- So imagine you have a technology
that can help you understand yourself,
your cognitive load, all the things that are distracting you
each hour during the day.
This technology essentially enables you to have
that type of information in real-time.
- There's a technology race happening
that you may not have heard of:
Connecting our brains with our everyday tech.
- Our dream is that you'll be able
to walk into a store, pick up a pair of Beats headphones,
Apple AirPods, Bose headphones, put them on your head;
they can record your brain activity,
and you can seamlessly switch your music
send a text message, et cetera, et cetera.
- But connecting our brains to our technology
raises a lot of questions.
- The world's already moving
toward a place where
this technology's gonna become essential.
It's becoming inevitable that this future that
we're creating is going to happen.
- Should we be concerned when neurotech companies
want access to our brains?
And are we ready for a mind control, sci-fi future?
- I thought to myself the only way to really reach that goal
that I want to accomplish,
to create a world without limitations,
is to be the one to push it as well too.
- This is a show about founders
challenging the status quo.
Ramses is demoing their brain-computer interface tech.
- What I'm doing is I'm focusing—
and now we're gonna see the effects of my focus,
if we introduce a distractor
of something really cute, like my dog.
Neurable is focused on creating
what we call an 'Everyday Brain-Computer Interface.'
How do you make technology
that just seamlessly integrates into everything around you?
- This idea is not a new one.
Scientists have been advancing this kind of tech
since the '70s.
You've seen it as EEG in hospitals
for diagnosing brain conditions—
generally with a skull cap and a bunch of sensors,
or maybe as an implant,
or partnered with a prosthetic.
Ramses and his team have taken the tech out of the lab,
and into consumer markets.
- The first part of our journey has been,
how do we take this lab-grade technology
and make it fit into an everyday device?
And so what we did as an innovation,
is we identified that there was a specific
type of brain signal, that we were looking for,
and we developed a modeling approach
to only focus on identifying that core, specific signal.
And that was such a huge step that we thought,
"Wow, we have something special here.
Now it's time to really bring this out to the world."
The next big milestone was getting this technology
down to something that fits around your ear.
- Wearing headphones feels normal.
We wouldn't have to learn new behaviors to
adopt neurotechnology into our lives.
Think of it like a Fitbit for your brain.
- Really the secret sauce is our software
that is able to interpret brain data
better than anything else on the market.
- It gives you an insight on how your environment
is affecting your brain.
So things like productivity, focus, flow, but also burnout—
all while reading your thoughts?
- Our technology is not reading your thoughts.
It's just reading large-scale changes
in electrical activation.
For example, if you start reading a book,
or doing coding or anything
that really activates your brain,
your frontal lobe starts to increase in electrical activity
because it's processing information.
And so we're able to understand
that there's an increase of focus
and processing that's occurring.
And that's what we're really picking up.
Part of making sure that this is an everyday device
is we wanted to make sure that it could work passively.
That you don't have to do anything special to make it work.
You can just put them on, and then it's recording your activity,
and whenever you want to volitionally do something,
they're able to pick it up and understand you.
I believe entrepreneurship really means
that there's something that you feel inside you
that doesn't sit well.
You look at the world and you see somebody's pain,
and you think, "Why should this exist?
This should be done better."
You know, if no one else is gonna do it,
then damn it you're gonna do it yourself.
We had patented the technology,
and we brought it to the tech transfer office
and we said, "Hey, so what's next,
are we gonna change the world with this?
Like, this is incredible."
And they said, "Well, you know, we're gonna license it out.
We're gonna go talk to these groups."
And at that point I said, "That seems really slow.
Like, I can't see it really moving forward."
And so they kind of jokingly said,
"Well, you can make a startup."
This was the next stage in that chapter
toward developing that mission.
When I was about eight years old,
my uncle got into a trucking accident,
he lost both his legs.
And it was one of the most traumatic moments
for me personally.
But what it really instilled is this deep passion
toward, how do we create technology
that can help everyone participate equally?
At that point, I felt that the right step
was to understand how circuits worked,
how control systems work for prosthetic devices.
So I went to the University of Washington,
studied electrical engineering there.
And what I noticed is there was this huge disconnect
between the actual brain
and the machines that we were controlling.
And so, that's when I decided to get my PhD in neuroscience.
And then from there, the opportunity to build something
and to accelerate this future was entrepreneurship.
Hey everyone, how's it going?
- Good, how are you?
- Good, good.
- The biggest challenge that we have in front of us is
making sure that the technology works seamlessly
across multiple individuals,
which is a very difficult thing to do
because everyone's brain is different.
In order to make it
so that this technology can work across multiple people,
we need to collect a lot more data.
But it is also your brain,
and there is a emotional connection to that as users.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa-
a lot more data?
Help me understand, if you sell your technology
to like Apple, they put it in their Airpods;
how do you keep Apple from not collecting your data?
- Okay.
All right, I guess we're gonna go on record on this one.
Okay, so right now, when we're working with partners
that are gonna be integrating our technology
into their products, we're very strict with them
about respecting that user privacy and that data.
We wanna make sure that a user has full agency
behind it, instead of just us hiding everything
into an end user licensing agreement,
and taking everything that they have
because that erodes trust.
The companies that work in neurotech
have to learn from the mistakes of the past,
specifically, the internet.
- With the internet, we've saved little bits
of data that have created shortcuts in our lives,
things like cookies and auto checkout;
but we are still incorporating all the ways
to protect that data.
- We have an opportunity to do better
now that we've seen these mistakes occur
as we move forward toward this high-data future.
Coming from academia,
that is actually one of the core reasons
why ethics is so important to us.
We've all gone through IRB training.
We all understand HIPAA regulations.
We all understand what anonymous data versus, you know,
identifiable data is.
From our perspective,
we like to think of it as an individual—
that gives us an advantage in really establishing the
types of ethics we wanna follow at the company.
When you're looking at the future,
you have to have a very concrete pathway
of how you're gonna get this technology
into millions of people's hands.
I've been asked numerous times,
'Why devote your entire life to one thing?'
My response to that is that, 'It's not done yet.'
I know that this is the world that I want to see,
that I want to create,
and that I want everyone to experience.
And so, my mission's not done until that's done.
- Killer.
He is an emotional support animal.
- That's right.
- I mean, I support his emotions.