Michael Mager | Pioneering the Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces

Srini

Michael, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Michael Mager

Thanks so much, glad to be here.

Srini

So you're like one of a long line of people who has been referred to be by Michael shine, who always refers to the most amazing guests. So no pressure at all, but, uh,

You know, he told me a bit about what you did. And when I heard the words brain implant, I thought, okay, yeah, I definitely got to talk to this guy. Like this is something that I've been wondering about. But before we get into all of that, uh, what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up shaping what you've ended up doing with your life and your career?

Michael Mager

Yeah, my parents had very different, and I'd say in some way complimentary careers. My dad was in business and finance his whole life and was involved in the community through board service on various charities. And my mother, after raising me and my sister, became a social worker and really dedicated her life to people who were older, who were often homebound.

and in many cases who didn't have family to come visit them. And so my mom would do home visits and organize for volunteers to do home visits, primarily in the Jewish community and in sort of uptown Manhattan. And I learned a tremendous amount from both of them. They have very firm sort of ethical moral foundations for what they did, but in one case, a very commercial focus and in the other case, really humanitarian focus.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Srini

Yeah, so it's funny because those are kind of opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Like a very commercial focus and a humanitarian focus. And I wonder how you blend the two together and how the blend has kind of shaped, you know, the choices that you have made. And when you're when you say that is in finance, we're talking like, you know, Michael Lewis, big swinging dick, investment banker, financier, you know, like somebody who's like a CFO at a company.

Michael Mager

Yeah, so somewhere between the two, I'd say. You know, he started his career as an investment banker in New York and then did some really interesting projects. He helped, for example, take the first car dealerships public before my dad and a couple partners. Car dealerships were always privately owned and there was actually restriction for taking them public because the auto manufacturers...

Srini

Okay.

Michael Mager

had a requirement of sort of knowing all the shareholders of the dealerships that they were in partnership with. And so my dad sort of pioneered this new method of public ownership for car dealerships. So somewhere in between the two.

Srini

Yeah. Well, so you alluded to the Jewish community. Are you of Jewish descent as well? Okay. So this is always something I'm curious about when I talk to my Jewish podcast guests, because everybody tells me that growing up as a Jewish kid is very similar to growing up as an Indian kid in terms of what you're taught about making your way in the world. It's like doctor, lawyer, engineer or failure.

Michael Mager

I am.

Michael Mager

Right. I mean, I think that there's definitely, listen, I think it's an incredibly proud intellectual tradition. I also think there's a history of sort of feeling a little bit like an outsider. And for me, I think that was honestly sort of helpful from a motivation standpoint, even though I grew up objectively, I was incredibly lucky. I had two wonderful parents and a loving family and a privileged upbringing in a lot of ways.

I think it's something in your background that my parents dealt with, their growing up, anti-Semitism and being excluded from certain institutions. And it's something that I have found in my life to be a, I'm quite proud and also quite motivational, but spiritually, I'm really not involved. It's more of a cultural grounding than anything else.

Srini

Yeah. Were they first-generation immigrants or were their parents here before them?

Michael Mager

Their parents, on my mom's side, my grandparents immigrated, and my dad's side a generation before that.

Srini

Okay. Yeah. He's like, I think about things like anti-Semitism and racism and how it changes from generation to generation. Like, you know, like I feel like obviously there's some undertones of some of these things happening today where it almost feels like we've gone backwards socially. But like, I wonder, like, what did they teach you about, you know, sort of acceptance and what all of that means in the context of society at large?

Michael Mager

You know, it really lit a fire under me. You know, my dad was told by the sort of principal of the school that he'd gone to that he couldn't apply to Harvard without sort of a loss basically to apply with him because they would never just take a Jew from the school he went to. They would at best take, you know, one and the other. And so, you know, that was something that I think understandably annoyed him for his whole life. And I found...

you know, to be sort of a motivating force in my life. And I sort of wanted to infiltrate the institutions that had historically been difficult to penetrate. And so in a funny way, I've always sort of, I've found it a positive rather than a negative. I can't say in my life that I've ever, I mean, listen, I grew up in New York. It's a quarter Jewish. It's, you know, outside of Israel, there are more Jews in New York than anywhere else. So, you know, I think it was an incredibly, an incredibly,

Srini

Hm hm.

Michael Mager

play stick we're up as a Jew I didn't experience anything bad.

Srini

Yeah. Well, talk to me about the trajectory of like, what has led you to what you're doing today? Because like, like I said, when I heard the word brain implant, like two thoughts went to my mind, this could be fucking amazing, or this could be dystopian as hell.

Michael Mager

Yeah, it has both those both those potentials, but I but I were working hard for it to be the former you know, I My life and my career were definitely not destined to end up In sort of you know brain computer interface industry. I studied history and literature in college and out of Out of college I moved to Hong Kong Initially as a summer intern for an investment fund that was based

Srini

Yeah.

Michael Mager

based in Hong Kong and basically investing from Australia to India and everything in between. And it gave me an extraordinary sort of background in business and different business models, different jurisdictions, incredibly different sort of cultural approaches to management and driving shareholder value. And I ended up sort of...

thinking that I was gonna spend a year or two in Asia, learn the ropes and then come back to the US, I ended up spending nearly eight years living in Hong Kong, which was an extraordinary experience and I made incredible friends and had a lot of terrific adventures. But ultimately, investing is generally about buying small stakes in very large public companies if you're sort of on the public market side. And that was something that I didn't find totally fulfilling.

So I moved back to the United States. I spent a year in England and did a graduate program and took some time off and came back to the United States and with a partner started really sort of buying and building a handful of businesses that we were intimately involved in. And it was sort of out of that came Precision Neuroscience, which is the company that's developing the brain implant.

Srini

Yeah. Well, let's talk briefly about your time in Hong Kong. I mean, I've been fortunate enough to be dragged around the world by my parents. But something I always wonder about people who spend like a large amount of time in another country, particularly as an adult, is the combination of two things. One is the culture shock when you arrive at that place and then the reverse culture shock when you return to the United States. Talk to me about those two things.

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, you know, it was a few different sort of anecdotes from that time. I'd say, you know, we invested in the largest media company in the Philippines, and the Philippines is a country of, at that point, 90 million people. And you know, it's a big market. And the movie stars there are completely unknown to anybody, virtually anybody in the United States. And so, you know, I had the opportunity to meet people.

at the sort of film studio who, you know, I couldn't tell the difference between someone serving the food and someone acting in the movies. And it was just a reminder that, you know, we all have very narrow perspectives and somebody's movie star is another person's total stranger and it doesn't, you know, one person is not really, you know, more valuable and more important than the next. It really just depends on your perspective on things. And I've sort of kept that.

as a core lesson, I think, for the rest of my life. I also had sort of, I think, a naive reaction to first moving to Hong Kong, which was, when I moved in 2005, which is when I graduated college, Asia was booming. China was growing over 10% a year, and developing Asia was just, it was going gangbusters, and yet there were fewer people.

who were sort of trying to leverage those opportunities who had gone to US or UK schools who were in a position to do really well out there. And I thought, God, what a mismatch. People have moved to New York, to these huge, very bureaucratic corporations, and they're just trying to sort of scratch their way up. Whereas this enormous opportunity in Asia, and people just don't understand. And what I came to realize was that,

living halfway around the world, no matter how big the commercial opportunity comes with real costs. And from a sort of lifestyle perspective, I really started to miss home and miss the people I grew up with and my family. And so I ended up becoming one of those people who ended up spending some time out there and coming home.

Srini

Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I had a similar experience. I moved to Costa Rica for six months because I was surfer and I was thinking, oh, this is going to be heaven. And I remember by the time I was done, I hated it. I wanted to get back and get back because I think that like and it's funny because you saw this really stark contrast between the people who would come on vacation there versus the locals and or people like me who are just staying there and everybody who was on vacation thought, oh, this must be amazing to like live here. And I'm like, no, it actually sucks.

Michael Mager

Hahaha.

Srini

And I remember when I went back for vacation, I had a much better time because I knew I was only there for three weeks.

Michael Mager

Totally, totally. It really depends on your frame of mind and also, you know, how much time. It's a big difference spending a couple weeks versus six months versus six years.

Srini

Yeah. Well, so one thing I wonder, you mentioned that working in banking gave you this fantastic foundation for understanding business and creating shareholder value. And something I've thought a lot about, I remember I wrote this article titled, Business School Teaches You Nothing About Running a Business, based on my personal experience. And I remember Naval Rabikov actually mentioned this. He said, the thing with starting a business is there are all these hidden.

idiosyncrasies that don't express themselves until you actually start the damn thing. And I wonder, based on the banking background, how much of that has translated and how much of it has been just like, holy shit, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Michael Mager

It's a great question. I would say that investing, especially investing in public markets, so investing in companies that are listed on the stock exchange, is probably somewhere in between running a company and really understanding the nuts and bolts and the guts of it and doing the more theoretical sort of business school case study type approach. You are making a, you're putting risk capital on the line.

into a company and every day you're told by the stock market whether you're right or wrong. And if you look too closely, I think you actually you sort of miss the point. So you can't look on a minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day basis. But over weeks and months, generally the stock price performance really follows the underlying performance and prospects of the business. And you're told in no uncertain terms whether your judgment was correct or incorrect.

And you don't necessarily know exactly why at least in the moment though. Generally you find out over time But you know having that money on the line and having yourself on the line to some extent You know really focuses the mind and it's not a theoretical Sort of construct that said, you know, there's a difference in doing that and then being

in the weeds of a business and living it day to day and seeing what the challenges are and the opportunities are and what can go right and what can go wrong. And I think that there's no replacement for that sort of lived experience.

Srini

Yeah, I think it kind of reminds me of Nassim Taleb's concept of skin in the game, where like you're directly affected by the outcomes of your actions when you're running a business.

Michael Mager

Mm.

Michael Mager

Totally. I mean, you are to a certain extent too, when you're investing. I mean, you know, you, I think that that's the benefit of investing where, you know, you feel it. When, when things go well, you can feel like you're, you're Superman and can do no wrong. And when things go poorly, you feel terrible. And I think that that's to a certain extent, similar to running a business, but running a business, you just understand what's driving the fundamentals in a totally different way.

Srini

Well, explain to me how a guy who studies history in college ends up running a company that was working on brain computer interfaces. And then I think we need to give people some foundational sort of neuroscience background, like the basics, because I literally had to take the article that was on Wired about you, put it into my AI, and it was like, explain this to me like a five-year-old so I know what the hell I'm talking about when I talk to Michael.

Michael Mager

Yeah, no, it's a it's that also is a great question. It's what my parents have asked many times. And so I'll do my best. You know, basically a brain computer interface fundamentally is an effort to create a digital communication link between the human brain and an external computer. And to enable

people through thought alone, so no movement, just through thought, to operate a computer, to play video games, to create art, to communicate via text messages and email, and so on. This sounds like it's science fiction, but the first person to be implanted with sort of a modern brain-computer interface was actually 2004.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

20 years ago, and that person was able to operate a computer cursor through Thought Alone. Subsequently, there are nearly 40 people who have been implanted with BCI technology. This sounds like it is very futuristic, but actually it's been going on for some time. The primary users of BCI technology up until now, and I think still for the next several

are people who are paralyzed for various reasons, whether it's spinal cord injury, certain kinds of stroke, neurodegenerative diseases. So the brain is still functional and the body in certain cases is still functional, but the connection is impaired. And so BCIs can play a really meaningful role in restoring that and giving people greater functionality and better quality of life.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Srini

Yeah. Well, so like when you said that you could send text messages through thought, like my first thought was like, what if I'm having a horrible thought about a friend or just thinking, God, this person pisses me off. Like that was, and it's like, hey, sent you know, and suddenly, you know, my friend who I absolutely love, but I'm just kind of annoyed with gets a random text from me thing saying, Hey, I think you're an asshole. Like, explain to me like what the boundaries are here. Like, how does this actually work?

Michael Mager

So the...

Michael Mager

The state of the art is certainly not that we can read people's minds. It is that, you know, it has to be very intentional. And, you know, for example, one way to think about it is through, I guess there are sort of two ways primarily the communication has been achieved with the BCI. One is by thinking about a moving a computer cursor over like digital letters on a keyboard.

Srini

Okay.

Michael Mager

and then clicking on them or by sort of imagining handwriting, so writing A, B, C, D, whatever, and write it, but not actually doing it, but just imagining that you're handwriting. And BCI can decode the intended movement and basically convert that into typing. Or imagine speech. So you know, really sort of...

recording around the motor area of the brain that is associated with movements of the mouth and tongue. And so, if you are trying to voice, and a lot of the people who have used this technology so far are locked in and so unable to speak at all, but they imagine moving their mouths in a way that would articulate certain words, and those words appear on a computer screen.

Srini

Yeah. Well, so something that I was thinking about, because you and I were just talking about my AI note taking app, which has like tens of thousands of notes in it, like, you know, all our podcast transcripts, like all my book notes. So are you saying that I could effectively have all of that knowledge basically accessible by memory?

Michael Mager

I think that right now we and most other BCI companies are focused on recording, i.e. the electrodes that are implanted in the brain in various ways and that gets into sort of the technical aspects of the technology, are sort of reading what the brain is intending to do as opposed to writing into the brain, which I think if you want to like basically allow for memory recall.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

through a technological product, you would need to be able to also write. And I think that that's some number of years away.

Srini

Yeah. Well, he's like, I was thinking about that. What are the implications of that for society at large? Some well-read kid who's read 1,000 books and has just kept detailed copious notes is going to have some massive unfair advantage over the average person who doesn't have this brain implant. So talk to me about the social implications for this over time. Because if we think about this from the standpoint of inequality, is this just going to create even greater levels?

of inequality potentially when we're talking about things like this. It almost reminds me of like designer babies.

Michael Mager

It's a great question. Let me take a step back and answer a question that I didn't really address, which is how did I find myself in this crazy industry and what am I doing here? It really was the genesis of a meeting that was set up by a mutual friend whom we had just both gone to college with a guy named Ben Rappaport. And Ben is an extraordinarily special and unusual person. Ben is both

a neurosurgeon and also an electrical engineer. So he went to Harvard Medical School and MIT to get a PhD in electrical engineering at the same time. And that was a very intentional combination of courses because his life's work, you know, starting sort of from the age of 20 has been to develop a brain computer interface. And the reason the mission, Ben's mission and now the mission.

of precision neuroscience is solely medically focused. So we are developing technology that we think will make a huge difference in the lives of people who are suffering from some forms of paralysis, of which there are a lot. And by the way, paralysis is something that could happen to anyone, could happen to any of us or our loved ones, family members.

Michael Mager

medical therapy that's available to people who are unfortunate enough to have paralysis. I think through BCI, there's the potential to make a huge improvement in quality of life in the first instance. Beyond that, I think that there are also hundreds of millions of people globally who suffer from neurological illnesses of various kinds, whether it's ADD or...

addiction or refractory depression or many others, which are poorly served by pharma, which has significant sort of unintended consequences and side effects. So I think there's a huge amount of potential that's, again, medical from this sort of combination of creating a connection between the human brain and artificial intelligence-driven algorithm.

So broader, what you're getting at, which is more sort of general use, BCI, is absolutely possible. I think it is decades away, and it is very much not the sort of founding mission of precision neuroscience.

Srini

Right. Well, let's talk specifically about what you mentioned about sort of the neurological issues as somebody with ADHD that immediately caught my attention. And you mentioned pharma, right? Which we say unintended consequences. Sometimes I don't, I kind of wonder if that's not actually unintended because we didn't have been Jane here. And I remember he was telling me about a phone call that he had with the CEO of a pharma company who said, the best drug we can make is the one that somebody has to take for the rest of their life.

He's like, it's the ultimate subscription business. And, you know, if you've read Michael Pollan's book, Changed How to Change Your Mind, he writes about the fact that, you know, like psilocybin is basically at phase three clinical trials. And the biggest opponents to this actually going through are pharma companies, because he's like, why on earth would you want somebody to be cured in, you know, four sessions of therapy with psilocybin when we can sell them, you know, Prozac that they have to take for the next five years? Like,

Michael Mager

Mm.

Srini

So this poses a huge threat to the industry. I feel like the pharma industry is like basically probably shitting bricks with all the innovation that's happening around potentially like making them unnecessary.

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, I think also neuro in general has been like a graveyard for most pharma sort of innovation. And so patients are starved for better solutions. And with a few notable exceptions, pharma has just done not a great job.

Srini

Yeah. Well, let's actually look at this in the context of some very specific use cases. Let's take ADHD as an example. Talk to me about how a brain computer interface could help somebody who has ADHD.

Michael Mager

So I think at this point, what do we know works? We know that we can put an array over areas of the brain that drive sort of motor function, so motor cortex, and that a BCI can decode those intended actions to drive function. We know that, and that's been the case, as I mentioned. Sort of people have been doing this for 19 years.

And we and other companies in this industry, and there's sort of five serious companies that have raised meaningful capital that are developing implantable BCI systems, we're all focused really on that use case because it is the one that frankly we know works. It's been extremely well validated. And we think that there is an opportunity, both sort of a clinical positive impact that we can drive by doing that, as well as

Srini

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael Mager

a commercial positive impact because it's a market that is significantly sized. Beyond that, there are reasons to believe that we can make a huge difference, but it will require experimentation and trials and validation before we can say for sure. One of the things about the brain, and I know that you've had a lot of podcast guests,

uh... who are you know involved in your own one way or another uh... you know it's in a lot of ways scientifically it's one of the last two frontiers we still know so little about uh... the actual mechanisms uh... of the brain and you know our hope is that this is not you know one of the sort of this is not why we started precision neuroscience but we think of byproduct of the work that we're doing uh... you know creating electrodes that interface directly with the brain we have already

provided a picture of human brain activity at unprecedented resolution. And the amount of what we're gonna learn from that I think remains to be seen. I think we're really optimistic, but it's hard to say with any certainty.

Srini

Yeah, well, earlier you alluded to the idea of, you know, making art, doing all sorts of things. So I like, you know, the like life hacker in me is thinking, OK, what are the implications of this for things like producing flow states on demand and like elevating human performance? Like, I know you've, you know, solely focused on medical applications. Like, what does the future potentially look like in your mind when it comes to this? Are we just going to have like cognitive superstars like being bred because of this?

Michael Mager

I would say that when we think about general use of brain computer interfaces, we think about this in the context of the interaction between human beings and computers. That interface, the interface between people and computers has really changed repeatedly over the course of the past, let's say, 70 or 80 years.

from like mainframe computers in the 50s to personal computers in the 80s and 90s, to laptops, to iPhones and iPads. And now we're moving into wearables. I'm wearing AirPods for this discussion and AirPods, I don't know if you use them, but like sometimes I forget that I have them in as if I had an implant. And that's actually part of like the functionality. So,

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

Right now, the way that human beings interact with computers is primarily through this little black box at the end of our hands. And it's possible that is the end state in terms of sort of the human computer interface. But I think it's also possible that it's not and that the interface becomes increasingly seamless in decades to come.

Srini

Well, and so one thing that I wonder about, you know, you mentioned earlier, like, you know, the possibilities are both potentially amazing and dystopian and that you're trying to avoid the latter. And I remember seeing it as a YouTube video or a documentary, there's a nightclub somewhere in Europe where the entire bar was run by an implant in somebody's arm. So they could pay for their drinks that way. They could basically their, their commercial life, like their financial life was managed through this implant. And

I don't know whether I saw it in a movie or something or read it in a book, but somebody was like, yeah, and the crazy thing about that is if somebody turned that thing off, you would effectively be paralyzed. I'm pretty sure it was probably a documentary about AI in China. So talk to me about sort of the... What are your fears for bad actors getting their hands on this technology and being able to do things like I just mentioned?

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, you know, we are building security into every aspect of the device, into the ASIC, which we're developing. So at the hardware level, as well as, you know, sort of fundamental and from the very beginning in the software level, obviously the stakes are really high when it comes to sort of neural security and data protection. You know, I think that this is a an area that requires like constant

sort of oversight and supervision. We're doing everything we can. I think, you know, one of the perspectives I think it's important to keep in mind is the patient perspective. And, you know, I was on a panel where someone who had one of the 40 people in Burkhart who was implanted with this technology, and, you know, he was asked a similar question about how he felt about data privacy and, you know, his own neural data.

And he said, well, it sort of depends. Like if the array is positioned on, you know, an area that controls my finger movements, I don't really care if, you know, those finger movements are kept super securely. But if the interface becomes able to interface with other areas of sort of my consciousness or my intentions, then that could be a very different, a different kettle of fish.

Srini

Yeah, I mean, like I'm imagining a black mirror type of scenario here when you're describing that.

Michael Mager

No, totally. Totally. And you know, this is something that like, you know, the first pacemaker was, you know, a plug-in. And then electricity was lost and, you know, someone died. And so I was like, oh, wow, we have to have a pacemaker that's battery operated in case that happens. And so absolutely like resilience is, and safety is sort of paramount in this technology.

Srini

Well, so talk to me about the patient experience. Let's say somebody, for example, with some sort of neurological disorder that comes to you and wants to have one of these implants, who's paralyzed, what does that process look like from diagnosis to implant? What does it look like after? And then are we talking people whose brains are fully functioning or are we talking stroke patients, people of Parkinson's, that kind of thing?

Michael Mager

So, you know, I'll give you a little bit of background on the company. We were founded in 2020. Ben and I started the company and then raised our first round of capital in 2021. And we implanted our first patient in 2023. So earlier this year, so, you know, basically two years from founding, which if you look at it in the context of medical devices generally and...

our peers in the brain-computer interface industry, it's incredibly, incredibly fast. So, so far we're limited in terms of the duration of the implants, so we can't let someone sort of go home with the implant. We're really now in the process of further validating safety and efficacy, but we hope to have our first FDA clearance.

Srini

Yeah.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

for a device that can be implanted for several weeks, sometime next year.

Srini

So I'd imagine getting FDA clearance for this is a hell of a lot more complicated than something like a nutritional supplement. So I'd imagine getting FDA clearance for this is a hell of a lot more complicated than something

Michael Mager

It sure is. And rightfully so. I mean, you know, you're talking about, you know, the stakes are high. You know, we are dealing with a material, which is a polyimide, which is what our array is made out of, that is, you know, well established in terms of biocompatibility. And the fundamental nature of our technology, I'll go a little bit into the weeds here, just because I think it's helpful context. So there are a few different approaches to how do you get

How do you create that interface for the brain? And it's really, it's basically how do you get electrodes, which are able to sort of sense the electrical activity of the brain and then stimulate, so IE like read and write, how do you get electrodes into the brain in a safe way that's able to drive functionality? That's kind of the core hardware question when it comes to the implant. And there are different approaches to how to do that. So,

The first approach was really pioneered by the Utah array, which is now owned by a company called Black Rack based in Utah. And it was a tool that was developed originally by neuroscientists for animal work that was then used for human patients. And it's basically a very small, few millimeters by a few millimeters, bed of very, very small needles. And those needles are pushed into the brain.

and are able to record sort of, you know, the activity of individual neurons at pretty good resolution. And so each of those arrays has about 100 electrodes. And of the five companies that are developing technology in the space, three of the five are doing something that is either that or is a derivative of that basic approach, i.e.

getting electrodes into the brain by penetrating into the brain in one way, shape or form. So that's BlackRock, Paragromix and Neuralink. And they're doing it in slightly different ways, but that's kind of the fundamental approach. We are developing, or we have developed an array that sits on the surface of the brain. It has incredibly a huge number of electrodes. So 1,024 electrodes within, you know, sort of...

Michael Mager

uh... a little more than a square centimeter uh... and these electrodes are you know that the array is incredibly thin so it's a fifth of the width of the human hair so it's really conformally on the surface of the brain uh... and those electrodes ninety five percent of them are fifty microns in diameter so half the width of the human hair so you can barely see them with the naked eye uh... and they're manufactured using uh... sort of photolithography which is like the same

technology that's used to make semiconductor chips. And because of that high resolution, you get an incredibly detailed picture of the brain's activity. The final approach to inserting electrodes is endovascularly, so like through a vein. And a company called Synchron is doing this with a stent-based array of 16 electrodes. And so, you know, all of those

sort of three technologies and three different approaches really have different safety profiles and they also have different efficacy profiles. And one of the benefits, I think, of our approach is that we don't do any damage to the underlying tissue of the brain, healthy or compromised. We do, you know, the array sits conformally on the surface of the brain, but it does not damage or disrupt brain tissue. And so it's reversible.

And from the FDA's perspective, this is an important feature, which is unique to sort of the approach that we've taken at Precision, and which is part of the reason why we've been able to get into patients so rapidly compared to others.

Srini

So once one of these implants is in somebody's brain, I mean, not just in terms of what you guys are doing, but across the board, like what kind of information are we able to get beyond sort of just like looking at a brain scan and seeing brain activity? Like, you know, how much of it can we decode into something that we can actually say that like the layman could make sense of?

Michael Mager

So that's where we are as an industry, which is that we're now on the cusp and really just starting to generate lots of high resolution data. And decoding that data is what is going to ultimately drive the extraordinary functionality of BCIs in coming years. There were two results at two different academic labs that were announced last week that made a

big splash sort of in the industry. Both came out in nature. And one was the result of work done at UCSF by the chairman of the neurosurgery department. And one was done by a group at Stanford. And the two groups, totally independently, were able to sort of record the world record in terms of the speed of speech decoding. So.

UCSF was able to achieve 80 words per minute, and the Stanford group was able to achieve 62 words per minute. And that's approaching sort of conversational speeds. And the people who were doing this, in one case, had a brainstem stroke and had been locked in for 18 years, and in another case had ALS and was unable to communicate. And so you're getting to the point now

you're starting to see in the academy, people drive results that really are sort of able-bodied like in terms of performance levels. And what we're doing and what a few of the other companies are doing are really taking this technology and productizing it because the way it's being done in sort of an academic setting is with technicians and with wires and in a way that's not a scalable product.

And so our job is to take that and make it something that can be adopted at sort of a mass scale.

Srini

Well, thinking about this, you know, I remember a conversation I had with the CEO of Effectiva, where they use like eye tracking technology to gauge people's emotional responses to how they're reacting to content that they consume. And, you know, obviously that is like incredibly valuable information for advertisers. We tried to do it with our listeners. The problem is people listen, they don't watch a podcast for the most part. So it was kind of hard to get any real data, but it just got me thinking like, wow, could we actually like, you know,

proved by like, you know, my goal was basically, I wanted to say like, we can use science to prove that listening to this podcast actually makes you a happier person over the long term, which was an absurd, like a really insane thesis. But just based on the anecdotal evidence, right? Well, what if we could actually quantify this with real science?

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, Elon Musk talks about Neuralink's device as like a Fitbit for the brain. And I think that that's, you know, along the lines of what you're describing, where you could see, you know, brain states in super high sort of definition and correlate those with activities and entertainment and all sorts of different things.

Srini

Well, where do you face resistance, both from the medical community as well as patients? Like, what kind of things? Because like I said, I think my first thought would be that people would be like, oh, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think our biggest challenge honestly is just that what we're doing is, you know, very complex. It requires there is hardware, there's an implantable aspect to it. So there's a part of the system that actually sits on the surface of the brain. Then you have to develop microelectronics, including a custom ASIC that processes the signals that are coming out of the brain in a sort of power efficient way. And then, you know, through, you know, appropriate power management, you know,

appropriate wireless protocol, you can get the information from the implant to a computer. And then there's a totally critical software element to this where, to your point, you need to sort of decode all the information that you're recording and make sense of it. It's a really interdisciplinary project to develop a BCI, and it requires people with not like good...

expertise, but like world class expertise in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, regulatory science, just so many different areas. And so I'd say that's like one of our largest challenges. And then also, you know, we're operating in a very highly regulated industry. And again, like, rightfully so. Safety is sort of, you know, cannot be compromised.

But that means longer timelines and ultimately greater expense. And so I think that just sort of comes with the territory of developing a brain-computer interface. On the other hand, the size of the market's enormous. So compared to most medical devices and really most technologies more generally, I think the opportunities here are pretty profound.

But you know, you take the good with the bad.

Srini

Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing like this in industry where there's like little to no margin for error.

Michael Mager

Yep. I think medical device technology is like that in general. And I think this is, this is, you know, especially so.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Srini

Well, let's finish by talking about one other thing. Like, let's, you know, go beyond the sort of health care use case and talk about, you know, like in the future, what might an everyday use case look like, you know, in terms of just enhancing our day to day lives with this kind of technology, like, what are we possibly going to be able to do that we can't today?

Michael Mager

It's so hard to speculate. I do think that all of the ways in which we, Elon Musk's view on this, which he's been very public about, is that AI poses an existential threat to humanity, and effectively, if you can't beat them, join them. And so, creating a sort of symbiotic connection between human beings and computers is our best shot at long-term survival.

That is like way out there and certainly not the thesis of precision neuroscience. Um, but I do think, I do imagine ways in which the technology could be, could be pretty useful on a day-to-day basis. I mean, I think about it in sort of sometimes like really prosaic ways. Like I like going for runs to sort of clear my head and, uh, get some exercise and, you know, I have most of my creative thoughts while going for a run. And I'd say I forget like half of them by the time I'm done. Uh, and.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

you know, being able to sort of jot down notes and maybe message someone on the fly, you know, using nothing other than your thoughts, I think would be really awesome.

Srini

Yeah, no, that would be very cool. As somebody who's a writer and content creator, that would be mind-blowingly cool to me. I think that would be just one of those things that could be transformative in terms of just our day-to-day lives.

Michael Mager

Thanks.

Michael Mager

Yep, absolutely.

Srini

Well, this has been just absolutely fascinating. I have two more questions. What is your take on the Elon view of AI being an existential threat to humanity? Because just to give you an idea, I use, as I mentioned, this AI note taking up mem. And this is something that I found that was really kind of funny. I was going into one AI, and based on the fact that I had all my content in one, I was like, I need you to give me a prompt that I can put into another AI to generate images. And I was like, this is

fucking ridiculous. So I was like, literally, I was like, okay, you know what? I want you to craft a business plan for an idea that I have no idea how to execute the AI to AI communication layer for the internet. And it was like, that's a gargantuan undertaking. But it got me thinking about what you said about the existential threat, because I realized, I was like, wait, I'm literally saying I want all my AIs to communicate with each other, which suddenly puts us in a very different state when it comes to AI, where it literally.

you suddenly are AI to AI communication, to me, on the one hand, I'm like, that would be amazing. And then I thought about the greater implications, I was like, that can be dangerous too.

Michael Mager

It totally could be. And I think what you're getting at is kind of my, I have sort of two fundamental thoughts when I think about AI. I think it's just the range of outcomes in the next sort of few decades has widened. So I think it could be insanely awesome. And there are so many ways that certainly, like I spent a lot of time in the healthcare sector, I think there's so many ways that AI can play an incredibly constructive role in delivering like consistently best in class healthcare to people.

Srini

Mm-hmm.

Michael Mager

that I think that there's a lot of both economic and human health benefits that I think are really likely as a result of AI. But then on the other hand, there's the non-zero chance that we destroy ourselves or it destroys us or some combination of those two things. People will debate the probabilities of that outcome, but the fact that it's non-zero,

Srini

Yeah.

Michael Mager

why haven't we found life outside of the earth? And one plausible explanation is that when creatures become intelligent enough, they figure out how to destroy themselves. And in the 40s, we discovered one area, one avenue for total mass destruction, nuclear warfare. And now it seems like we're in the process of sort of...

Discovering another one so going from like zero technologies that could destroy humanity to two all you know within a hundred years is You know, maybe that's bad. I don't know

Srini

Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating as I expected it would be. So I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Michael Mager

You know, I sort of think about this from the perspective of an investor, which is sort of, you know, how I was trained in the first part of my career. And you know, it's very, when you're looking at investment, you're looking at the idea, the product, the problem that's trying to solve, you look at the team, or the person who, you know, is trying to execute it. And you look at the size of the market and the risk that is associated with that market generally.

And people generally sort of think like the more risk you take, the more return you get and vice versa. And that's usually the case. But every once in a while, it's really not. And for me, you know, meeting Ben, Ben is just, you know, one of these incredibly gifted, brilliant people who had spent his whole life becoming, you know, the world expert on an area of technology.

that we knew worked and yet still hasn't had the impact that it should have. And so I certainly felt like meeting Ben was sort of an unmistakable opportunity for me. And that's how I've spent the past several years of my life.

Srini

Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, your company, and everything else?

Michael Mager

Yeah, I mean, our website, precisionneuro.io and LinkedIn. And we are hiring, so please take a look.

Srini

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.