But you know that feeling when your gut just isn't happy and everything else just feels kind of off?
Whether you're dealing with occasional digestive issues or managing more complex gut health challenges, finding the right support makes all the difference.
That is where VSL probiotics steps in with their scientifically -backed approach to gut health.
VSL No. 3 is the number 1 gastroenterologist -recommended multi -strain probiotic brand specifically It is basically formulated with eight powerful probiotic strains to support those managing IBS and UC.
And for everyday wellness and digestive balance, they're new or offering VSL -4 gut.
It delivers those same complementary strains in a daily supplement designed for regularity and gut harmony.
Both options reflect decades of scientific expertise and a deep understanding of what your gut needs to thrive.
Visit them at VSLprobiotics .com today to learn more.
in 2018 I was at a conference where one of the co -founders of control labs stood up and he was showcasing the technology and he had it in the form of basically a watch on his wrist and he said why are we human such clumsy output devices we're incredibly good at taking in information but we're really bad at getting it out of our brains and what if instead of you know using these sledgehammer -like devices on the ends of our arms, we just think about typing or swiping instead.
And that was the aha moment, where it was both the form factor had been solved by integrating brain sensors into everyday devices like a watch, and the functionality was being addressed in that it was an interface to all of the rest of our technology rather than just a limited application.
And I thought, like, that's it.
That's the pivotal acquisition.
I'm going to watch that product because as soon as one of the major tech companies like Apple integrates it into the Apple Watch, all the things I've been following forever are going to go mainstream.
And, you know, sure enough, that was the pivotal acquisition.
It just happened to be Meta who acquired them a year later.
Yeah, I mean, this is so interesting, right?
I remember back, and unfortunately I joined you in the Acronic Micronora Club.
It's been a part of my daily life for as long as I meant, you know, like so many people, I have tried so many different things, and there have been all sorts of tech and gadget and things you stuck on your forehead and all the different stuff.
But it's interesting, I think what you're referencing also in terms of one of the really early devices around meditation was this device, I think it was called Muse, I don't know if it's still around or not?
Where you would put it on.
It was sort of like a very simplified neurofeedback type of thing which would try and kind of tell you when you're in the zone or not and help you try and get back there.
But it's fascinating that you've looked at the world and you said like, okay, we're not there yet.
But I can see where this is going.
And when we hit that tipping point where technology actually is able to do what we wanted to do in a much more sort of commoditized in public and ease -filled and accessible way, it's going to be game on.
Right. That's exactly right.
And, you know, I think because I've been watching it so long to your point, like, I could see what was necessary for the tipping point and then to see the technology finally come into fruition...to be like, wow this is like, all of the sci -fi kind of scenarios that I've played out are about to come true and you know the urgency of it then just became really clear to me.
So maybe let's do a little bit defining here also because I'm sure we'll have folks and you know joining us who are kind of saying, what are you talking about?
Of course. What actually is this?
And like we've used the phrase neurotechnology a couple of different times here.
If you're explaining this to somebody who's never met you before at dinner and, you know, how would you actually break that?
How would you walk somebody through understanding what is neurotechnology the way you talk about it?
Yeah, I mean so the easiest entry for people is at this point to say like how many of you are wearing like a smart device, like a smartwatch, like an Apple watch or a Smart Ring or a Fit bit or any of these other devices that have a sensor in them that are tracking some aspect of your bodily functions, right?
It could be the number of steps you take per day.
It could be your heart rate.
And you know, at least half the people at your dinner table probably have at least one of those devices on, or that they've, you know, have one in their life that they've acquired.
And neurotechnology, at least the way I'm talking about it, isn't what Elon Musk is doing, although we can get into that.
It's really taking many of those those same devices, whether it's Airpods or a watch and adding another sensor.
And this is a sensor that tracks your brain activity.
And it's surprising that these aren't already in our everyday lives because people are so used to quantifying so many other aspects of their bodily functions.
But all this is tracking the brain functions.
And most people will say, well, how can you do that?
that. And most of these are tracking what's the electrical activity in your brain.
So if you're thinking, if you're listening to this podcast right now, neurons are firing in your brain, giving off tiny electrical discharges.
Now that's happening with hundreds of thousands of neurons at the same time and they give off characteristic patterns that can now be decoded things to advances in AI.
So you have these different sensors that can pick up that electrical activity, then you have AI that can interpret what those signals mean.
And they can interpret increasingly more thanks to advances in AI and thanks to, you know, massive training of these models on this electrical activity.
There are other sensors that are coming too.
But the dominant form that most of these devices are integrating are EEG or electroencephalography sensors.
My sense is that, you know, if we were having this conversation a decade ago, this is the type of stuff where you would need to actually have a cap on your head and have, you know, like electrodes, like all over with wires coming out and potentially on an FMRI or any of the other sort of, like, brain -oriented scans to get information and generally it's only available, you know, either through scientific research, if you're part of a study, or through medical diagnosis and treatment.
Right. But now, it's just – it's part of our consumer products.
Yeah. So definitely a decade ago, if you wanted any quality of signal, you would need to have a cap that had, you know, 100 -some electrodes on it, and that was applied with gel to your scalp, and it would be a messy process, and you would just track a short period of time while you're in a doctor's office.
us, or you go into your point like a giant functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
And you might be in there for an hour doing an activity, but you'd get a snapshot in time.
Those are still going to give you far better signal than any of the consumer devices are because you're talking about the ability to look more deeply into the brain or to have, you know, more electrodes covering more of the scalp than these devices.
But now, a decade later, you can buy almost from countless companies now, headphones that have sensors, maybe eight in each of the cups, the soft cups that go around your ear, or earbuds that might just have four electrodes in each ear and can detect through the ear what's happening in the electrical activity in your brain.
Or pick up peripheral nervous system activity that is like as the signals go from your brain down your arm to your wrist to pick up motor neuron activity at the muscular junctions through something like a watch that has an EMG, electromyography center, in them.
And these are just consumer -based devices, and the major players on the market like Meta, who acquired that company, Control Labs, have started to market these products, to you know do things like integrate with their Orion augmented reality glasses, or you know Apple ProVision that uses eye tracking to make inferences about brain and mental states.
You know, they have a patent to put sensors, brain sensors into their air pods and likewise to put brain sensors into the forehead band of their virtual reality devices to pick up that electrical activity.
And so, it's no longer something that's confined to the medical arena.
And then, of course, the algorithms have gotten much, much better at being able to extract signal over the noisiness of the signal that it's otherwise getting.
So the quality has improved for what can actually be detected from brain activity.
I mean, it's just incredible, you know, and it feels like AI over the last couple of years probably just allows interpretation of like whatever simplified data we're getting from our devices in a way that, you know, probably not too long ago.
We would've had really interesting data, but the AI is letting us actually see the utility and that like how do we actually use this to live better and differently?
That's right, and much faster, I think, than anybody expected.
when chat GPT first came out, I reached out to some of the leading neuroscientists and said, how are you integrating this already into language decoding?
And they're like, we're figuring it out, we don't totally know yet.
It was only a few months later that one of the researchers out of UT Austin published a paper applying GPT -1 to being able to decode information from functional magnetic resonance its imaging scanning sessions, being able to do things that nobody would have expected, like continuous language, entire paragraphs of what people were thinking, being decoded from that, thanks to advances in GPT -1.
And when you listen to the conversations at Meta that they've done at Meta Connect, they talk about the power of being able to have a large language model on a device.
One of the limitations of shipping out these products to a mass market has been that everybody's Your brain signal's a little bit different, and when you have a consumer product, when it comes right out of the box, it needs to work.
And so what they've been able to do, thanks to generative AI and having these on -device large language models, is to have basic functionality work right out of the box.
Like, you can use it to go up, down, left, right.
But then it learns you, right, and co -evolves with you and gets better and better at decoding your brain activity by having an on -device decoder and classifier.
That's incredible, right?
That wouldn't have been possible five years ago.
And the fact that now these devices can co -evolve to get better and better decoding brain activity enables a mass market product that couldn't happen before these advances.
break down what you mean by decoding a little bit more here, you know, are we talking about literally like wearing a pair of glasses or a watch or ear earbuds or or headphones that can pick up electrical signal in your brain and then literally start to say oh, this is what you're thinking.
this is what you're saying, this is what you're or, they do one out there, but like, walk through what decoding actually is.
So, what's tricky is how much it can decode, and what it means, what you mean by thinking.
So intentional thought or intentional communication is different than passive thought that you have in your brain.
Like if I say, I want to send a text message and here's the sentence I want to send, and that's intentional communication of speech in your brain, and the devices are getting much better at that, being able to pick up intentional communication of speech and literally what you're thinking, right?
So if I want to send a text message and type on a virtual keyboard from what I'm thinking, these models already are starting to be able to do that with pretty amazing accuracy and then, you know, just think about what a large -language model does, it predicts the next word in a sequence, and so, you know, what am I most likely to say, like open the, you know, is it open the window, open the door, open the wine bottle?
You can pick up context to figure out what it is that I'm most likely to say next, and so these models make decoding happen much faster and much more efficiently.
You know, just a few years ago, before the models came onto the market, it was already possible to classify major brain states.
So you talked about meditation, you know, Muse has been trying to classify, like, here's roughly what this brainwave means when you're, alpha wave dominant, or beta wave dominant, different patterns of electrical activity in the brain, most likely means you are meditating or you're focusing or you're happy or sad.
So those big brain states are already possible to decode with a decent degree of accuracy using these consumer devices.
But it's the ability to decode intentional speech is what has gotten remarkably better.
It's even possible to decode passive thinking though, so that's the external environment.
It has potentially heart rate sensors that are integrated with the Apple Watch that I'm using.
It has EEG sensors, and it's all that's being used at the same time with complex algorithms to interpret what you're thinking and feeling.
And that gives a much more accurate picture.
It's where you move in the virtual environment, it's the email that you brought up and how responding to it.
And the kind of contextual ability to take all of that biometric information and all of these other contextual clues means that the power and the accuracy of decoding what you're thinking and feeling goes up exponentially.
Yeah. I mean, that's where I was going with this, right?
Because if you had a watch that if you had where you've got galvanic skin sensors and temperature and heart rate and pulse ox and these things, Because those are all, you know, like indicators of emotional states.
Now, it may be—it's not going to be able to distinguish, are you anxious or excited.
Because a lot of times, I guess maybe, it'll tease it out and maybe it can actually overlay that with what you're thinking to actually then determine, is this physiological response more likely to be anxiety or excitement?
It's wild. Mm -hmm. Yeah.
But I mean more importantly it's not even just are you anxious or excited.
It's what are you anxious or excited about and then how like what are you envisioning and what are you visualizing at the same time and you know and then you know even more provocatively and if whoever or whatever entity is monitoring the fact that your anxious or excited is it possible to change how you feel rather than to just you know allow you to continue to be anxious and excited.
And we'll be right back afterward from our sponsors.
Goodlife Project is sponsored by Better Help so you know it's kind of fascinating how we celebrate independence in our culture yet some of the most remarkable breakthroughs happened when we're willing to reach out for support.
I mean think about it every great leader or artist or innovator has said someone in their corner helping them process challenges and unlock their potential And that's where therapy comes in, and Better Help makes it beautifully simple.
With over 30 ,000 credential therapists available online, Better Help makes it so easy to connect with someone who really gets what you're working through.
Whether you're navigating career decisions or relationships or wanting to show up more fully in your life or navigating some anxious times.
So whether you're looking to develop better coping skills, set healthy boundaries, or simply grow into your strongest self, there's a therapist who specializes in what matters to you.
So build your support system with BetterHelp.
Visit BetterHelp .com slash Good Life Project to get 10 percent off your first month That's BetterHelpHELP .com slash Good Life Project or just click the link in the show notes.
What is... Dax, are you?
Tracking all our cars on Carvana Value Tracker, on all our devices.
Yes, Kristin. Yes, I am.
While I've been looking for my phone for...
In Dax's domain, we see all.
So we always know what our cars are worth.
All of them? All of them.
Value surge. Truck's up 3 .9%.
That's a great offer.
I know. Sell. Track your car's value with Carvana Value Tracker today.
Race the runners. Race the sails.
Race the sails. Captain.
An unidentified ship is approaching.
Over. Roger. Wait. Is that...
An enterprise sales solution?
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more.
We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign.
Get started today at LinkedIn .com slash results.
Terms and conditions apply.
I also want to explore, you know, what are the big benefits of being able to do this on a personal level, on a societal level.
What comes to mind immediately is, are there benefits on a mental health level of being able to actually harness these tools?
Well, I mean, to your point, you've tried every device, just like I've tried every device with respect to migraine.
And if you are a chronic migraine tougher, you understand that it is debilitating, it is painful, and it's frustrating because every treatment is inadequate in some way and has some side effect to it.
And if there's just some magical thing that I could do to just stimulate my brain and make the pain go away or to stop my brain in its tracks, I absolutely would.
That's true for a lot of mental health conditions and to neurological conditions.
And it's just an incredibly undertreated area and poorly understood area.
So, what's happening in the space of neurological disease and suffering, up until now has been incredibly poorly characterized and undertreated.
So, you know, consider the fact that, like, already people with epileptic seizure, especially those who are treatment resistant, that one of the big breakthroughs of monitoring for brain activity has been the ability to use algorithms to predict minutes to up to an hour before a person suffers from the epileptic seizure.
And for somebody who's treatment resistant, they could take just -in -time medication or get a just -in -time alert to be in a place of safety.
That's, you know, a game changer.
I would like to have that same kind of notification of when I'm going to have a migraine and be able to address my life accordingly.
I don't know if you get aura.
There are visual disturbances, but I do.
And it can be frightening while you're driving suddenly to have stars running across your visual space.
Likewise, areas like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, it's possible to diagnose a lot earlier using neurotechnology.
One of the really exciting studies that I saw looked at glioblastoma, which is, you know, one of the most frightening brain cancers for people when they are diagnosed with it because it's such a pervasive kind of brain cancer.
By the time it's been diagnosed, it's almost always, you know, spread throughout the brain and the tangles of it make it incredibly difficult to fully resect and so it's a really lethal diagnosis for many people.
There are early, early electrical changes that happen in the brain that are getting better and better as we study and understand, I shouldn't say we, I'm not one of the neuroscientists, right?
I'm studying the neuroscientists.
But as neuroscientists, really study and understand what the effects of those are and then make them increasingly more precise.
Because one of the things that was exciting about transcranial magnetic stimulation is you could look into the brain, figure out a specific spot, and then direct the pulse to it.
But for the most part, that had to happen in a clinic.
And they're not sustained treatments that every time you're experiencing it, you go in and get a pulse that happened.
And so what the promise of a lot of these neurotechnologies are is being able to move from the clinic, from the hospital, from the doctor's office, into everyday settings to have portable, wearable technology that offers much more precise and targeted treatment.
Yeah, I mean it's so exciting.
One of the things that's popping into my head around this also though is, is there a, so here's the analogy, over the last couple of years whole -body MRIs have become sort of topic of conversation.
Anyone can show up.
You don't need a script from your doctor.
You pay a couple thousand dollars.
You spend an hour in an MRI, and they'll give you this report.
And what a lot of people are doing with them is they're trying to actually see if they can pick up really early -stage cancer in their bodies.
And there is a contingent in the medical world that is pushing back aggressively against this, saying you're going to get a whole bunch of false positives and b a lot of what may get picked up is never gonna go anywhere nothing's going to happen to it so you're gonna start to flood the medical system which is already overwhelmed with people where they're using technology in incredible settings and some of them will detect things which are incredible now you can stop something before it actually becomes really harmful but the concern is are you going to if this becomes something that happens at scale
are you going to start to flood the medical provider system with all these people inquiring into and running, you know, like a metric kind of additional tests and stuff like this that end up actually not being necessary or useful.
So I'm curious whether you see that potential with what we're talking about in Neurotech.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, doctors seem to hate every step toward personalized medicine, like we're, you know, you have more autonomous patients.
And by the way, that wasn't me making that argument, because I don't necessarily agree with that.
But it's an argument that I've heard a number of times.
Yeah, I hear it all the time right now.
I've heard it in every different context.
So 23andMe, when they launched the direct -to -consumer genetic testing, doctors are like, now everybody's going to come in.
We don't now have any idea how to interpret any of this, and they're all going to be convinced that they have a predisposition for X, Y, and Z as they flood the medical system.
Well, I mean, it is true that patients would go in with their 23andMe reports.
and the doctor would say, I have no idea how to interpret that.
I'm not going to order a bunch of tests for you.
But the idea that one of the early arguments in that space was that women were going to come in asking for preemptive double mastectomies based on what their 23andMe report showed.
That didn't happen.
But if it was a well -informed patient who went in and said, hey, this showed that I have the breast cancer genes.
My mom and my grandmother died of breast cancer.
I'd like to run the test because we haven't tested, you know, with medical grade testing.
And if it's positive, I want to have a double mastectomy.
That's okay. I mean, I actually think what the good informed patient that's yes, it's an increased number of patients, but essentially an increased number of patients who are saved as opposed to just an increased number of patients.
And you know, what hasn't happened is, and each of these other areas, the same arguments were being made about the Apple Watch doctors were opposed to, you know, giving patients the capability of having the A .G .s on the watches, and there's going to be abnormal heart rhythms and all kinds of patients who are flooding the system.
No, but you know, there are earlier detection and more detection of heart disease and there is very low false positive rate, but there is some false positive, and yet there are also positive cases of it catching and saving lives.
And so I think the medical system has to be open to a changing world of technology where patients are more empowered and getting more and more information where they can make decisions about their own lives and that they might be more in the driver's seat of those decisions.
The MRI case is a tricky one and the reason is a tricky one is we don't have routine scanning data for patients to know what those scans mean, right?
And so, it's the validation that's the problem, which is, you know, being able to interpret a scan when there is no baseline set of healthy individuals who have MRI scans to know what, like, what's the rate at which these things progress.
If they progress at all, does that finding actually mean anything clinically significant?
And so, you know, it's harder when you have unvalidated studies like those and we don't have a basis to be able to study.
What I hope is that a lot of those early MRI scans will become part of a dataset so that we interact with them over time, and that we more systematically start, like, you've got to compare the different machines that they're on.
They've got to be capturing the data in a way that could actually allow for long longitudinal studies of them so that in time, they'll become useful.
But I haven't rushed out to get one of those MRIs largely because we just don't know what That's the early scans mean in a lot of these instances.
My blood tests are fine.
All the other indicators of kind of early – the other early indicators of scans that you might do are fine, but my sister did.
She went out and got the full body MRI and she and her partner both did it and are making lifestyle choices based on what they found.
So ... Yeah, it's such a fascinating moment.
I actually know somebody who did it and detected – thought they were completely healthy and that are going on that detected stage one, or even less than stage one pancreatic cancer and had a very fast and easy treatment and was basically said you're good.
And you realize that, especially with cancer, that so often it's not the fact that it's there, it's the stage that is caught that comes...
And that's why my sister did it, she was like, okay maybe there'll be a bunch of kind of unknown, significant findings, but if there is a significance finding that we know of and we see it, I'd rather have the scan and be able to address it.
I think that's a fair point.
I think, you know, doctors are worried more about the, like, the findings of unknown significance rather than the findings of known significance on the scans.
Got something clear.
Yeah. And we'll be right back.
After a word from our sponsors.
Good. That project is sponsored by Earth Animal.
So, you know those rare companies that appear and fundamentally reshape our understanding of what's possible?
That's Earth Animal.
For 40 years, they have been quietly revolutionizing pet care by finding another way to nurture our animal companions.
So, when they looked at something as basic as dog chews, they saw an opportunity to transform the entire category.
Their no -hide chews have redefined what a satisfying, long -lasting tree can be.
Moving beyond traditional rawhide, they have created something truly special that brings joy to dogs while giving their humans peace of mind.
These treats are thoughtfully crafted with simple wholesome ingredients a perfect reflection of earth animals deep commitment to health purpose and kindness Our team members with dogs tell me these have become an absolute favorite in their homes So give your dog a chew you can feel good about visit Earth Animal com and make the switch today Picture this you're halfway through a DIY car fix tools scattered everywhere and boom you realize you're missing a part It's okay, because you know whatever it is, it's on eBay.
They've got everything.
Breaks, headlights, cold air intakes, whatever you need.
And it's guaranteed to fit which means no more crossing your fingers and hoping you've ordered the right thing.
All the parts you need at prices you'll love.
Guaranteed to fit every time.
eBay, things people love.
There's one thing that will forever change the way you sleep.
and it's the softest 100 % organic cotton sheets from Boland Branch.
You'll fall asleep faster, wrapped in the most luxurious comfort.
You'll never sleep hot again with sheets that feel breathable to sleep in.
You'll experience the purest softness on night one and feel your sheets get even softer with every wash.
Discover the difference with 15 % off your first set of sheets at BolandBranch .com with code BUTTERY.
Exclusions apply. C site for details.
So, if we think about neurotech then, like in all these different use cases and technologies we're talking about, it feels like we can also explain this in to you.
So, there's on the one side there's the sensing element of it, and then, for some it seems like there's starting to be also and sort of like an intervention side of it too.
It's like so first we pick up something that's like ooh this is a signal that something's a little bit off here, and then we have some technology.
Maybe it's the same rate, it's a different tech that can then influence the connection between the brain and the body to actually, in some way, intervene or help with whatever it is that you're moving through.
As we start to zoom the lens out a bit, you know, all of these technologies, and this is something you speak and write about regularly, they tend to not be the type of technologies where you buy it, and then everything that gets sensed and intervened just stays with you.
Right, yeah. Yeah. And this is where we start to get into really murky water.
So, take me into this.
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, as we've talked through, there are huge benefits to individual access to this technology, or even sharing the data with your doctor.
You know, the upside potential is really quite enormous.
But in order to capture data about what's happening in my brain, I have to have that data go from my brain somewhere else, right?
That is, something has to detect it and then it has to communicate with something like my iPhone and an app that's on my iPhone.
And then from there, the big question is what happens next, right?
Does a company suddenly have access to that data?
Does my employer, if it's a work -issued, you know, phone, have access to brain data?
Does the government, in the same way that they have subpoenaed all kinds of personal data from phones and from Apple Watches and other devices, suddenly have the right in a criminal case or in a civil case to, you know, be able to get access to that data and to be able to use it against me in different settings.
So, you know, the what we've seen in the digital era is that all of these different technologies which we, you know, purportedly receive for free or for really subsidized costs aren't free to us, that the product is us and that the collection of the data and the use of data and the reselling of that data or the use of that data to steer or behavior or to keep us addicted to devices is primarily how the companies have monetized the products that they're selling to us.
And brain data, I believe, and many others too that it's uniquely sensitive.
It's the kind of pre -behavioral information.
It's the information we haven't shared.
We haven't hit a like button, but our brain lights up like a like button when we see something.
and for companies and employers and governments to have access to that information and the closed loop environment that has been created where not only do they have access to that information but they can use it to shape the environment that we're interacting with, it can go dystopian incredibly quickly.
And so, what I really have been writing about and speaking about is this is technology that we shouldn't be trying to ban.
That's not the answer, but that we have to steer in a way where we're not afraid of the misuse of this.
It doesn't become the most Orwellian technology we have ever introduced into society, that we get the upside potential and we mitigate against the downside risk by putting into place safeguards now before it becomes in every pair of headphones you wear, in every AirPod, in every watch, in every VR and AR device that you donned.
Yeah, I mean it's interesting also because I would imagine we'll get to a point fairly soon where a lot of the devices that we buy just for our own convenience have this technology in it.
We didn't buy it because of that.
We may not be aware of the fact that it actually has this capability in it because we're not really using that for our own benefit.
Right. But the sensors are there.
It's detecting and decoding potentially in the background.
And the question is like, are we okay with that?
And are we like, and what is even if we have no interest in that information, we're not using it in meaningful way.
If that's happening and then that's being passed outside of our immediate ecosystem or device, you're like are we aware of that?
Are we okay of it? And I'm not aware of a lot of conversations happening around this.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right.
Now, I think many of the companies will start by marketing much more directly to say, like, it has these capabilities, and that's why you're buying it.
But if the next generation of AirPods is packed with sensors, and some of those sensors are brain -sensing sensors, and you can either choose to interact with that on your Health app or not, but it's still collecting the data all the same, or you buy a virtual reality headset, and the way that you navigate you know through the game is by thinking about it, but you're not thinking about what that actually means, about how leaky your brain is now with respect to the data that can be gathered about it.
You know, should we have much more explicit consent?
Should we have much more explicit notice to people?
And should there be different ways that different categories of data are treated?
Right? You might be fine.
And a lot of my students, they you know, when I asked them how they feel about personalized algorithms that figure out what they like.
For the most part, they seem to be fine with that.
They're like, okay, you have to collect a huge amount of data for me but are you giving me products that I actually like and I'm seeing fewer that I don't?
Great. My feed is more specialized to me.
I'm okay with that.
It's what that data enables in ways that are frightening or problematic.
And some of the examples I go into in the book, like in China, there's already educational classrooms where the students are required to wear brain -sensing headsets that track their focus and attention.
That data is given to the teachers, it's given to the parents, it's given to the state.
And they've been punished for what their brain metrics reveal.
And just imagine being in an autocratic regime where your child and your brain activity is being monitored the entire day that you're in the classroom.
What does that do to your child should be able to develop and grow, or in the workplace, where, you know, people are increasingly used to surveillance of their productivity tools on their laptops, but suddenly your brain -sensing earbuds are also something that your employer has access to, and the kind of informational asymmetry that creates, or the increased pressure that creates, to stay focused and paying attention the entire day, even if that's not the best thing for you or for the bottom line, or they start to see decline in mental health and what do they do with that information?
Or if health insurance companies have access to that information, your car insurance company has access to the information, right?
Like it's not hard to start to see how this becomes dystopian pretty quickly.
If there aren't any limitations on the kinds of data each of these different entities can have access to.
And nothing really prevents these companies from selling your data to all of those third parties, there's a couple of states in the US that have started to move in the direction of adopting laws that protect neural data and there's some international treaties and accords that are underway but it's largely the wild west when it comes to brain data.
Again, it's exciting and terrifying simultaneously.
It will enable so much and at the same time You know, it just opens so many questions, you know?
The notion of, you know, the typical person.
I remember hearing some data about, you know, like the types of thoughts that are typical.
Just a normal, everyday person, well -adjusted, great life.
And yet, that typical person is also going to have some pretty warped and pretty dark thoughts, like here and there, and sometimes more.
They'll never do anything about it, they'll never act on it.
You know, and it's actually, and they may actually feel like, well, that's kind of weird and dark, are not realizing that, actually, the vast majority of people have those same types of thoughts.
You know? Like that pass in and out – and we'll never do anything about it.
It's just sort of like part of the human condition, you know?
But if those thoughts register, you know, like if you're hanging out wearing your smart glasses and just walking around, those thoughts register.
And then that information can get passed on to other people.
Like, does that then raise – raise red flags with, you know, potential partners, potential employers?
potential, like somebody wants to, you know, who's considering you as a student in a university and they have, you know, they look at your application and then, like, they have their neural data that gets passed to them also to try and make sure that we have a safe class.
On the one hand, yes, we all want safety and we want ease, we want the best, but at the same time, you know, if you start to just judge people on what are, quote, aberrant, but everyday and very common thoughts that happen in the brain.
It's just, it gets really spooky.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you read so many interesting points within that right from the misclassification of neuroatypicality, right?
I mean, all of us have thoughts that, you know, like a good example I like to give every now and then, you know, I just think like, okay, I'm going to strangle my husband.
Right? Don't really think that.
right? I'm never going to actually act on that, but I don't have always, you know, just kind and lovely thoughts about my husband every single day and every single second of every day.
And you can just imagine for yourself the thoughts that you have, you know, somebody walks by, you have an unkind thought, like, whatever it is.
We're not always proud of every thought that pops into our head, but it's our actions that we want to be judged on, not every thought that pops into our heads.
And yet we could quickly get to this world where we're judging people based on their thoughts.
And that's not so unbelievable, right?
If you already look, like I talk about this in my chapter on your brain at work, you know, there's already companies that are doing personality and cognitive and neural testing, based on neuroscience for screening and for hiring candidates in the workplace.
And, you know, like the theories that they're built on are all based on trying to, you know, typify how your brain works.
And, you know, that together with a device that's put onto your head or eye tracking data that's making inferences about what's happening in your brain as you're answering those questions, this is all within the realm of what's already happening.
And so, you know, given how afraid we all are as a parent, you know, I worry every day when my kids go to school with all the school shootings, is it really so far fetched for us to think that there's going to start to be increased screenings for people for safety and that we start to label people in particular ways.
There's a researcher by the name of Kent Kiel who, for a long time, has been studying psychopaths and has been characterizing their brain activity and came out with some really controversial findings a few years back, where he showed that the differences he sees in brain scans and psychopaths who are in jail, he can start to see those differences as early as five years old.
Now, he hasn't followed those five -year -olds to adulthood to see if they end up in prison.
But, you know, it's not hard to imagine people taking that kind of research and applying it to say, okay, we have an incredibly competitive and selective process for this private school.
You know, you have to submit this kind of data for us to see, are you a danger to our classroom community?
Or are you the, quote, type of student that would thrive in this environment, which brings in all sorts of opportunities for bias and all sorts of other stuff?
Well, that's the thing, right?
Is that it's the coded bias that can happen in the space.
It's like nobody's going to tell you that the reason that they didn't bring you in or hire you or that they fired you is because of what your brain metrics showed.
Instead, they're going to say you weren't the right fit.
You weren't being as productive as you should be.
We're just having structured layoffs, like whatever it is, even though they're using this data to make those kinds of decisions.
And then on the other side, there may be some real value for someone to actually be using data like this.
for both people. Like maybe you actually figure out like we actually legitimately are not a type of fit for the type of opportunity that this is and just relate the way that your brain functions.
Or optimistically like there's all kinds of brain wellness programs that companies have implemented.
So instead of using it to penalize people or to invade on their mental privacy, you actually use it to provide more services that help people who are struggling with stress or struggling with mental health to be able to have the resources they need to get treatment and to be able to regain the kind of self -determination over their lives they might want.
Yeah, I mean maybe somebody, like you're able to actually pick up, you have some young employee there who's just pushing and working nonstop and they're being told, like don't do this, like we don't expect this of you, but the script in their brain is like, this is how I get ahead.
Right. And you can start to actually detect maybe, like this person is tipping towards mental illness or burnout or something like this and we need to intervene because we need to help them because they're not helping themselves.
Well, I mean, in fact, I get into some of those use cases in the book, where I talk about cognitive load and overload that, already, the future of a more positive workplace could be one in which you can actually detect cognitive overload, which has been attributed to not just stress and mental health concerns for the individual, but also safety, their own safety and the safety of the others that they're working around, and to be able to say, like, oop, you are reaching cognitive overload.
So there's a new company, a company that's just launched their headphones that have EEG sensors.
And one of the features that they've enabled in the app is to give you a signal when you're reaching a level of overload when it's time for you to take a brain break, both to be able to recover but to get to levels of optimal productivity and to optimal levels of the right balance of stress versus kind of drive versus burnout.
And, you know, I think those are really positive possible use cases of being able to give you the feedback that you need, that you're not getting internally from yourself about, hey, it's time for a break.
This is the best thing for you to actually achieve the goals that you want to achieve.
So where do we go with all this?
You know, where there there's a really clear acceleration in the technology and what it's able to do.
There are a lot of really interesting and fascinating benefits, maybe even life safety life -changing benefits.
There's some real big concerns about what happens with all of the data that comes out of these.
What's the way forward right now?
Like if you look at the next three, five years, what would you want to see happen?
So first and foremost, I think we have to put into place a recognition of basic rights for individuals to flip the narrative to empower people.
And those are rights around what I call cognitive liberty, the right to self -determination over your brain and mental experiences.
And From a human rights perspective, that looks like trying to secure to people a right to privacy, which would include a right to mental privacy, a right to self -determination, which gives you both a right to access and change your brain if you choose to do so, and a right to freedom of thought to protect you against interception, manipulation, and punishment of your thoughts.
On the other side, we have to shore up the capacities for cognitive liberty, you know, being able to help people navigate an increasingly noisy world.
So these are things like really starting to develop our introceptive capabilities, our mental agility, and our relational intelligence so that we can navigate this world and be able to use the freedoms that are being protected by cognitive liberty by having the capacities that we need to be able to navigate the world, to be able to think critically, to be able to think freely, and to engage with technologies in ways that are intentional and productive for us.
So, you know, that looks like educational changes that we need to put into place.
It looks like practices in our everyday lives to be able to create this better mind -body connection that we're losing because of the way technology is being developed and designed.
And so I think there's a lot that needs to happen at the individual level, and there's a lot that needs to happen at the societal level to bridge the gap of where we are right now versus where we need to go.
Are you bullish on the policy level?
Bullish, not at this moment in time, you know.
I think the U .S. is going into a period where we're going to see is an experiment with much more laissez -faire engagement with technology.
And what we see as early indicators of how technology companies are reacting to that is really to push all of the obligations to individuals rather than providing any protections to them.
And companies up until now have been monetizing all of our data and have done so with without any kind of oversight.
The EU is moving in a very different direction of trying to put into place much stricter safeguards.
And that could end up serving as a floor that companies have to adopt certain protections to be able to not have to navigate different markets incredibly differently.
But what I see is kind of an unrestricted race by technology companies without a lot of intervention by governments to try to put into place the right sticks or the right incentives to realign that technology with human flourishing.
So I'm not that bullish in the exact moment that we're talking.
But I also feel like if I don't maintain optimism it's hard for me to do the work that I do, which is to continue to advocate for the changes we need to put into place.
The one thing that gives me a sliver of optimism is that the few states and countries that have adopted specific pressure, like specific protections around brain and mental experiences have done so in a bipartisan fashion.
They seem to recognize the exceptional nature of being able to peer into and to change our brains.
And so it gives me some optimism that at least in this one space, there is a concern.
Like imagine being a politician, being able to have all of your thoughts read, that would be really bad for them.
So they sort of get that there needs to be some protections in this space.
And so, that gives me a good sliver of hope to keep working on.
I mean, that makes so much sense, you know.
It's like if you see this technology, you know, like, this would help me do X, Y, or perform at this level or like, they just live so much better, more comfortably.
But it also potentially exposes me, but I really want the benefit of that.
Then there will be an incentive to say like, I want to be able to access this, but I also So we need to be able to protect against the dark side, the downside here.
It's just such a fascinating moment.
Yeah. It feels a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.
So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up?
It's to live a life of purpose and meaning.
And I think increasingly, as I write in this space, I find that it's not a destination.
It's about the journey itself.
And the more we can do to enable people on that journey to do so freely, to be able to do so with intentionality and to be able to do so with their full capacities, I think the more likely that we can live a good life individually and collectively.
Absolutely. Thank you.
Before you leave, if you love this episode, save it, you'll also love the conversation we had with Adam Grant about rethinking things.
You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.
Editing helped by Troi Young, Christopher Carter crafted our theme music, and special thanks to Shelly Del Bliss for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or in YouTube too.
If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here.
Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor, share it with just one person.
I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even.
Then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
There's one thing that will forever change the way you sleep, and it's the softest 100 percent organic cotton bedding from bole and branch.
You'll fall asleep faster, wrapped in the most luxurious comfort.
You'll never sleep hot again with airy blankets, cloud like duvets, and breathable sheets.
You'll experience pure comfort on night one, and feel your bedding get softer with every wash.
Discover the difference with 15 % off your first order at Bolandbranch .com with code Exclusions apply.
See site for details.
Brace the runners! Brace the sails!
Brace the sails! Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
Over. Roger, wait. Is that an Enterprise sail solution?
Reach sails, professionals, not professional sailors.
With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more.
We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign.
Get started today at LinkedIn .com slash results.
Terms and conditions apply.
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies?
Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days?
Do you still think Discover isn't widely accepted?
If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past.
Discover is accepted at 99 % of places that take credit cards nationwide.
And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back.
Welcome to the now, it pays to Discover.
Learn more at discover .com slash credit card, based on the February 2024 Nielsen Report.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash?
Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies.
Try it at progressive .com.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states.
