Aadeel Akhtar of PSYONIC: Affordable and Accessible Prosthesis

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here.

On the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies.

Of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview, and on Fridays, we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom, and I am thrilled to have on the CEO and founder of Psionic, Adil Akhtar. Hey, Dil, thanks for being on the pod.

Hey, thanks for having me, Neil.

It is a real pleasure. I saw you from afar talking broadly about why San Diego should be the Bionics headquarters of the world, which obviously I sat right up and said yes. And then we've gotten to meet on a few founder hikes as well, too, so it's really great to have you on the podcast as well. You want to give us a quick overview of what Psyonic is?

Yeah. So we develop advanced bionic limbs that are affordable and accessible for everyone. And this is something I've wanted to do ever Since I was a kid. So it's. I'm really grateful that I have the opportunity to do that. Wow.

Really incredible. We're obviously going to have to tease out that entire story in that. But you're recent to San Diego, right? How long ago did you move to?

Yeah, so I think we moved August 1st. So it's been. Been about like six months now. Ish. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Awesome. August 2022. Okay, cool.

Yeah, yeah. So very recent.

Very recent. Well, we're stoked to have you here. Want to hear a little bit about the ecosystem you see and play in already, but take us back. Like, where are you from originally and how'd you. Even as a kid you said wanted to build bionic limbs.

Yeah. So I was born in the Chicago suburbs and I've got two older brothers who were also born in the Chicago suburbs. And my parents had immigrated here from Pakistan and that was, I think, like the 70s and that they had moved over here. And we would often take trips back to Pakistan to visit the rest of the family. And the earliest one I can remember was when I was 7 years old that we had gone on a trip to Pakistan. And that was actually the first time I met someone with a limb difference. And she was my age, she was missing her right leg using a broken tree branch of the crotch. And that's what inspired me to want to go into this field. And so, yeah, that was just a moment that had kind of stuck with me since then.

Yeah, I can imagine. That's like a very hit home moment, for sure. I'm curious, like, how early that was. And how do you even conceptualize that you will create a company one day? Because there's a lot of steps in between, including education and other things. Like, how did you first even start to think, like, I'm going to solve this person's problem?

Problem? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the funny thing is, is that the original intention was never to build a company, and that was actually never part of the plan. And the original plan was that I was going to become a medical doctor. Right. And so I went to Loyola University Chicago for undergrad and I wanted to. I think the. The very original plan was to become like a. A neurosurgeon who was going to work with people with amputations and then like connect to their nerves and things like that and build devices. Right. And it was my sophomore year of undergrad that I took my first computer science class at Loyola, and I absolutely loved it. I loved everything about coding and programming and engineering and I realized that if I became a straight up MD that I don't get to do any of the cool stuff that I learned in my engineering and computer science classes. And I wanted to figure out how we could combine those two things together. And it was right down the street at a hospital that was formerly known as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. It's now known as the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. It's the number one rehabilitation hospital in America for the last 32 years. And they had made these huge breakthroughs in mind controlled bionic limbs where they invented a surgery where you could reroute nerves to muscles that you still had to control. These like, you know, $100,000 bionic limbs that were developed by Dean Kamen and funded by darpa. And I was like, this is the perfect combination of engineering and clinical medicine. And that's kind of what I wanted to shift gears towards, was towards this bionic engineering and starting to make that accessible to everyone as opposed to just, you know, the military or all the very few who could afford it. And so I ended up getting a bachelor's in biology and then a master's in computer science from Loyola. And I taught in their computer science department for a couple years. And then 2010, I headed down to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, got another master's in electrical and computer engineering there, PhD in neuroscience and. And then finished the first year of medical school after. But then I left to do psionic full time because this was much more fun.

I get that, man. Really cool to hear another person inspired by Dean Kamen because he is what pulled me up into engineering as well too. I applied all my colleges as a business major and First Robotics got me the last semester of high school and said, you should be a part of this. My physics teacher said, join First Robotics. And yeah, the rest is history. So it's super cool that Dean has touched so many of those lives. I didn't know he was on the limb side too. I knew about the wheelchair, the six, six wheel wheelchair, and maybe a catheter and maybe an insulin pump, but wow, the bionic side too. He's done some heavy limb work there.

Yeah, yeah. And so they developed an arm called the Luke arm as part of a DARPA funded revolutionizing prosthetics program and then subsequently the DARPA haptics program. And so it was amazing to see because it just had, you know, a lot of the movements that a natural limb does as well. And especially with the technology that was available at the time, it was pretty cool to see all the functions that I could do, there are many issues, but one of the big ones was just the cost of development that was just really, really high. And so that was something that wouldn't be able to be easily deployed, I guess, for the masses in the US and abroad.

Got it. Okay, can we set the stage or at least define a few terms here for some people? Because I think in the prosthetic limb world, you've got kind of your analog limb or prosthesis and your robotic or your bionics. Can you tell us a little about the difference? And you know, they're semi competitive, I guess, to each other and why someone would choose one versus another.

Yeah, yeah. And so in the prosthetics world, I mean, the way we define it is the one that you were referring to as analog is usually like a body powered or a mechanical device in particular. Right. And so those can be like your steel hooks, for example. Right. You have a steel hook and then it has a bicycle cable that's connected from the hook to your shoulders. And then usually you like squeeze your shoulders together and the hook will open because it pulls on the cable. Then you relax your shoulders and then the hook closes. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have here what we call bionic devices. And these are electronic devices that are using biological signals that are coming from the body to drive the device. And so for example, our ability hand, we have muscle sensors that are that go on the surface of the skin of the user and can detect when they're trying to make different movements with their residual limb. And then we can translate that into commands that the hand can do. And so it can make different grips based on the muscle signals that it's receiving.

Got it. Okay. And take us through kind of the develop maybe what's the development of both them? I'm guessing the mechanical prosthesis has been around much longer, yet people still opt for that at times. You definitely see a lot, especially on the leg, I would imagine. I feel like I see a lot of people go with like the spring style leg prosthesis versus why would. Or how would someone go towards like a robotic prosthesis?

Yeah. And so hooks have been around since basically the Civil War era of the US and their design hasn't really changed much since then as well. There have been obviously some design changes on that, but the design basic principle has always been the same with the shoulder harness and the cable that you use to open and close a device. And they're super robust and they're super low Cost. And those are like two of the biggest things going for it in particular. And you also have a sense of knowing how open and closed the hook is based on where your shoulder is located. So that's something that also a lot of hook users like in particular. And with the bionic side of things, I mean, one of the biggest issues with the more complexity you add to a device is that the more fragile, the more easy it is for it to break. Right. And so the cost goes up and as well as the fragility of it. But it allows you to do more functions potentially. Right. So you can move individual fingers, you can do like pinching, you can do like a key grip, you can hold a credit card. You can like, you know, hold like most things more naturally as you would with a natural limb than you would necessarily with a hook. And so those are kind of like the opposites of ends of the spectrum for these devices. But one of the hugest, one of the biggest barriers for patients has just been the exorbitant cost of these devices to use on a daily basis.

Really interesting. So where was. I mean, how have you watched the industry grow as you've progressed towards deciding you wanted to build a company in this? Because I've got a mat. Like you said you didn't want to start a company. At one point, you must have said, I got to do this. So is the industry just not there enough N. Too nascent in the beginning. And you said, this is. This has got to be something I got to do. Or tell us a little bit about that founding spark to it.

Yeah. So I was in the MD PhD program at the University of Illinois. Right. And we established a research collaboration with the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. But the thing is, you know, there's still like two and a half hours north of Champagne where we were at. And they had like all the super expensive, like the. The theme came in Luke Arm and like all these amazing bionic limbs there. But the thing is, is that, you know, we only get like a limited time to work with these devices. And then, you know, if they broke, then it'd be like a really big problem. And they did break fairly often. And so we were like, you know, we're engineers at the University of Illinois. It's one of the best engineering schools in the world. Why don't we start building our own prosthetic hands? And so we did. So we started with some open source designs that were available online and we worked on modifying those and then we started building our own open source designs and Then we just kept iterating on those and started working with patients. And we refer internally to these different design iterations as Mark. So we're on mark two of the ability hand back in 20. Well, mark one back in 2014. And that was around the time that we had met a man named David Krupa. He was the CEO or he is the CEO and co founder of a nonprofit organization called the Range of Motion Project. And he's also an alum from the University of Illinois. And he was coming back to campus to win an award from the international Studies program there. And he was giving talks on his nonprofit organization, the Range of Motion Project, whose mission is to provide prosthetic and rehabilitative care to those who can't afford them in the U.S. guatemala and Ecuador. And so he's giving a talk on this. And I was like, this is exactly what I experienced in Pakistan, right? They are helping the people who can't afford these devices in developing nations. And that's exactly what I wanted to do. And so I talked with them and he was able to arrange for me and another graduate student to go down to Quito, Ecuador and try out our hand on a patient there. And we were like, oh my goodness, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, right? And the problem was was that at the time, the open source hand we were working with was like a full forearm. And if you still have your forearm, you can't physically place motors and electronics there. So we had to go to a new design that moved all of that into the hand itself. And so we had gotten it to the point where we got all the electronics in the hand, but the hand wasn't working. But we'd go down to Ecuador for two weeks and we'd figure it out there when, when we, we got over there. And this is basically the beginning of two weeks of all nighters and trying to get this hand to work. We didn't really get it to work until basically the last minute the day that the patient showed up. And he came back from like a week's vacation in Brazil and in front of international news stations. Like we basically had one chance to get this right in front of international news stations. And we were actually able to get our patient Juan so Geo to make a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years. And he literally says in front of these international news stations that he felt as though a part of him had come back. And that's when we realized that if I go this traditional route, if I stay in academia, If I become an an MD and have an academic lab in an academic hospital, that this just ends up as a university project or a journal paper, and that's the end of it. If we want everyone to feel the exact same way Juan just did, we have to commercialize the technology. And that's when Psionic was born. And so then we entered our school of Business plan competition. We won that the Illinois Innovation Prize. The next year later, we won several grants from the National Science foundation, raised a pre seed round, and then as Of September of 2021, the ability hand has been available nationwide. It's covered by Medicare, it's FDA registered, and we have over 80 patients using it already and 20 researchers across the globe, including NASA and Meta. And it's been like a whirlwind experience ever since.

That's incredible.

Wow.

And so empowering to see it live and working and then say, let's go change the world on this. Because you're right. It could have sat in academia and you could have let someone else commercialize it. But you said you got to do that, which is pretty entrepreneurial thing to say. Like, you get addicted to solving people's problems, not just one time, but a billion times, is the hope. So how's it been since taking the leap, taking the plunge? Was it everything you hoped and dreamed? Or what's entrepreneurial life like coming out of a PhD program or pausing a PhD program?

Yeah, so it's definitely been a roller coaster, right. I mean, I feel like that's like the entrepreneurial journey in general. Right. The lows are low, but the highs are really high. And so, you know, when we first started, we were 3D printing all of these devices entirely. Right. And we thought that that was like the way to go, like completely 3D printing these devices because we can make them at super low cost and like, really deploy them very easily everywhere. And that's when we started doing like, you know, the customer discovery process, where we would actually talk to potential end users of our hand as well as the clinicians who fit them on the patients. And we asked them what their pain points are. And to our surprise, their pain point wasn't. Their number one pain point wasn't the price of these devices. The number one pain point was that their $50,000 really expensive bionic limb was breaking within months of using them. And it wasn't because they did anything crazy with it. It's that they accidentally, like, hit their hand against the side of a table. And because of that, because they were made out of rigid Components, they would just snap at those joints. But our own fingers, Right. If you hit it against like a natural hand, if you hit the fingers against an object, it flexes out of the way. It has compliance, it has this flexibility that gives it robustness. And so we had to start thinking outside the box of how can we still leverage low cost manufacturing like 3D printing, but also make this hand more robust than anything else that's out there as well. And so we ended up coming across soft robotics, the field of soft robotics and particular. And what you do with soft robotics is instead of building rigid components for like your robotic devices, you use soft materials instead that are more akin to human biology. For example, and we're talking about like silicone and rubber. And instead of 3D printing the actual fingers, what we would do is we 3D print a flexible bone and then put that in a 3D printed mold and then use a silicone, like a two part silicone, inject it into that mold, and then four hours later we get this flexible finger that had very natural human like properties in terms of like compliance and flexibility and robustness. And I basically took that finger and I could just like smash it against the side of a table and it would just survive. And I was like, this is the direction that we need to head in. And that was one way that we had pivoted in particular that, you know, we thought we needed to build these 3D printed hands, but we really needed to build something that was really durable and robust that would last users a long time. And then also focusing on low cost manufacturing so we can hit that Medicare price point.

Makes sense. Really interesting. I mean, you hit it on the head around the roller coaster piece. Like you could have two ups, two downs in a day, literally. Right. And you got to keep trucking. But you also, situationally where you're at also affects this as well too. And at some point you decide to make the move to San Diego. I'm curious, I mean, it's a little tainted now that you're here, but what did you perceive about San Diego that was different than what you, like you were missing from where you were at?

Yeah. And so we were on the fence in particular when comparing Chicago to San Diego. So. So we were either going to move to Chicago or we're either going to move to San Diego in particular. And we had already pretty big established networks in Chicago and our families were there. And so there was a lot of draw to go over there in particular. And so like I mentioned, the Shirley Runability Lab was there, you know, University of Chicago, Northwestern are there. And they're all really big players in the prosthetic space as well. And so coming to San Diego, there were, there are several things that tipped that in its favor. And one of them was the big military presence here. Right. And so we're working with the Navy's orthopedic surgeons on a lot of the more, you know, the futuristic stuff, the, the stuff that's going to take this, these devices to the next level. And that includes things like bone implants and nerve implants. And so with bone implants, for example, the way that these devices are typically attached to your body is that you'll have a socket, it's kind of like a cast that's made of your residual limb. And then you'll put your arm into this cast. Basically you'll take it on and off at night. And it's got all the electronics embedded in it. It's almost like a shoe for your arm. Right. But you can imagine that a shoe for your arm would also get very uncomfortable over time. Right. You'll start to sweat in it. You know, things will shift around. And with these bone implants, what we're working on is it's basically a titanium piece that gets implanted into your bones and then comes out of your body. And then your hand will be attached directly to your bones. And that's the natural way that hands are supposed to be attached are to your bones. And so it makes the device feel way lighter. It makes it so that, you know, you're not like, like sweating into the socket. You're not like sweating onto the, the sensors that are trying to pick up your muscle signals and messing with those. And then with the nerve implants, what we're doing is instead of having these muscle sensors that are on your skin and you can only do like pre programmed grips, we're working with our collaborators to do individual finger movements so that you can actually eventually play piano or type on a keyboard again. And also when you. Our hand is the first one to give users touch feedback. So we have touch sensors in the fingertips, so when you touch them, you can actually stimulate your nerves to make it feel like it's coming from your hand that you no longer have anymore. And we wanted to build our hand or we built our hand in a way so that it's compatible with clinically available control systems and feedback systems now. So for example, these muscle sensors that go on your skin and these vibration motors that's similar to your phone that vibrate when you Touch the fingers. But also in three to five years when these amazing new technologies come out that directly connect us to your bones and your nerve. So the military presence or the military hospital was a big one. UCSD is a phenomenal engineering school and there's a huge biotech presence here in, in San Diego as well. And so we figured that there's already a good ecosystem to help a young company like start to grow pretty massively. Right. There's two prosthetic schools here and there's only like 11 in the entire nation. And they're in the, the outskirts of la, so they're like an hour and a half away. The Challenge Athletes foundation is located 10 minutes away from here. We've got a five year goal of making an ability leg that you can do a triathlon in. And, and you know, San Diego is a birthplace of the triathlon and the Challenge Athletes foundation holds the paratriathlon every year. There's like, you know, a Paralympic training facility nearby as well. And so there's all of these different pieces and what was missing was kind of the device component, right? There is no one necessarily building prosthetics here in San Diego and there are prosthetics companies in Chicago. But one of the advantages I saw to coming to San Diego was that it's like an open playground, like where we can just like do we think outside of the box with this stuff? Right. And if you've seen some of our videos, you know, I've arm wrestled against the hand, we've punched through like flaming boards, like blocks of ice. I climbed the roof of my house and I dropped the hand 30ft in the air. We threw in a dryer. Like it survived all of those conditions and coming to San Diego by bringing all those newer pieces together. Right? So the military hospital, ucsd, the Challenged Athletes foundation, we could take this outside of the box thinking and apply it to all these crazy new situations with bone implants and triathlons and like with para athletes and all of that. So it really felt like we would have an unlimited potential moving here to San Diego. And that's why I, I truly believe that we will turn it into the bionics capital of the world.

I love that.

Wow.

Like so much stacked upon that, that, that makes sense. I think San Diego, kind of what you've alluded to is really good at blurring of the lines of a few leading industries from our biotech world and our Iot, if you'll call it that, or whatever you want to call the physical tech piece that qualcomm and a few others have given legs to. Right. And these blurring here of putting sensors in the body, you know, which Fitbit has a team here doing. Right. But also from even an academic standpoint, the 2021 Nobel Prize delivered to Artem Padaputian was literally on the discovery of receptors for temperature and touch at Scripps Institute. Like, how fundamental of that, by the way? We're just discovering that, or at least awarding the discovery of that if we're just discovering that in human bodies, like you guys are leg up on, on doing that in robotics as well too. And why not have the fundamental science here connecting as well? So I'm with you. Like, let's go make this the robotics bionics capital of the world for sure. And with you guys leading the way, you mentioned some of the really fun things you've done, and your videos are amazing. We'll make sure we link them to it. Like a very public consumer kind of brand to, you know, a seemingly medical device that could be very sterile and, you know, not talked about. And tell us about that. Like, why does the brand need to be so consumer in the face? And why are you going kind of directly to the public about it like that?

Yeah. And so traditionally in, in this field and like all medical devices, or at least most of them, they're usually marketed in a similar way where you have sales reps go to the clinics directly and then they'll push it that way. Right. And so we'd seen a couple like, you know, competitor hand videos go viral in the past. And they would usually show their, their patients doing certain things like, you know, grabbing a glass of orange juice and drinking from it and things like that. And so we saw those. And the thing is, the general public would typically like those videos, but usually every user or clinician would see a video like that and they'd see right through it. Because the thing is, is that most people know that, you know, if you're going to drink from a glass of orange juice and you were, you're only missing one hand, you'd still probably use your other hand to drink from that, that glass of orange juice. Right. And, and it's not really highlighting the capabilities that the hands are really affording the users to do. And so I got to thinking, I was like, how can we leverage the cool factor of a bionic limb, but also show something that is of value to patients and clinicians at the same time? And what we knew from doing our customer discovery process were the things that the patients and clinicians actually valued one was robustness and durability of these devices. And so then it was like, okay, so how can we showcase, you know, things that our hand can do that no other hand can do that? A patient and clinician, if they see this video, they're not going to be like, oh, yeah, this is just like, you know, the term that's used is usually inspiration porn. Right. Like, the general public really likes it, but at the expense of, you know, things that people who use these devices would never actually really do in the first place. Right. And so that's when we came up with, like, you know, let's do. Let's show, like, arm wrestling. Can we design the hand to make sure that it can withstand the forces of an arm wrestling match? And so one of our users is the para triathlete national champion. And I was like, I challenged him to an arm wrestling match. And we go into the physics behind it and how we are actually able to design our hand to withstand those forces. And then we did, like, bottle flip tricks. And if you remember that trend from like a couple of years back, we have a partially filled bottle of water. You try to flip it and make it land right side up. And you can imagine it's a lot harder to do with a bionic hand. But one of our users, she got the hand when she was 17, and she came over to our lab and she was like, nailing these shots all over the place. And. And it was because of the way we had designed it with our flexible fingers and the touch feedback that she was able to have that kind of dexterity to make those. Make those bottle flips actually happen. And then our first user in the U.S. sergeant Garrett Anderson, lost his hand in Iraq in 2005 due to roadside bomb. We had him punch through, like, three wooden boards that we set on fire. Six ice blocks. Harkening back to Karate Kid 2. If you've ever seen that scene where Daniel LaRusso breaks through the six ice blocks. I climbed up to the roof of my house, dropped the hand 30ft up in the air, and put it in the dryer for 10 minutes. And it survived all those things. And those are things that, a, the general public sees it. It's just like, whoa, you can do that with the bionic hand. But B, the patients and the clinicians also see that. And they're like, I didn't know bionic hands could actually do this because I've seen them breaking all the time. And 50% of our sales actually come through our social Media, which for a medical device company is just unheard of. And so. And it's just fun, right? We love making videos like this, like, even on the robotic side of things. For Halloween, we had the hand walk on its own, Addams Family style, and then we had an army of them. And I was like, you know, like, webbed up and covered in like spiderwebs and everything. And we just had a bunch of them crawling next to me. Right. We also put the hands on the Boston Dynamics Spot Dog. And I had a lightsaber duel against the Spot Robotic Dog. And it's just all these cool, different fun use cases that, that we have that it's just really enjoyable and makes this a fun place to work as well. And just gets our community involved as well. And makes it fun for them as well.

Totally. Which naturally makes the opportunity for the community to engage in another level by investing. Totally makes sense. Right. And so going to a public crowdfund, which you also probably wouldn't see a lot in a medical device, you know, totally makes sense with your brand. So tell us about how that experience has been, because that's a. Putting yourself out there publicly about, you know, be a part of the highs and the lows. Just like you.

Right, exactly. And that was, that was one of the major reasons why we did it was because we were just so public, public facing with all of our devices and with all of our, you know, marketing and everything. And, you know, we were. Our accessibility in particular is, is rooted in the company. Right. Like it's, it's within our blood to make these devices accessible to everyone. Right. So not only just that, you know, the, the 1% of patients can afford it, but as many as possible. So in designing the hand in particular, we wanted to make sure that we could get it covered under Medicare, which expanded access from 10% of patients who could typically afford a Bionican, which was, if you were in the military, if you had a workplace accident to. Now, 75% of patients in the US can afford Bionican that has features that no other bionic hand has ever had before. Like, it's the fastest in the world. It's got the. It's the only one that has touch feedback in it as well. Right. It's super robust to impact, it's water resistant and all these other amazing features. So accessibility is in our blood. Right. We wanted to make sure that the hand was accessible to as many people as possible. But on that note, we were like, why don't we make the company as well accessible to Everyone, right? If we believe in accessibility. And the most beautiful thing to come out of this is that our actual patients have invested in the company as well. And it's like we're building these devices for them and then they get to be a part of that entire process. And that has just been incredible that they can be involved with that. And I'm incredibly grateful for such an opportunity that they can be involved as well.

Congratulations on getting it live and having a great response so far. You're obviously supporting it super well with your content too, which, you know, it is for some founders. It's a whole extra exercise that they have to do with you. Like you said, it's part of your brand and it's driving sales as well, too, which is exactly what is a great thing to be doing. Take us through. Like, where are you a year from now? Where is the company? Where's robotics and bionics, do you think, even going forward from here?

Yeah. And so our biggest issue right now is that we've got more demand than we can produce. So definitely a year from now, you're going to be seeing a lot more of these things. Right. So that's a lot more of these devices out there. And I think, you know, at some level, it's also kind of blurring the line between robotics and humans too. Right. So on, on the clinical side, you're going to see more seamless integration between these devices and the human body. Right. So nerve control, boat and direct boat integration as well. And then on the robotic side, you're going to be seeing more robots doing more dexterous manipulation tasks. Right. So, for example, Apptronic, they're a. A startup based out in Austin that's making humanoid robots. Like, they're trying to build the first consumer humanoid robot. And they bought a couple of our hands and they just released like a couple videos in the last week of their humanoid robot, you know, doing manufacturing tasks. And just like that, they're being teleoperated by some guy who's located somewhere else, and he's able to manipulate the hands and grab things off the table, put them in boxes and things like that. And I think we're going to see more of this kind of automation and robots in the workplace, as well as this more seamless integration between humans and machines in general.

I love that. I mean, obviously you're seeing the software catch up in a certain regard on the AI side, which hopefully will catch up on the device interface as well, too, because I feel like a lot of people are spending time, you know, doing ChatGPT, but let's use it for some realness here on how do we build some databases to get hands moving. Even more lifelike, Right?

Exactly.

So, yes, really excited for the software hardware conversions, all before, you know, judgment day happens. So as long as we can that can happen in another lifetime, then we're all good here, right?

Yes. We use our robots for good and.

That'S all we can control right now is how we use them until they start using us. But you're new to San Diego, but I know you're not new to a taco. Have you discovered our taco scene? Have you have some favorites already?

Yeah. So I recently went to City Tacos and I was, I was thoroughly impressed. Especially coming from the Midwest in central Illinois. There's no body water where you can get some good fish tacos. And the seafood scene here has been incredible. And so I really enjoyed the fish tacos out over at City Tacos in particular.

Love that City Tacos is a favorite on the show here, easily top five place. But what's amazing is like, how big their menu is. I'm on the hunt right now to try every single thing on the menu. It's gonna take a number of times, that's for sure, because I'm only eating two at a time right now. But my favorite has been, I think the Mexicali. That's got steak, onions and potatoes.

So.

But I'm excited to dive into some of the seafood ones as well too. Sounds like we need to get some City Tacos sometime. You're further south downtown area.

So we're in Scripps Ranch. Okay, cool.

Well, there's. Luckily there's a City taco, you know, in throwing distance to a lot of places.

That's right.

So it sounds like we need to. You, me and your robotic friend need to go grab some tacos. Have you. Can you have the robot eat hold the taco for you, Luli?

Yes, we absolutely can.

Leave the mess off of your hand. It's perfect. Adil, it's a pleasure to have you on. I hope we can see you on a hike again soon. And all the best. Congratulations on what you're building and keep going.

Thank you so much, Neil.

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