The Jordan Harbinger Show - 55: Mary Lou Jepsen & Rob Reid | The Future of Telepathy and Affordable Healthcare

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Mary Lou Jepsen (@mljmljmlj) and Rob Reid (@Rob_Reid) discuss giant holograms, affordable life-saving medical imaging for all, telepathy, and a future when devices read images directly from our brains. What We Learn from Mary Lou Jepsen and Rob Reid: Mary Lou Jepsen's MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) alternative that will save countless lives by being affordable to all. Why Mary Lou's multidisciplinary background makes her uniquely qualified to bring such a revolutionary medical breakthrough to light. How this technology will more accurately hone in on early stage cancer, detect clogged arteries in time to prevent strokes, identify pregnancy complications, and much more. Ways this technology might be applied in the future to make telepathy possible. Why you should subscribe to Rob Reid's After On podcast if spooky science like this is right up your ally. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. On this episode, well, I'm not really talking to anybody. I actually decided to air an episode of another show. And don't worry, I don't think I'm going to make a huge habit out of this, but I listened to this episode on AfterOn podcast hosted by my friend Rob Reed, and he interviewed Mary Lou Geppson, who's talking about, well, imaging technology, fMRI that's portable, wearable, a lot of brain imaging, just stuff that's going to blow your mind from dream reading and being able to upload thoughts and dreams and everything that's going on in your brain to the cloud.

It is a crazy set of thoughts and she is the authority in this field and really working on this stuff now. This is not just like one day we'll be able to do this. It's like, no, I'm working on this right now. I figured y'all would love this so much that I remember listening and going, I should interview this person, but I would probably just do the same interview. So Rob and I reached out to each other, and we were like, hey, why don't we just do kind of a cool swap? Because he really liked the James Fallon episode and sent it out to his audience. So I'm hoping that many of you will discover a new favorite today in AfterOn podcast. It's quite a different show than what I'm running here. And I interview Rob at the end of this episode so you can figure out what's a fit, what's not, what's going on

with Rob's show and why I think it's a fit for you and a little bit more about him. So enjoy this episode with Mary Lou Jepson and prepare to be pretty freaked out and amazed by what's coming in the future. And don't forget to stick around at the end of the interview because I do have that little mini interview with Rob Reed at the end of Mary Lou Jepson's interview. Enjoy. What a beautiful morning to be in your gorgeous living room. And for those who can't see us, which is everybody, could you just briefly describe your home in your neighborhood because it is so fabulous and unique? I live on the houseboats in Salisito that were really a hippie colony where people squatted in the 60s where they didn't need to pay any rent.

And it's really evolved into this really great way to live. It's earthquake proof because when the ground liquefies, big deal, we're already liquid. And there's this big secret about the Bay Area. There's a Bay. There is a bay. And you see it. You're surrounded by it. And you're surrounded by it.

And we've got a couple seals on that platform. and you'll see pelicans come in and kayakers. How many houseboats are in here? There's about 450 houseboats. And when I bought my first houseboat, they were considered landfill. It turns out that more professionals moved on the boats. I think Stuart Brand, for example, is a neighbor. He's been here since 1975.

Cool. And as a result, somehow we were able to become legal in 2004. So all of a sudden, houseboat prices went up. And now we've gone from landfill to their thinking of historic preservation of them. So talking about your company and your work, I feel like most new ideas and technology could logically occur to anyone of a number of people who have the necessary background to conceive of the idea at the time when it first becomes possible. But occasionally something comes along that could really only arise in one brain

because of the exotic intersection of knowledge that the idea requires of inputs. And I view your current work through this lens because I see it is arising from four background elements which you probably uniquely possess. They are, first of all, deep expertise in holography, which very few people have, an equal depth in the 2D graphical world of screens,

of all kinds of screens, which more people have, but relatively few holographists have, thirdly, years of pushing billions of dollars worth of product through the trillion-dollar manufacturing infrastructure in Asia. And then finally, a very personal and highly relevant history with brain tumors. And in the Venn diagram of backgrounds, you may be the only person who occupies that very spot. And so if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to go through those very, very briefly, perhaps starting chronologically with holography. You, I know, grew up on a farm in my own tiny state of Connecticut and then went to Brown University in the even tinier state of Rhode Island. And shortly after you

got there, you discovered holography. Well, I'd been fascinated by it, but there was a class in it. It was amazing. I mean, it's combined all this really hard math problem and really beautiful lasers and a lab, a whole room that was like a camera that had to be completely dark and a table that floated on air and you'd set up these mirrors and there was these magnetic bases that you locked down and nothing could move more than a hundredth of the width of a human hair when you made this setup to make your hologram come out right. That's cool. You stayed with that for years, right? I mean, that became the focus of your graduate work, didn't it? Yeah. My parents said they'd help me pay for college if I'd major in electrical engineering and they were quite serious. But to maintain

any ounce of creativity I might have had. I started to take art classes. I joined a punk rock band and needed to express in different ways. And so you stayed with holography. Were you still working with holography when you were into your PhD stage? Yes. You were. I was doing liquid crystal-filled holograms, did them for windows, for daylighting, and then also for the new burgeoning area of microdispplays, which ended up being my first startup with two other grad students. Oh, I was also working on crazy things like projecting video on the moon. Like the side art projects, keep me happy. Wait, wait, wait. Let's take a little bit of a side detour here. Projecting video on the moon? Did you do that or was that a concept?

We didn't do it. So I designed a system to do it. I could have been making these really big installation holograms in primarily Australia on the Great Barrier Reef and Germany. And they filled a city block or a beach cove. So it's like installation art that you're doing on a grand scale. On a grand scale, but they only worked when the moon was in the correct position or the sun was in the correct position for maybe 10 minutes a day for 55 days a year, for example. So figuring all of that out, I had to write my little moon package. And then I thought, well, why not just go for it? Let us project right on the moon. Could you do it? And so I figured out how to do it and raise some

money and got a lot of support actually from musicians and MTV, rock stars and so forth. How do you do it? Or how would you have done it? So the only way to get enough light that I could figure out is when the sun, earth, and moon were all in the right positions using the heliostatic mirrors. Those are these big three by three meter mirrors that track the sun. They basically reflect the sun to a tower that has water in it, to boil the water to make steam to drive a turbine to make electricity. They went in during the Carter administration with solar funding. Yeah, there's one in Daggett, California near Death Valley. It's a square mile of mirrors. Wow. And looking at that and adding a couple million dollars of options, to the top. It's enough light where you can project the light on the moon and see it with the naked human eye. And you would do this when it was a new moon so there wasn't any light on it? Right. A sliver moon where it's actually dark. And so... That's cool. It's still a cool idea. Yeah, you can do it. Actually, Bill Gross has this big solar array. So every time I see him, I'm like, we should do that at some time. But here's the thing. I got these death threats and people were

really offended by the idea. And the question is just because you can do it, should you do it? And so also I was getting sick at the time. But really, I think it was the death threats. And he had to do it at a sliver moon, which had religious significance. Oh, right. In Islam. In Islam. Yeah. And people might have been afraid you were going to put the Coke logo up there or something like that, which, by the way, Coke would have been delighted with, I'm sure. I had meetings of both Coke and Pepsi. And they were both vying for who was going to sponsor this thing.

There you go. Okay. And then you did get sick. It was almost a year, right? And it was mysterious, wasn't it? I'd been on and off sick since about age 12 with long bouts in the hospital, two, three months at a time for unknown diseases. And I had been getting progressively worse for a few years. It's insidious, though. It's so slow you don't even notice. You just, you know, I was late 20s. I thought I was getting old. So, yeah.

So then I was sleeping 20 hours a day, living in a wheelchair, body covered with all kinds of different color sores. and I couldn't move half my face, so I drooled. The worst part was I could no longer subtract in my head, and so I didn't think I deserved a PhD in device physics. So I dropped out of my PhD program to go home to die because nobody could figure out what I had. I mean, I was at an Ivy League school that had a med school. I got access to a lot of the professors.

They tried to debug what I had, but they could not figure it out. And then what ended up happening? One of those professors actually sprung for the cost of an MRI. And then it turned out I had a brain. tumor, which everyone else was depressed about, but I was thrilled because I had a diagnosis. I'm like, great, there's a solution for that, cut it out. And so that worked. I had brain surgery. And it took about 30 days to get the appointment, have the surgery, recover from the surgery. And then I got back into grad school. Now, I want to echo something you just said. You were in an Ivy League school. You're in the wealthiest

country in the world. It was a while ago, but at that point, MRI technology was already pretty widespread. And I think a lot of Americans, particularly more privileged ones, incorrectly think of MRI as being a pretty broadly accessible service, but it certainly is not, as evidenced by your own experience. It saved your life. Had you not had this generous professor, you probably would have died. Could we talk briefly about the cost and the inaccessibility of MRI even in wealthy countries in 2018? Sure. We have about 50 MRI machines per million people in the US today. But you get to Mexico, you've got two MRI machines per a million people. I was talking to a reporter in the UK who was just in the hospital for five days. She said she only needed to be in there

for two days, but it took three days to get a slot on the MRI machine in the National Health Service in the UK. These things are expensive. They're a few million dollars. They're the most expensive room in hospitals. It's a two-ton magnet with liquid helium cooling it at all times and shielding. And it's about half a million to a million dollars a year of maintenance for these machines. And these are like $26, $2,700 a scan. They're a profit center for hospitals, so they want to do more of them now today, 2018, and it generated $50 billion of revenue in the U.S. alone last year. Even in this very wealthy country, and even for people who have fabulous insurance,

an MRI is a better way to diagnose breast cancer than mammography, but it is rarely used because it is so expensive. Yes. Mammography is not as good a diagnostic as MRI. MRI is too expensive. It's not used for first-line screening in this country or in any country in the world because of its expense. And if it were presumably a certain number of lives

would be saved, but it's simply too expensive even here to use it. Yeah, it's about 10 times better in terms of diagnostics than mammography. So now I'd like to fast forward through your post-tumor pre-open water career, because that's when your expertise in 2D screens, which I think is very important,

and also your experience with this massive manufacturing infrastructure in Asia came into play. So after recovering, you started a couple of companies, right? Yes. So I started micro-display, and we worked on virtual reality systems and projection displays and wristwatch video and early smartphones.

And basically, we were putting liquid crystals on silicon chips for very high resolution screens. And also in the midst of that, you co-founded one laptop per child, correct? Yes, I did two screen startups, although I moved to Intel and was the CTO of their display division, convinced them to close it

and decided to give up any kind of commercial stuff forever, and went to MIT and became a professor. At the Media Lab, right? At the Media Lab. So I became a professor at the Media Lab. That's what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And it took like three weeks to start one laptop per child

with Nicholas Negropon. the founder of the MIT Media Lab. Could you give us a brief sketch of what one laptop per child was? So the idea was to get one laptop to each child, everywhere. Throughout the world, but particularly the developing world. Particularly the developing world, yes. What year was it that you guys? It started in 2005.

Yeah, when laptops were not at all widespread in the developing world, nor even necessarily in the industrialized world. People thought it was a joke. Craig Barrett, then CEO of Intel, my former boss's boss's boss. And Michael Dowell and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs just thought it was a joke. It would never work publicly and privately derided us. It seems so crazy because laptops at that time were about $2,000 plus all the software you put on them. Think of a loaded laptop and what that cost. Nicholas was really going out and selling it. I was the chief technology officer and nobody actually asked me, but I'd never shipped a laptop before. But I'd shipped a lot of the most expensive components in the laptop before the screens and the way you drive the screens, which is really seven. 20% of the cost. And so I had an idea of how to do it and did it. But really, the issue was more than cost was power because half of the children in the world live without steady ready access to electricity. So we figured out how to make a one watt laptop and chipped it. So a lot of that was the

screen architecture that I invented that was sunlight readable and retina display before Apple coined the term long before, in the lowest cost laptop ever made and super low power. Now, the organization did not ultimately itself hand a laptop to each child in the world, but there are a lot of things that came out of it that were radically important. You also did ship a lot. How do you encapsulate the legacy of one laptop per child? Right. So that's true.

We delivered to Ministries of Education and only did a billion dollars of revenue. We catalyzed the $30 billion of revenue and catalyzed the fact. as growing consumer electronic category ever recorded the netbook, which was a low-cost, small laptop. But the legacy is really changing the equation of what a minister of education can do for the children of their country in the developing world specifically. Now, after OLPC, you went through a couple of the very storied companies of the digital world. You worked first at Google and then at Facebook, correct? Yes.

At Google, you were working on moonshot projects with Sergei, correct? Yes. And in context of what was then Google X, what constituted a moonshot? And is there anything that you worked on that you can actually mention or is that still deep dark secret? I can talk about the patents because if you just Google my name and Google in patents, you can find out what I was working on. A moonshot basically was what Larry and Sergey thought was cool. I think that was the best definition of a moonshot. It's a good definition. Something that they thought was cool enough to. to put some resource on and explore. And so the Wall Street Journal reported that there was this sort of Lego TV system that Google was working on. It reported that I was involved in it.

And if you look at my patents, you can see a way to make screen-like walls where there's no line between it or bezel or anything. There's no seam. You could put up one screen, then another screen, then another screen and slowly, steadily as your budget allows or as your design sense allows, cover more and more of your wall with screens. I'm just guessing. Is that roughly? Yeah. So you really change TV, but you also change your digital life. Because LCDs right now cost $15 a square foot. Wow. It's amazing. It's cheaper than walls. So everybody can have a million dollar view or a shared wall. If your family lives in a different time zone or a different geographic location, it can just be this ambient thing. You can change decoration. We have all

these photos, you know, millions or at least hundreds of thousands at this point for lots of us. But basically changing screens to enable ambient screens and wall-like screens. And it must be noted that Google does make a lot of money advertising and there's profound implications for large screens and walls. So figured out how to do that using really low-cost, high-volume manufacturing processes to make that quickly. Very cool. And then Facebook, what was it that took you over to Facebook from Google? Something happened that I really didn't like. That is somebody else's story. Somebody I was working closely with was treated very badly by the organization. Mark Zuckerberg had wanted to have dinner. So I'm like, okay, let's go. I felt very well cared for. And Sergei was

very supportive of my work and I liked working with him and he's so bright and creative. And then Mark handed me this folder at dinner. It basically added a zero to my compensation package 10x. Yes. Yeah. So then I just realized I was worth a lot more to Facebook at that time because Mark had bought this company called Oculus for $2 billion. And really, really great computer gamer people like John Carmack. They were working on VR and I built VR systems in the 90s in VR 1.0. But here's the thing is they didn't have any experience shipping any kind of consumer electronics before and particularly distinguished by the screen and the optics. And that's really the thing that I was really specialized and they thought that I would be really valuable.

And you were there for how long? A year and a half. Oh, can I say something more about Oculus? Absolutely. The cool patent's there are sunglasses, VR, AR with a toggle. Everybody says, is it VR or AR? And the answer is yes. And are our real reality?

And so you need glasses that can do it all. And so if you look at my patents, you'll see like sunglasses, like no excuse, that form factor. Yeah. That does VR or AR. And also the AR, like if you've got aliens and you're playing a game or you want a person to appear on the couch over there in my living room. Don't you want the person to be opaque? Right. Not translucent. Yeah. So we have what they call on computer graphics alpha channel. So that is what I was doing at Facebook and Oculus primarily. How many patents is your name on?

I don't know. I haven't checked recently. I had to check about a year ago and I had more than 200. Wow. So let's talk about near infrared light, what it is and why it matters so much to the work that you're not doing. Near infrared light, silicon is sensitive to it. And your body's translucent to it, but it scatters it. So like, as we all did in summer camp, you put a flashlight up to your palm, and you look on the other side and there's this creepy red glow. It's not transparent. Like, our bodies are transparent to x-rays, but some gets through. Some gets through. And you see red light and infrared light is more red than red light. It's actually a little bit longer wavelength. We can't see it with our eyes, but if you put on night vision goggles, you can't. You can't

can see it. Yeah, it's the nearest neighbor to the light that we can see, but it's lower energy than the light which we can see, which means it's absolutely non-carcinogenic. It doesn't cause cancer at all, et cetera. It's not something we're afraid of. Right. It's benign. And we're talking about light levels lower than you experience outside on a sunny day. As I understand it, if you pulse a light source, an infrared light source on let's say one side of your hand because we use that example and have a detector on the other side, some tiny fraction of the light rays will go right through. A lot less than 1%,

but some tiny fraction, a lucky raise, will get right through. And I love the term. It's called the ballistic rays. Did I get that right? That's right. But the overwhelming majority

will be scattered in some way on their journey through the hand. They'll bump into a bone or they'll be bumped off, coarse, diffracted in some way. Just by your flesh, right? Your flesh. Because it's microscopic,

right? It sees it as it's bouncing around like billiard balls on a table, if you will. It's kind of tunneling its way through, but some goes right, right through. And this is the thing that is self-evident to you because you've been working in the field for so long, but it simply blows my mind. We humans can make detectors that are so sensitive that a detector on the far side can tell the difference between the light that came all the way through and the light that got diverted by a couple of millimeters,

because those couple of millimeters, even at the speed of light, causes a tiny delay before it hits the detector in the picosecond scale. that's a trillionth of a second. And light travels a third of a millimeter in a picosecond. And the fact that we humans can create something that is that sensitive is just kind of awesome. It is. And it's how LIDAR works too for the autonomous vehicles. They call it time of flight because it's literally measuring the third of a millimeter per picosecond. It's how fast the detectors are, the camera chips, if you will. That's another word for detector. And then if you have that kind of sensitivity and you say, okay, the light pulsed, and I'm going to just throw away all these laggards and just take the ballistic light. Then you have something that's very much like an x-ray, right? Because that light has

gone right through. And we've just ignored all the stuff that got diffused. Right, because it didn't get scattered. And because you can tell this stuff got here first, this stuff got here second, you can toss all the stuff that didn't go straight through. Right. And you had seen some work that was done, was it at Washington University in St. Louis? Yes. Around 2014. And they'd kind of done this, right? Yeah, they'd created a system using near-infrared light that matched the resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging. They'd basically done an optical MRI. MRI itself, of course, is magnetic field. So they had done it optically.

That blew your mind. Amazing work. Yeah, they got rid of the two-ton magnet and the liquid helium, and they made this sort of 50-pound fiber optic wig that looked like I'm trying to think of some... Steampunk. Yeah. Something or rather. Very expensive setup then.

They have a 50-pound fiber optic wig, which can't be cheap, but they did it. Let's talk about what you're doing with the light that's special. If I'm not mistaken, the key to what you're doing is the scattering of the light that isn't the ballistic light is not random, but it's predictable and also reversible, correct? Right. And it goes back to the people that made one of the first display holograms. They made it of a train set, and it made a lot of waves in the optics community in the late 60s. So the next experiment they did was they did.

They put a big scatterer in front of a whole sheet of glass that scattered the light in the holographic setup. And it turns out that they could actually reconstruct a 3D image of the train through that scatterer. And so as I was thinking, I realized, oh, my gosh, we could do this with holography. We could do this with holography because the pixel size is approaching the wavelength of light. So you can sample all of the light in terms of not just recording its intensity, but you can capture the phase of the light, the wave nature of light, which gives you all this extra information. You can then basically neutralize the scattering of your body mathematically with pretty simple transforms. So with that, you've reduced the cost of literally big iron, like a two-ton

magnet filled with liquid helium, the most expensive room in the hospital, to liquid crystal displays and camera chips that are made in factories that supply the world's smartphone and consumer electronics industry. Made in massive, massive quantities. And so if I can just replay that and tell me if I'm understanding this properly, you've taken a hologramatic technique that dates back a number of decades and applied that to the scattered light so that you can use all the light. And so the scattered light, which is a overwhelming majority of the light, that would be thrown away in the first example that I gave, that actually becomes useful data. You can use that scattered light to create an image of the three-dimensional landscape that that light went through. So you get much higher resolution because if

you think of light going through your body, this rib cage, the other rib, they're all on top of each other. You get kind of a 2D picture of a 3D thing. If you think of the sort of shadow casting thing. Sure, like X-ray is very much a 2D experience looking at an X-ray. And you can do so-called tomographic and take different pictures. from different sides to add that up. But when you actually capture all of the light in terms of amplitude and phase, you get much, much higher resolution, much better signal the noise ratio, a lot more light, and you don't have to deal with the shot noise that you get on a picosecond detector. The interesting thing that people may not be realizing is we're not talking about

massive improvements strictly vis-a-vis a very expensive academic array that sits in a lab in St. Louis. we're talking vis-a-vis MRIs, right? So if one were to build an MRI-like machine with this technology, how much cheaper would it be, how much smaller would it be, and how much higher the resolution would be versus an MRI? The first ones will be more expensive, but at scale, we leverage the consumer electronics manufacturing industries. So it'll be the cost of a smartphone and a scan for the cost of a phone call.

So a thousand times cheaper, a million-fold smaller, fitting into a wearable like a ski hat or a bandage. And the resolution would be substantially higher to you. The resolution is higher. We've been able to get about a billion times higher resolution. Now we don't know if we're going to do that for our first product, but that gets us to neurons. Yeah. Which is pretty exciting. So we can do this non-invasively. Yeah. Look at neuron activity. I think per chip, we could probably do up to probably a million neurons a second, which is, everyone says it's utterly impossible. And it's like, actually, if you rethink it. it is in reach. Just because we've started on it, let's stay briefly on the medical thing and then

go to the neuroscience. Let's go back to mammography and this tragedy that breast cancer cannot be monitored by MRIs because it's so expensive. How might that be cured? Sure. So you can imagine a bra, for example, that you could, instead of a monthly check, you can just put on the bra once a month and wear it for an hour, wear it for a day. And you'll get a lot more data on what's happening, and a lot more precision. Now, another one of the cool things, about the color red, and I guess we could say the color infrared, is blood is red. And so there's a lot of things that you could illuminate like clogged arteries, right, with this kind of technology. So, yeah, clogged arteries, we can find out where the blood is and where the blood isn't.

And that's pretty important for cardiovascular disease. And so if we can find out where you're clogged up, there's some solutions. Could we prevent stroke and heart attack by understanding somebody's at risk earlier? because there's very often not many symptoms. In fact, for women that have heart attacks, they usually have no symptoms and then they're dead. So can we find that out? And then on the flip side, cancer, any tumor bigger than a millimeter or two grows vasculature, and it's sort of strange vasculature.

It's leaky and it supplies the cancer with the blood it needs to grow fast. So to put that in civilian speak, vasculature, it grows its own blood supply. It taps in to nearby veins and arteries that comes into it. It steals the blood to grow the cancer because it wants to grow. And so you can see this little highway of blood going into this rogue entity. And it's a distinctive highway from what you just said. It looks weird. Your body is about 3% blood, but your tumors are something like 15% blood.

So we can look at that and we can look at the shape of arteries or the veins that are growing around it as well. As I know from our good mutual friend, Jeff Huber, who has done a lot of work in liquid biopsy, even with the blunt instruments of treatment that we have today, if you detect a cancer at stage one, your survival rate can be typically north of 80 percent, whereas if it's asymptomatic as tragically most cancers are, and you don't detect it until stage three or four, your odds plummet to 15 to 20 percent survival rate. So that early detection, that can save a factor of four times as many lives. So detection is a really big deal. Yeah. So I think that's what Jeff F founded and was the CEO of Grail where they're trying to sequence your genes so you can create a blood test for having early stage cancer.

Yeah. Even still, where is it? It's hard to find it. One other quick thing, going back to blood and its redness, internal bleeding is also something that I imagine would be highly detectable with a system like yours because, again, it is blood and it is red and it is discernible. if you're at a billion times more granular than an MRI, you could find that kind of internal bleeding, bone marrow issues, all kinds of issues with pregnancy. The placenta really is an organ. It grows when you're pregnant. So there's a lot of blood and there's a lot of diagnosis you can have on pregnancy from that. But we can do more than blood. We can get neurons, as I said. We can look at other shapes in the body, but just blood gets you really far.

So let's now pivot over to neurons and telepathy, which might be entirely indefinitely. enabled by this. So the key thing is, as you said, you can get down to a level of granularity where you can see a solitary neuron, you can see whether it's firing or not firing, and perhaps even cause it to fire. I know from talking to Adam Gazali and some other folks in neuroscience, both with this podcast and in other contexts, that using the best technology we have right now, the most invasive technology, technology that very few people would want to mess with in their own brains, at best we can monitor a tiny, tiny handful of neurons. You're talking about monitoring very precisely and non-invasively millions of them. Yes. Let's talk about what this could enable and how

it works. It turns out, we didn't know what the limits of the physics were for this process that we've developed or this technology we're developing at Open Water, my new startup. And so with my funders, I said, look, don't give us a ton of money in the start. We want the first year just to explore the And for anybody doing a hardware startup, I would advocate insisting on that and skipping the minimally viable product to say, look, we need a year of playing around in the lab, the small team to figure out the limits of the physics because nobody knows. How deep can we go? What kind of resolution?

And the answer to that is six inches and one micron. Six inches deep. Yeah. Pretty much the skull. Well, double that. Coming from both sides. Yeah. From both sides.

It's 12 inches deep. So like we're succinct. Can we get the obese people? and we don't need one micron for the gut. Yeah. And certainly not for the head, for the brain. Six inches is quite enough coming in from both sides. Right.

So we can get to a micron, which was startling. And nobody believed it, but we've repeated it and repeated it and repeated it. As we neutralize the scattering of your body, we can see the differential scattering that precedes an electrical pulse going down. A neuron is basically a ruffening of the membrane. And when a membrane ruffins, it scatters light. So let me repeat this back to make sure I'm understanding. When a neuron fires, and neurons can do this even hundreds of times a second, it's sheaf ruffens

in a way that your technology can discern. Yes. And so you could say very distinctly, that neuron just fired. That neuron did not just fire. And you can get down to that level of granular. So now you are hypothetically monitoring many orders of magnitudes, more neurons than can be done with any known technology. As a prequel to talking about how much you might be able to discern with this technology,

it'd be interesting to take a brief side journey to Jack Gallant's work at UC Berkeley, which I've seen you speak about on the TED stage and I've seen you speak about online. Could you describe that briefly this amazing stuff that he did? He was in 2012 with far less sensitive technology than yours. Then we can extrapolate what might be doable with your technology. Yes. He's a professor at Berkeley and doing really cool work in neuroscience. And what he did after working with macaques and all these other animals for a while,

is he took his subjects to be graduate students. And he threw them in MRI machines for hundreds of hours and made them watch YouTube videos and then more lately Moth Radio Hour stories. And he made recordings, fMRI recordings of their brains reacting to the YouTube videos or the audio. So they're looking at a boat and their brain lights up in this manner. They're looking at a blank screen and it lights up in that manner. They're looking at a green screen that lights up in this manner in over hundreds of hours. I'm sure there was a machine learning algorithm on the background, started inferring when the brain

lights up in this way, this particular grad student is looking at a Christmas tree or something like that. Right. So it was this best way to get more data on how we react to things. Using that data store, when a new image sequence was shown, the computer could guess what it thought the grad student was looking at and the result was a grainy version of what the graduate student was actually looking at. Yeah, I'll put the video on my website and the show notes of this because it is astonishing to see. The grad student might be looking at elephants walking across a plane or somebody being interviewed on CNN. And the video that you shared at TED showed on one side exactly what the grad student was seeing. And on the other side, what the system inferred the grad student was seeing based on the brain patterns.

And it is a grainy image of it. That was mind-blowing. I thought the brain mapping people were kind of like modern day phrenologists about 20 years ago. And I saw this in 2012 and I'm like, whoa, they did it. We need to up the resolution and really go for this. And so I pitched that to Sergey when they were starting Google X. I was like, okay, let's do it. And that's, I think where my TED talk came from, it was like effectively my job talk. I didn't know it was a job talk at the time. Then Sergey Aqua hired my company at Google. And I thought I was going to be working on this. And he's like, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to see that you're a creative and creative and. kind of crazy. We needed to do this other stuff, so I didn't get to do that at Google. But I started reading pretty widely about this and saw that there were dozens of research groups working in this area using fMRI scanners all over the world. This has been replicated. And that work that we just discussed, that was in 2012 or 2011. And so things have progressed much further. It's now we're sitting here in 2018 today. And still, they're stuck with these very expensive, very big, kind of uncomfortable,

if you think of laying in them for hundreds of hours, machines, how do we get higher resolution and lower costs and put it in a wearable to enable us to communicate with thought? And more than that too, right? Some of the replicating work or subsequent work can figure out what song somebody's thinking about can detect whether or not they're in love, can detect whether or not they're paying attention. It's a diversity of things, not simply what they're seeing,

but all this is with very, very low resolution apparatus. compared to what you believe you can build using your new technology. Right. Is there any reason why you could not with the technology that you're developing, if everything goes right, do a far, far deeper and more precise, higher fidelity vision of what I'm looking at, and then pump that over to the internet so that somebody can see what's coming out of my eyes right now? There's no reason you couldn't do that, but why not what's coming out of your head?

That might be more interesting. So next step, let's say I go to sleep and I have a bunch of dreams. Right. Is there any reason why you couldn't record my dreams in very high fidelity and play them back for me in the morning? A Japanese group just did that with FMRI. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

The news, I don't know, a month ago. But again, the consequence of doing that at a thousand or a million or a billion times the resolution is overwhelming because you could really see an HD video of precisely what you dreamed the night before. That is nuts. That's why I left my cushy job at Facebook to go for this. And what are some of the other applications you've talked about telepathy? Well, I think we'll start to work just with our whole brains.

I mean, right now we talk to get ideas out of our head or we type. But what if we could get the complexity of how we're thinking of things out and share our minds with each other? The speed of thought, there's all kinds of ethical and privacy and legal issues. involved, but what could we be capable of if we could share our brains with each other? Yeah, to put it in computer speak, there is a major I.O. issue that we have, input, output issue because we can take in the equivalence of gigabytes of information with our senses very, very rapidly. But we can really only output a couple hundred words per minute if we speak very quickly and a few dozen if we type very quickly. And you had an example that you used in one of your

talks that I thought was very evocative. You said in a way we're all Stephen Hawking. I mean, first of all, let's think about what it could do for him because all the amazing things going on in his brain and his output rate is even slower than ours. But in a sense, we're all Stephen Hawking because our ability to output what's going on inside of our brains is so slow compared to our ability to take it in. Yeah. And there's other things. I just read a paper yesterday about turning off anxiety. We know how to do that invasively. Right. So a lot of of people suffer from anxiety, right? So what if you could just performance enhance your brain? I'd probably do that because I had a brain tumor. So I take a dozen pills every day for the last 23 years.

And I do, I think, performance enhanced myself because I have to decide how I want to be each day. I don't make any hormones. Cortisol is a hormone. Adrenaline's a hormone. So you have to onboard your hormones. And cortisol is what causes stress. Adrenaline is what causes us to surge. Should go into adrenal failure if you don't take it. Like, you die. You have to avoid. Yeah, yeah. So what if you could amplify human excellence? We talk about the two billion people who have brain disease, but there's seven something billion people on the planet. What if we could make ourselves better and define what that means? Okay. So this is getting to one of the crazier and more intriguing things about your technology, which is you believe using infrared light, you could not merely monitor the activity of neurons, but you could cause neurons to fire, correct? Right. How would you do that first of all? How would the physics of that work? Right. So once we map, we know where the neurons are. You know where they are. Yeah. I just got someone who just finished her PhD on this. It's quite controversial, but her results are very clear. And we're working on it in the lab.

In theory, if you went down that path, you could maybe even implant memories or implant desires into people. I mean, it can obviously become a Black Mirror episode very quickly. Make them into a suicide bomber. Whatever, right. Whatever it is. So let's talk about these ethical issues. Most startups when they're at your stage are very, very quiet about what they're doing. You've been extremely open about what you're doing almost from the beginning because you do want to trigger this important dialogue about ethics, correct? Right. And I think one of the problems is a lot of people don't believe until they see it that it's going to happen. They're like, yeah, sure. But actually, in every program I've ever done, I talk about it early almost to get the people really interesting. in giving their eyes and teeth to work in this project, to be to pass to the door and join the project to make the vision happen responsibly. In some ways, talking about it early is having that effect in a small way while we probably show a system this year that allows you to dump your thoughts out in some way. This year. Yeah. Wow. We haven't decided exactly where and how, but we'll probably do that. And then I think people will get it. Yeah. But right now we're trying

to define what that means. Our system will only work if you want your thoughts to be read. We're going to add in sex and violent filters. So if you don't want to communicate any thoughts of sex or violence, but even as a personal creativity tool, to be able to dump the things in your mind out to your computer with really good crypto so only you can see it or share it with your spouse. I mean, it might be more intimate than sex to be able to share the intricacies of what you're thinking, the raw emotions, you know, everything. And so how do we use this? Do we let children use it? Will children figure out a way to use it? You know, what are the implications of that? How do we design a system from the beginning that can't be hacked? The consensual part can't be hacked. It has to be consensual if the police or the

military put the ski hat on your head and want to know what you're thinking or your parents when you come in at three in the morning. How do you make it only work if you want it to work? So you're clearly committed to having a deep conversation about the ethics before you even ship and creating a product that will have safeguards on it so it hopefully cannot be used unethically. But if it does, in fact, work as intended. The negative consequences are essentially inevitable. People are going to do whatever can be done with these things over time. Is it an international bill of rights around the next generation of technologies that include CRISPR and other technologies as well, the AIs. What is the responsible thing? Do we just keep the resolution low right now? Do we make sure

these aren't permissible in court? Right now, even using FMRI, people have gone to jail and been convicted for things that were indicators that they were lying. Really? Yeah, there's a great book called, I Know What You're Thinking, which talks about the legal status. of just the simple relative to what we're talking about mind reading machines and how they've been used in courts to incarcerate people. Because I know that traditional lie detectors are almost useless. They're so easy to fool and it's 1920s technology. But I guess MRI as opposed to a traditional galvanic skin response lie detector. That's interesting. It's been using court. Wow. So you can get a warrant already, I guess, to go after somebody's thoughts. In some countries. In some countries.

In some countries, yeah. And then they've been, in some cases, exonerated later. Animals. Could we find out what our beloved dogs are thinking? Does your dog love you or is it just hungry? Maybe both. You think of babies. Like, should you do this to babies?

You have a baby and you don't want to break the baby when you bring it home and, like, it's crying all the time and just won't sleep. And could you do this? Is that ethical? Right. Don't know. But we need to answer that. Big questions.

Well, with you demonstrating some version of this, I think a lot of people are going to be talking about this. Is there anything we have not covered? Yes. Peter Gabriel named my company. He came up with the name Open Water. Yeah. And he called me like every week for six months trying to convince me to quit Facebook to do this independently so that we could have these kinds of discussions. Oh, interesting.

So you were thinking about doing this within Facebook. Peter knew this. And he said, no, do it on your own. So you can have your hand on the wheel a little bit more. Well, mostly to open up the conversations because large companies really control the nascent technology that they're working on. They don't want to announce usually because it is nascent. They don't know if they'll ship it, all kinds of reasons. Plus, the best reason I heard is at Google, somebody told me, you know, we have so many products as it is.

We'd like to focus on the ones that we're shipping for VRF. But in order to talk about it as we were developing it, like we did at one laptop per child, seemed important in the response. thing to do in this case because it feels like the implications are a modern day kind of nuclear bomb. So Peter called me a couple weeks ago and he said, you know, I know a lot about the music industry. I'm like, yeah, Peter. Yes, famous rock star musician. He knows a lot about music industry. He knows a lot about the music industry. As do you. As do why. Underdor of Listen.com. And he said, you know, our industry really transformed with something you are responsible for, which is digitally stream music. Yeah. Totally changed it. Fundamentary.

So everybody had access to any kind of music. So a little background. I've mentioned this in prior episodes, but I'm sure some people are, this might be their first episode. My background is I founded a company called Listen.com. The name of the company is forgotten, but the name of the product is not. It was called Rhapsody. And we were the first company to get full catalog licenses from all the major record

labels and hundreds, even thousands of independent labels. And we also were the first to create the unlimited on-demand streaming model that is now best personified by Spotify. but has also been emulated by lots and lots of other companies. We were the first to do that. So that is very flattering that Mr. Gabriel says that this was transformative to music. I certainly believe that because the access did change radically. When I was a small child and a medium-sized child and a big child and a young adult,

almost every discretionary dollar that I had went into music because that is vital to my daily happiness. and having saved up every dollar I could throughout my adolescence, I had a few thousand songs on tap. It was almost like I had my own little water tower of music and all of my friends had their own little water towers of music and we all had this little tiny sliver of the catalog of music. And what excited me most about the streaming model as we started thinking about it was that all the friction that stands in the way of any particular music lover, exploring any particular song vanishes. There's no marginal cost to it. You don't have to go out and mow another lawn or shovel another driveway, which was how I earned music back in the day. There's the instantaneous access. There's all the hyperlinking between it. And yeah, the friction vanishes. So I'm delighted that he said that accessibility changed. I think it changed by many orders of

magnitude in a way that the experience that we have with music today, we couldn't even fathom it back. Right. So his next question is, how do we do that with healthcare? How do we digitally stream health care. Yeah. I think this segues to something you were talking to Paul Allen about. Well, the Paul Allen thing, I've only met Paul once and it was many years ago. It was very much in the context of the music. But I think that this hopefully will touch on what we do with health care.

And I think it touches on what you're doing. And so the anecdote with Paul was I was presenting at a conference that George Gilder put on shortly after or right before we released Rhapsody. I forget which one it was. But I described this in detail at this conference. And when I was done speaking, two people came up to me. And one of them had a name tag I could read, which was Bob Metcalf. And I was like, wow, Bob Metcalf. You know, he created Metcalf's law.

He's one of the biggest thinkers in networking. He started the company Threecom. And he's a very witty and urbane writer. I'd read a lot of his articles. And he's a very insightful writer, but there would always be these funny little jabs and quips. And I just delighted in his writing. So I'm like, I am meeting Bob Metcalf. Not only that.

Bob Metcalf is coming up to talk to me after my talk. and there's this other guy whose name tag I can't read. So the other guy obviously knew Bob, and he started asking me some really, really smart and probing questions about Rhapsody. And then other guy, whose name I don't know yet, says, why do the three of us get lunch? The buffet was open, right? So we sit down and I realize at some point this is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. He described to me the music infrastructure that he had built in his own home or compound or whatever it is. And it had involved thousands of CDs having lots of people encode those CDs very carefully, acquiring extravagantly expensive hard drives because this was some years ago to store all these

gigabytes of data, hiring people to type in the names of the songs and all this other stuff. I think he might even have done something crazy like but a cellular tower in the middle of his home to broadcast it wirelessly. And he basically said in a playful ways, I put X million dollars. I forget what X was, into this system. And you're about to make that available to anybody in the world for $10. That's why I love this industry. And that's what technology does as it moves down the curve of Moore's law. And as that trillion-dollar infrastructure that you and I have discussed in Asia that creates things

cheaper and cheaper and better and better, that's what happens. A billionaire's music experience can become available for $10 a month. It's the hospital. Yeah. So he made a hospital. and how do we digitally stream the healthcare? Like you did it, listen. Yeah, now, I don't know if we can digitally stream everything.

I mean, certainly hands-on care would be notoriously difficult to stream. But we can do surgery without the knife with our system, right? Right. And the diagnosis on the medical imaging side. That's what's so exciting about what you're doing is suddenly it does digitize a lot of things or currently these big radically expensive rooms. And the other side of it is things that are unaffordable expensive. at first, once that trillion-dollar infrastructure in Asia starts working on it in great minds,

start working on it, and Moore's Law starts operating, the billionaire's music collection does become a $10 a month product and then eventually free, probably, but we have to worry about how musicians get compensated. Right. I mean, you're talking about radically changing access to medical imaging. All of health care. Like, we know that AIs are better radiologists than a lot of radiologists. and that even a radiologist on a different day will misdiagnose versus diagnosed.

There's all kinds of studies shown on that. But there's three continents that don't have enough doctors. It's sort of like the one laptop per child problem again. Certainly in oncology, I think it's getting rapidly to the point where radiology simply cannot be done by humans as well as it can be done by an AI. Right. But oncology, I think that still the human role is very important. Absolutely.

But in continents where they don't have enough doctors and they do now have internet and devices. And as we make our devices and we augment with, you know, whatever Jeff Huber is doing and lots of different people, we can imagine a day where we can have $10 a month digitally streamed health care. Yeah. And we can catch things much earlier and treat them much earlier and massively reduce the cost of it, which is now 18% of the GDP of the U.S., which is incredible. And so how do we get to the vision that you created in distribution of music and access to music so we can get access to health care? I think that the solution to that would involve digitizing everything that we can. You know, blood draws would, I'm sure, be notoriously difficult to digitize.

You perhaps can't do quite everything. But again, if Open Waters technology delivers on its maximum promise, you've shown this thing that I never would even have imagined before you came along, which is medical imaging, which is something that would seem you have. to go to a destination and if you're in an impoverished country, you might have to go to the capital to get the one machine in the country. Suddenly that can become extremely widespread and more than widespread, you know, particularly for neurological conditions, I'd imagine that the constant monitoring that you could enable would be very, very important. I did a little bit of research into epileptic disorders in writing my novel because that was a problem that one of the characters had. And if you're going in for your annual

MRI, what are the odds they're going to have a seizure right then and there? Whereas if you're wearing a cap because you have this issue, you can do this dynamic monitoring. And with anything with mental disease or brain disease, which affects two billion people between depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and stroke and on and on. But yeah, I mean, if it's just the blood draw, that probably could be handled locally, pretty easily in the whatever passes for the pharmacy. Yeah. That could be added with. something that does the diagnosis, spinning down the blood and looking at what rises. Yeah. And I particularly think of the developing world context because so many of the therapies

that we have here, obviously we'd like to push them much further so that people in countries like ours can live longer and healthier lives. But it's so tragic when you travel to places that are so much less privileged and you realize for want of a 30 cent vaccine, these terrible things are happening and it can be blindness and it can be a lot of child mortality. But you mentioned the centrifuges. I saw a YouTube video that some brilliant people were thinking about the problems of centrifuges in hospitals for spinning the blood down and important stuff for tests and sampling and so forth. They need electricity. They're expensive. They're not very portable. And somebody figured out a way, I think looking at a child's toy, like sort of this spinning toy to make a perfectly satisfactory centrifuge

essentially with some string and some cardboard. And it's something that could be mass produced for a lot less than 10 bucks. It might have been even closer to a dollar. So like a top kind of. Yeah, kind of like a spinning top. Pull a string and get the top. And it's amazing because there's no reason this couldn't have been developed 50 years ago,

but for whatever reason, the insight finally struck a brilliant mind quite recently. And so things like centrifuges, things like MRI machines, to our astonishment and delight, could become extremely widespread. And maybe Peter's notion of the streamed health would be a battery of diagnostics and early warning devices and so forth that can be distributed

to people through a digital device with community health care workers taking the next step when it's necessary. Right. Even with our system, we can deliver light to a point, you know, removing the cancer or colonoscopy without the discomfort. Roto-roiter. Yes. But then also remove the polyps in the extreme. I think we're going to start with reading, but the potential there is for writing. Photodynamic therapy is amazing. If you deliver light to someplace where you're getting chemo, you can use 10% of the chemo that you would otherwise need. That's interesting. There's this combination now of using the drugs and the light, but can we move to just light? We can get this to molecular level, so can you get rid of drugs in the

extreme is a question. Well, particularly neuroactive ones, because the medicines, the molecules that we use right now to treat any neurological condition are pretty blunt instruments. Right. They really are about causing synapses to fire, refrain from firing in certain circumstances. And if you could do that with optics, and it sounds like there's a potential with your work to do that, you could certainly replace a lot of medication. Yeah, there's other work going on as well, the big universities of the world working on that problem.

How do we accelerate a lot of this work in a way that can actually get out of the research lab, is I think the bigger question because people are dying. Yeah, they are in vast numbers. Another interesting to mention the winner of the TED Prize last year, I'm blanking on his name unfortunately, but he had been born in Liberia. I think he was of Indian descent, but he had spent part of his child in Liberia, came to the United States, became a very, very successful doctor, and then was drawn back to Liberia after the Civil War ended and realized that there was this category of worker that's very, very important, but generally untrained and uncompensated, which he calls a community health worker. And it was almost like a folk practice that people would

learn a few things. They'd get a thermometer. They'd get some very simple gear. And they would get out there and for very, very low wages would enter into an economic relationship with a community where they would provide some very simple but effective health care services. And so his Ted wish and the Ted Prize that he was granted was all about formalizing that and helping these self-starting community health workers getting them a curriculum that made them quite sophisticated quite quickly in a handful of frontline treatments that are most important to their community and getting them a packet not just of training but of gear that they would be able to take out into the villages and deliver. So the TED Prize was to enable him to expand his efforts substantially.

And that's successful, one could certainly imagine it expanding beyond West Africa into more and more places. And so that kind of thing coupled with these advanced inexpensive diagnostics and interventions that we're talking about really could radically change the equation. It would be easier to monitor the blood without taking the blood out. I named Andy Conrad who sat next to me at Google Hood, the founder of Verily and the head of Verily now started as Google Life Science. and the former CTO of LabCore, one of the largest blood testing operations. Yeah, one of the two largest, yeah. And as he explained it, LabCore is the fourth largest private airline in the country. Because of all the samples that they shuffle around?

Because the logistics of shuffling around the blood samples. That's amazing. He's like, can we just measure the blood while it's in the body? Please figure out how to do that because that makes it digital. Well, one of my big disappointments in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years is that Theranos does not seem to be what we hoped it would be. Theranos being the company for those who don't know that seemed to promise or did promise that with just a drop of blood, you would be able to run a huge, huge battery of tests.

But it's been unfortunately racked by scandal. And certainly a number of observers, including their significant partners and government regulators and so forth, seem to be strongly indicating that the technology was not what it was cracked up to be. Right. But can we just skip the blood completely in monitor? it in situ in your body. Is it in vivo or in situ? Sorry, in vivo.

Sorry, in vivo. What's in situ? My Latin is not good. Inside your body. In situ, yes. No needles at all. Yeah. Just skip the needles.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I know you have a flight to make on Forge. I could sit here all day and look at this beautiful bay on this gorgeous day, but you have to travel great distances and I'm probably pushing it with your airport appointment as it is. Yeah, I got to go to Detroit.

Detroit. Rock City, as Kiss once said. So have a wonderful trip. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me. No, we will cross paths probably quite soon because we seem to do that a lot. Yeah, it's been really fun. And I love the podcast and love the book.

I'm not through it. Read the book. It's amazing. After on, I was really inspired by the e-petstores.com. When I was walking into a tough meeting, I realized I needed to swagger more. So there's all these things that you can't say when you leave companies about what actually happens because we all have signed so many. NDAs we can't comment. But since you've abstracted it to fiction, you tell more of the truth of

what actually happens in Silicon Valley, which is the amazing thing that nobody can say or they'd get sued. And that's why it has to be fiction, but it's awesome. Read the book. Well, then also the other amusing thing I have to point out is the Epetstore.com CEO has a last name very much like yours. It's Jep's son or the S-O-N. Right. The Swedes are S-O-N. The Dains or S-E-N. But yeah. But we don't have much in common at all. The Swedes and the Dains. Or, no, the e-patsdwells.com. Oh, God, no, no.

You and Tony Jepson are completely opposite people. Well, thank you again. Have a wonderful trip. Thank you. Nice to be here. Hey, everybody, Jordan here. I'm back. I know you missed me.

I'm here with Rob Reed, whose voice you just heard on the Mary Lou Jepson episode. And whose voice you just heard again. That's right. Now, this episode was phenomenal. That's why it's in the feed. I listened to this on the plane home from Denver, where I was working on some advanced.

Antium dynamic stuff, which is why I took that, uh, the opportunity to throw the show in the feed in the first place. And this is, I never do this, but I didn't want the episode to be over, which, uh, I mean, like I said, never happens. Usually I can't wait for, and at the last 20 minutes of anything, I'm over it. I'm already checked out, right? Even Breaking Bad gave me that feeling. It's like, come on. Really? No, I think, I think probably there are a few exceptions. There are some. There are some. But this, this, this Mary Lou Jebson episode was one of them. Rick and Morty. Rick and you and everybody else tell me about this. Major exception to that role, yeah.

But I want to know what gets you, look, you've done a lot of amazing things in your life. I'm not going to go and embarrass you too much. But you essentially, is it safe to say you invented music streaming or is that kind of? I would say the team that I was able to draw to the company that I started did. I don't get myself credit for it. But my company was called Listen.com. The product we created was called Rhapsody. and it was absolutely by any way of thinking of it, the first Spotify.

We did create as a team the Unlimited On Demand Streaming model that everybody uses now. And we were actually also the first company to get full catalog licenses from all the major record labels. So that was back in my troubled youth as a tech entrepreneur. Right, right. The reason I'm putting this out there is not only to flatter you here and show everybody how smart you are, which I think they already have the idea from the episode, but to show the amount of work, obviously the amount of work that goes into an episode like this is 30 hours or so. And we just discuss this pre-show. But I prepare probably eight to 10 hours. And people who listen to the

Jordan Harbinger show are like, whoa, my God, that's so long. You're tripling up on that. You are very prepared as an interviewer without any question. I'm kind of, you know, pathologically prepared. Yeah, exactly. And part of the reason is I do interview folks in a radically diverse set of disciplines. And so one week it might be quantum computing. Another week, it might be synthetic biology. You know, another week it might be something pertaining to neuroscience or consciousness. And it's such a diverse array of things that, you know, the need to bring myself up to speed pushes toward that. But then I'm somebody who really enjoys a rabbit hole. Yes. And I also try to get really, really deep into the work of the person that I'm interviewing

because I hope to ask them questions. They've always wished journalists would ask them. Because journalists also, you know, they've got a very short, very short, you know, format that they're working for, working with. And so a journalist, probably journalists ask, you know, some of my guests, the same seven questions a hundred times from different people. So, yeah, I prepare to a kind of pathological degree, no doubt. But it shows, and that's what I love about the after on podcast,

I would never consider running, 99 shows out of 100 or more. I would never even, for one second, run in this feed. But when I listened to that, I thought, oh, gosh, I want to do this interview, but I kind of just want to do the exact same thing that you did. And then I was thinking, well, good thing I don't have to. We're literally going to put this in the feed. And being pathologically prepared can often result in disaster because everything is so

scripted and so structured that it just seems kind of like a really yucky non-conversation. after on doesn't have that problem. I'm interested in how you're able to keep it conversational while also going, I have 30 hours of stuff I want to cram into 40 minutes and also let the guest talk. I don't know. I think maybe that comes from all the years that I spent as an entrepreneur because you would be in so many conversations as a CEO, whether it was with the press or, you know, cherished employees or angry investors or whoever it was, where you really, you really.

had to navigate a conversation better than you need to, I think, in most professional contexts. And so I think I wasn't very good at that when I first started my company, but I got good at it over four or five years. And that might be, I haven't really ever thought of this, but that might actually be a transferable skill between entrepreneurship and podcasting, of which there are not very many. But I think that's probably what I'd attributed to. When I was listening to the episode, one of the things that I thought was probably the most exciting was the wearing a ski hat, as she put it, fMRI. Right.

Or just wearing a bandana and having that be fMRI. I mentioned to you pre-show, I think in an email that I've been talking about this for years because I'm a huge geek. And one of the things that that really strikes me is how little we know about the brain. The more we talk to our mutual friend David Eagleman or these other neuroscientists that we've had on both of our shows, you find that we know all this amazing stuff. And then they go, well, you know, we kind of don't know how this works. So, well, emotions, they do this thing.

And you'd said it in the episode that MRI and even fMRI right now is just this blunt instrument where it's like, oh, the left frontal lobe part of the brain is lighting up. That's where this emotional side. And now with the wearable fMRI using, is it lasers or just regular light? It's lasers, yeah, yeah. We're going to be able to go, these little tiny clusters, the size of one, the head of a pin, that's what's causing seizures in all these people because now we have millions of hours of data that we've collected in the past six months of all of these epileptic people

or all of these violent criminals or all of this whatever. This is the area that's causing a problem. Yeah. And I think also just as relevant is the time series. And so right now, if you get an MRI done, it's effectively a very, very rare snapshot that's going to be taken of your brain state. Now, imagine you wanted to understand what Times Square was all about, and somebody gave you a snapshot. You could learn a lot from that. But now imagine somebody gave you a 24-hour feed of Times Square. You're simply going to detect patterns, nuances, and things that are absent at the instant of that snapshot, but are actually common on Times Square. You're going to understand it on a radically different level.

And so I think one of the ramifications of Mary Lou's work is that we will end up getting these intensely broad time series. on a lot of brains that is just completely unaffordable and impractical for reasons of portability and a thousand other things. It's just going to completely roll back the frontiers of understanding. Think about what we're going to learn about love even. I know that sounds cheesy, but I'm curious because that's one of those, everybody's writing poems about it. There's songs about it.

There's movies about it. When people feel it, even smart people do stupid things, we're going to go, oh, this is what that is in the brain. Or, geez, you know, we know so much about epilepsy, but we're not. Here's the medication that we have for it. Well, okay, good luck catching somebody having a seizure while they're in the MRI machine. That would be terrible for the person having it, but research gold. Now, we can, or not now, in the future, hopefully very soon, we'll be able to literally give every person who suffers from seizures in this test this wearable device and we'll say, just send us a message after you've had any sort of seizure episode and we'll take the data from the device.

Nice. Yeah. And it's interesting because there's that there is so much benefit from that, you know, the amount of life saving that's going to go on. And Mary Lou's own story, the fact that she almost died of a brain tumor because she couldn't afford an MRI is going to be as cheap as photograph, right? Now, one of the downsides is demystifying the mystical. You know, when we talk about things like love, we're going to understand it a lot better. And that could be kind of sad or even repellent on a certain level. I think it was Keats wrote. this poem about unweaving the rainbow. And he was very denunciatory, I think, toward Isaac Newton, who predated him by a couple hundred years. But Newton was the person who figured out that you could scatter the light with a prism. And so there was this very moving thing that one of these brilliant dead poets, I think it was Keith, said, unweaving the rainbow. And I think that that is, that's something we've got to be a little bit cautious about. I think if love itself were completely reduced to zeros and ones, we'd lose something. But at the same time, when you're talking about saving thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives,

and you're talking about really rolling back the realm of experiences that we could potentially have as we understand the brain better. I think the balance, I'm glad that Newton came along and unweaved the rainbow. Of course. Yeah. Very, very glad. I would not want to go back to the 16th century or whatever the hell it was. Right. Where they bleed to you? in order to figure out, oh, how to cure the disease? Just cut open some veins. And if you're still alive after that, you're cured. And even worse, I think Newton's most productive period was when he went home from university for a span of almost a year

because there was bubonic plague going on at Cambridge or Oxford. Or spring break ever. Worst spring break ever, right? Boobonic plague, you know, and we thought, you know, Ebola was bad. It's, it's worse when everyone in your entire city has. has it and most of your friends and professors are dead. I think looking at the dream reading stuff, that was, that just kept me up at night. Not in a bad way. I just thought, well, that prevented you from dreaming. So that maybe that was counterproductive. It was my self-defense, actually. I don't want

anybody reading my dreams, so I just didn't have any. But what I think is going to be amazing with this is think about the economics of this. Okay, so we're able to read dreams. Okay. Well, then is there going to be dream roulette where I can watch other people's dreams if I can't sleep or maybe I just have a dream channel on whatever device is the TV equivalent at that point. Am I streaming other people's dreams? Or do what, what if I want to see what my loved ones are dreaming about? Are we going to allow that? Is that going to be too invasive? Is it going to be like the pre-nup of 2050? I want to see what your dreams have been for the past six months. I don't know. Well, it would be invasive, certainly, if you could watch your loved ones or any

dreams without their permission. So I think you start with permission, you know. And then beyond that, I think that, you know, things like anonymity could make certain things more interesting to folks. There's going to be a whole realm of, you know, etiquettes and laws and practices and traditions that emerge around these things. But we're going to be around as they're emerging, much as we've seen those things emerge on the internet in our own lifetimes. The dream thing, though, is really, really fascinating. I mean, for me, probably the most pedestrian application we could even think of for this is just hit and play in the morning when you wake up. And for me, that is just so cool in and of itself. But dream roulette, yeah.

Dream roulette. Tapping into, you know, the dreams of whatever random person it is. And unlike chat roulette, it can't necessarily be hijacked by perverts because they don't have any control about what they're dreaming when you drop, when you drop in on them. That's true. That's a good point. Although there will be ways to curate dreams. There will be ways to tag them. You'll be able to archive your dreams. You'll be able to archive your kids' dreams. But man, you thought it was weird when James Fallon found out he was a psychopath through a brain scan during a study. Imagine the weird stuff you're going to find out about yourself. Are my dreams copywritten? Hmm. There might be a whole level of intellectual property law. Like, sorry Disney, that was a great movie you came up with. But this kid, dreamed that plot line about four years ago, and you're getting your asses sued. Oh, gosh. What on earth? There's so many things like that that are going to be. So these are what the episodes make me think about. Well, this episode in particular, but a lot of episodes of Afteron make me go, wait a minute, hold on, let me think about this. And I find myself

sometimes pausing and going, I just need to let this one marinate. I just need to let this sink in. And I wish I had a concrete example. I know there was stuff during David Eagleman. I know that, And now I'm even looking for, I'm looking forward to the parasitology, which is a word you had to teach me, the study of parasites, not the study of Paris in France, although it sort of sounds like it might be. Or Paracelton, not the study of her. Not that either. No. I'm looking forward to all of these things because of the way that you prep and the way that you're able to go down the rabbit holes. And just, I know people go, ooh, parasites, they're thinking tapeworms.

Imagine the parasites that get into your brain and make you think things. These exist. Oh, yeah. And that'll be a fascinating episode when it comes around for sure. What are your favorite episodes of your own show? I know it's like choosing a favorite kid, but since you don't have any kids. Yeah. Not yet.

Not yet. Well, I've been doing it only since August. So it's a limited family. There's about 30 right now. And boy, it is hard to distinguish them. What I'd like to do actually maybe is start by talking about episodes. I think your listeners would really gravitate it toward. I think that the Mary Louie.

Jeffson episode fit great with your show. Agree. A few others that, you know, if you're listening and you enjoy the Mary Lou Jepson episode, I can pretty much guarantee you would get a big kick out of an episode with a guy named Adam Gazali. It's actually my second episode. And what Adam does, kind of in your neighbor to Mary Lou, he's creating video games that can actually reverse things like dementia, like ADHD.

And in fact, a game of his is in his. is in the very end of a phase three process with the FDA. They got incredible data out of it, and it is very likely to be approved as a prescription product, a prescription video game in the next several months. And so that's a pretty wild and interesting and very accessible episode. Now, I do try very hard. I mean, this is the whole point of my show. I try to make the most exotic and complex things accessible to the listener.

No knowledge is presumed. and hopefully in the course of my episodes tend to be 80 or 90 minutes, by listening to it, you can become, you know, kind of top percentile, fluent, conversant. You know, top percentile not amongst experts, but amongst folks at a cocktail party, you know, in this particular domain. So, you know, beyond that, I'd say, look at the set of episodes and the things that you might find you'd like to be expert in. I did a great interview in December that I think would interest a lot of your listeners

with a guy named Fred Ersum, who's the founder of a company called Coin base, which is probably the largest and most successful company in the cryptocurrency domain right now. And we really went at it. It's all about a two-hour conversation. Soup to nuts. Like from the very beginning, what is cryptocurrency really for those who barely know a thing about it? And then by the end of the two hours, we're deep, deep into some of the crazy, complicated things that could one day be done with blockchain technology that most folks haven't even thought of probably yet. So that's one that I think has pretty wide interest. Now that I've tried to talk your listeners into listening to my podcast, I'll try to talk some of them out of it because our shows are very different.

Yeah. Your shows are very different. And some of the episodes on your show fit grain on mind and vice versa. Where I'd say, you know, steer clear is I don't, unlike you, I don't have a focus on the practical. I think when you listen to one of my shows, you hopefully will have a lot of really interesting, you know, mental curiosity itches scratched, right? but you're not going to come away with a set of, you know, actionable things. You won't really learn anything that will help you get through life better, manage your relationships better, you know, pursue your career better.

And so if the way that you like to allocate your time is geared toward that, my show's not as much for you, you know, the ones that we, the ones that I just mentioned probably will be. But, you know, maybe the show is less for you. And maybe a good episode is actually a test case episode to decide if my show is, is something you'd enjoy listening to. It's a guy named George Church, who was on in early April. He is arguably the leading bioengineer in the world right now. He is one of the fathers of the field of synthetic biology. He's also one of the most influential people in the world of genomics. And George and I sat down for two hours and kind of created a challenge for ourselves to, again,

like try to take somebody who knows nothing, you know, barely knows what DNA is, which I think is most of us before we dive into a subject. Double helix is all I really can. Yeah, take it from double helix is all I know to really understanding the foundations of synthetic biology. And from that, getting into the really cool, fun, fascinating, oh my God, how will this change our world? Kind of like Mary Lou Jepson things that might happen as a result of synthetic biology and radically improve our lives and extend our lives and so forth. And I think if somebody who listens to that and is like, that is too sciencey, it's too nerdy. It ain't for me.

Well, ultimately not really embrace my show, but somebody who listens to that and says, damn, that was a riot, probably would. And I think any of your listeners would probably get a kick out of cryptocurrency. Sure. You know, and some of these other things. Absolutely. I will caveat your caveat. I think a lot of people who think they might not be into it because it's not as practical

or that you made it sound a little bit like, oh, it's going to be using all these words. You don't understand. There might be one or two. That's fine. But they're always defined. They're always very carefully defined. We don't assume any knowledge. But the thing is, look, I think there's a reason that you sometimes got to read a book

that might be based on a true story instead of a business book or nonfiction. And not that your stuff is fictional, of course. But what I mean is even me, I read 100 plus books a year. 99% of them are probably a business or some sort of hardcore. But occasionally I just go, you know what, screw it. I want to read a novel. and I want to enjoy it. And I don't want to have homework at the end.

And that's one of the reasons why I love After On, because I can listen to something on a plane, learn a bunch of stuff and not go, oh, if I don't apply this, I'm failing. And I don't remember it. I'm somehow shortchanging myself. Exactly. And I know a lot of people for the Jordan Harpenter show go, there's just so much stuff. There's guilt attached to it, which is one of the reasons why we did the worksheet. I always feel bad about not. I don't do the worksheets.

There you go. I'm sorry. I never. Shame on you. I've never done a worksheet. But I love your show. Thank you. Well, good. Well, thanks for coming on. We're going to link to this, of course, in the show notes as well, because I want you to go and check it out and tell me your favorite episodes of Afteron. And Rob, it was fun hanging out with you at your apartment, but I'm hungry. Let's go eat. Let's go eat. It's dinner time. So I hope you all enjoyed that. Rob's a great guy. I'm really glad to be able to introduce him to you. The Afteron podcast is legit. I think you're really going to have some mind-blowing info dropped on you if you decide to go ahead and check that out, which I recommend that you do. This episode produced and edited, as always, by Jason DePhilippo.

show notes are by Robert Fogarty, booking back office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. Of course, that interview before, hosted by Rob Reed, and edited by Jason Sanderson. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Don't forget to pay that fee and share the show with those you love and even those you don't.

We've got lots more in the pipeline and we're excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast?

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