 If we can monitor the brain more often in times when it is not necessarily in crisis mode, we can get a better understanding of the variables that affect it. Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are on site at Dr. Lowe's Stealth Residence in the beautiful Silicon Valley, California. We are now going to be talking about a new paradigm in brain research. We have Dr. Philip Lowe joining us on the show. Hello. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Super pumped for the conversation. Welcome to Phoenix, Nasty. Thank you. Thank you. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. For those who don't know, Dr. Philip Lowe is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of NeuroVigil, which is dedicated to the betterment of the human condition by merging neuroscience, non-invasive wireless brain recording technology, and advanced computational algorithms to rapidly generate accurate and automated readings of brain wave data. This information is being used to assist with the data collection on a myriad of medical conditions and treatments. He's also the author of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, the signing of which on July 7, 2012, marked a Copernican moment in the history of civilization as the official recognition by scientists of non-human consciousness. And you can find the links in the bio below to neurovigil.com as well as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness and Dr. Lowe's Twitter. All right. Philip, let's start things off with asking you, what are your thoughts on the direction of our world? At what level? Are we talking about the scientific world? Are we talking about the political world? Are we talking about the cultural world? What level? You get to take it. Okay. Very good. Well, I think we are at a very interesting time. Certainly, you know, Rousseau's prediction has come to fruition in the sense that we have matured technologically, immensely, but we have confused that level of maturity with an idea that we have also evolved ethically, which is not the case at all. And I think we need to remember that. This is a sobering time for us to distinguish between the two. And it is a very exciting time to be a scientist and an entrepreneur in order to steer one's work into the world. This is a time when globalization has gotten a bad name, unfortunately. And this is a time when people have exploited that distrust for globalization. I think that is very dangerous because when we stop collaborating, we stop building upon these non-linearities, which are so important. So I think we are at a critical time and I think that people such as yourselves who are actually educating, engaging, and inspiring people are critical because you get to be the bridge into this new world that we are all trying to build, which is one where we can create wonderful technologies with an ethical mindset. So frequent now that we have a guest on the show that we talked to about this wisdom race that's happening, where our level of ethical and moral evolution needs to catch up to the democratization of these exponential technologies and the way that we interplay geopolitically. So I'm glad that you bring that up as a central pillar of the direction of our world. That's massively important to figure out. All right, let's jump into who you were as a kid growing up. How did you even get interested in the fields that you're in now? You know, it's interesting. I think that the moment we understand who we are, we stop being that person. So we love to have this idea that we are masters of our destiny. I think nothing is further from the truth than that. But if I look back at glimpses of my past, I can see how the dots may have connected in some cases. So certainly, I knew from a very young age that the brain was fascinating and was very fragile. I knew this from an experience with my father who overdosed on a particular sleep drug and then threatened the person with a weapon that led us to losing everything we had in one week when I was 10 years old. And then I was always fascinated with mathematics and physics. So I was fortunate I graduated very, very young. I went to the University of Chicago studying mathematics and physics. And I had some theories about biology. And this was a time when students in the University of Chicago had to take half of their courses outside of their expertise. And so I took a biology sequence, applied quantitative techniques. And it so happened that there was a clerical mistake, because of which my name was not removed from a mailing list. And then Harvard Medical School wanted to take a student from the University of Chicago. They chose me even though I was a math geek. And then I worked in the laboratory for a few weeks, ended up loving it, wrote a letter to Francis Crick, who was in neuroscience, and a molecular biologist asking him for guidance. He invited me to come to the Salk Institute for my PhD. I worked first four years in Chicago on sleeping birds, joined the Salk Institute, invented an algorithm to analyze brain patterns during sleep, and then started my company and went the entrepreneurial route. So it was a path that I certainly did not plan. Yeah, and the influence that you had when you were so young of what happened to your father, and how something as complex as taking a what had been made as a sleeping pill could have such an adverse effect on our behavior. And then to set yourself on to see yourself now on this, where you're at now, is like, whoa, what a profound moment in my trajectory that that had. Yeah, and also you also took a big, you know, you really have to, we'll talk about this towards the end, but these risks that you took with going out and to Harvard for the period of time to start analyzing the sleep patterns in birds, and then to also write the letter to Francis Crick to get out to the Salk Institute. I mean, these are massive. He took a risk. He took a risk with also bringing you out, yeah, for your PhD. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is, this is another reoccurring theme. And so even now, I mean, getting all the way to like what you actually did. So what we saw in the old days, we saw the, you know, 10, even 10 years ago, just such like a bulky, call it octopus, sometimes array of old neuro technology. And to be able to find out that you can take something like a single electrode and be able to write an algorithm that's able to make sense of data of brainwave data was a profound realization at that time. True. And it was, that certainly was a gamble. And it started in the following way. There was a student at the University of Chicago, who had discovered that zebra finches, songbirds appear to rehearse their song when they were sleeping. And basically, there's a particular brain structure that is very active while the bird is singing. And lo and behold, when the bird was sleeping, you could see that pattern, you know, reappear, even though the bird was sleeping. And so that caused a huge competition between Caltech, MIT, and Chicago to figure out in what state of sleep this was going on. And I thought this was a good, good project to be involved in. After a year, Caltech and MIT published their findings and did not show any REM sleep in these birds. And I knew that this was wrong, because birds are very photosensitive. So I led them sleep a little bit longer in the hope of catching REM sleep. And I monitored them with security cameras and infrared. And sure enough, later in the night, I could see that the eyes were moving. And it didn't appear that they were waking up. The big question was, why is it that nobody could capture the change in electrophysiology from story of sleep to another state, like REM sleep? And I went to Salk. And then I realized in the middle of my first year, why that was, the brain anatomy is very different. And people were using coordinates that were similar to the mammalian coordinates. That was one issue. And another issue that one of the teams had is they created implants that were quite uncomfortable. And we know that stress changes sleep architecture quite a bit. So I explained this to my mentors at Salk. And I said, you know, I think we have to put the electrodes very close one from the other and make a super light implant. And sure enough, I went back to Chicago and showed that these birds had REM sleep, that they had an intermediate sleep state, that they had brain patterns that were thought to belong only to mammals, even though they didn't have a mammalian brain. And that led to two different things. You know, I had wonderful help at Chicago. I trained another student who was able to replicate these findings. But I also, and he did some beautiful work on human hemispheric sleep. So this is when half of the brain is awake and the other half is asleep. But it led to two things fundamentally. One was the algorithm to then analyze these patterns automatically. And I was told that it was impossible to do this, that we needed at least, you know, eye movements and muscle tone, that maybe sleep states were thought to be a certain number, you know, just based on a convention. There was a fellow in Japan who thought there may be seven or nine sleep states. And so coming up with a mathematical formalism to do this was, you know, a big bet. And people did not want me to do this. In fact, I was forbidden to actually work on this. And I did because I thought this was a great opportunity to do something new. And I want to bet that's why my thesis officially is one page, all kinds of patterns and so on in the appendix. But I showed that mathematically we could separate the sleep stages. And on the other hand, there were people like Francis Crick who were looking at the data and they would say, what does a bird's ability to have REM sleep class about consciousness? And so years later, I was able to rally neuroscientists from all over the world. I'd written this document, which became the convention declaration on consciousness. And what we pretty much did is we took a, we pretty much did a Turing test for consciousness. In other words, we looked at all these different brains and looked at all these similarities between them. And we were looking for these continuities. And what we realized was that the most different parts of our brains did not appear to be necessary for certain behaviors for which consciousness was necessary. And because of that, the idea, the Cartesian notion that consciousness was limited to humans fell. And that was that what you call this Copernican moment, which is now leading us in a new direction and in a world where we'll probably treat other sentient beings a bit better. Yes. And this is also interesting as so many people in our past have been so spiritually connected to source and to nature and to the deeper understanding that other creatures also have feelings that we similarly do. And that it took, it's funny to think that it took this long for scientists to need to say that octopuses and birds and even our dogs and our cats that are in so many of our homes exhibit consciousness. Yeah. That's right. I mean, if you look at it from one particular standpoint, when I started my PhD, I asked three eminent neuroscientists the same question. If animals are not conscious, why do we anesthetize them? How could they feel any pain if they're not conscious? And the first one said, oh, this is a political problem. Don't worry about it. We have people who love before us. I was quite surprised to hear him say this. The second one said, well, we anesthetize them for two reasons. This is a practical one. We don't want them to move during a surgery. But we also want to make sure that in case they are conscious, we wouldn't want to cause pain. So we do this for our own sake. And then this third scientist said, well, clearly they are conscious and we are using them for our own purposes and we want to minimize their pain. And I was surprised by his admitting this. And I said, you know, I hope I did not cause you to be visited by demons right now. And he said, no, I'm visited by them every day. I was quite surprised. And he said, we'll be remembered as butchers later on. And this is a person who worked with with primates. So if we look at it through the lens of history, you know, I mean, the numbers are staggering. What is it 100 million? Well, yes, we're so so so about 100 million vertebrates are sacrificed by industry, academia, and governments every year. According to some numbers I've seen, 40 billion is spent every year. The likelihood that we will actually test a drug is about 6%. And about 98% of those will fail. So this is whether you're an animal lover or not, this is very wasteful. Yeah, that's because he needs to get better in this process. Well, we just need to move that we need to change the paradigm. And we need to instead of waiting for people to be completely sick, we need to actually get data from them when they appear to be healthy still when they're asymptomatic. And when our chances of correcting whatever is going on, when those chances are higher, that I think needs to happen and changing the whole world into a laboratory and using real population data is key. But if you look at, you know, all of this with the lens of history, well, remember, it starts with a white Greek male. The white Greek male stands alone and everything around him is deemed to be barbarian. Over the centuries, that radius extends a little bit. So now, you know, Persians are seen to not be barbarian. Latin America is conquered in America in general. There was a priest from the Inquisition who says his name was Bartir de las Casas. He says, why are we giving a Christian name to these natives? Either they're animals and they do not deserve a Christian name, or they are human beings and they quote unquote have a soul and we should not be enslaving them. You know, so our ethics have evolved. Wow. But, but so, but we're committing the same hubris now with the animals. So, you know, eventually the Amerindians have more rights. Women are recognized by the by the Pope as having a soul that took a few hundreds of years as well. And if you look at, you know, what happened during the Holocaust, it's always this idea that a group is distinct from others. And, and when when people start believing this, this is when they dehumanize others and they do horrible things to them. And I'm quite scandalized when, you know, a country such as America, which, which, which did try to live up to the ideals of democracy, even though this is a country that was founded on genocide and slavery, abandons these ideals and treats our neighbors to the south, you know, worse than Nazi war criminals who did, you know, have shampoo soap and toothpaste. So, I think, you know, the, the, the cart had introduced this difference between human animals, non-human animals, and the Cambridge Declaration reversed that. And so we're living at a very exciting time now because we are recalibrating our understanding of who we are in the universe. Yeah. And it does at times feel like in the earlier times of human evolution that there were likely deeper connections to the spirit in the other as one that was just like my own. And so then it seems like way more of, there was a lot of tribalism, but whatever religion did to dehumanize like you were describing in some instances as well, complex. Let's touch on the democratization of neuro technology and also what it means when we now have all of this more simple, smaller, able to analyze and map what's going on in our brain on a moment-to-moment basis. You had this very interesting moment in your TED med talk when you asked the audience, how many of you have neuropathology and no one raised their hand? And then you asked them, when was the last time you got a brain scan? And again, people were like, I haven't gotten a brain scan. And so you need a moment-to-moment biometric analysis of your brain of your body in order to really be able to predict the development of pathologies. And that's a big part of the future of neurovigil and just medicine in general. It's part of the present. So we've been doing this. We have implemented vision. We've worked with some of the world's biggest pharma companies, and we've actually created maps of brain activity in individuals who are undergoing all kinds of treatment on the research basis. But we have found some interesting things. And so now, when it comes to democratization, the idea is to make the probes smaller and smaller, made them available to people all over the world at a very low cost so that we can actually track individuals and enable them to record their brain data as easily as they may be able to record their heart data. Some people will say, well, I only am interested in an EEG if it has 12 leads or 16 leads. I think that if you do that, then it doesn't become portable. So if you use some serious AI and you have enough probes out there, and you can screen people longitudinally, then you can actually, whatever percentage of bandwidth you feel that you may be losing by going with fewer channels, you more than recoup the accuracy by contrasting the data within people and across people. More people with a single electrode can provide you with very valuable insights versus one person turning into a pincushion. Absolutely. Because again, this is the Heisenberg Institute of Principle for Biology. If you turn people into a pincushion, you are going to actually change their physiology as well. You're going to affect them in a way. So we're creating probes that are very, very gentle, very, very elegant so that we can actually put them in a lot of people. And may we take a look at the eye brain? Well, here's a little one. The little eye brain. So now we're in a stage of the company where we have about 60 international patterns and we've done work in many different directions. We've helped Stephen Hawking, we created a system so that if he ever became completely paralyzed by the end of his life, that we would be able to actually bring him back and enable him to communicate. So we actually patented this, the biomarkers of intent. And now we have a number of trillion-dollar companies that want licenses to this technology. We've got companies that are interested in the small device that we have. We have companies that are interested in the Parkinson's sensor. So now we're using this IP in order to create a number of new opportunities and to attract people who are excited by those verticals. So this is a tiny little eye brain, for example. So this is all there is. You've got everything in there. You've got the battery, you have the transmission to the phone. And we're still going to do a lot of testing on these types of devices. NASA is interested in them. But that's a really small footprint. I think it was Newsweek that called it a Fitbit for the brain. I think it's much better than a Fitbit for the brain. But that's the idea, something that's very, very simple, very gentle that you can put in a lot of people. And then I can take something as simple as the eye brain and place it on forehead. Is that the best place for that? Unless you have a hairy forehead, which you don't have. So it's a pretty good place. And then I'm usually wearing that with some sort of a comfortable strap to hold it in place. You don't need to. The electrode is adhesive. So I can use these adhesive straps to keep it on. So then through then there's a process of the biosignal is then being processed by your technology. The devices are very easy to build. These algorithms must be extremely complex to be able to understand a biosignal of intent. Something like that is like, what? Wow. Well, I've been doing this for a while. So it doesn't appear complex to me, but making violence may not have appeared complex to study various either after a while. You get pretty good at patent recognition. But a fundamental thing that people had to understand was that EEGs are 1 over F. So that means that the higher frequencies are going to have less power. And power goes with the square of the amplitude. So there's a 1 over F-square relationship between frequency and amplitude. Think about it like waves in the ocean. You can have these very, very big waves, but they're slow. Or you could have these little ripples, high frequency, but less power. And so the first thing to realize was that there could be statistically significant changes in these VR high frequencies that were not observable initially if one only focused on raw power. So that was the first step. And then there are all kinds of machine learning algorithms that you can use. I like to favor unsupervised ones because if you do a supervised neural net, then you can't actually discover more than what you already know. And I think that's risky. So I love to use unsupervised nets on these types of data. But interestingly, the algorithms that we created work initially for sleep, but then we created algorithms that were geared towards wakefulness and intent. And that's quite interesting when we have a person who actually communicated and was able to spell his name or just say the word communicate without moving. So then a biosignal that's common then is either like a lower frequency or a higher frequency or something in between. The whole thing is to get a pattern. A pattern of the frequency over time? A pattern of changes in relative shift in frequencies over time. Relative shifts in frequencies over time. Okay. And then sleep stages can be determined from this or potentially things like the onset of neuropathologies can potentially be determined. What you can do is once you have certain signatures that correspond to particular brain areas. For example, you can then track these brain areas over time and see if the signature is affected over time, either naturally or by some compound. Okay. And we can potentially show the efficacy of in clinical trials. We just filed a patent actually. Doing that. Yeah. Absolutely. Showing particular signatures that were being affected by certain compounds. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So all the numbers that you were mentioning earlier with our need to increase efficacy in clinical trials can be augmented through patents like what you just filed. Well, we need to, well, the pharma industry, I mean I had a very famous oncologist who asked me in Beverly Hills a few weeks ago why the pharma industry hadn't put a hit on me, which I thought was a pretty interesting question, coming on the heels of a Chilean reporter who asked me why the meat industry hadn't put a hit on me. So really strange questions these days. But not everybody likes to know that you can actually check whether a particular compound has a signature on the brain. You know, because especially compound makers, if they've invested a lot of resources, like to believe that their signatures are just clean. We find all kinds of interesting things. Wow. It'll be great to identify those that have self-dealing proclivities and... That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem and it's like we were talking about earlier. It's just difficult. It's still going on right now. So for instance... The science and math are complex and so that also... It's about greed. I'll give you an example. When my father had this adverse reaction to a sleep drug, turns out that the company that created that drug had data showing that this drug had some major side effects and they just tried to sweep everything under the rug. In fact, many years later, when I created Neurovigil, I have a co-founder, Kirstenowski, a leader in artificial intelligence and one of my PG advisors. But around that time, I met with a French billionaire who I was interviewing as a potential investor in the company and he brought with him a gentleman who actually admitted in the middle of the negotiation that he had been hired by that pharma company in order to create a disinformation campaign afterwards. And this is still going on. And so one of the reasons I'm excited about having technology that is wearable that people can have immediately and directly is that even if this technology may not diagnose them, if we can notice that there's a change and get a physician to look at the data and diagnose them, there's a level of vigilance there that I think is very important. Too often, many physicians act like drug pushers. If they don't feel some quota, they're not invited to the retreat in Hawaii. There are eminent physicians in the US who will go on nightly news shows and pitch all kinds of products that they actually have. Financial incentives and pitching and they don't disclose those. And I've actually been known for going after a number of them. I think if we can give a wearable to people, but avoid the self-diagnosis because I think there's a trap there too, then we shift the power back to the people and that's where we need to be. Yeah. And now let's explain how that will happen. So then as you identify the patterns in biosignals, you're also showing the person that's wearing this data on their phone. So then is this... I was the first person to have a beam brainwave data on the phone as far as I know. Beam brainwave data, that was 10 years ago you were showing that. Well, I showed it at Ted Med and that pattern was issued a number of jurisdictions already. Yeah, I mean the phone is just a vehicle to get... To get these insights that can be preventative medicine, they can be a beautiful way of being able to live healthier. Now then... More data. Yeah. Well yeah, more data, more insights. So then when would someone be able to take something like the eye brain and be able to wear it around with them? Sure. So eye brain has been on the market now for 10 years. But everything has been done through pharma. So what we're doing now is we're creating a number of new subsidiaries, new affiliates, new companies. One of them is a wearable company. So assuming that we find... If we find the right partners and the right people to staff that company, then we will be able to bring the technology to those markets. But I'm more interested in getting the technology in the hands of people who need them the most. So who are the most vulnerable people? The elderly population, the big one. I remember the organization for... ASHA. Yeah, so ASHA is the American Senior Housing Association. Correct. Yeah, and so you did 20,000 elderly brains being monitored now. We did a deal with a member of ASHA. They deal with sign. You know, it's for a large amount. They haven't delivered on their part yet. I'm not going to call them out. But certainly we're negotiating with other ASHA partners as well. Okay, cool. And ASHA members. But I think that that's certainly any... You have a lot of people who are over-medicated there. I think at least getting some data and providing that to physicians would be very, very valuable. Yes. And that's where I'd like to start. And then also another really interesting one that just went through last year was the deal with Wyoming as well. It does make a lot of sense with being the 10th largest state and having... Is it the least population? But 586,000 people. Yeah, yeah. And so then being so sparsely populated and then being able to do things like have this extra data about the elderly especially can help with them living longer, saving more lives. They've got a huge issue in the winters there because their roads are snowed under and they have a number of people who are over-reporting false emergencies, right? So just reporting false emergencies. That's obviously an over-report. And you have some people who are undergoing real emergencies who are not getting the attention that they need. So Wyoming is extremely interested in having access to any type of physiological home-based monitor. So not just the ones that Neurovigil is planning on building but also a number of our partners. And so we're creating this thing called an accelerator right now. And the first batch of companies will be about 10. Five will be Neurovigil subsidiaries. And the other five are other partners. I can describe them a little bit. If you're interested. Yes, please. Yeah. So I'm happy to do that. But Wyoming wants to be the first state outside of California to have access to these technologies. Another country that is interested in having access to these technologies besides the United States is Argentina. So Argentina provides free healthcare not only to the Argentines but to the neighbors as well. And with the 17% official unemployment rate and with about 37% of people of working age who cannot get a full-time job, that is not a sustainable model. And so they want to also put a big emphasis on preventive health. I just gave a speech to a joint session of Congress over there. I met with the Speaker of the House in Argentina. I met with an advisor to President Macri and with a cabinet member. It looks like I'll go back to meet with President Macri as well. So they get it. And they want to help also on the clinical trial side. They have to change their export laws in order to export anything that may be manufactured there. The Chileans are also very interested. They have wonderful institutions, great export laws. And we're already looking at space on a campus in Santiago, Chile. I was just there. And we also have an offer on space in Wyoming. So we want to go and work with people who need these things the most. And I think that's the more powerful proof of concept. And if you look at what we're interested in, in terms of their original, we're interested in Parkinson's sensing. So it turns out that there are biomarkers that appear to pop up about 15 years before the onset of Parkinson's. That's very, very important. 15 years before the onset. Before the onset. Yeah, that's a really good long window. Absolutely. So if it's a neurodegenerative disease, people may say, well, why would you want to know? You know, why would you want to be freaked out this way? I'll tell you why you want to know. Because there are now a number of environmental factors that have been isolated, which may contribute to Parkinson's. And so certainly knowing that you may be at risk and giving you the option to engage in certain behaviors that might decrease the likelihood of developing for Parkinson's, I think that's valuable. So we know, for example, that if you look at Parkinson's genes, the sensitivity is about 16%. That's not huge. RBD, Rembehavioral Disorder, which is a disease that is characterized by maintaining muscle tone during REM sleep. Well, it turns out that according to some experts in Canada, if you have RBD, the likelihood that you all have Parkinson's within another 15 years, if you live another 15 years, is nearly 100%. So that's nearly 100% specificity. And about a third of Parkinsonians have RBD. So the sensitivity is more than twice the most sensitive Parkinson's gene. So you see it certainly, you would want to know if you have RBD or not. Because I was able to show mathematically that you can distinguish between REM and wakefulness on a single channel. We can just add in another channel and see if the muscle tone is on or off during REM. So we're interested in that. We're interested in the wearable space. We're interested in mind-controlled interfaces that work we did with and for Stephen Hawking. We're interested in glioblastoma, finding out if you actually have a change in physiology that could be a negative of a brain tumor. I met with a very prominent inventor, Southern California, just recently who wants to team up on that. And we're also interested in pooling all of that sensor data and doing real, very rigorous AI on that. So that's on the NV side. If you look at the partner side, there's a TMS company on the east coast. They have about five million in revenue. They've been using the technology for bipolar disorder. They want to stimulate the substance in anigra, which is affected by Parkinson's. We'll see if they do a good job with that. But they are applying. There was a Stanford Lisbon spin-off working on what they call a 4D bioreactor. The idea is to replicate the blood-brain barrier in vitro. There was a drug called Tyranfluorobyl many years ago and received about a billion dollars of investment. And it flunked in phase three because it did not even cross the blood-brain barrier. So basically the phase two data was underpowered. It was fluffed. And so if we had a way to just test that in vitro, that could be a very good thing. There is a company that wants to create injectable brain parts. It sounds like sci-fi, but if you're not... If you're working on something that doesn't sound like sci-fi, then you're not innovating right now. So they actually have some really interesting technology. And the 4D bioreactor company has technology that is applicable to what they are building as well. So there are a number of people who are applying. There's an MIT wearable spin-off as well. There's another wearables in a Parkinson's space. So we're creating the best in class. We're not creating infomercials for one university or another. We're creating a business environment that is so much in favor of the entrepreneur. I know this having been on this side and staying on this as an entrepreneur, we're not taking any equity. It's not a mandate of ours. We're just taking royalties. And after the services are repaid, the royalty goes down to 1%. So the idea is to give the best terms possible. We have VCs here. They all say they're all different. But then you look at the term sheet, they're all doing the same thing. They're taking a 2% management fee and they're taking a 20% cut. That's if they make money. And if they don't make money, they're not punished. So it's a very interesting model. We don't take any management fee. 10% should go to the Department of Nature Maintenance of all venture capital. It's an interesting thought. But what we're doing is we are not charging the LPs anything, right? And there's no the LPs. No, there's no management fee. There's no 20% cut that can invest in the companies or through NV. And the portfolio companies just pay a royalty. And the royalty drops to 1%, which is pretty damn good. And they're provided with legal services, with accounting services, with space, anything they need in order to get through the value of death, as we call it, right? Get to market. And we've got people in Wyoming and other places who are already showing that they want to explore these technologies. So I think it's going to be a bell-apps for the brain. I think it's going to be very exciting. Not a single animal will be killed or used in the process. This is all biomarker-based, human biomarker-based. And I think it's going to be very exciting. Yeah, this is truly a new paradigm in brain research from not using animals. Also, with having a new way of structuring the neuro-technology acceleration of these projects, and being able to get the interest of people from around the world, and the minds that create potential from around the world, and helping also unlock the potential of underprivileged people and help them get access. So I just created a foundation. Well, I brought back to life a foundation. Initially, I created it years ago, but it was not used. Now, it's being brought back to life, and it has three, four sides. The first one is to do exactly what you say, which is to provide job training for people who are underprivileged, so they can actually integrate the booming new technology industry. And this is something that the company has done for many years, but we'd like for all the neuronal companies to offer internships as well, and the foundation can certainly provide for that. The other element is when these new technologies are offered in very small batches, the price is quite consequent. People complain about healthcare in the States, and they have very good reason to. But we are also the first ones having access to some fantastic technology. And that is part of the problem. It's a multi-faceted problem, but it's part of the problem. So we want to make sure that the foundation can reduce the cost significantly. For individuals who cannot afford these technologies, when these technologies are approved, I think that's going to be very important. And I created the Francis Creek Memorial Conference, which was held in Cambridge, UK, July 7th, 2012. And certainly, if there were to be other conferences, the foundation could host those and also provide busing and reduce cost or way fees for individuals who would otherwise not have access to that content. Yeah, the vision extends into a lot of the important facets of our world, and I definitely love that about the way that you see things and the way that you're pursuing this new paradigm. There's so many aspects of this that we can still unpack in detail, which we can, I think, do on further conversations. I want to at least get your thoughts on this on the way out with all of the emerging exponential technologies, with the amount of the democratization of these technologies, and with our ability to create these powerful algorithms that can make sense of the data that we're getting. And as something as simple as a single electrode can be so discreetly, yeah, a single channel can be worn discreetly with us throughout the day and have that fourth dimension of time with us, then where does the future of neuro technology go? Am I going to be getting this on my moment-to-moment basis, my state of my body, all my biometrics, I get that notification that 15 years, oh my gosh, it's starting to take care of that. For that you wouldn't have to actually wear it every day, but basically it's interesting. If you make the technology very compact, you might lose some bandwidth, for example, but you might also be able to put on way more people and get some great statistics. I went from birds to humans, so sleeping birds, sleeping humans, and then we're talking to waking humans. The idea is for the whole world to become a major laboratory. And the more we can actually get data from people as they behave and in going about their lives, the less corrupted the data will be. We've been treating the brain as this black box. We find information about it after there's been a major crash. And that's going to be changing. We're going to be aware of things that are happening in our brain before we present symptoms. And that means that a number of treatment options that have so far been failures might prove to actually be very, very protective of the brain if implemented at the right time. It means that we will get a better understanding of the impact that diet has, for example. There's a lot of data, for example, on Parkinson's and dairy. And it's interesting. There's a lot of data on red meat and cancer. Now, I'm a vegan. You might say, we have to control for your veganism. And I'll say, we have to control for your non-veganism because I want to look at the data. There is something that seems to be significant and we have to see if there's a mechanism behind those things. So I think that if we understand, if we can monitor the brain more often in times when it is not necessarily in crisis mode, we can get a better understanding of the variables that affect it. Totally. That's a great way to put it. We so frequently just go in to health for healthcare when we're in crisis mode. And this is probably most evidently felt when we get sick, when we finally realize how grateful we are for being healthy. We take better care of our cars than of our brains. That's ridiculous, right? That's ridiculous. We need to have a more frequent check-in with the complex biology that's happening inside of us. And so I'm really looking forward to those days. And they're actually with things like the social genome and what's going on with that. There's, we just did an episode talking about that as well. There's some very interesting future that even we couldn't predict a couple of decades ago that we would have these instant drone deliveries, instant cars to pick us up, instant video communications across the planet, all these types of things. And now we can't predict that we're going to be doing things with our matching to people based on our genetics or to do other nuts things like editing out diseases or augmenting our abilities. So we're really, it's beautiful to be there at these moments of being able to figure out how biotech and neurotech are just going to be causing a serious. And we're also going to piss off a lot of people. And that's good because the number of failures could have been addressed a long time ago. And so we're fighting people who are very entrenched just like with the Cambridge Nuclear Declaration. We had people who had to argue against their own self-interest because they were working with animals. So we have to look at the data and we have to do what's right. And so the innovators will get a lot of the fire, but that's fine. That's what we're here for. Yeah, there's been so many instances of fighting, the movement of the new paradigm, especially with people that have the old paradigm in their pockets and they want to keep it. And that's a major part of what we talk about on the show is updating the code of our world, shattering through the old paradigm, bringing the new forth and being inspired to do so through the guests that we have that talk about what they're working on. Let's actually wrap on exactly that. You've had a very complex entrepreneurial journey that you're referencing. You can look back at and connect some of the dots along the way. But you persevered through the tests of faith. And this is so important for so many of the young people that watch for so many of the guests that we have on. Give us some of your thoughts around the importance of embodying that entrepreneurial spirit and going through those tests of faith. I think you've got to decide why you're doing what you're doing. Now, if something is a passion, you may never understand it on a very fine level because by definition, we are passive, vis-a-vis something that exerts a huge force on us. But I would say don't be an entrepreneur just to call yourself an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurs I know don't call themselves entrepreneurs. They tell you about what they're building. And when that happens, then you've got a mission, then you have a purpose. And it becomes much harder to stop because you know that there's a whole vision that relies on you. If you do this for your ego, there are plenty of other things you can do for your ego. So I think find something that's way bigger than yourself. And sure, when I wrote the declaration, I knew that there was a very good chance that my career was over. But I thought that that's just one life. When I did the algorithm, and I was told not to do it because people for 50 years tried to do this, that was exactly why I needed to do it because I thought this is a chance to have impact, do something positive. And when people abandon you, that's a very good thing. They are doing you a favor, whether that is an investor who doesn't understand what you're doing anymore or a person in your life, a fiancee or a friend. That's a good thing. They're doing you a favor. They are lessening your load. If your passion does not excite them, they should be nowhere in your ecosystem. So I would say, don't take no for an answer. Understand why you're in this. Do not give up. Now, adapt. Understand if there are different ways of doing certain things. Absolutely. Learn for sure. But if your vision is one that would be your biggest gift to the world, then you're stealing from the world and you're stealing from yourself by not going forward with it. Love that. Love how you use the word intent as well. We build things that transcend us, that transcend our ego, that are for the betterment of our world and not for fame, greed, corruption, those types of tendencies. Those old codes are dying. And the new codes of building a better world that transcends us is the future. And also another one is looking at the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. In so many ways, it's exactly the styles of declarations that we need moving forward. So we need more, especially young people, to be thinking, what are these declarations that we can write today? Because 50 years from now, people will look at this time and say, can't believe you are slaughtering these billions of animals for food. So what are the declarations that we can write today? So, well, I think that's a great question. As far as I was concerned, it needed to happen, even though up until the night before, we did not know that it was going to happen. I mean, there were some very prominent scientists who said, we don't sign declarations. And I said, actually, if you're not signing, you are actually implicitly validating Descartes' declaration. And there's no data on that whatsoever, that we should be the only conscious species. So, and then I was like, well, scientists don't issue declarations. That's actually not true. If you look, there was a conference in Hawaii in the 80s that declared umami a taste, the fifth taste. And this was after decades of research. And so I thought, OK, we have decades of research on these non-human brains. And it's pretty clear that what distinguishes us from them doesn't appear to be necessary for features for which consciousness is necessary. Therefore, we cannot assume that we are the only conscious beings anymore. And by the way, in terms of AI, that's quite interesting, because if it means that an octopus with 500 million neurons can actually be... And three hearts, is that right? They're very, very interesting. But if an octopus with far fewer neurons than we have can produce something that seems to display elements of consciousness, then it means two things. It means that the conditional probability of finding conscious life, given the probability of finding life in the universe, is far higher than we thought. Far higher than we thought, yeah. Does not need to be anthropomorphized like humans. That's correct. Can be found in so many places, yes, yes. And number two... Even on some of our moons, yeah. And number two, the likelihood of creating artificial consciousness may not be as low as people may have thought it was. So, you know, I mean, it gets us to think a little bit differently. Wow, Philip, I've had a great time talking to you. Likewise, amazing questions. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you to your team. Yes, a huge shout out to Ron Vagus, a producer and director. Thank you very much, Ronnie. Thank you, Philip, for coming on. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. It's a huge thing to be here. Looking forward to doing follow-ups on where Neurovigil is heading and where the industry is going. This is very exciting stuff and how we are living healthier lives. We'd love for everyone to check out the links in the bio below. Again, to neurovigil.com as well as the Cambridge Declaration on consciousness. Go and check that out and share that with more people so we can have more of these stop-provoking discussions with our friends, our families, our coworkers, people online on social media. Get talking about these things. Get talking more also about things like the future of neuro technology and biotechnology and where we're heading with that. Get inspired to write your own also declarations that we so desperately need. And be sure to also understand that your talents and your genius should not be subservient to your ethics. So start with your ethics and then draw upon your talents and your imagination to meet them, to meet the ethical challenges that you want to resolve. And everyone, check out the links in the bio dissimulation. We really need you to start helping the entrepreneurs, the artists, the spiritual leaders to help them succeed, support them in their processes. Go and do it yourselves. Support them and grow and create yourselves. Our links are below to our Patreon cryptocurrency paypal. Our design cool merch and get paid links down there. Go and do all those things, guys. Help us continue to do cool things like coming on site for interviews. And go and build the future. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you very much for tuning in, everyone. We will see you soon.