments controlled by like the equivalent of a PlayStation 5 controller.

Yep.

Which sounds incredible. And I think in my mind, I'm like, wow, have we really not been able to do that yet? But you think about the technology that's needed to do that at scale. I mean, It was blowing my mind how it was like, you know, advances in communication systems, ultra-low latency, you know, they're able to allow these surgeons to see real-time images, control the surgical tools without any delay. So really, it just demonstrates how moving forward this notion of telemedicine and a little bit of the AI view, right? Like telemedicine. Robotic surgery, AI, that's the future of healthcare, right? These are going to be combined to provide healthcare to patients in the most remote or underserved regions, or just like literally allow, you know, some of the world's best physicians to be accessible to anyone worldwide. So, you know.

Yeah. And surgery is so high stakes. Incredibly high stakes. And so requiring of, it's way up the skill specialization, high stakes quadrant, right? Right. So if you can do it there, in my mind, what a great ability for me to operate a crane remotely for a special job where I have special skills or special training. 1,000 miles away. So if we can do it there, again, this whole idea of, you know, these new technologies are going to replace jobs and everybody's going to sit around writing poetry all day.

Yeah.

Where, you know, I don't see that. I really don't. I think we are always, as humans, pushing the envelope. And if you can do surgery there, you can do it in space.

Yep.

And you can, and you can, if you can do surgery 9,000 kilometers away, you can do 900,000 kilometers just a day soon.

Yep.

And so again, I just think it's a tell on, you know, what's going on. And again, you know, these technologies kind of come together, the goggles, the AI robotics we talk about, you know, there's nanotechnology, Just over the horizon. But yeah, I think in the near term, the whole idea of telemedicine, I think we're starting to see it. I think we're starting to feel it. Definitely knocking out some of the earlier things. But, you know, and it's also not out of— there's been a lot of surgeries. Intuitive Surgical, we've talked about, has been a company around. Yeah. There's other companies that are in this space right now, but I think it's It's one thing to do robotic-aided surgery locally. It's another thing to kind of set up pods to be where people are.

So— Okay, I'm going to butt in here really quick. I found a really awesome video from the BBC called The Technology Turning Surgery Virtual. Now, this isn't as you know, insanely innovative as, you know, a surgeon operating on someone across the world using robotics. But this technology developed by Dr. Nadine Hashash Haram pretty much allows any doctor to scrub into any surgery across the world. Now, it's again, not as technologically advanced as As the robotics surgery. But if this sort of type of operating system is developed and spread across the rest of the world, it gives it a better baseline for these other innovations with robotic surgery and AI surgery and AR surgery and all that crazy stuff to take place. So So now this current system is being developed, you know, in hundreds of hospitals around the world. And the BBC did a really good video on it. So I'm going to share that now. And then we are going to finish off with the rest of the interview. I thought it was really cool. And I'm super excited to explain it. But the little intro description for this video says this. As a child in war-torn Lebanon, Dr. Nadine Hashash Haram witnessed firsthand the devastating effect that inequality in surgical care could have. Today, 5 billion people across the globe still lack access to safe surgery. More people die from this than from HIV, malaria, and TB combined. In response, she's created a technology that allows surgeons to virtually scrub into any operating theater around the world just by using a tablet or computer.

I think what's continuing to be clear is that we have such a fundamental challenge in surgery. Globally today, 5 billion people lack access to safe surgery. That's 2/3 of the world's population. And of that 5 billion, about 18.6 million people die every year from that lack of access. That's more than HIV, malaria, and TB combined. And so we need to do something about that, and the current models of surgical care will never enable us to bridge that gap in the way that we need to. My name is Dr. Nadine Hashash-Haram. I created a technology that enables clinicians and clinical teams all around the world to virtually scrub into any operating room or cath lab simply by using a phone, a tablet, or a computer. So my family and our heritage is Lebanon. During the war, my parents emigrated to the United States and we were born in California. And at the age of about, you know, 8 or 9, they felt it was really important for us to go back and connect with our family, our roots, and kind of, you know, learn more about our culture. And so you can imagine leaving sunny California and landing in sort of war-torn Beirut, just coming out and emerging from the civil war. Of course, as a young teenager, I'd seen quite a lot that many people perhaps my age hadn't seen. But as a surgeon, those inequities continued to grate on me, those inequities that I'd seen as a child growing up, and it became clear to me that these inequities in surgical care were everywhere. So as a clinician, it was really important for me that whatever solution we design or build really democratizes surgery as well, that it is not specific to a location or a piece of hardware that you can afford or a type of bandwidth that you have. This software could be used in the most rural of environments, in a camp hospital in the middle of the field, in the middle of nowhere, to the most sophisticated team Hi, Katie, how are you? Can you hear me?

Yeah, good. So what you can see in Andy's hand here is that's the small bowel.

Yep, I can see that.

So that's just being packed away.

Yep. So what you can see here is you've got a full view of the operating room, and that's the beauty of having multiple views. So imagine I'm sitting here I can see all the views, I can control the cameras, I can zoom in and zoom out on what matters, I can expand a view specifically to the view that I'm interested in, and I can have a fully immersive discussion with the clinical team. At the same time, on the left-hand side here, you have a number of annotation tools from simple pen telestration to a 3D hand to even the augmented reality hand where this camera is capturing my hand movements in real time and overlaying them into the surgical And so in the operating room, they're able to see my hands as I interact with them. So we've now zoomed into one of the views, the key view that Katie's now operating on. It's a, it's a difficult part of the operation, but I can now immerse myself in that case with her. So I can actually overlay my hand, which you can see on the screen, and I can gesture different movements, annotations, and she'll be able to see that on the screen where she is as well.

Particularly for endoscopic surgery, which is natural orifice surgery, you know, there are no cuts in the abdomen, there's no sort of overview. So that sort of 3 views and the ability to interact and annotate has been fantastic. You can actually just take your pen and draw on the screen, you know, and draw on it and say, well, okay, this is where you need to cut, this is what you need to do, this is what I'd recommend. So we've been using it, you know, regularly in our practice and we continue to do so.

In 2019, I'd anticipated it would take about 3 to 5 years to really accelerate the adoption of and growth of these solutions. But as COVID came, that change happened almost overnight. You can imagine healthcare workers who are self-isolating, who are unwell. Our workforce started to become depleted, and during COVID we have a multitude of examples where this technology was the only solution available to enable us to deliver care to patients in some circumstances.

I think the future is really exciting, you know, with all these technologies coming together, we can actually collaborate You know, not only as a local region but as a country and across the world.

Whenever I think about the impact of technology, I'm not as interested in the technology stack as I am in the impact that it has to every single patient and the lives that we touch. This was a patient in her late 50s who unfortunately had suffered from multiple operations. She hadn't fared very well with that, ended up in intensive care for many months, and so we were able to connect We were able to connect a global expert who does a lot of these cases through the technology dialing into this operating room, and 4 days later she was home. That summer she was at the beach in a swimsuit, and it has completely transformed her life to a person who no longer wanted to live to now being able to live their best life. And that patient is my mother.

Yeah, it's, you know, We're in such an awesome position, and I would say privileged position at AV.

Privileged, yeah.

You know, we have, we have these very expansive portfolios where, you know, our team members are getting in the best robotics deals and at the same time the best healthcare deals. This to me is the very easy way to describe it to any individual where it's like this breakthrough probably is more of a push in terms of like where our communication systems have gone.

Yeah.

Right. So you start to think about some of these things we've invested in over the years and you're like, oh, I didn't realize for ABC communication systems or, you know, different types of building ultra-low latency, you know, the ability for satellites to communicate with one another. Maybe you thought early days, very defense-related, other industry. Now all of a sudden you're like, oh no, it's, you know, robotic surgery miles away.

Yeah.

Like it's just so cool to see all of these technologies coming together. Yeah. Which I think we'll only be able to see more of that. And that underpinning tends to be the power of compute. The power of AI is really bringing these different industries together.

Yeah. And again, you know, we talk a lot about space as a, you know, super exciting area. Where I think a lot of— there's arbitrage between kind of people thinking of it as kind of wacky space tourism stuff versus kind of near-term making real money. But there's an example of like communication still has room to go, right? Oh yeah. I mean, we should be able to do anywhere on Earth high-bandwidth communication, and we're not there yet. It's getting better. I mean, you can be out pretty remote on You can get satellite coverage coming way, way down. So, I think it's happening. I think it's going to just become like oxygen. And yeah, I mean, it'll be one thing getting a text message in an airplane, it's another thing doing high-stakes surgery. But again, trends are all in the right direction, very exciting and empowering for people. Oh, yeah. It's liberating. It encourages freedom. There's political things that are super positive about, you know, kind of worldwide communication access.

Yep.

Driving down costs for everybody.

Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. Next week, see you again. All right. See you.

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