From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak

Max Hodak, co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, joins Sarah Guo to discuss the future of vision, brain-computer interfaces, and the human experience. Max explains how Science’s PRIMA retinal implant could restore functional vision for people who have lost their sight, and why treating the brain as a computational system could unlock new approaches to medicine. They explore the broader potential of neural devices, from restoring lost capabilities to expanding human potential, as well as deeper questions around identity, consciousness, and whether the human experience can persist as our biological hardware changes. Max also shares Science’s long-term vision for reducing the fragility of the human condition by repairing, replacing, and ultimately upgrading parts of ourselves. Finally, he discusses the surprising parallels between AI models and biological brains, and why AI may offer a powerful new lens for understanding intelligence. Chapters: 00:00 – Cold Open Trailer 01:40 – Max Hodak Introduction 02:00 – Science Corporation Overview and Origin 02:53 – A Revolutionary Solve for Blindness 06:32 – Scope of Timeline and Engineer Cost 09:10 – Clinic Trial Process 09:45 - The Response from Clinicians 12:21 – Broader Biotech Landscape 14:59 – Brain’s Relationship to Senses 17:35 – The Study of Consciousness 19:50 – Investments in Brain Computer Interface 22:10 – Fertile Ways to Study Neuroscience 24:46 – Biotech Expansion for Science Corporation 27:50 – What Success Looks Like in Neuroscience and Tech 29:06 - Goals Within Human Preservation vs. Adaptation 30:25 – Conclusion

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The brain very literally, very clearly plainly is a computer. You can solve computational problems by arranging matter in a certain way and then like taking your hands off and pressing go. We talk about being a brain in a vat. That's what the skull is. Like, the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves, these little cables that carry your interaction with the world. If you can get the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, in and out of the brain, that is an end in itself. That is the central object. The retinal prosthesis right now, I think, is a great proof of concept that we're on the right track. Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way. We need to add depth of grayscale. We think we could see a path to get at least red and green.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  And so there's ways that we can compound upon this path through an engineering process to make a product that's better and better.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Max Hodak, the founder and CEO of Science, formerly of Neuralink. We talk about Prima, the implant that helps people who have gone blind see again, which just got regulatory approval in Europe, their quest to sustain the human experience and substrate independence for the brain. We also talk about alignable representations between AI models and the future of neuroscience. Welcome, Max. Max, thanks so much for doing this.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  So for anyone who is not familiar with Science, can you just describe a little bit about, you know, why you started the company, leaving Neuralink, what the mission is?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Fundamentally, we're a medical device company. But I think if like the mission of lowercase s-science is to use a differentiated understanding of the universe to improve the human condition, I mean, that's, that's the mission of uppercase s-science. That's what we do. We use specifically an understanding of how to work with the brain to get big effect sizes that you don't get in medicine often. Our main product is a retinal prosthesis. You can think of it like a cochlear implant for the eye. Cochlear implants are some of the biggest impacts in all of medicine. I mean, you can, if you've ever seen a video of a newborn turning on, turning it on for the first time, it's striking. And our goal is to build things like that, including our Prima retinal prosthesis.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  And for people who are not familiar with that, it's a chip that is inserted with glasses.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  It's a tiny chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye for patients that have gone blind due to loss of the light sensitive cells in the eye. So specifically, this is diseases like macular degeneration, which our clinical trial was done, and we're about to do studies in retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt's and a couple of their diseases. So it's a chip that sits under the retina and then converts, the patient wears glasses that have a laser projector that projects an image onto the implant that then stimulates the retina to bypass the dead rods and cones and stimulate the retina directly to get a visual signal back into the brain.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  How did you go from, we should have like a nick invasively in the brain to this particular form factor as the first premise?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Oh, so when we started the company, we had a couple ideas. One of the ideas was the bio-hybrid neural interface direction, where instead of placing metal wires into the brain or genetically modifying the brain, what we do is we engraft in living neurons that grow in and form new biological connections. That's a big research project. It's very exciting research, but also needed to be paired with another nearer term business. And we asked ourselves, like, what was the most valuable thing we could do? And we thought that we could restore vision to the blind with the resources available to us and where the state of the field was in early 2021. And so if you want to do that, you have to start from this understanding of like, how does the brain get vision? What is vision in the brain?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  And you, you could look at the retina, which is obviously how vision gets into the brain, the first place it's created. The first stop of the optic nerve into the brain is a structure called the lateral geniculate nucleus and the thalamus, so that you could think, oh, we'll stimulate the LGN. And then the connection from there is visual cortex. Like, it's a half a billion cells up at the back of the brain. And so if you want to restore vision, you can think, I can go into the retina, I can go in through the thalamus, or I can go in through V1. There's a bunch of scientific, technical reasons that lead you to think, if you have an optic nerve, you want to be in the retina. And from there, you have a choice of, do you stimulate? There's two types of cells, and there's a couple of different ways you could stimulate them.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  And so we explored kind of all variants of that early on. We developed an in-house gene therapy that affected the retina in one direction. We did a survey of electrical stimulators. We looked at ultrasound. And what we ended up doing is we developed indigenously a state-of-the-art gene therapy, which is probably going to humans next year, as well as we, we found the state-of-the-art out there in the world of people electrically stimulating the retina. And there was a company in France called Pixium that, back in late 2022, had by far the state-of-the-art work. It was originally developed by an inventor at Stanford and then licensed to this small French company. And they were in the middle of clinical trials.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  And we got to know them over a course of a couple of years, and then were in a position to acquire them when we saw something that I think kind of nobody else really saw at the time. And that, I mean, we, that deal has turned out to be great.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Can you talk about the recent CE designation, regulatory approval you got?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it took us about two years for post-acquisition to get it to the place where this was, was possible. But we just in July got marketing approval in Europe for Prima to start commercially selling it there. And so that's a major milestone. That means it's really commercially available. The first sales will happen in the coming weeks.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  That's amazing. I think most people think of anything in the BCI field as, you know, a moonshot project that may or may not pan out 10 years from now.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, people forget that the moonshot worked. Like, we went, we left like boot prints on the moon. And so this comparison, I mean, I think that there's, it has gotten used in Silicon Valley to mean these things that have extremely long odds and are unlikely to work, and therefore we can vaporize a bunch of investor money just fine. It's like, you know, when we went to the moon, we did it. And so historically, the success rate of moonshots is higher than I think people give them credit for. One of the most important things is having a real business here, and this is the start of that.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Can I ask how you, when you were exploring both different signaling pathways and form factors and just conditions to go attack, or how you thought about scope of timeline and engineering cost and risk? Were you just looking for like the, like, big enough to be useful and feasible in some period of time? Or how did you think about funding the project and how long it could take?

• 6:46Speaker 00

  So there's three elements to our pipeline. The first is our work in vision. Second is our bio-hybrid neural interfaces. And the third is that our work in a different area of medicine, perfusion, a program called Vessel. These three things together form kind of the minimum set of things that I think if they're successful on the time scale of 10 to 15 years, could really drive a, I think, a significant revolution in medicine broadly. People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to, to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the, like, the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest. On the other hand, the brain is a computer. And when you deal with the brain as a computer, you get these, these things to work very, like, it's just, again, there, you don't see demonstration, you don't see things in medicine like a cochlear implant being turned on or a deep, deep brain simulator being turned on. Or, I mean, you can implant a quadriplegic patient in motor cortex and, and have them playing video games in like an hour. Like, this just, you just don't really see things like this in, in most drugs. And so there's this-

• 8:00Speaker 01

  You know, in small molecule, random walk, you know, sifting in, in nature.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, small molecules especially are super hard. I mean, even, I mean, you can do some super highly engineered, patient-specific CAR-T, and instead you get like an audit, like giant immune overreaction. It's like, if I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour. And so it's just, it's easier, it's more amenable to biology in many ways. You can do drug discovery for a decade, run a clinical trial, you're going to turn over a card, the answer might be no. And then like, what, like, everybody goes home. Whereas here, we have a clear sense of how to make the thing better. The retinal prosthesis right now, I think, is a great proof of concept that we're on the right track. Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of

• 8:48Speaker 00

  a, of a blind patient in this way. But at the same time, it's, it's a small field of view. It's like looking through a straw. It's only black and white. We need to add depth of grayscale. We think we could see a path to get at least red and green. Blue is a little bit trickier. And so there's ways that we can compound upon this path through an engineering process to make a product that's better and better.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Can you talk a little bit about what you saw in the clinical trial in terms of variation between patients or what the ceiling was so far?

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, in the clinical trial, I mean, the main thing was just the existence proof of, like, that success was a possible outcome, right? Like, you had patients filling in Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles. There were patients that were reading books. And so I saw some of these patients, some of these videos, met with one of the patients, talked to the surgeons. We, I mean, this is one of those things that seems too good to be true.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  How did clinicians react to all of this? Like, do, would, would the people that you work with say at the beginning, like, yes, Max is right, like, the brain is a computer, this should definitely work, it should work at a higher likelihood and better rate of progression than our random walk in biological understanding?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Well, if you want to make people angry, you should tell the internet that the brain is a computer.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Okay. We're gonna start by doing that, right?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. That kind of starts you off in a, like, a defensive place.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Why don't people like that?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  I don't know. This is one of those things. This just feels like bike shutting to me. I mean, to me, I don't mean that metaphorically, like the brain very literally, very clearly plainly is a computer in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer. Like, we can solve, like, you can solve computational problems by arranging matter in a certain way, and then, like, taking your hands off and letting and pressing go. And so the fact that, like, that unfolds in time to solve some computational problem, I think of that as a computer, the brain's the same thing. And that, I don't think there's necessarily a

• 10:40Speaker 01

  That's a broader definition of computer than I had before.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  A deeper point there.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's nothing special about transistors. I mean, we understand computers in this idealized way as the, as like a Turing machine, that's an abstract computer. It's just, you're going from state to state in ways that are subject to laws that mean that the transformations are interesting and meaningful. But, no, I think this was fairly contrarian. The, both in the sense that BCI has this broader interpretation than motor decoding, as well as, like, is a retinal prosthesis a BCI? That's also kind of this minor definitional question. But if you think that it is, then that, that kind of opens up this interpretation of a lot of areas of medicine that could be accessible to it, that other, that people

• 11:27Speaker 00

  weren't really thinking about. I mean, clearly, there was interest in, like, looking into this, like, it wasn't that contrarian. It's a different approach, and I think we come from a different culture than a lot of the conventional biotech industry. There's always been kind of an east coast, west coast divide in biotech especially. And we are more of a tech company than a conventional biotech company. And our device view of a lot of historical biology problems makes us like even more of a tech company by biotech standards. So we mostly raised from, from tech investors, not that much from biotech investors. In fact, there's only one VC that I sought out at all at the Series A that I went to go pitch, which was Bob Nelson, who's a biotech investor.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  When you describe different types of BCI products and missions, I think you have a really good way of explaining it that is, you know, on a spectrum. Can you, can you talk about just the landscape of what devices and approaches people are working on in BCI today?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think BCI is a category, kind of like how pharma is a category. I think sometimes you, I'll talk to VCs, and like, oh, we have a BCI bet. Like, do you have a drug bet? You made one bet out of drugs. Like, that's that, how you think about the category. Everything from

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Versus thinking about it, like, in, you know, neurodegen and Parkinson's, or a specific

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, or maybe even different bets within neurodegen. Maybe you've got a degrader, and maybe you've got a gene therapy, and maybe you've got something else, like, because they're

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Different hypotheses.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And similarly, I think on, like, one end of the spectrum, you've got silent speech devices, that may be BCI in a greater or lesser degree, like, maybe they're recording a neural signal, like EEG, maybe they're using something just like radar through the face, which I know, like, it was an idea out there. But these are all basically hand substitutes. And on the one hand, hands are great. On the two hands, hands are great. The, they work really well. You don't need to think, like, I'll talk to teams that say, like, oh, well, it'd be really nice if, to go to your next thing, you didn't have to, like, open the Uber app and, like, call an Uber, you just, like, thought of it, it was there. Like, you probably want to communicate really unambiguously with the Uber app. It'd be pretty annoying if they just start, like, spontaneously, you're getting notifications during meetings that, like, oh,

• 13:37Speaker 00

  it thought that you were thinking about an Uber, therefore decided to summon, summon two for you. And so you'll probably want these to be pretty explicit, and to the degree that that is a volitional intent, like, you already don't need to do a lot to get your hands to do things. Now, could you have extra hands? Extra hands famously useful. And so having some easier way to communicate might, might be useful. That is kind of outside of the scope of things I spent a lot of time thinking about. Because if you can, if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control, you're halfway to the matrix. And this takes you into some, like, really trippy reinterpretations of medicine. And that's the stuff that we work

• 14:18Speaker 00

  on. I think other people will do things like speech to text and AI communication. There is a distinction, so there's, there's, let me come back to your broader question a second, but there's some point where you go from communicating with a thing to redrawing the border around your brain. And we don't have a great sense of exactly where that transition is yet, but there's a sense that there is one. Like, the way that you use the two hemispheres of your brain as one integrated bound thing is different than the way that you talk to another person. And it's not just that there's correlation, because, like, all communication

• 14:59Speaker 00

  is about creating correlations between brains. When we speak, there's big correlations that are being driven between our brains, because there's, I mean, all, all communication is, is, like, premised on that. If we didn't pre-share a language or some common education, like, some sense of math, then we wouldn't be able to communicate those concepts. Because there's some, there's something that's lit up in my brain, I can serialize that to language, can send that to you, that lights up the same pre-shared concept spaces. And so there's one mode where you're, you've pre-shared some structure between the two brains, whether this is an AI model or a biological brain, and then you're communicating over that channel. The other is you've added some new structural capability. I think figuring out where that transition happens is a really, like, a really compelling area of research for us.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  What are you most personally interested in, in terms of exploring that boundary yourself?

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that is, like, what is you is a really central question here.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Like, if the end of the artificial intelligence quest

• 15:58Speaker 01

  I don't really care. What if I just want my brain to be a better computer, or a richer one in terms of understanding other people's experiences?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that you still, there is an important question here. So if I just, like, scanned your brain into a computer, and there is a software simulation of you, is that, does that count as you? Like, would that make you feel better about dying of cancer? Like, if you were diagnosed with lung cancer, and so you said, okay, well, we'll scan you into a computer. So imagine that we did, like, non-destructively, so you're, you are still there, but then you're talking to the software replica of you. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to go to hospice, but this thing will keep doing my venture investing job. Does that make you feel better, that much?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think on this question, have you ever been under general anesthesia?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well,

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And that produces a break there. And that's, this is the type of thing that you have to explain about, why does that feel different? Because I think it does feel different. I think that people are reticent to undergo general anesthesia, but they do it, they survive, and they realize it's fine. And then there's, if I could make a copy of you, and you can talk to that copy, and you're like, okay, I will go away now. I just don't think that many people are going to be like, this is it. And so you have to answer why it's different. There's an asymmetry in the, so you've got, like, some of the operators that actually change things in physics, so like, your creation or annihilation operator, and we get these in life, right? You can create a new life, or a new mind, or a new soul. And then there are times when they can be annihilated, they can get destroyed. And then there's ways that

• 17:31Speaker 00

  they kind of change while intact.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Do you study consciousness at science in a, like, a sequential way, or directly, explicitly today, when you talk about the operators that are part of it, let's say?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  So your conscious moment is a, you're experiencing a bunch of things in parallel. So you're seeing things, and you're hearing things, and you're feeling things, and you're smelling things, and these things happen just simultaneously together. But they are, they're kind of different elements of the experience. And we want to understand, how does the brain construct each of those, and how does it cause them to be perceived together to the exclusion of other things? Like, you have your vision and your hearing, you never get my vision and your hearing. And I, you kind of have this, like, you might think, like, that sounds, like, really obvious, like, it's in my brain, it's not in your brain. But we need some more fundamental explanation for really how that partitioning happens.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so you think that's a foundational component? Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  And so, and yeah, so I'm in the camp that, like, continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time, as long as they have continuity. But if you preserve the sense of identity, like, you have a software simulation that answers exactly like you would now, but it's not phenomenally continuous, that is less satisfying.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an interesting trade. I think I would take dramatic morph, but continuous experience.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'd take, like, significantly degraded IQ. Laura Dimming asked me this. Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  It's like, life with provable characteristics is a thing we've never seen before. And it might be, might be transient. Like, you probably accept degraded IQ for some period of time, if it then got backfilled some number of weeks later, and then you got some, I mean, at that point where you achieve substrate independence, you can really, you can take that almost anywhere you want, which is why that's really, really interesting. One of the big missing pieces here is connectomics. That is getting to, that is getting pretty close, I think, in terms of to the point where the project could be done. We're still relatively far from a human connectome, but I think we're not that far from a mouse connectome. That would be enormously useful for, for, like, facilitating this research and understanding about how all this works. We need to understand, like, even really basic questions, like,

• 19:41Speaker 00

  what is the overall architecture of the brain? We have some answer for it, but I don't know that it's like a really, really detailed one at this point.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  You are of the view that it makes sense that there is this increased, like, interest, this surge of investor interest and founder and engineer interest in BCI as a field, given the progress of AI model research, because the representations actually should be shared, or they empirically seem to be.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is, this is the idea called the platonic representation hypothesis. And this is really interesting. It is controversial in the community, but, I mean, from where I sit, there's clearly something real happening. So when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience. So if you look at how do, how do these AI models represent, just like, represent concepts, then you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts, you see these, you see very similar geometry. That, to me, was one of the first clues, like, when I really saw that. And we use that practically, like, we use that constructively at science. Like, that's, we know that that is, that is true, because we can get alignments between animal brain neural recordings and AI model internal representations.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  That was a big clue to me that the AI was on the right track and this was like not a gimmick and not hitting a wall. There was like something deeper, deeper that's true here. There's some fact about the universe for these things as they're learning or grabbing onto some true underlying data manifold. I mean, it feels like a law of physics. Like if you apply enough compute to matter, you get this thing that looks like intelligence.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Why do you think that's controversial? Or why is it in the field?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  There's some faction of people that kind of don't want this to be true for reasons that are not totally clear to me. It is also not clear. We don't completely, we don't really fully understand the whatever phenomenon is happening here. It's unclear if the structure is global or if it's local in some sense that in like, there's, you can recover relational structures between ideas, but it might be that this, this works locally. It doesn't like that where disconnected things might be placed might like this gets fairly detailed, like tech, technical quickly, but there's a bunch of stuff that we just don't know. And I think this causes, creates space for people to wonder, is this as giving us this fundamental of like a hint as it might seem? I think that it is.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  What do you think are the most fertile ways to study neuroscience today? If, if your set of beliefs is true?

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, ironically, it's probably working on AI. Yeah, I have some, I have a couple of neuroscience friends at, at OpenAI and Anthropic who it's like, we joked like, oh, you left neuroscience. Like, no, no, no. It is just way easier to do neuroscience on the models. But the, the degree to which it is neuroscience is fascinating.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I want to talk a little bit about the future and the, maybe the very short and then the medium time scale for, for science, short of, you know, changing the boundary of who, who we are. So what does it, what does it look like to commercialize the first program for you? You said that there need to be a hundred million dollar run rate businesses in this field. How do you get there?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, becoming profitable or at least have like, having the ability to do this forever is a super high priority. Restoring vision to the blind is a pretty good business if you can actually do that.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Especially since almost everyone has the problem as an age-related problem.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So AMD, it's like one in two have some early stage by 80. The, it's like one in 10, 85 that actually have it. The, it is definitely a major issue and not just vision, but these topics in general affect everybody. We don't have firm pricing yet. This is a thing that we are being a little cautious about how we talk about publicly because we aren't like totally sure yet. But the precedence for vision are all, I mean, I think we could say they're expensive. I mean, Second Sight 10 years ago, they, so there's a company about a decade ago that had a retinal prosthesis that works differently than ours does. It did not get the type of performance that Prima does, but was briefly

• 23:49Speaker 00

  approved because then there's really nothing for these patients. There's always been a lot of enthusiasm for anything that could possibly help them. And they didn't get what we call form, form vision. They didn't get like a coherent like face or like, like paragraph that, that your eyes could scan over. They got these flashes of light that patients could look at and kind of think about assembling into what they meant. They got paid about a hundred fifty thousand dollars per patient in the mid 2010s. There's a gene therapy that works, that is only relevant in the first place for about 5% of patients in one narrow indication. And it really doesn't work that well. It gets a point one line to improvement. It kind of slows the rate of degeneration for some patients. That reimburses

• 24:32Speaker 00

  at almost half a million dollars per eye. And so there's, I mean, some of this is a function of just how expensive it is to develop these therapies and how high the failure rate has been historically. And then some of it is that there's just, it is, I mean, vision's a very dominant sense for us. If you, if you lose that, that's totally debilitating and restoring it is, is very important, even just like minimal vision. So the, the TAM will grow over time. For this first version, it's on the scale of like hundreds of thousands of patients in the US and Europe. So for the, the current version of Prima is probably hundreds of thousands of patients. And then the next version, which is going into animal studies now will be in humans hopefully next year. Should expand that to millions.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  You said something that surprised me as a intermediate point between vision and, you know, fully understanding consciousness. How does oncology or other, like, how do other indications fit into the picture in terms of what you might work on?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  I mean, the thing that makes you, you, the only organ that you can't even in principle transplant is the brain. The, like, the heart, the pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and going. And I think we're going to get to a point where because the biology is so difficult, I mean, you've got this like alien nanotechnology that is around us that we are like completely surrounding us, that we are completely dependent on, that we understand still very poorly. Instead of needing to solve that, are there ways where we can accomplish the same fundamental goals, you know, like using a toolbox that humanity is much more advanced in? And so I'm going to be ultimately fairly disappointed

• 26:16Speaker 00

  if I'm murdered by my pancreas. And that, I think that's, that's the worldview. It's that the thing that matters is the brain. The brain is the computer that gives us this. You could not, we talk about being a brain in a vat or have like these upload thought experiments, but you already, that's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves, the optic nerve is nerve two, vestibular cochlear nerve that carries hearing and balance is nerve eight. You've got these, these little cables that carry your interaction with the world. That world is, is generated by the brain. And so if you can get visuals, the visual signal, auditory signal, balance motor, like somatosensory motor in and out of the

• 27:00Speaker 00

  brain, that is, that is an end in itself. That is the central object.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  And through a mix of the BCI's that allow you to kind of change the, the thing that it's interacting with and our perfusion medicine program, we think that there's ways to significantly improve not just lifespan, but health span and kind of create a better, a better quality of life for many patients in ways that I think will feel kind of like a lateral move rather than just solving many of the things that people have seen on the horizon.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  For people who are interested in working at or investing in science, if you are successful, you know, what will be the change the human experience 20 years from now besides you not worrying about your pancreas as much?

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, that's it. Like that's the, there's the, there's a sense, like a fragility that we all live, like there's this jeopardy that we all live under as part of the human condition. And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be, we will just become much less fragile. We will have the ability to upgrade and replace parts of ourselves. So neurodegeneration, we don't know about. That one still seems, that's still difficult. That still needs like real investment. The two leading causes of death though are cardiovascular disease and cancer that metastasizes to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work. The other extreme is if we're serious about

• 28:31Speaker 00

  exploring the universe and going to the stars, we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment. We're not going to export Earth with us everywhere we go. And these bodies are great, but they're designed for this planet. And it is going to be, adapting ourselves to the hard vacuum of space is definitely going to be, I think, the thing that we want to do in the long run. And ultimately, those are the same, those are the same project.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Being able to preserve yourself and being able to adapt yourself.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Swapable parts and substrate independence. Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Substrate independence. I'll use that phrase. The, the simplest premise for a company in the BCI domain today is like you can in some way, invasively, non-invasively talk to an AI model in like a high bandwidth way. That is not your focus of interest. Why?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that talking or writing is thinking. I think this idea that there's the stuff that's just this kind of preformed in your brain, that if you could access it through BCI, it would be faster is probably not, not the case.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  You don't think there's some special latent state that's not language?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  No, I think that, but the, like, it feels like you'll have, you'll, it'll feel like it's fully formed, but until you really sit down and try to write it out, it is, it isn't really. And I think that feeling is misleading. And so there's this, there's this like 10 bit per second, kind of famous like cognitive bottleneck. There's this observation that the brain seems to process information. Like if, there's a bunch of ways you can triangulate this. You can put somebody with a perfect memory on a helicopter ride over Manhattan, ask them to draw what they saw. And then you look at all the details, it works to about 10 bits per second over a course of an hour or two. There's like a bunch of different independent lines of evidence for this. So there's some deeply evolved cognitive bottleneck at about that. And I think that this kind of rolls up through

• 30:14Speaker 00

  language. But even so, but even if you, if you take that, it probably, I mean, it probably would be nice to be able to walk down the street with like a cap on and like ask questions to my AI through monologue. Like that might be possible. There's probably some combination of EEG and MEG that might be capable of this. That is still just like a different type of product. That is not the thing we are trying. Like brain keyboard is, I'm not, it might be valuable. It might turn out to be like AR lens, air glasses where it's just we were, our attention was already fully 100% occupied and putting it on the face didn't really change that. We were already consuming all the, all the time. But the,

• 30:54Speaker 00

  at the other end of that spectrum are things like generating vision or generating hearing or achieving substrate independence. Those are the things that we are focused on, not brain keyboard. Both of these are potentially BCI problems or products, but very different type of companies that will build them. Just as I think you have a huge range of, of drug companies.

• 31:18Speaker 01

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