Poaching Data, Little Dragon: Uncovering China's Secret War for Athlete Brainwaves

Superstars like Jannik Sinner and Mikaela Shiffrin wear a headset to train their minds and get in the zone. But a six-month investigation by Hunterbrook Media, in collaboration with PTFO, uncovered the technology's secret funding by entities linked to the Chinese government — plus partnerships with robotics companies helping to train super-soldiers of the future. Hunterbrook's Sam Koppelman examines the potential impact on AI, mind control, state surveillance, cognitive warfare... and one very surprised Super Bowl champion. Read the full Hunterbrook investigation into BrainCo at https://hntrbrk.com/brainco/ or listen to the Hunterbrook podcast, The Hunt https://open.spotify.com/episode/6tTWM2Sy9w6qTf49bVwhMZ?si=Jw2h1ed6QK-44yAlMaJbfQ, wherever you get your podcasts. (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and Hunterbrook Media and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I believe in training the brain, but you gotta be careful who you do it with.

• 0:11Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:15Speaker 02

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• 0:43Speaker 03

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• 1:16Pablo Torre?

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• 1:58Pablo Torre?

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• 2:24Speaker 04

  I'm trying to figure out if I can, if you can make the thing light up on your head. There's some button that can make it light up. I don't know if I charged it. Oh, wait. The lighting will play. Oh, [bleep]. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom. Now we're talking.

• 2:38Pablo Torre?

  I do want to begin by acknowledging what people on YouTube are seeing, but listeners may not discern, which is that I am wearing a very weird electronic headband. Also, I'm sitting across from returning PTFL correspondent Sam Koppelman, the publisher of Hunter Brook Media, who was last seen helping us investigate billionaire Phoenix Suns owner and mortgage king Matt Ishbia.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  We tried to warn the Phoenix Suns fans.

• 3:04Pablo Torre?

  I feel like we did a pretty good job warning everybody of the dystopian future that was also to come for the Phoenix Suns in the NBA.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  100%. It was like, if you like how Matt Ishbia is running his mortgage company, you're gonna love how he's gonna run your favorite basketball team.

• 3:19Pablo Torre?

  I wish we could just spend another hour talking about mortgages and the Phoenix Suns, but there is another dystopian future I need to acknowledge. It's the one that was promised to us by comic books, by sci-fi movies, that we both, that all of us sort of inhaled growing up, because now, Sam, we got robots. We have humans just actively falling in love with artificial intelligence. And we also have a sporting event that happened just last month, in August, that was effectively ignored by my very serious colleagues in sports media here at America, despite the fact that it looked like this.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  This is not your average sports tournament.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  At what is billed as the first ever World Humanoid Robot Games, the athletes come in all shapes, sizes, and structure to compete in events ranging from running to kickboxing to soccer.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  For three days, human handlers from 16 countries are putting machines through the motions to show the potential of embodied AI as well as its limitations. It isn't about winning or losing, but it's a way to trial the robots in agility, endurance, and battery life.

• 4:35Pablo Torre?

  I mean, those robots were throwing punches and slowly kicking soccer balls like toddlers.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  100%. I mean, to be clear, the humanoid robot games looked kind of ridiculous. But what's important to understand is that what you saw broadcast in that tournament was just the early days, the Model T equivalent of these robots.

• 4:53Pablo Torre?

  I mean, I hope so because, for the record, the first ever World Humanoid Robot Games, which was allegedly not about winning or losing, as that kind culture warrior of a broadcaster.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, participation trophies for all of the humanoids.

• 5:07Pablo Torre?

  Or in slice, robot orange slices for all the robots. That whole event was dominated, actually, by one company, by this Chinese robotics company named Unitree, because all those robots that didn't look like they know ball got apparently blown out by the Michael Phelps of robots. They won 11 medals, they set multiple records, which apparently are a thing we're tracking now as well.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  And this gets to the part of the story that we spent six months investigating at Hunterbrook, which is that China is working on pairing this humanoid robotics technology with something called brain-computer interfaces.

• 5:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  BCI. And so, the Cold War had the nuclear arms race, the 60s had the race to the moon. Today, China and the US are locked in a battle over who can master the human brain itself.

• 5:57Pablo Torre?

  And I think that big headline does need a little more explanation. Because I get that it's robots and AI everywhere, but the brain, how do they want to master and win the brain?

• 6:07Speaker 04

  You've probably seen Elon Musk with the Neuralink, where it can help paraplegics walk. There's all sorts of good, positive use cases for this technology.

• 6:16Pablo Torre?

  Inspirational, like, I think of that story earlier this year, where they enabled a quadriplegic from Arizona to control a computer using his brainwaves, and he could play chess, he could browse the internet, he could play video games, he could tweet.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  I think it just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving. Um, basically, it was like, uh, using the force on a cursor. The thing is, China's prioritizing what it calls cognitive warfare, which is that this technology, as it develops, is gonna be able to do things like read your brain, see if you're responding positively or negatively to something you see in the world, catch you if you're lying or disloyal.

• 7:02Pablo Torre?

  They're gonna hack the human brain, is what you're saying?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  They're gonna hack the human brain. That's the idea.

• 7:08Pablo Torre?

  So, this whole technology, which, uh, you know, China has made a priority, the end game here, insofar as you can see it, just top line, would be what?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  The end game would be to be able to understand people's thoughts when they think them, without having to wait for those people to share those thoughts in public.

• 7:31Pablo Torre?

  Which feels useful to a government like China's or ours, frankly.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And then there's one other thing that the government seems excited about using brain control interface technology for. And it's pairing this technology with the humanoid robots.

• 7:47Pablo Torre?

  The ones we just saw.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Correct. To create what the Chinese Communist Party has called super soldiers.

• 7:54Pablo Torre?

  The super soldier, to me, I grew up, Sam, knowing that Captain America was the original super soldier, right? But when I think of the American side of the space race, I do think of Neuralink. I do think of Elon.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  In America, Neuralink's the name you've heard of, but they're not the only major player. Just like China, the US government is investing heavily in brain-computer interface technology. It's a technological and a military imperative. There's companies like Synchro that's partnered with Apple. And then just last month, in August, there was this Bloomberg story about how there's a big American BCI company that was founded at Harvard in 2015 and is now, quote, "aiming to compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink."

• 8:35Pablo Torre?

  And so this company, this American company, I wanna say that the name of it, it, it just feels optimized in the same way that Netflix has that show about NFL quarterbacks that they just called Quarterback?

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Correct, yes. Neuralink's American-born rival startup is named BrainCo.

• 8:54Pablo Torre?

  Which is perfect.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  According to Bloomberg, BrainCo is in talks to secure roughly $100 million in pre-IPO financing at a valuation of more than $1.3 billion, in part because of the weird electronic headband that you're wearing right now.

• 9:11Pablo Torre?

  This headband, which is called the Focus Calm, and is in fact available for the low, low price of $279.99 online, is studded, as you were alluding to, with these electrodes that have been reading my brainwaves while podcasting here through my skin, as a commercial helpfully explains.

• 9:33Speaker 07

  It's time to change your mind. Now there's a wearable that can help train your brain for a better focus and a calmer mind. Introducing Focus Calm. Focus Calm uses EEG technology to detect and analyze the activity in your brain, while proprietary algorithms translate those signals into your Focus Calm score. In the app, you'll practice raising your Focus Calm score and keeping it high while staying alert and focused. You'll see your progress week by week as your brain gets stronger, more consistently relaxed at work.

• 10:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I just feel very consistently relaxed right now with you in studio.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Okay, well, I'm sorry, because the next thing is probably going to ruin that moment of zen. The reason I reached out to you to collaborate on this investigation is that there's something that BrainCo doesn't want anyone in America to know. Because, yes, the story of BrainCo is that it was founded out of Harvard by a Harvard PhD slash professor who taught a course on brain-computer interface technology, and it even had the dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education as an advisor.

• 10:34Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  But according to documents that Hunter Brook Media has obtained, BrainCo itself has been funded for almost a decade by entities linked directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

• 10:48Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  And in recent years, BrainCo has largely shut down its US operation. Moved to China, where it's now going public at that $1.3 billion valuation. And it has quietly become one of the most important companies in the world to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.

• 11:05Pablo Torre?

  Which would seem to have an important bit of context, given everything that we just said at the top of the show.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Correct. An American company with years of research from Harvard and MIT scientists is now on China's team in the next space race.

• 11:20Pablo Torre?

  And as much as people listening might be thinking, what are these two assholes going on about? Why are they the only two people who care about this thing? On some level, I should point out here that in April of 2025, three prominent US senators happened to publish a letter with the goal of warning America about what they called "the rapid development and commercialization of brain-computer interface technologies." The senators wrote, quote, "The risks posed by the exploitation of sensitive neural data are not hypothetical. The Department of Commerce has determined that Chinese companies are using biotechnology to support military end uses, including, quote, 'purported brain control weaponry,' end quote."

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Brain control weaponry. Chill, casual stuff. Normal sports podcast material. And yes, according to the Chinese government's own website, quote, "The country seeks to achieve key technological breakthroughs in the industry by 2027."

• 12:18Pablo Torre?

  Which also brings us back around to, yes, those now increasingly terrifying humanoid athlete robots that were running around and punching stuff. But also a question that I think is worth asking, which is, what is the source of the neural data that everybody is warning about that the government of China is apparently quite interested in?

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Pablo, this might be the most insane part of the story. What we are reporting today, a portion of that neural data, has been secretly harvested from the unwitting brains of some of the greatest athletes in the world.

• 12:56Pablo Torre?

  Which is why, clearly, I decided to join you in investigating this story, and also why I think it's probably time for me to take this headband off.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Probably a good idea.

• 13:07Pablo Torre?

  Just a little bit safer if it's just on the table over there.

• 13:27Pablo Torre?

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• 14:00Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be great if life's little upgrades didn't feel like a splurge? Like getting the aisle seat with extra legroom for a one-hour flight? Ordering extra guac with zero hesitation? Or paying for assembly on that swing set because you'd rather spend your Saturday doing literally anything else? It's called living filthy comfortable. And whatever filthy comfortable looks like to you, Schwab can help you find it with investing, trading, education, and human help, all in one place. Learn more at schwab.com. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 15:06Pablo Torre?

  So Sam, I want to establish that this headband that I was just wearing, called the Focus Comm... is not just like a random thing. It is actually incredibly popular in the world of sports because it enables athletes to track their brainwaves for performance reasons. Right? You can see when you're calm, when you're stressed, you can get in the zone is what the whole advertising around this is. The thing about the power users of this quietly Chinese government-backed device that I think people need to know here is that these aren't just like any athletes. We're talking about Italy's famously focused Yannick Sinner, who trains with the Focus Comm.

• 15:48Pablo Torre?

  We're talking about the former number one women's tennis player in the world, Iga Swiatek, who is using it every day. The number one alpine skier of all time, American gold medalist Michaela Shiffrin, who uses it as also a bunch of English Premier League soccer players do.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  The Focus Comm website also says it's currently used by, quote, "over 20 NCAA teams, including the University of Kentucky, in addition to, quote, 'professional and Olympic organizations across every major sport.'" U.S. Weightlifting is a partner, USA Bobsled, Skelton is a partner.

• 16:22Pablo Torre?

  Yes, you can actually see some of these logos. The USA Weightlifting logo is on the box of the headband that I took off. And if anybody is wondering why, at this point, all these athletes believe in this connection between brain-computer interface technology and actual athletic results, I do think it's worth hearing from somebody whose Zoom background happens to provide an answer to that question.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  You see, I got an Lombardi Trophy. Not the real one, but looks just like it. I guess that's me right there in a Bucks uniform. Someone sent me that. I thought that was cool, an action figure. And I got some of the helmets from the teams I played for, the Giants, the Patriots, San Francisco 49ers, my last team, and all the tags are from Super Bowls I played in for my locker.

• 17:15Pablo Torre?

  So Sam, this is longtime NFL defensive back Logan Ryan, a guy who played 11 seasons in the NFL, won two Super Bowls, as you see those replica trophies indicate with the Patriots. But what's funny to me is that after Logan Ryan left the Pats, he wound up on the Tennessee Titans. And he is the answer to the question of, who's the guy who intercepted the last pass that Tom Brady would ever throw in a Patriots' uniform?

• 17:40Speaker 08

  We'll never see this run again, Jim. Brady's pass, it's intercepted and returned for a touchdown by Logan Ryan, the former Patriots.

• 17:51Pablo Torre?

  And after that, by the way, Logan Ryan became a Tampa Bay Buck, and yet another piece of memorabilia happened to enter his possession.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  I picked off Aaron Rodgers when I was on the Bucks, and that completed my run of picking off Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers. So I finished my quest of picking off all the GOATs of my era. So that's what the Buck season was for.

• 18:14Pablo Torre?

  He has like a wall in his home with like the heads of the greatest quarterbacks on it.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Yes, everybody he has slain. And I was just thinking that you interviewed Logan Ryan because it was another way to rub something into Bill Belichick.

• 18:26Pablo Torre?

  Yes, I'm surrounding the Belichick empire in all sorts of journalistic ways.

• 18:34Pablo Torre?

  But speaking of this question of like, okay, the invasiveness around these characters, I should point out that Logan Ryan says he did all this stuff because of this device that read his brain. And he trusted it so much, actually, that he signed up to personally endorse the Focus Comm and even appeared in a commercial for it in 2022.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Well, how I got introduced to it to start is, I would use yoga as part of my recovery. And one of the yoga instructors that I was working with was also talking about breath work. So I started doing breath work with her. Then she introduced me to a device that you put on your head and it's an app you play on your phone, and you would play a race car game. And the more that you were in the right breathing and the right mental space, the faster your car would go. And the harder you tried, the slower it would go. And it made me realize that we can't just will everything to happen. So when I perform on the field, I could better off get in a flow state. Because any athlete, you know the story when they're in the zone,

• 19:42Speaker 01

  or it's the ninth inning, Michael Jordan and LeBron, their pulse is like this and everyone else is going crazy. They keep themselves in a calm flow state. So when the two minute happened or the last drive against Tom Brady is happening, I'm not freaking out like some players, like most are.

• 19:56Pablo Torre?

  What was the name of the company that you partnered with?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I think they changed, I think they changed names. I gotta, I don't want to misquote it. Let me, let me.

• 20:04Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, please.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Get back to you on it.

• 20:06Pablo Torre?

  Please.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  The bigger company's name is BrainCo.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Okay, so this is probably where we should properly introduce BrainCo and its founder, Hanbi Chang.

• 20:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes, because I was long gone at Harvard when BrainCo was being founded by that guy in 2015. But you were actually on campus, I believe.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  I was, I was. I think we might have been in slightly different crowds, but I was there when he was there. He was studying neuroscience. And he founded BrainCo a year before Elon Musk even started Neuralink.

• 20:35Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  And by 2017, Hanbi Chang was being honored by MIT Technology Review as one of their top innovators under 35.

• 20:43Pablo Torre?

  And the headline for MIT Technology Review read, quote, "An inventor that brings brain-machine interface out of science fiction into reality," end quote.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Okay, so Elon and Neuralink were focused on brain implants, where you've got to drill a hole into someone's head.

• 20:59Pablo Torre?

  Into your skull.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  To make it work. Hanbi Chang set up an office in sunny Somerville, Massachusetts.

• 21:05Pablo Torre?

  Where I used to get drunk in college.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  100%. And he built a gentler, more consumer-friendly device that you just wear on top of your head. And he also created a robot prosthetic hand, operated with that same handband technology, that would go on to be named one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Innovations of 2019.

• 21:24Pablo Torre?

  And as the host of one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Podcasts of All Time, I can tell you that I too trust the gentle touch of this robotic hand.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and you are not alone. Plenty of academics got on board with Brainco as well. As I mentioned, Brainco's advisor was the dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who went on to become the president of the University of Virginia. According to an interview with Bee Chang in Chinese Media, he said, quote, "Most of our core teams are from Harvard University and the MIT Brain Science Center, very legit places." And a Harvard grad named Max Nuland is who became the president of Brainco USA. He was working as a research scientist at the company when Brainco reportedly announced its seed funding round of $5 million in 2016.

• 22:10Pablo Torre?

  Which is a very American success story.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  100%, except that Hunter Brook had a reporter in Taiwan dig into the corporate records on who actually invested millions of dollars into Brainco. And what we found was that Brainco has been repeatedly financed by Chinese state-owned enterprises, including an entity inside China Electronics Corporation, which is a conglomerate that the US Defense Department has sanctioned.

• 22:36Pablo Torre?

  And so how was the Chinese government hiding their investment then?

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Well, actually, by 2024, we found that the Chinese government was just straight up investing tens of millions of dollars directly into Brainco.

• 22:48Pablo Torre?

  And I think this would help explain why the biggest initial market, the biggest user base, was not hyper-competitive pro athletes, but something I think that is arguably even more competitive?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  That's right. It was the Chinese education system. As this 2019 report from the Wall Street Journal explains.

• 23:06Speaker 09

  For this fifth-grade class, the day begins with putting on a brainwave-sensing gadget. The device is made in China and has three electrodes, two behind the ears and one on the forehead. These sensors pick up electrical signals sent by neurons in the brain. The neural data is then sent in real time to the teacher's computer. So while students are solving math problems, a teacher can quickly find out who's paying attention and who's not.

• 23:33Pablo Torre?

  I just gotta say that that video... Classrooms of kids wearing the headband that Logan Ryan and I apparently both share in common. It's fucking crazy looking.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  It's absolutely insane. There was a ton of backlash even in China. Parents were like, I do not want the Chinese Communist Party collecting data on how well my kids are paying attention in class.

• 23:55Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  It actually got some coverage here in the United States, too. And then, between like 2020 and 2023, there was this weird era in Brainco's history where they kind of like stopped sending out press releases, they weren't doing as many interviews, they began to lurk in the shadows a little bit.

• 24:13Pablo Torre?

  The block got hot, even in China.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Even in China, people were like, what the hell is this?

• 24:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, which raises questions about how the American wing of the business was handling this.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Badly. We actually spoke to a former high-level Brainco exec who told me that almost the entire team in Somerville was laid off by like 2024 in the first couple of months. Almost nobody was coming into the office. We actually had a reporter go visit Brainco's offices three different times. We never saw more than two people.

• 24:44Pablo Torre?

  Great.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  That guy Max Nuland, who was the president of Brainco in the United States, he resigned. And he was the same guy who was always hyping Brainco up.

• 24:52Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so the president of the company in America is gone. And meanwhile, the question that I think is really important to ask at this point in the story is, what access does the Chinese government have to what was harvested from the brains of all of these Chinese schoolchildren in all of these classrooms?

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Such an important question. And here is where we've got to make clear that in China, it's not like optional to share information and data with the government. They actually have a national intelligence law that requires Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence services when requested. This, you may remember, is why TikTok was almost banned in the United States.

• 25:32Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  But the thing is, like, whereas TikTok knows your preferences for which dances and cooking recipes and memes you want to watch, Brainco has data on your actual brainwaves.

• 25:43Pablo Torre?

  Which sounds extraordinarily valuable to said government, to the point where...

• 25:49Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, how do they handle the fact that it's a flop?

• 25:51Speaker 04

  Right, so during this period of time when Brainco was laying low in the US, waiting for the school controversy to pass, the Chinese government's interest in Brainco's data doesn't seem ever to have wavered. In fact, Brainco is now being listed as one of the Six Little Dragons.

• 26:09Speaker 06

  The Six Dragons is what people now call a cluster of elite startups here. China's rising stars in gaming, robotics, AI, and neurotech, all working around the clock to beat Silicon Valley at its own game.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  These are the six tech firms in the city of Hangzhou that receive special government support, favorable loans, and integration into China's broader technology ecosystem.

• 26:35Speaker 06

  The most prominent being DeepSeek, that little-known startup that upended the AI world in January with its low-cost chatbot. And there are more. Unitree Robotics is seen here as having the potential to do for China's robotics sector what DeepSeek did in AI.

• 26:55Speaker 06

  They make humanoid and quadruped robots, like G180U, that can dance to its own beat and pack a decent punch, if that's what you want your humanoid to do.

• 27:07Pablo Torre?

  This is the same gold medal-winning technology from the World Humanoid Robot Games that we started with.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Yes, that is Robot Michael Phelps. And that company, Unitree, you're probably not surprised to learn at this point, is actually officially partnered with Brainco, which we know in part because on Unitree's own website, the company outlines how its robots can be equipped with Brainco's dexterous hand, the one from Time Magazine, which is now being showcased at robotics conventions-

• 27:35Pablo Torre?

  Of course.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  -where they're not being used to help quadriplegics walk or tweet. They're being mounted onto full humanoid robots capable of neural control.

• 27:45Pablo Torre?

  Which is to just spell it out, the ability for people to control with their brains a robot army of the future.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Correct. And of course, the other reason we know about Brainco's partnership with Unitree is that Hunter Brook Media looked under the hood of Unitree's source code, and we found that they actually have an integration with Brainco's prosthetics right in their codebase.

• 28:05Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, while you were sniffing around the codebase of this robotics company, what the US government was doing, what the US House of Representatives in particular was doing in May of this year was send a letter of their own warning about Unitree and their, quote, "well-documented ties to the Chinese military and the CCP."

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Which is probably a good time to mention that Brainco's offices in Hangzhou, not to be confused with the Somerville offices, they're right next to Unitree's. And that office has hosted visits from the Chinese premier, the CCP's number-two guy after President Xi, as well as their Minister of Science and Technology. We've also seen photos and videos of Brainco CEO Han Bi Chang being visited by the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

• 28:53Pablo Torre?

  Which is?

• 28:54Speaker 04

  A Beijing-installed figure known for crushing democratic protest.

• 28:59Pablo Torre?

  And what we're seeing here, just in this video, is another bit of tape. It's a guy who lost both hands, using two of those Brainco robotic arms to draw calligraphy, to shake hands. Another guy is playing the piano, Sam, to speak to the dexterousness of the robot arm. This is, from a pure, like, science perspective, objectively incredible.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  It's [bleep] sick. It's an unbelievable invention, and it makes complete sense why China and the United States care so much about this technology.

• 29:37Pablo Torre?

  So if you're wondering here, as Sam and I were, how this entire company just got swiped out from under the noses of Brainco's US leadership team, we tried tracking down James Ryan, the former Harvard dean and subsequently the president of the University of Virginia, to ask him this very question.

• 29:56Pablo Torre?

  And in an interview with Hunter Brook Media, James Ryan confirmed that he had been an advisor to Brainco, and he joined Brainco because he knew Max Nuland, the since-resigned Brainco president, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But in 2023, Ryan said, this is after the Chinese schoolchildren scandal we mentioned, and around that time when Brainco went dark and stopped sending out press releases, he officially stepped down from his advisory role at Brainco, citing his sparse experience helping out the company. Now, when asked directly about Brainco's links to the Chinese government, James Ryan told us that he didn't know anything about that. And when told that Brainco had plans to IPO,

• 30:40Pablo Torre?

  Ryan said that he would divest from the company entirely. Quote, "I am disturbed and saddened to hear this, and very disappointed, obviously." End quote. In fact, as a US college administrator, Ryan told us that he had been briefed on attempts by the Chinese government to steal intellectual property from American universities. He said he even spoke to Max Nuland about that. And what Nuland told him plainly, according to Ryan, quote, "We are not connected to the Chinese government." End quote. Now, what Ryan tells us is this,

• 31:23Pablo Torre?

  quote, "I truly hope Max didn't know." Max Nuland did not respond to repeated requests for comment. And that raised an even bigger unsolved question for us and the American government about how exactly Brainco pitted it and why its business is currently booming in China.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Well, a big part of it is, of course, the data that they're collecting, which brings us back to Brainco's roster of some of the world's greatest athletes.

• 32:01Pablo Torre?

  Yes, one of whom, I believe, we left in the middle of our Zoom call. And yeah, I should probably tell American Brainco spokesman and two-time Super Bowl-winning defensive back Logan Ryan some things that I have learned after the break.

• 32:29Speaker 10

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• 32:44Speaker 11

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• 33:00Speaker 12

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• 33:06Speaker 10

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• 34:36Pablo Torre?

  In order to understand how BrainCo pivoted from classrooms full of tiny Chinese schoolchildren with FocusCom headsets, we had to call somebody who was not Chinese and not American, and I believe may well be the most Italian person that I have ever met.

• 34:58Speaker 14

  If you want to make a good carbonara, you need to have on the table all the ingredients. If you don't have all the ingredients, okay, the carbonara will not be perfect. So an attrite, a top attrite, is like the ingredient on the table before to be cooked. Okay?

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 35:19Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I just, I love him. I love this man despite everything that we're about to get into with him, honestly.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  He's amazing, especially because carbonara only has like five ingredients. And so it's clear he takes each of them very seriously.

• 35:32Pablo Torre?

  Yes, the spice level is important.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  You need to kick in your carbonara, and don't let the egg get scrambled. Pro tip.

• 35:41Speaker 14

  My name is Ricardo Cecarelli. I am a medical doctor specialized in sport medicine. I live in Italy. In this moment, I am in my facility, Formula Medicine facility, which is in Tuscany, in Viareggio, a little town on the beach. Very nice place for summertime. So I would recommend to join me as soon as you can because here now, the weather is perfect.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  I'm basically ready to move.

• 36:09Pablo Torre?

  I know. I was like, I feel like I can expense that.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  Into his house. Yeah, no, 100%.

• 36:13Pablo Torre?

  We can expense the trip to Tuscany, to a beach town I didn't know was even possible in the Italian countryside. But that is, of course, Dr. Ricardo Cecarelli, who, beyond being a volunteer ambassador for the Board of Tourism in Tuscany, is the CEO and founder of a company called Formula Medicine. And Formula Medicine has been supporting F1 drivers in mental and physical training for more than 15 years. Yes, their logo, it's on the boxes of these devices that are on the table. You may recall, Sam, how Logan Ryan earlier was talking about how he was playing that Focus Comm game on his phone where you calm down and the virtual race car goes faster.

• 36:53Pablo Torre?

  Dr. Cecarelli, turns out, has been basically using the Brainco Focus Comm to study the exact same thing for years.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Except with actual human race car drivers.

• 37:04Pablo Torre?

  Who happen to be the best in the world.

• 37:06Speaker 14

  And so, our innovation was to link Brainco and a heart rate recorder directly implemented inside our test. So, it's not for meditation, for relaxing, but it's just like the heart rate recorder on the treadmill to see how much you activate your brain, your frontal lobe, which is the frontal lobe is the decision maker. But it's the problem of the tennis player before and during a match, the problem is how to control. But how to control, not when you are relaxed in a closed room with a silent and they do meditation. The problem is how can I control when I am on the match point, on the tiebreaker? So, that is the point.

• 37:50Speaker 14

  So, we train people in the out of the comfort zone.

• 37:54Pablo Torre?

  And the tennis thing is also in his comfort zone, personally, because Dr. Cecarelli, when I talked to him in July, had actually just gotten back from training the brain of one of his non-F1 clients, who was at Wimbledon. Oh! Winning the tournament, because, yeah, you might recall how Yannick Sinner won one of the most impressive matches in the recent history of tennis.

• 38:23Speaker 14

  Yannick, he had to learn how to cook. This is what we did at the beginning when he was 19, 20, 21, because he's a very clever guy, he understood, and now he's able to do a good carbonara.

• 38:42Speaker 15

  That's it.

• 38:45Speaker 15

  Yannick Sinner takes his pace. It's in the world of history. What a wonderful match.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Notably, Yannick Sinner, closest thing to a robotic tennis player we've seen.

• 38:59Pablo Torre?

  The greatest living advertisement for Focus and Calm.

• 39:02Speaker 04

  He is like a human humanoid.

• 39:05Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  But the thing is that, obviously, Dr. Cecarelli came to Brainco when Yannick Sinner was just 19 years old. He's been partnered with this company for a very long time. His name is literally on the box.

• 39:19Pablo Torre?

  Yes, he is also on the website. When you go, as we did, to order this thing for $279.99, you see the testimony from this guy. He's testifying to the greatness of the Focus Calm specifically. And he is not shy about how long and how intimate this partnership is.

• 39:38Speaker 14

  I have to say many thanks to Brainco because when we met them, we select different kind of device and then we saw that this was for us the best and more reliable. And so we.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Okay, so we knew that he was a Brainco partner. What we didn't know was which athletes have actually been using the Focus Calm and giving Brainco data. But it sounds like the doctor essentially told you everything?

• 40:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it was sort of like just hearing him name a bunch of people in his phone that he had also studied the brains of.

• 40:15Speaker 14

  We had here in this gym many, many famous athletes. Michele Shifri, Federica Brignone, that won the last world championship on the ski. Paltrinieri, which has been one of the best swimmer in Italy, but also winning gold medal. Fencer winning gold medal in the Olympic Games. We are already working with two football players, Manchester City.

• 40:45Pablo Torre?

  But there is like this other missing part of this, which is, okay, here's this rolodex of athletes that you've been studying, working with, who've entrusted their careers, their minds to you. And they are very thankful because it seems to have, in their view, really worked. But in terms of like where the data goes, right? This is a technology story as well. How that data is secured, whether it's encrypted, is it stored on a hard drive? Is it stored on a cloud somewhere? It all made me think of how the CCP had announced, as previously mentioned, that there were going to be some key technological breakthroughs in the industry by 2027. And I wanted to know, how do you assure privacy? And how do you work on on stuff like making sure that it stays protected? All the Brainwave data.

• 41:29Speaker 14

  That is a very important question. And I think that was one of our, I don't say problem, but you know, when you when you start the research, like we did many years ago, was a different age. But more this system is getting out of our limited number of person. We discovered that it was important to have a very important privacy protection. So we did, obviously, when Brainco gave us SDK, this kind of things,

• 42:13Speaker 14

  everything has to be protected and private. But now we have a legal team that is working together with our technicians to develop a system that they are encrypted, that they are protected at 20.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  I mean, that's insane. Okay, so a couple of things on that.

• 42:36Pablo Torre?

  So there's that.

• 42:37Speaker 04

  So one, sounds like the privacy protections, he says, are very important to implement. They don't exist yet, even though he's been working with Brainco since 2019.

• 42:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  And Pablo, we bought Brainco devices and we looked at their privacy policy. And it's not great, Bob.

• 42:58Pablo Torre?

  And so I just gotta jump in here to point out that we, of course, reached out for official comment from BrainCo. But not before finding out that BrainCo and the FocusCom's data privacy policy is kinda like untangling a nest of Christmas lights, seemingly by design. For instance, if you go to the BrainCo website, its privacy policy is littered with references to data collection. It reads in part, quote, "We collect data from any given person using our devices and applications, including people under the age of 18," end quote. And included in the breakdown of data types collected, EEG raw data is listed as provided and managed. But when reached at long last for official comment,

• 43:43Pablo Torre?

  what BrainCo told PTOFO and Hunterbrook Media on September 4th, 2025 is this, quote, "We don't share user data with anyone. EEG data received from the BrainCo headband is transmitted to the FocusCom application. All EEG data remains in the FocusCom application within the user's smart device and is purged from the application at the conclusion of each use. All accusations about data collection and sharing are false," end quote. And in fact, when you now visit the privacy policy page for FocusCom specifically, it mirrors this exact language that we got. It says that, quote, "Neither EEG nor IMU raw data

• 44:24Pablo Torre?

  is transmitted to BrainCo servers," end quote. But it is also worth noting here that the privacy policy page says it was updated to version 2.0 on September 7th, 2025, which is three days after they issued their response to us. And also that, according to the Internet Archive, which saves earlier cached versions of webpages, that specific language did not exist in version 1.0 of the policy earlier this year.

• 44:57Pablo Torre?

  But maybe even more revealing is the fact that Sam and the reporting team at Hunter Brook Media looked under the hood of the BrainCo open source code on GitHub. And what they found is that BrainCo was letting third-party developers access brain data of users wearing the Focus headbands. This is, quote, "user brainwave data, attention data, etc." And they let those third-party developers access it, quote, "every half-second", which is a far cry from its claimed "local-only" storage policy. All of which brings us back to sports and athletes' brains.

• 45:41Pablo Torre?

  So this is where I do think it's just worth us grounding this in reality. Because as much as this is very, I mean, truly, just like a parody on some level of itself, this is what the big data era of sports is like. We are the children of Moneyball, Sam. And so BrainCo is not a story about the future. This is the story of right now. This is the story of who gets access to your increasingly personal biometric data, which a guy like Logan Ryan, incidentally, is otherwise already pretty aware of.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  As athletes, we wear a lot of wearables. We wear a whoop and we wear a thing to show how fast we run. And there was a lot of times where, you know, the team would say it's optional, but everyone has to kind of wear it. And I would say, "Well, if I'm 33 and you realize I'm not running as fast every practice, how are you using that data, right? Is that gonna lead to my release?"

• 46:45Pablo Torre?

  There is one last thing that sort of unites all of this. And this is where I'm like, I just wonder if you were ever told or learned anything about this before this interview. Because the last bit of information, which we found really interesting and kind of crazy, is that if you get into some of the open source code, apparently, and this is the GitHub open source code of BrainCo, what they're doing is that they're collecting the brain data of users every half a second. And in China, companies are obligated to send the data they collect to the government. And and the last last thing to just close the circle is that BrainCo has Chinese investment from the CCP.

• 47:30Pablo Torre?

  They're funded by Chinese entities sanctioned by the US government with direct ties to the military. And I'm like, did Logan know any of this when he decided to like, I'm gonna try and use this to improve my football career?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely not. You know, I had no idea about that. I mean, I this is, I used them a lot in like 2020. You know, I can't say robots and AI wasn't coming, but you know.

• 47:53Pablo Torre?

  And I just feel obliged, Sam, to point out that I do believe Logan Ryan, I truly believe that he did not know anything about this when he signed up to be a spokesperson.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  No, BrainCo does not make this obvious.

• 48:04Pablo Torre?

  Right, right. And so when Logan, and by the way, I proceeded to tell him about so much of what we just talked about in this episode. You know, about BrainCo founder Hanbi Chang, about robot humanoid super soldiers, the letter from the US editors, private neural data, all that, on and on. It it just built towards this question that I now have to admit is pretty predictable. Is that something you wish you had known?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, and the way it was presented to me obviously is not that way. So you you try to accept to be to get better in your field and you're you're willing to do what it takes legally, obviously, to get better at your craft. And I believe in training the brain. But you gotta be careful who you do it with. You gotta make sure you you're you do your research and you're vetted. And like I said, nobody on my team was could even have thought this is a possibility. But this is the world we live in nowadays with all this type of AI and technology that who knows with the information that we're putting in, what that could be used for. And obviously, we we need a right to to protect ourselves from that. So I don't know how personalized it is to me.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  They're able to track my thoughts or something with that, but that that's all pretty alarming to me and.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Definitely look into that.

• 49:21Pablo Torre?

  He is calm still in all of his assessments of this.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  That shit worked.

• 49:26Pablo Torre?

  I mean, well, but except for after the Zoom interview because, and I want to be just fair to everybody involved, I think it's worth me pointing this out on their behalf. Logan Ryan and his understandably panicked PR person, who was not on the Zoom call, but heard about the Zoom call from her client, they reached out to us here at Pablo Torre Finds Out to reiterate how just unbelievably freaked out Logan was once he sort of realized what this all implied.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally understandable.

• 49:56Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and I wanted to help him look into that. I wanted to help figure out, okay, how real are these concerns? Because as for the TikTok example, we all are giving our data to some foreign government in the cloud on some level, it feels like. But is this data actually going to the Chinese government? And are they going to act upon that? Is a question that I had for our old friend in Tuscany. The best athletes that you've trained, whether it's Yannick Sinner, Charles Leclerc, Michaela Schifferin, Manchester City, I mean, just an incredible roster. Do you think it's possible that China would use those brainwaves to train their athletes? That they might get better athletes because of their association with BrainCo?

• 50:41Speaker 14

  Yes, absolutely, yes, absolutely, yes. We are still in contact with them now because they did also a device which is more wearable and that we can use in different experiment with aviation, with the military, because obviously the device has to be wearable and comfortable. So it's a synergy, it's a project that is running since many years and obviously BrainCo was really, really supporting us.

• 51:12Pablo Torre?

  Sam, I don't think that's gonna make Logan Ryan feel consistently relaxed.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  I do not think it will because it sounds like the doctor just confirmed not only that the Chinese government might be using these brainwaves, but that they might be using them for military purposes.

• 51:32Pablo Torre?

  And so this is where I should note that military purposes can mean a lot of things. There is a difference between FocusCom EEG data, for instance, training human soldiers to perform better in combat scenarios, and using brainwave data to control the robotic limbs of super soldiers. But, at the same time, honestly, in the hands of a foreign adversary, both not great. Meanwhile, in their response to our detailed questions, Brainco said, quote, "We have no collaboration of any kind with any military in any country. To the best of our knowledge, our technology is not being used for any military purposes. We have implemented stringent compliance measures that explicitly require our customers

• 52:16Pablo Torre?

  not to use or transfer our technology for prohibited end uses or to prohibited end users, including military applications," end quote. Brainco also added, somewhat amazingly, quote, "To emphasize, we develop and provide dexterous hands for humanoid robots with no affiliation whatsoever to the military. Our technology is exclusively applied in the fields of embodied intelligence and dexterous manipulation," end quote. And yet, that's not even the most bizarre exchange that Sam and I experienced while we were trying to get an actual interview with Brainco's founder, Han Bi Chang, for this story. Because that exchange, that bizarre exchange, occurred over text message.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  This one was from a burner number, according to the open source intelligence analysts on our team. And Pablo, if you would indulge me, I would just like to read these texts out loud. Would you be the gray text and I'll be the green?

• 53:13Pablo Torre?

  Probably best that way.

• 53:16Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 53:18Pablo Torre?

  8:50 PM. "Hello. This Brainco. Very smart company. Hello." Three exclamation points.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  My response, 10:21 AM. "Tried calling you. Always happy to talk Brainco, but seems you called me from a burner? Try me whenever."

• 53:36Pablo Torre?

  1:29 PM. "I, Brainco."

• 53:40Speaker 04

  I respond immediately, totally. Who are you? Got impatient five minutes later. Is this Dr. Han?

• 53:48Pablo Torre?

  4:39 PM. Yes, Dr. Han.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  And then, like I'm on an episode of Catfish, how can I confirm that you're really Dr. Han?

• 54:00Pablo Torre?

  You ask me if I am Dr. Han, I say yes. Thumbs up emoji. Gangnam Style.

• 54:08Pablo Torre?

  Peace sign emoji.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Ha, ha, ha. Can we video chat? We should talk.

• 54:13Pablo Torre?

  6:56 PM. Yes, it is 7 AM in China. Chinese flag emoji. I free at my lunch.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  Deal. 1 AM my time, 1 PM yours. What email should I send a Zoom invite to?

• 54:31Pablo Torre?

  9:08 PM. Unsubscribe.

• 54:35Speaker 04

  I have to admit, it kind of hurt my feelings.

• 54:37Pablo Torre?

  I mean, that's a great burn, just at the end of a long text message exchange, just being like, unsubscribe.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Horrifying.

• 54:44Pablo Torre?

  This is, by the way, like, worry something a different way. Because the whole question underlying that text exchange is a simple one. Are you being scammed?

• 55:00Pablo Torre?

  And now, the question I think we should ask, as we get close to the end of this episode, is, is this headband really what this very smart company says it is? Is this thing also a scam?

• 55:30Pablo Torre?

  Look, at this point in my life, Sam, I've done enough investigative journalism and just buying of stuff that I tend to see promises from unicorn tech founders through the lens of, is this a scam? And we have an episode in which we've established that this technology is backed by the Chinese Communist Party, which is competing in a brain race with America and all this other stuff. And so it's fair to wonder whether all of this is also, on some level, just propaganda.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Good question. So, the first thing to note on this front is that I hired a Harvard Crimson reporter to fact-check Dr. Han Bi Chang's Brainco origin story.

• 56:04Pablo Torre?

  Which is a brilliant move, to just outsource it to a younger, hungrier person.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  100%. And what we found out is that, first, Dr. Han Bi Chang is a doctor in the sense that Julius Irving is a doctor, which is to say, not actually a doctor. According to the Harvard registrar, he never finished his PhD.

• 56:25Pablo Torre?

  Which is worrisome.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Second, Brainco was indeed founded out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. But when we spoke to the iLab, they told us that they tell every company not to use the iLab's branding on any of their websites' memorabilia. Brainco has it basically everywhere.

• 56:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 04

  And third, Han Bi Chang likes to claim that he taught at Harvard, specifically a course on brain-computer interface technology. He actually once told an interviewer that he recruited students to the class by telling them it could teach couples to read each other's minds. But the reality, according to an email we were sent by the course's actual professor, is that Dr. Han was a teaching assistant for like, one semester. And he swears that the course was never branded as a way to help you read your boyfriend's mind.

• 57:12Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so, this question, though, this now through line of, is this false advertising? It takes us to a question that I don't think has ever been asked before in human history, but was Logan Ryan, longtime NFL defensive back, and President Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, both misled by Brainco founder Han Bi Chang?

• 57:36Speaker 04

  So, look, there are smart people who disagree on this. We spoke to one former technical leader at BrainCo and a few experts on neuroscience. And some of them think that headbands like the ones BrainCo sells don't do much. They collect a lot of information, but it's hard to parse. They compare it to standing outside of a stadium and trying to hear individual conversations. You can hear cheers, but it's not like you can understand what everyone's saying.

• 58:01Pablo Torre?

  Right, and this is sort of like the trade-off. Neuralink, Elon, they're drilling holes into skulls and implanting stuff. BrainCo is sitting at the top of my brow, on my skin, and is therefore ostensibly less precise.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  That's correct, but we also took our findings to Nita Farahani, a professor at Duke of Law and Philosophy.

• 58:21Pablo Torre?

  An actual professor.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Who literally wrote the book on BCI. Professor Farahani was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She has a particular expertise in cognitive warfare, and she warned me that China, technologically, has come a very long way when it comes to mining the brain through headbands like the FocusCom.

• 58:44Speaker 16

  It's probably useful to look at the broader context of a lot of information that's come out about China's investments in brain-computer interface more recently. Which then makes you think, okay, well, why is China investing so significantly into brain-computer interface devices? Clearly, it has some military component to it, some dual-use component to it.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  So I asked her, where does BrainCo come into all this? And what she said is that maybe BrainCo is a way for China to, quote, "collect citizen and athlete data" by greenwashing a company claiming it's a Harvard and MIT institution, to intentionally hide from the consumer what data's been collected, where it's going, and who's behind it.

• 59:27Speaker 16

  And maybe BrainCo is part of the pathway either to distribute it internationally and be able to collect biometrics from individuals in other places and/or to be able to develop brain interface technology that is using these devices to be able to share commands, for example, within the military, or to be able to communicate with a device in an incredibly secure and very difficult to intercept manner.

• 59:56Pablo Torre?

  And this reminds me of the conversation with Logan Ryan, where he had to jog his memory to remember what company he was the spokesman for, actually, because BrainCo, if we go back to the box on the table, is not on the FocusCom box anywhere.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  It's not even on the FocusCom website.

• 1:00:17Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, like Dr. Cecarelli's name also, I just realized this, happens to be misspelled, missing a couple of letters there, and Cecarelli, but at this point, I basically digress.

• 1:00:27Speaker 16

  An article in Nature Communications recently came out of a bunch of Chinese-based researchers who were at one of the state universities that has significant investment from China in it as well, and it proposes an incredibly secure mechanism of trying to safeguard what goes from brain signals to a device, and they were doing it based on a wearable device, and the level of security that they were developing is far beyond what you would need for financial transactions, even far beyond what's applied, for example, to classified documents.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the whole thing with BrainCo is it's always a question of whether this is actually this incredible company that is instrumental to the Chinese Communist Party, or whether they're a bunch of incompetent students who weren't even really doctors, who can't even spell the doctor's name right on their box. And so I asked Professor Farahani, is all of this technology BS? Are those neuroscientists right, who say that it's kind of like trying to listen to individual conversations standing outside of a stadium? And what she told me is that initially, the data might have seemed kind of worthless. It was always going to be way noisier than the kind of data you get from a device like Neuralink that goes directly inside of your head. But she says that because of the rise of AI,

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  some of the data that BrainCo collects may increasingly become discernible. All of the noise can become signal. And that's because of AI from companies like DeepSeek, which we should remember is another one of China's little dragons located right next In that neighborhood. to BrainCo and Unitree. We should plan a trip. Yeah. And in Professor Varahani's mind, BrainCo probably isn't duping China. Because no matter how well it works, she says, it's going to still be a useful tool for an authoritarian regime.

• 1:02:26Speaker 16

  So let's take that world where it collects nothing. It's already incredibly oppressive, right? Then you go to the other extreme of like, let's assume a science fiction scenario where like literally everything you're thinking could be decoded. And to be clear, it cannot be from a wearable headset like this. And it's hard to imagine that it ever would be. But there's enough that could be collected where you can do things to prime people in settings like that with information that you can then extract from their brain signals. You know, show them communist imaging, see how they respond to it. Figure out if, you know, their reaction is starting to be, you know, likelihood of demonstrating

• 1:03:09Speaker 16

  by rising up because their anger levels are starting to increase. So as a tool of oppression against already oppressed minorities, it doesn't surprise me. This seems like the, you know, most powerful kind of oppression that you could do and not have to physically harm somebody.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  And by the way, it is worth noting. Remember those images of BrainCo being used in Chinese schools? And how they got all that backlash and kind of walked away from it? Well, BrainCo didn't actually stop doing that. Our reporter found a Chinese government contract from 2023. And it showed that the CCP had tapped BrainCo to supply its headbands not just to any school, but to a special education school in a region called Ningxia Hui. Ningxia, for listeners who haven't heard of this place, Yes. has surveillance cameras above mosque doors. Religious lessons for children are banned. Worshippers have to swipe government issued cards to enter their places of prayer. Their movements are logged.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  Their identities are confirmed by facial recognition. And BrainCo, it seems, is part of that surveillance toolkit.

• 1:04:20Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that, you know, this isn't actually like the Whoop wearable device that lots of people have now, or the Aura Ring or anything else. It's something more disturbing.

• 1:04:35Speaker 16

  For an athlete, I think it's easy to think, especially an elite athlete, you hear a lot in any privacy context, somebody saying, "Well, I don't really care about my privacy because I personally am insulated from the harms of it." And first of all, that's not true for the individual. But second, we also have to start to think about the group effects. Like, what does it do to sports? What does it do to competitive sports? And, you know, more societally focused implications. What if your data is taken and used to discriminate against somebody else? Which is how it happens. And so this idea of like, well, it's not going to harm me. And even if my data is used to harm other people, not my problem. I think I'd say it is your problem. It's all of our problem if we become complicit in a system

• 1:05:17Speaker 16

  that means that we give up data willingly, knowing that it could be used to harm other people. The use cases and the misuse cases will just become more problematic.

• 1:05:27Pablo Torre?

  But to be very clear about the use case that we started with, which is, you know, athletes and robots. It does seem like the professor here does not dismiss that out of hand.

• 1:05:41Speaker 16

  For the skeptics out there, I think it is very likely that the CCP is using brain data to try to better understand how our athletes perform, to better train for future soldiers, to become part of an overall program that they've been developing around cognitive warfare.

• 1:06:02Pablo Torre?

  Which means that BrainCo might actually be training, you know, like Chinese artificial intelligence with Yannick Sinner's brainwaves.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:06:20Pablo Torre?

  And if you're wondering here whether Yannik Siner, until very recently, the number one tennis player in the world, responded to our request for comment, the answer to that is no. Same applies to his fellow former number one, Igos Viantek, as well as all-time number one Alpine skier Mikhail Shifrin, who also trains with Dr. Cecarelli. But I did get to ask one more question of the NFL player who picked off Peyton Manning, and Aaron Rodgers, and Tom Brady. What's it gonna be like when the Chinese military has an army of Logan Ryans?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  If they have a Logan Ryan robot come out, they're gonna be making some quick decisions, some smart decisions out there, I'll tell you that. And, um, so they'll be tough to beat, man. I was pretty sound in my mind back then, a football perspective, so they'll be safe and sound in the middle of the field and, um, figure out how to... We just don't, don't put no Tom Brady's out. Logan Ryan got the best of him one time.

• 1:07:20Pablo Torre?

  And I just wanna put a pin in that taunt from Logan Ryan for just one more second here, because it does bring us to the end of an episode that connects to a number of topics that we've been recently investigating on this show. From Harvard, to sports washing, to insane athlete endorsement deals, to billion-dollar startups. But this particular story is about something so big, because this story is about how our most personal and sensitive and valuable data is being compromised, so often. And we don't even know it. Because the norms have already been set and sold

• 1:08:04Pablo Torre?

  by a foreign adversary with our cooperation to enable it.

• 1:08:13Pablo Torre?

  But the thing I found out today at the end, after all of this, after all the super soldiers and neural surveillance and China using American technology against America in a global brain race, is I think just a recipe for trash talk of the future.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, the robot that stole my brainwaves is gonna kick the ass of the robot that stole your brainwaves. It's a weird time, Pablo.

• 1:08:36Pablo Torre?

  Just a bit of futuristic spice at the end of a very meaty episode.

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Ending with a real kick.

• 1:08:44Pablo Torre?

  Just, just like a good carbonara, a wise man might say.

• 1:08:58Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 1:09:27Speaker 17

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