Steve Gullans, PhD — You Can Train Your Brain to Flow on Command | Steve Gullans [music] Hey, Steve. Uh, welcome to Pale Blue Nexus. Uh, you're a PhD. Um, graduated from one of the top schools. Tell me a little bit about your project, Think, and uh welcome to the show. All right. Well, it's great to be with you, Johan. Uh real a fan of anything that's entrepreneurial and especially innovators like you, bringing the messages to the world that matter most for the future generations. Uh I wake up every morning trying to inspire somebody younger uh to build something new that's going to make people stand up and feel that life is better. Uh so yeah my my background is very eclectic. I was an academic scientist uh ended that part of my career about 23 years ago uh as a professor at Harvard Med. I left because I wasn't making a big enough difference in the lives of everyday people. I ran a couple of companies, ran a venture capital fund and ran a public company. Got to ring the NASDAQ bell. And so I've seen every side imaginable. Uh from the beautiful, the fantastic, the glorious down to the the bad and the ugly, unders sides, underbellies of bankruptcies and everything else. I've probably been around 60 companies at some level firsthand uh in my journey going back to my academic days. And so uh fundamentally I care about working with great people and building good teams and doing something that's wonderful for the world. Yeah, I connected with you on our pre-in call um because you're developing this really cool product that uh you know my kids can use like they it's a it's a hardware device um it sits on your head and given your background you know like you're kind of well positioned to to develop this product. Tell me a little bit about it and and what do you expect to achieve with it? Right. So the the uh the company's name is Think T H Y N K. Uh I was actually retired and I came out of retirement because I'd seen this technology. It was languishing a bit and so I I took hold of it and brought it forward into the markets, refined the the the technology a bit. And what it is is it's a little headset that you wear. By you I mean anybody between the age of five and 95. Anybody from any walk of life or any nationality. And using this headset uh you actually it passively monitors your brain waves in related to very very specific functions which again the field neuroscience has been working on this for decades. And then your brain waves are then used to control a video game on an iPad. It's an adventure game like Temple Doom or you know Subway Surf or things that kids can play or adults can play. Uh but it's not an addictive game. It's a game that's taught it's to teach you cognitive skills. Although some kids in particular get addicted in the sense that they enjoy winning uh against themselves, seeing how much they can achieve on their own. there there is uh no ultimate goal in that other than improving your tech brain skills and uh we're now serving everyday people. We don't go direct to consumer because we're a very small team right now. Uh so we're we started in the first market is uh public schools mostly in the south and we'll be moving into sports. And the best way to think about what we teach is we all wish we could get into a flow state every time we're writing uh a document or driving the car or in a very challenging moment uh stressful taking an exam. But somehow we get locked into these little pathways that you know you're worried about dinner, you're worried about uh your date tonight or something else and you're distracted. So, we get you into that flow state of being non-distracted while being in a high pressure situation of having to be part of a video game. So, imagine it's it's not like sitting in a cave and meditating. It's like being at work on a timeline to deliver something to your boss. How do I get into this flow state under pressure? That's what we teach. Get into a flow state under pressure. I mean, it it's already hard enough to get into a flow state. Um, and now you're you're almost saying that you can bring it on at will, which is like a superpower these days, especially with so many distractions out there. It is a superpower. Uh, I had a personal beginning in this field about 10 years ago. I was doing uh some uh mindfulness training with the John Kitt Zen Institute in Massachusetts and I was failing miserably. I couldn't get away from my own thoughts. And so I actually had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jud Brewer who uh brought me into his lab with tens of thousands of dollars of EEG and other equipment. And I learned with bio feedback to actually meditate at a level I know most humans have never felt. Mhm. But it was the value of the device that I could actually teach myself, but was because it was giving me an independent measure. Imagine trying to lose weight without having a scale to stand on. Oh, I feel a lot skinnier today. [laughter] You really don't know what you're doing in a flow state. But we all know, we've all been in that state, getting a lot of work done or playing music or somewhere in a sport, you don't even remember making the shot, but it went in somehow. That's trainable. That's something we've lost as a modern species because of our distracted lives. Why doesn't uh a current publisher like Nintendo or somebody that's really good at hardware develop a device like this? Is it just that they're align their incentives don't align here? Uh it's there's a few reasons. Um, one there there's never been a product that's worked in this space until we came along. Uh, literally billions have been thrown, for example, working in schools primarily right now. Billions have been thrown with into technology to help students do better in school. How has it worked out? Well, we've given them standardized tests and they're not doing any better. We can now blame COVID, but they're still not doing any better no matter what we throw. When we do this, kids behavior calms down when we our self-regulatory pathways in our brain that we help develop over the course of just six weeks and their math and reading scores on standardized tests go up one grade level playing just an hour a week. And big companies care about selling to everybody. And in the gaming world, it's very easy to sell something that's a dopamine rush. You challenge in a in a co in that kind of cognitive sense. Our game challenges you every instant at your own personal level. It's dynamically adjusting to how good you are. And so as a result, it's like going to the gym. Does it feel good to lift weights every single day? And most people quit after a month. And so something is good for you takes some dedication. And that's what uh the big v the big companies know that if you're counting on people to buy something that's good for them and to get a subscription that's year after year it's not going to work. [laughter] But there is an in between stage. It is possible to think of video games controlled by a headset like ours where there's actually different routes to take. Okay, I mean this is in the future where some are the training comp steps and the others are just the pure fun steps. So you can begin to integrate across platforms. So it's a scientific problem and it's also a understanding your market uh problem behavior. How do you get people to change behaviors? They're happy with the results. And that's why we like to do work in groups because everybody shows up for their their group uh tutoring class or they show up for their senior citizen weekly reading class or you know book reading or whatever. If you show up for this class, you're going to do it the end of six weeks. You got the benefit. So, the game's called Skyler's Run, and um it monitors uh the users's attention state every 100 milliseconds right? Correct. Um what's kind of like the most uncomfortable thing you've learned regarding the human and how the human behavior is while like I guess looking at the data at scale? Uh well there's a few things I've been in uh the field of data generation in health and wellness for my whole career uh where you know fundamentally uh we've actually gotten with wearables in particular to a point where we can measure lots and lots of things but there's very few things that when you're measuring it that actually teaches you how to improve it. uh you know if you wear a heart monitor and says you're stressed it does that monitor doesn't give you a training program how to reduce your stress or your heart rate variability or anything else that's a difference we're seeing here so it's it becomes an approach that people have to understand it's no different than going to the gym for your brain 60 years ago who went to the gym to exercise I guarantee your great grandmother didn't Oh, if you asked her, she would have said, "What are you talking about? " Now, we've given over our physical uh challenges to machines and automation and cars and everything else. We're doing the same thing with our brain. So, the idea of a cognitive suite of tools for any age for a wide range of skills. We teach 13 skills right now. We're envisioning a map to a 100 skills that is individualized and it can be in any sort of game game setting. So the fundamental difference here is the training aspect that transfers into the real world. So if you're better at this game, you're better at math and reading. You're better at surgery as opposed to if you're better at this game, you can drive Mario Karts anytime you want and that's all you can do. [snorts] [laughter] That's the big difference. All right. I I I see my son on Mario Kart and and all of these games and uh yeah, I'm I'm How much is it, man? I want to buy one. So, uh, right right now we're in schools where because kids can share the headsets, we give out the headsets. They're inexpensive, built by team of brilliant engineers that have EEG machines in every major hospital on the planet. But they're very proud of this simple device because the signal and noise is as good as anything they've ever produced before. And the EEG experts, the clinicians and the the psychologists have built something great. And then we also have a team of psychologists who are data analytical people who've gotten their PhDs in gaming technologies and how games can actually map to very specific cognitive skills in the brain. And so when you put that combination together, you end up with something that's very compelling. It's the first of what's going to be hundreds of things in the space just like apps on the iPhone. So where we are right now is we're selling it only to schools because we don't have a big team to manage the inbound calls from you know a grandmother who doesn't know how to use an iPad or something because we see these we will go direct to consumers in about a year. Uh you can write us you can look for us on think uh it's just about making sure we can give everybody a seamless experience. It shows up in the mail, you put it on and you go. And for right now, it's uh as I tell people, if you know Steve, you might be able to get one. Depends if you're an inves potential investor. But uh uh we have a lot of people asking, but we're also in the schools. We're in Florida, Puerto Rico, Ohio, Tennessee. We're and we're in some of the largest school districts in the entire United States states. So rather than selling one person at a time, we can sell one district and they Puerto Rico for example, we're doing a pilot there has 250,000 students in one school system. Wow. Yeah. And even uh through initiatives like uh podcasts, you can reach more people. So um tell me about like cognitive skills and which ones stand out to you as ones that help adults the most in today's world. So the one one we're dealing with is actually fundamentally a uh there's there's different levels if you look at it as sort of pyramid blocks where you build up to the premium executive uh skills, executive function skills of deep reasoning, you know, being able to put mathematical concepts together, understanding uh quantum theory. Those are very high reasoning skills. And it could even be giving speeches in public and things like that where all the skills below it where there's language or you know uh connecting the dots have to come into play to build to the top skill. Well, what we've bypassed with a lot of our technologies recently or actually unlearn is when you start doing multitasking, you lose the framework required to be uh in sort of an automated mode and to be self-regulated where you're not interrupting people every 3 minutes, you're not looking at your phone every two minutes. Those are now reflexes that are built into our body. you everybody opens their phone at least 150 times a day and 50% of the time it's not because it's ringing or you expecting it's just you it's like a nervous tw tick I have to do that but when you lose that when you pick up that ability it's great for the AI world because you're going to have so many things streaming at you but you still need to sit down and take that damn test again where it no matter what it is or drive the car under in a snowstorm you have to be able to get into a state where you're just excluding everything that's out there. And so I view it as we speak English, but we've learned to speak French with this AI brain now, but we still need English once in a while. And coming back to one of your original questions, people who play it regularly, and we had a lot of summer intern engineers playing a lot who one was a competitive video gamer, he noticed the scores were going up. People who play a lot say, "I know the difference. I know when I'm in the flow state, I can feel it. " We believe it's possible to push yourself into it, but we haven't gotten there yet. Okay. But it's great and I guess it it can help when it uh with conditions like ADHD and things like that. Uh or keep somebody focused. Absolutely. Um focus and attention to the top ones with working memory is another example. If you can't remember a phone number, uh that's a problem. And so imagine how many phone numbers we used to learn as kids. We had them all in our brain. Mhm. Now, you ask any of my grandkids, they couldn't remember anybody's phone number. It's not a skill that we have anymore. There's part of the the working uh memory. So, the uh I forgot what you asked. I apologize. The even even multiplication tables like we used to know all our multiplication tables. We we used to have to to to say them uh all of them in front of the class or you know on on demand. And I ask my daughter that these days and no clue. It's like that whole era of just memorizing, working memory is just not there anymore. And another great analogy, especially for kids, is you you say, "Here's what we're going to teach." And I tell them, "Are you what sport do you play? You're going to be better at soccer because you can do you can focus on the penalty kicks or something." Just have them write with their natural hand. So their right hand, write their name in a sentence. Now do it with your left hand. Your left hand is physically capable of doing it, but your brain pathway hasn't learned to do it yet. And over the course of three or four weeks, you can train it. And that's exactly what we're talking about here. So in in the case of ADHD, there were actually eight clinical trials run with this technology before I acquired it, showing it works as well as any med in the metrics you measure when you're measuring ADHD. Now, just like obesity or hypertension, there is no cut off line that says you have ADHD or you don't. We all have a elements of it. So that's why it's useful for everyone. That's why we haven't we don't need a clinical designation of any kind. But I will say of the 19 most commonly uh diagnosed mental health conditions including depression and bulimia and things like that in all but two uh attention issues rank as one of the biggest symptoms they have. And it's not it's even worse in some than it is in ADHD itself. H That's amazing. Underlies everything. I mean, there's there's one thing and one word that uh I think is important these days and it's focus. We just have so much noise everywhere. It's the the I am constantly as as a CEO myself, I'm constantly looking at my to-do list and having to say, what is it that I'm taking out of this? Like what can I remove? And I think it's like uh there's just so many things that that that you can focus on, but you just have to be choosy about that. You know, we've done a pilot study that was quite successful with a company called Mentabi Health, MABI, that does telemental health. They provide adults with counseling and med medications and you know a therapist. And so the people who came into that were between early 20s and mid-40s. Uh and we sent them a headset at home. They had they had a trainer who was part of Mntavi. Uh and only about half the people finished the program because we're all busy. And now we're talking about people who have you know anxieties or whatever. Every single person who completed the program raved about how it was life-changing on top of what they were already doing. The number one thing they said, which relates to what you just said, is I now get my work done by the end of the day. [snorts] That's why they go home. And the other thing that the other comment I love was I no longer interrupt my co-workers. Interesting. Impatience. Yeah. Yep. Impatience. Um, talk to me about like your journey from being a 18-year career at Harvard Medical to becoming a CEO. I I I think like not many people understand how difficult that could be, you know, being in such a academic sort of mindset now to becoming a CEO and a man a people manager and all the other business owner and all those different things. Yeah. Although I'm not that good at the finances, but I was [laughter] I skipped that class. Um, but I can read a cap table and a piano. The uh the journey was totally unexpected. You know, I was a basic scientist studying very basic research problems. Uh, and in the mid 90s, my father got Parkinson's and my cousin got ALS. I wasn't working in neuroscience at the time, but I switched over. said and I was impatient because I wanted something that would help them in particular. So I formed alliances with some of the nonprofit groups to say let's try to do something different. Let's not go figure out the basic science suddenly. Let's see if we can find some diagnostics or therapeutics in their nearer term turn out to be unfundable by the NIH. Uh I examples are I made the first library ever of all existing drugs in the pharmacy by asking bought and last and Latin high school kids to come into my lab across the street and grind up pills not fundable by the NIH because what's your hypothesis that it might work in some disease you know we could do these in petri dishes or animals uh I sequenced the first cancer uh tumor with a team we put together got the informatics done in Malaysia. This is a little over 20 years ago because there was no AI platform that was strong enough here at that time. And uh again, what what's your hypothesis when you sequence it to well now we have this field called translational medicine where everything's come forward. It was out of my frustration of trying to get being a good hum human humanitarian by offering up these technologies because I was getting access to them high throughput screening all these things to the academic groups and finding nothing they were interested but nobody wanted to give me money to do it actually Michael J. Fox wrote me one of his first grants to look for biomarkers in the blood for Parkinson's. It's now coming to fruition 25 years later, but it was literally no neurologist believed there was a signature in your blood for something that goes on in your brain. Now they're getting approved for Alzheimer's at this moment. Wow. And so my funding was all coming from Hollywood and Wall Street fundraisers. And eventually I just said I just got to push out. I got I was I was working with a lot of VCs just helping them look at technologies. And that's really how I got involved in the um the business world is I worked with small companies and I worked with VCs and I gave away free time when I when I to be sure I could be in I I was get paid for a lot of the consulting but I would give away free time to stay in the business conversations what is this technology works perfectly why is it not getting funded and that's when I learned you know the market fit the timing you know the money the team All of these things became critically important. I built a couple of teams myself and then I put a venture capital fund together with my very close friend Juan Enriquez. Um, which was great. We had over 200 million and we invested it over 10 10 years or 12 years I guess. Uh, I enjoyed that a lot but at the same time I have more of an operating personality. um you going you know to a board meeting quarterly and just hearing an update is not as enjoyable as being part of a team and building it and that's uh I was going to ask you why don't you just advise instead of uh operating or building but uh it is nothing like building right so no it's about the team yeah and and and now so then I I ran a public company because one of my portfolio companies needed a new CEO and uh there was uh it was just a way for me to move outside the fund. And the fund was going great, but I didn't want to sign another contract for 10 years because that's really what you'd have to do. And uh so I said, well, let me try this public gig, which we had an FDA event that hurt us significantly. But then I retired and I came out of retirement when uh after seeing my grandkids who were living with us because they had no daycare in California. Um one of them struggling to learn how to read through a iPad screen. Yeah, the teacher was wonderful. Practically standing at her head to keep him entertained, but the human mind needs some help. I love that. It's like I'm not done yet, you know? I've got a I've got a I'm I'm well positioned to to deliver this and you are. So, it's it's amazing and I think I hope um it comes to market to to the point where people can uh benefit from it. Uh, I I think it's a great idea for a product and we'd like to get to market quickly. The biggest struggle right now is we're finding since nothing like this has ever existed that worked, we're having to prove it one case at a time. So, for example, we're going into elite sportsmies now to chat because there's these kids pay 50 grand a year to go to these sportsmies. to try to get D1 scholarships where they're now getting paid a million dollars to play basketball and they're missing it brain cognitive training when the big, you know, when you're at the free throw line in the finals, you got to make that shot. This I I attended a a performance workshop at IMG Academy down in Florida there. And uh yeah, they talk a lot about this type of stuff. you you might uh you might run some tests over there if you if you connect with them which is and we have entre we're talking with a former NHL goalie right now and some others in New England. Uh it's really about finding the right coach or guide to help someone through it. We can't just give it to someone and expect them to succeed because we don't have the proof of what it improves in sports. And that's frankly what I'm looking for is people to tell me what would you measure? I we're not going to go a whole season looking at free throw percentages. Okay, let's measure. And because there is no existing cognitive training, they don't have lots of measures. All right. I I I bet you are met with a lot of like I guess uh reluctance and and and maybe critics that say you know the this neuro uh feedback sort of field has gone through a tried product market fit scenario before but you know what you're talking about here is actual measurement and actual uh science. Yeah. And and so we in the schools for example in every case we just say what is it you want to get better at and behavior comes number one for the teachers. So how do you measure behavior? Well here's a survey we use great but one of the behavior things we didn't even think about but it's come through in our most recent work is there's something called referrals. When a child is really disruptive they get written up in an official referral and three referrals and you're out. And the number of referrals is down. And that's something that translates to every teacher in America, that one statement. Yeah. And there's an example. And for the superintendants, they love the math and reading scores because that's what's the front page of the paper when the annual numbers come out. Yep. Tell me about the term neurodeivergent. It's come up recently and I think you would be great to explain what this is and how you how uh what you think about uh people who have this sort of trait. Um yeah, let me explain it from uh from my own background which uh starts uh in this case in the field of cancer. I I actually have a lot of expertise and background in cancer particularly genomics. I'm helping people work on vaccines right now independently uh that will come forward very quickly. Uh and what you discover there is when I first doing started doing genetic analysis as an academic in the cancer field is the pathologists had already declared how many different types of cancer there were and there were no more. That was it. If you go back 70 years to the WH I guess their blue book uh states there were 50 years ago there was only 50 types of cancer only one type of breast cancer now we have a triple negative her two positive blah blah blah everything so there's over there's hundreds of different cancers in fact there's 20 major types of breast cancer and 18 subtypes now just that H and so we're going to see the same thing happen with the brain. There's only two m there's only two codes for depression. It's basically major and minor. Okay. But everything is a spectrum about human biology. Everything I've ever looked at and you know we can find ways to redefine. For example, diabetes is now a higher A1C than it was 20 years ago because nobody could get to the one we used to have. It's [laughter] normal. We're now now the index for BMI and obesity is higher than it used to be. So, we just change the guidepost like we do with everything else. In mental health, there is no cut off. Uh they say 20% of people have mental health issues. In fact, it's a 100% of people over the course of their lifetime. There's no one who doesn't go through a point of some depression or some anxiety or something else. It's just we said you got to have a diagnosis in order to get some treatment and the treatment's very expensive. You know, it requires if you're going to see a therapist 1 hour. You can't do 20 minutes. So, that might work just fine, especially with AI. So what I'm saying is 20 years from now with these devices like we have, we're going to start to see all the subtypes of brain ability of cognitive behavior, your actual behavior, and we'll say, you know what, there's 18 types of Parkinson's we see in just the data. We now know for sure which ones are going to respond to which drug regimens, right? And we're going to see the same thing for nerds. The neurodiversity is just a wide variety of metrics you care about. Some are manifest in behaviors we find a little troublesome because maybe you're always late or maybe who knows what, you know, but if they're not troublesome, but that doesn't mean you can't improve. That's comes back to this idea. It's have a mental gym that I can improve. I can learn a language in six months with some mental help. That's interesting. Um what does the FDA say about your device? Like um is it it's there's there's two there's several stakeholders. One is the user, one is the clinician if you're going to go the clinical route. The other is the FDA and then finally the insurance companies which generally comes down to Medicare or Medicaid because they're the largest insurer company. Uh the uh the FDA cares about the claims you make. So when I talk to people, I've talked to scientists about their neurochnology. It could be like a a music app that entrains the mind in a certain frequency. They say, "Well, we're going after Parkinson's. " I said, "Why? Everybody likes music. Everybody wants to have a better be a better dancer. Why would you confine yourself to have to get a diagnosis? " And in this digital health space, you can't change. We couldn't change our game if we got it approved. Imagine in this world of AI not being able to change it. So it goes from Skyler to Johan's journey, you know, and all of these things have to go through one more reg and there's nothing. It's 100% safe. These technologies are out there. So when it comes to the FDA, they are compliant and they're willing to do this, but it comes down to what's the claim you're making, right? And the other the insurance companies want to get return on their investment. So that's why that's why I want to make this dirt cheap. Yeah. If if this comes out as a clinical product, it's going to be several thousand required prescription from your doctor. It doesn't need to be. It's for kids in school. And then you have so we're there's an in between space. There's the FDA and then there's I'll call it loosely the neutrauticals where there's broad claims and no meaningful data. There's an in between space that we're blazing and I'm really procilitizing all the neuroscientists I know. Publish the data. We're not going to work on everything. Mhm. But publish the data and then I'm also and [clears throat] then people can make their own decision because it's safe whether they want to do it or not. It's like plastic surgery or Botox. It's safe. You decide whether you want to do it. Are something called peptides safe? Yes, they well there you can make bad peptides. Okay. And it's a vir viral or bacterial po uh toxins are often peptides for example. Uh peptides um it's uh how would I want to approach that? Uh peptides are nothing different than small proteins. Insulin is a peptide. I see look how many people take insulin in this world and it was we als we have other peptides GLP-1's a peptide why why are they making such a a comeback within uh I guess the youth of today it's they've been targeting uh high performance athletes when I talk about I've taught bioeththics when I talk about adoption of new uh technologies it always starts the same with a with an orphan rare childhood disease because nobody's going to argue about the cost or the need to do it and then over the course of time as it the safety profile shows it's perfectly safe like a peptide in some cases or even in the case of the training for the tour to France in the old days um then the price comes down it ends up going into high performance and beauty beauty or aging you know Botox toxic H human growth hormone Barry Bonds and all these baseball players they were taking doses that were so high it was stupid. Mhm. But if now we're talking about with GLP1 in this peptide universe it's you have to inject it. You can't swallow them right now. Something is 100% natural is what your body already uses. And that's the beauty of it. Unlike pills that you swallow, the body doesn't make any of those compounds, right? Some come from nature, many, but these are actual natural uh components of your own body. And so what I do is I measure and adjust. Measure what's going on and make sure you're adjusting properly to get into the right range. And so in the case of the peptides, that step is missing. What are you measuring and adjusting to? If I'm just taking it like I take a supplement and I know I know people who take 40 supplements and I'll say, "Well, what's that one for? " And they'll for my immune system. What on earth does that mean? Show me what the purpose is. And so the at normal levels levels, especially as you get older, all of these hormone systems begin to fall apart. That's why we get cancer. That's why we get diabetes. That's why our muscles weaken. That's why we lose our memory because they're all on a decline. If we just brought them back into the natural range, it would be great. In fact, I've given many lectures saying, "I'd like to make an organ that makes about 50 of those things just naturally at the same level I was at it when I was 50. I did one at the science museum. It's two little old ladies came running up to me. They're not so old. " Uh, and said, "Where do I get this organ? I want it right away. " Oh, man. that that that would uh that would do well I guess. Uh that's that's interesting. So So GLP1 is the chemical compound or is that that's the peptide name? That that's the name of the GLP1 that is gluc glucanol like peptide one. Yes, that's the one that's goi and mont all the weight loss drugs that are globally. I see. Interesting. The toxicity of those has been a little nause. That's one of the purposes of GLP-1 is when you've eaten too much like at Thanksgiving, GLP1 makes you feel nauseous. Interesting. Okay. Um, what do you think about uh your products pollination or cross-pollination with AI? There's a lot that you can that you can do with the data. Um, yeah. Uh, I have a few thoughts about that. first just to speak about data se privacy and and safety. Uh you know we got social media a bit wrong in terms of where the the guidelines are and and the [snorts] borders uh and we're trying to correct that now. I think we grossly underestimated as a society what the implications were for a lot of the social media devices in the neuro techch field the the whole everybody's trying to get out in front not everybody people like me and others trying to get out in front of it. There's actually four groups now that are nonprofits that are that are working on neuroche uh neur neuro your neurorites. There's a neurorites foundation. I spoke I spoke the other day to Stephen uh who runs the organization about aligning ourselves because the only thing I really worry about I in terms of safety and security and privacy we have the HIPPO regulations to follow as a guideline and in schools in particular uh privacy is enormously important and being in there even near their computer systems is a problem in all of this Right. So, we're good citizens on that front, but we have to extend it to into the video gaming universe and everywhere else. What is Don't take people's data. I mean, it's from their without telling them. Don't infuse information into their brains without telling them. Those are the obvious things. But right now, we're trying to figure out where do we draw draw the guidelines. And what I'm what I'm recommending to all of these groups is we don't know what we don't know yet. Because that was absolutely true. We can't envision what technology is going to exist and so let's not make the rules are so hard and fast that nothing new can happen. And I said, "The only thing I really care about for me, because we're a good actor, is that people don't come along and ruin the field for us by making claims that are unfounded or doing something that makes no sense or doing a knockoff of ours and saying it's just as good without any credible evidence." And so that's the idea is let's build a standard. Uh they're actually yeah that might work. The the data is going to be incredibly valuable. Um but you're right there there needs to be privacy here and in Canada like we have this I'm consulting somebody about um Mhm. this similar type of thing that they're collecting health data and it it can't go to the cloud and into somebody's model. Yeah. Um, it has to stay local. Uh, which is, uh, one of the things that my company does for for clients is just to to keep their data safe, right? Uh, so I guess you have a similar challenge about how you're collecting this data and where it's stored. We do. Uh right now when we're in the real world and we with a paying customer, we do we leave all the data on the headset except a single number that's derived from it that controls a video game. And so we do collect the game performance metrics because that allows us to go across the 13 categories and tell how well you're doing in each skill or whether you're improving. That but again that's within the confidentiality of the system we're living within. But there are other companies and we can obviously open ours up and we will under IRB when we want to go after another field. Imagine we wanted to work with drug addiction for example or something. We might want to see a signal in there that's we're not picking up now because it's a different situation. Uh so but there are companies right now that are putting all the data in the cloud. The real value becomes when you have the outcome data linked to it. No different than in any of the other clinical settings. So the outcome is did the student do better better or worse on the test. Yeah. Did the athlete hit a home run or strike out? Those kinds of things. If they're not there, you can't sub. You'll see subgroups like I did when the original days were looking at cancer genomics. Look at all these different subtypes, but we didn't have any idea how to treat them or what and we had no difference in the outcomes. They just existed as different. That's interesting. So that's all the the the valuable data is whether or not it caused a noticeable improvement in there. Yeah, it's some outcome event that you can track and say it could even be on entry. Here's the data that coming in. These are the kids who are the most successful. We could see that before they did the first mission even. Interesting. What is your advice to startups and entrepreneurs these days that you you sit on a lot of boards and you you you're um you see the startup ecosystem for what it is. Uh and and what is a a couple pieces of advice that you would give to a startup in like the seed to to series 8 sort of range? Uh a few things. Uh the CEO's only job is raising money. Let me repeat that. the CEO shop host job is raising money as a VC they all they would do is talk technology and they had no idea what I was interested in which is the other thing is before you meet with anybody doesn't matter if it's a customer potential collaborator potential investor think about what it is that they care most about 99% of entrepreneurs only talk about what they know and what they care the most about that's interesting. Um what you're saying is like some CEOs they are maybe too involved in product and design and not enough on just focusing on finances and and raising. Yeah. I mean a simpler question when I was a VCA used say let's assume your technology works is perfect. Uh all right um who [snorts] you going to sell it to? and they'll say, you know, they'll say, uh, uh, well, there's, imagine it's a cancer diagnostic and do something about that. Well, there's there's all these diagnostic labs out there that I'm sure they'll want it. Well, could you tell me the name of one that you've talked to and how much they would pay for it? [laughter] I even had one person say, "Well, that's your job. " [laughter] No, if you don't if you've never talked to a customer, how do you have any idea what you're talking? So, that's what an investor wants to know. Who's going to buy this? As I said, assume it works perfectly. Who's going to buy it? That was on my mind. And and that's just such a such great advice because the customer is always right in this regard. Like you can't you you you that when somebody throws their money down to buy a product from you that's everything that you need as a founder right like that's everything and what will they pay for it I mean you asked me earlier you know can I buy it directly and as consumer we know we could charge a lot of money for it but we know a lot of people would fail if they didn't have the right uh guidance from us going into the the experience. So that's why we cut our figure we figure it out with kids to start with because they're kind and we just keep moving on. Yeah. At the end of the day, you you need the the case studies, right? So yeah, absolutely. And the proof points that shows it and and those and so as for an entrepreneur, you stop building the technology at the expense of testing it. All right. I'm using it with someone. On that not though, like if you if you could put the think set headset on anybody you wanted to, who would you put it on? Uh I would like uh to see it on uh Lo Messi. I'd like to see him actually perform on this. Wow. Are you uh for this World Cup, man? That would be some interesting Absolutely. I mean, if he if he did it before, I'd like to see how how well he can pop cuz elite athletes can jump right into this space until they hit a skill when they fail because they all do like mission four, five or six, then they have a complete meltdown. Yeah. But there some people like, you know, Michael Jordan and others, they blow right through it. Yeah. Interesting. because that's a natural skill they have that they learned on their own and were born with that differentiates them so much that that's where the term you're a natural comes from, right? Uh and every single athlete says there was someone more skilled than I was in when I was in school, but I had the ability to win. Yeah, that's interesting. Um and and on that note, I'll wrap it up with this. like you you've been around in the field for some time. What's one thing about the brain that in 20 years uh will surprise everybody, but you kind of see it going that way? I what I see is PE again just think about going from 16 apps to 1. 9 million on the iPhone. I see there being so many technologies that will enable us to accelerate the way we learn and the skills we have. So imagine me expanding beyond five senses to having, you know, infrared or whatever, being able to be a tactile sense or something else that your brain can train because our brain has such plasticity. If you lose a limb, you can figure out how to how to, you know, write with your feet or whatever. We have so much opportunity that people are going to find, you know, I don't know how to play music. Well, let's put together a music thing. So, it's good to be an enjoyable training of doing music lessons. [laughter] I remember trying to learn the piano when I was a kid and was such a pain. But I I see what you're saying like if you can diagnose it, if you can label it and you can have a customized learning plan to learn that piano going as you're going, it's it's teaching you the rhythm just and you're keeping up with it and it's just pushing you just a touch every step of the way. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe there's a tactile sense cuz you have poor sense of beat in your own brain that's just going against your hand with a little uh that gets you at the right beat at the same time is training that part of your brain. Yeah, I am not coordinated in that regard and I think that's something that would help me. Thanks, Steve. This has been an amazing conversation. I think it's going to do uh it's going to help a lot of people in my audience. Thank you for coming. Let's stay in touch. All right. Thanks, Johan. A lot of fun.