EB-2: Prophetic - Transcript - Part 1

[00:01.687]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Awesome. So welcome to the Emergent Behavior podcast. And I have with me today Eric Wahlberg and Wes Lewis from Prophetic AI, and which is what I would describe as a lucid dreaming company. I don't know if they would describe it as that, but let's let me take it away. Eric, why don't you introduce Prophetic?

[00:30.278]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Sure. So Prophetic is a consumer neurotech company. The two core technologies that certainly we'll be diving into today that undergird what we do is transcranial focus ultrasound, which is our neurostimulation modality and the utilization of neural transformer architectures, which are very unique machine learning architecture specifically tuned for neural data. And so the way it kind of loosely works, right, is
We use the simultaneous EEG fMRI data sets. We can get into that, but it's a rather unique neuroimaging data set. The model is trained on that. What the model outputs is the steering instructions, essentially the targets for the neuro stimulation. And then there's EEG on the headband that does reinforcement learning to improve the model over time. To your point of, are we a lucid dreaming company?
That's certainly what we're known for. When we showcased our first model, Morpheus One, a couple, probably three weeks ago or so, one of the things I say at the end of the presentation, that's very important, is that really, what we should be known for really is a consciousness experience company. The model allows us to take any discreet universal brain state that's focused in the prefrontal cortex, which is the brain region of focus for us in terms of neurostimulation.

[01:46.393]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:55.402]🌌 Eric Wollberg: we can use that to increase the number of experiences that are being provided on the same hardware. And this is our prototype, the Halo, which we can obviously dive into. So that's how I would introduce the company.

[02:02.767]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[02:12.519]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Indeed. So let me just, because I've been extremely curious about this. I have, like many people, I have maybe somewhat experimented with lucid dreaming, but more in the kind of like, hey, you know, when you're falling asleep, just be very conscious. And when you're almost asleep, like try to like, move stuff around in like your field of vision while your eyes are closed.
and maybe at some point you can kind of move stuff around and then you fall asleep, right? And then like, you know, 10 seconds later you're asleep and then you wake up and you're like, did that really happen? Like, you know, and so describe for me this experience, like I take the halo and I put it on, right? I put it on and I lie back and do I switch something on?

[03:06.826]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so the way that this works right is the hardware has an app, you pair it with the app, you calibrate the device when you first get it. And basically, our goal right is that this is being done for you. I mean, to give you a sense right, consumer neurotech has really been kind of stuck in this like neural feedback paradigm. Really like trailblazing companies like Muse and Mendy, which came out probably over a decade now ago.

[03:14.722]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[03:28.533]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[03:34.078]🌌 Eric Wollberg: really relied on this EEG headband paired with some content and trying to create like this neural feedback process that would help get you into places of, whether it's meditation or focus, et cetera. And my joke here, I mean, it's really impressive what they did certainly, especially how long ago it was, but my joke is, why is Ozempic flying off the shelves and not gym memberships? And it's really a function of human nature, right? We want things to be given to us, the less work required.

[03:45.775]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[03:57.795]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[04:03.51]🌌 Eric Wollberg: the better. So, you know, what we do right is you put on, you know, the headband, you pair it, you go to sleep. The first thing that the headband is looking for is the EEG signature of REM, you know, eight has entered REM.

[04:18.863]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay, so let me stop you there. So it's not gonna help me get to sleep, right? So if I'm being restless, if I've had a lot of coffee before, it's not gonna like, boom, put me to sleep. It's gonna be, I'm gonna put it on and I have to naturally fall asleep, right? So I'm naturally kinda like, I fall asleep. And at the point that I fall asleep, there is some period where I enter rapid eye movement, REM sleep, right?

[04:32.367]🌌 Eric Wollberg: No, you have to naturally fall asleep.

[04:47.519]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: And so it only starts to work at the point that REM state is detected. Is that correct?

[04:54.386]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Exactly correct, right? Like the EEG on the headband is what's prompting the models. So the first thing that the model's waiting for is that REM basically prompt to the model. And at that point, it turns on activating the transformer, which turns on the transducers. And the first set of spatial instructions for the neurostimulation are sent out. Neurostimulation begins. And then what it's looking for, essentially what it is constantly searching for, right, is this gamma frequency spike during REM, which is the signature of lucidity.

[05:04.682]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay.

[05:24.35]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And so it's basically saying, is eight, is eight lucid? Is eight lucid? Oh, great. Eight's lucid. Let's keep her lucid, keep her lucid, keep her lucid. And then when you, when you get out of REM, the transformers are turned off and you, you know, continue with your sleep schedule.

[05:39.567]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay, so here I am, I'm asleep, and then I start to enter RAM. And I'm entering RAM, and as I enter RAM, there is sometimes a period of lucidity which is detected by this gamma spike that you talk about, is that correct?

[05:57.874]🌌 Eric Wollberg: No, so let me correct that. So you enter REM, the transducers turn on, you know, utilizing the model. And when I say what the model is looking for in terms of those gamma frequency spikes is as each set of spatial instructions, which are targeting the prefrontal cortex activation, it's basically like being like, are we making her lucid? Are we making, okay, we're making her lucid. Let's keep her lucid. So that's what, yeah.

[06:05.152]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[06:13.552]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Ah... Uh, uh...

[06:18.679]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Ah, I see, I see. I see, I see, I see, I see. I see, so you enter RAM, it takes a reading, and then it gives the ultrasound gives a pulse, and at that pulse, and then it checks again to see have you entered lucidity, and if you haven't entered lucidity, it gives you another pulse and another pulse, and then once you enter lucidity, it tries to keep you in that lucid state.
and then for whatever period of time. Is that period of time adjustable? Do you say, oh, you know what, I want 30 minutes today? Is that something that you adjust on the app? What happens? How do you maintain that?

[07:02.798]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Sure. So first of all, a REM cycle is generally speaking 20 minutes long. So we only target during the REM cycle. And so the maximum of what you could really expect is a 20 minute simulation experience. One thing that Inception definitely got right, and people who've experienced this in dreaming would attest to this, is there was quite a bit of time violation. So

[07:20.668]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see. I see.

[07:30.543]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[07:32.426]🌌 Eric Wollberg: 15 minute, 10 minute period of lucid dreaming feels a lot longer than that. In terms of adjustment, we could certainly put, right now we're still in kind of this hardware phase and kind of, and so on, but as we build out the app, things like being able to set maybe how long you wanna be lucid for is certainly something that would be easy to build in.

[07:37.245]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[07:45.218]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[07:56.339]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay, so because obviously you have to keep triggering pulses in order to keep lucidity. So the moment you stop the triggering those pulses, like you fall back into a natural kind of exit. Would that be an accurate characterization?

[08:15.417]🧠 wes: I would say our goal is to create a self-sustaining sequence of neural activity. So, by continuously stimulating the brain with this TFUS, looking at the feedback from the brain, is there a point where now the prefrontal cortex is active without our assistance? That would be the ultimate measure of success.

[08:22.113]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[08:37.845]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.
I see, I see. So there you have it. You've entered RAM. You've triggered the, and is it, do all people have lucid states during RAM? Is that consistent? Everyone can do lucidity? Or is it like only some people? Yeah.

[08:55.607]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Thank you.

[08:59.335]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah.
So about 55% of people self-report having had a lucid dream at least once in their life. Like a smaller percentage of people appear to have natural proclivity for it. I'm part of that lucky second group. So the reason I got into this is that, you know, I got my first lucid dream when I was about 12 years old. You know, I woke up and was equal parts terrified and excited. I'd never heard anyone talk about this. I'm 30. I found early, you know, kind of internet forums. There wasn't really that much, you know, there wasn't really

[09:08.847]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[09:13.6]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[09:20.867]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[09:32.258]🌌 Eric Wollberg: where people were talking about lucid dreaming. And so I was like, okay, sigh of relief, other people do this, that's great to know. And then I got really into the work of a gentleman named Dr. Steven Labarge, whose PhD at Stanford in 1980 really kicked off the neuroscientific and cognitive scientific study of the brain state. And moreover, Dr. Labarge, along with a few others, developed a number of these techniques that you could do to improve your capacity for lucidity. So things like reality checking, or pneumonic induction, et cetera.

[09:35.244]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[09:49.656]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[10:01.814]🌌 Eric Wollberg: So you can, even if you don't have a natural proclivity for it, you know, train yourself. It probably is more difficult in varying, but you know, we should really probably talk about, right, what are the neural correlates of lucid dreaming. I mean, lucid dreaming is a naturally occurring brain state. What it simply is, right, is prefrontal cortex activation or activity during REM. This makes a lot of sense, right? REM is when you're in a dream, your prefrontal cortex is where your conscious awareness, working memory, decision-making.
frankly, it's where you are, right? That's why it feels so, you feel so present right now because your prefrontal cortex is like, is incredibly active as our Western eyes right now. So that it is a naturally occurring loose brain state in the sense that, you know, upwards of 55% of people self-report having had it, but not everyone, you know, is super, you know, has necessarily a super proclivity for it, but it is, you know, it is simply
prefrontal cortex activation during REM, which is something that anyone can theoretically have.

[11:07.907]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So even the 45% of people who maybe have never had a lucid dream or maybe have never recognized that they had a lucid dream, even for them, it is possible that using the halo, they might be able to experience prefrontal cortex activity. Is that correct? Yeah.

[11:31.186]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Exactly. Yeah, there's absolutely, yeah, there's no reason why with neurostimulation, we couldn't give this extraordinary experience to anyone. And I just want to make one point, you know, if you've had a lucid dream, you will remember it. So I believe that these 45% of people, you know, haven't, haven't had it given that, you know, a lucid dream, you know, right, is the awareness that you're in a dream that, you know, at its height, right, can, can give you control over the phenomenological contents of that dream at will. Right? So what you imagine becomes

[11:35.983]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[12:00.618]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And because your working memory is active in the prefrontal cortex, you remember this. So I believe there's 45%, but we can absolutely give those 45 and 55% of people induced stabilized lucid dreams. There's nothing that neurobiologically or neuroanatomically prevents them from doing

[12:05.848]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[12:20.495]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right, let me come back to the actual dreaming part, but let's just finish our walkthrough here. So I've had that REM state, I've had the device has helped me get into prefrontal cortex activity, I've had that lucid dream, and then a REM state starts to come to an end, 20 minutes in. Does the device detect
the ending of the REM state and therefore stop triggering this neurostimulation that causes the lucid dream? Or does REM state naturally end by itself and then the device kind of like just like, doesn't detect it or what happens at that point?

[12:56.469]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Exactly.

[13:04.266]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Right, exactly. So a REM cycle's 20 minutes. Your REM cycle will end, whether you're lucid or not. And once your REM cycle has ended, neurostimulation stops.

[13:09.931]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[13:15.415]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Nervous stimulation stops. Okay, and then typically I might be able to continue because now REM has stopped, the lucidity has stopped, so typically do people just continue their nap, continue their sleep cycle and then naturally and then wake up the next day? Is that typically what happens?

[13:33.07]🌌 Eric Wollberg: That's, yeah, that's, I mean, typically for sure, that's, you know, I can speak from a natural, like lucid dream, that's what happens and that's exactly what we would want to happen. You know, we wouldn't want it, you know, to wake you up and then you have to go fall back asleep. That'd be a bad user experience. You want people to just, you know, have the regular, you know, rest of their sleep, their light sleep, deep sleep, maybe another REM cycle, but we're only gonna target one REM cycle on a given night and then you wake up in the morning, yeah.

[13:46.124]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. Alright.

[13:57.075]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah. OK. So OK. So now let's go back to the actual lucid dream, right? So it's a little bit hard to describe, I think, because I think it's one of those things about things that people experience which are kind of inside their heads, and they have to describe it. And you can't really describe what's inside your head that accurately to someone else.
because you don't really have like, it's not a visual and it's not like an audio, it's kind of an experience, right, which you have to, which we are, you know, it's difficult to describe experiences, right, it's not, we don't have like enough vocabulary to describe this experience. And so how would you, you know, I read through kind of like Paul Tolley's kind of like, you know, Wikipedia entry on like, you know, what is a lucid dream? How would you actually know?

[14:37.794]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Sure.

[14:54.595]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: How would you actually know that you are in a lucid dream? You said if you experience one, you would never forget about it, you would know. So how would you actually understand that you are in a lucid dream?

[15:07.426]🌌 Eric Wollberg: So the best way, first of all, I should make the point, right, that lucidity is a scale, right? You can, for example, be aware that you're in a dream but not in control of it. So you're along for the ride. It's a function, frankly.

[15:13.847]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[15:19.763]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. And would you call that a lucid dream? Like just awareness that you are in a dream?

[15:26.934]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, I mean, I think that like, it's fine to call that a lucid dream, but I think to make clear what we're talking about, right, is we want the 95th percentile lucid dream, which involves the awareness that you're in a dream, the ability to pivot between third and first person, something called disassociation and control. Control is what people want. And really that's like, right, a function of just how active your prefrontal cortex is really relative to how your active your prefrontal cortex is right now.

[15:33.581]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[15:37.647]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[15:43.928]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Wow.
Wow.

[15:55.51]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And so the experience of being in a lucid dream is you are as present, I mean, at its height again, you are as present as you are right now in a dream, such that you can change and manipulate various phenomenological components of the stream at will. And so that's really like the gold standard of what we know and what we're driving for. And so, I mean, yeah, I mean, in terms of, I mean, we can talk about, if you'd like,

[15:56.011]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[16:07.905]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Wow.

[16:14.405]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[16:24.998]🌌 Eric Wollberg: what people tend to do in their lucid dreams. If you'd like, I'm happy to dive into that.

[16:32.951]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Just to take a step. So you are, you are, so firstly you have a consciousness that you are in a dream. Secondly you start, and this was my experience trying to do it, you know, naturally and trying to mess, it was a little bit messy, but I remember at the beginning, you know, they tell you should keep a diary of some sort and you should have like a kind of like focused way of like getting yourself in there each time.

[16:54.327]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Dream Journal.

[17:00.431]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: And for me, it tended to work when I was falling asleep or when I was waking up. So there was these two periods when I would kind of experience it. And I would have agency in, hypochagic. And is that typically also where people tend to see that kind of lucidity or is that, because REM is kind of in the middle, right? Like it's not at the beginning or the end.

[17:08.962]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Those are called hypogagic states, just so you know.

[17:19.742]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, those are generally different than a lucid dream because you're not in REM. I mean, a hypogagic state is this kind of, you're somewhere right between waking up and being asleep and you kind of have like a little bit more of this kind of manipulatable, like malleable phenomenological space, but it is distinct from lucidity.

[17:23.728]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[17:31.64]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[17:35.981]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[17:40.039]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see, I see. Incredible, incredible. So, a lucid dream is actually a fully present kind of like experience, which is, that's pretty amazing. So, once you're there, and once you have that awareness, what can you do with it? I mean, can you like conjure like, I'm gonna be in cyberpunk today, or I'm gonna be in Dungeons and Dragons today, like,
Is it a replacement for the holodeck? Like, you know, what can you do there?

[18:13.214]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so if you look at kind of, one thing that's always fun to do, one of the largest subreddits in the entire world is the luciddream subreddit, it has over like a half a million people in it. If you were to take a look at what those people do, I'd break them into three core categories. So one is recreation. It is the ultimate VR experience, right? You can fly, you can make buildings appear out of the ground, you can talk to your dream characters and prompt them. Frankly, one thing that I didn't really realize until
you know, really experiencing, you know, chat, GPT, for example, is that they, they kind of act a little bit like, like large language models in the sense that they, they also, like, they say very interesting things. And sometimes they say absolute gibberish. It's almost like they're hallucinating or something. Um, but, but they're fascinating, you know, uh, to, to talk to, um, and, and then secondly, right, it's like, there are these productive capacities in lucid dreaming. Um, we have investors who code in their lucid dreams and run the code in the morning.

[18:57.231]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[19:07.001]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[19:10.206]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Actually, a friend of ours, Case Fenley, who among helping also do the initial branding for the company did the first render of our hardware as a fashion and hardware designer who designs in his lucid dreams. So, there's also productive capacities. And the history of discovery and creativity and dreaming is quite long, right? Famously, Srebastan Ramanujan does his infinite series in his dreams. Schrodinger did his physics, Niels Bohr in their dreams.

[19:22.51]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Oh wow.

[19:33.807]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[19:41.199]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Salvador Dali famously paints in his dreams, probably actually maybe also a hypagogic state, but nonetheless gives his painting these surreal qualities. And then the third point is the metaphysical potency of the experience, a la a spiritual or psychedelic experience. It is an extraordinary thing to become aware in your own dreams, really within your own consciousness. It is a profound experience from that sense, from that perspective.

[19:56.675]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[20:06.579]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[20:09.822]🌌 Eric Wollberg: More concretely, what I'll say is, a very common thing that you see people do is when God forbid they lose somebody. So two years ago, I lost my grandmother. 98 years old, she lived a wonderful life. First lucid dream I had, what do you think I did? I went and talked to my grandmother. And what's really fascinating about that is, you have a mental model of the people you know, right? And so when you talk to her, she kind of doesn't respond.

[20:18.111]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[20:26.383]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Wow.

[20:32.896]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[20:37.362]🌌 Eric Wollberg: like just a regular dream character that they're just kind of talking to, she's kind of responding right in the ways that you kind of would remember or think that she would respond. And it's a very, very impactful experience. So you see a lot of people doing things like getting, just obviously like talking to them again or having closure with them or people who had bad relationship breakups and kind of trying to come to terms with that, et cetera. So, I mean, those are like the three core buckets.
But what I broadly say, right, is that the limiting factor here is your imagination. And so what you imagine becomes. And so I think we're, you know, again, one thing that like Wes pointed out to me, you know, engraved on the inside of the halo is our company like slogan, which is Prometheus, still fire from the gods, we will steal dreams from the prophets. And, you know, of course, right, Prometheus is kind of our myth in Western civilization for technology.

[21:06.806]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[21:11.288]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.

[21:35.442]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And what was pointed out is like, you know, it's not like we actually discovered fire, right? Fire existed. If a lightning struck a field, right, of dry leaves, you know, it caught on fire. What we learned how to do was to control it. And through that control, right, we created industrialized modern society. And so, you know, we've been dreaming for a long time, you know, animals dream, primates dream, octopi dream, which is very cool if you've ever seen a video because...

[21:35.448]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[21:43.246]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[21:48.844]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[22:03.355]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[22:04.234]🌌 Eric Wollberg: You can tell that they're dreaming because they're changing their colors and their textures. Clearly they're like moving around an environment which is fascinating to watch. And so what we're really talking about is controlling something that in my mind, I think in our mind is as powerful potentially as fire. And so who knows what we will create as a result of that control.

[22:07.635]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.
All right.

[22:27.407]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Indeed. Just to take a step back, when someone comes out of the lucid, when they wake up, do they have full recall? Do they remember the entire dream?

[22:39.57]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so when you have a very, again, high level of prefrontal cortex activation during lucidity, because you're working memories in your prefrontal cortex, you have great memory recall. This is very important, right? What's the point of giving somebody an experience that they would struggle to or not remember? So this is why I said, I really believe those 45% who haven't had a lucid dream because you would, it's very, even vivid dreams, right, that are not lucid.

[22:52.387]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Oh wow.

[22:58.785]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[23:08.63]🌌 Eric Wollberg: you kind of wake up and you're like, wow, that was wild, you know, but, you know, after like, you know, your first cup of coffee, it's already a struggle to remember it. Um, and so that's, that, that's a key thing. And then the second thing I'll just say is we also have this, you know, so we're going to have the app have also this kind of social media meets dream journal, where you can write what you dreamt about, which is also a great way to improve your memory recall. And two.

[23:20.629]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[23:35.945]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[23:36.618]🌌 Eric Wollberg: We'll also pair that with certain levels of gen AI, where we can create videos or just visual representations, as also a really great way, not only to encapsulate that for you, but also to give the people that are following you, right, a kind of an insight into that. So yeah.

[23:53.163]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. So just a segue, there's been some recent research where I think these guys could read images off an fMRI. I don't know if you saw that. They kind of like scan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is that something that is possible also? Is that like?

[24:10.047]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, from the HOOST lab.

[24:17.899]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: you know, is that a possibility that, you know, you have a lucid dream and you also have an, you know, the fMRI reading and you are kind of able to generate what the person saw. Is that a future possibility? Obviously not now, but is that something that looks like it might be possible at some point?

[24:34.71]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so first of all, I mean, as exciting as that research is, right, it's done on like a very kind of like, like you train like, you definitely, you know, like 20, you know, images and then you have to go imagine those 20 images, right. And you think about like the data labeling problem of the entirety of the non-logical, you know, experience, quite, you know, a challenge. But at the same time, one thing that I think is really important, you know, the second piece on our blog that we ever published.
was on something we call noetic sovereignty, which is really an offshoot of the kind of cognitive autonomy movement, et cetera. These are really profound and powerful technologies. I think really as a society, we really have to have a conversation around, do we really want that level of quote unquote mind reading? Your conscious awareness, your experiences are the most intimate thing you will ever have. And I think...

[25:10.284]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[25:29.059]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[25:29.654]🌌 Eric Wollberg: You know, we really focus on bringing you to brain states and you fill in the content of your consciousness with them. And frankly, like if you don't wanna like, you know, post what you lucid dreamt about, all good, right? That's completely up to you. It, you know, you really want, I think, to have a real sense of, you know, sovereignty and so on and so forth over your conscious experiences. So I think, first of all, you know, right, that's probably years, if not decades away.

[25:35.633]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: right

[25:42.255]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[25:55.734]🌌 Eric Wollberg: But moreover, I really think we should really think about as a society what the level is that we really wanna enable and allow for that technology to really give us. I think this technology is obviously inevitable in terms of on at least a medium scale, the longer term time horizon. I think it's a really important thing that we need to talk about as a society at large.

[25:56.628]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[26:13.519]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[26:19.234]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[26:25.535]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, indeed. Let's go back a bit. And at what point, like, you guys have been at this for, I think you guys raised the seed, a seed run in October last year, I think. I saw the seed closed, something like that. A pre-seed, in pre-seed in June. So when did you guys start working on it? Like, what?

[26:38.573]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Pre-seed in June. Yeah, pre-seed in June.

[26:46.915]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: drove you to have this idea? And when did you first feel like it's gonna be possible? Like what were the signs that you saw? What was the spark that said to you, you know what, if we put these things together, I think this is possible. And so what happened there?

[27:05.366]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Totally. So as I mentioned, you know, I'm a, you know, have this wonderful natural precarity for lucid dreaming. So I've been, you know, a lucid dreamer now for 18 years. It's been one of the most profound aspects of my life. And, you know, in 2018, I was working for the innovation authority, which is the government's venture arm. I was living in Jerusalem. And if you look at my background, I'm kind of a hopelessly curious person who goes like an inch deep and a mile wide. And I knew that really wasn't a way that I wanted to live my life.
Now, when you live in Jerusalem, you can't help but, you know, kind of think about and ask like ultimate questions. And I thought if I could choose an ultimate question to try to answer, well, that would certainly keep my attention right, you know, for my life, given that these are questions that we've been trying to answer right for millennia. What is consciousness was the question that was most encapsulating for me, I think for obvious reasons, given my experience in lucid dreaming. And, you know, I talk about lucid dreaming as a kind of a particle accelerator for consciousness.

[27:48.514]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[28:03.286]🌌 Eric Wollberg: I mean, if you create, like, if you think about the parallel, you know, lucid dreams are this conscious experience where you're interfacing directly with consciousness with little to zero sensory input. Kind of like how we, you know, create these, like, you know, very exotic states, you know, the Large Hadron Collider using magnets, et cetera, where we can kind of, you know, create these subatomic, you know, particle collisions and grok, you know, deeper mysteries in the universe. And so I was like, you know, not only one do I think is...

[28:24.697]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[28:31.966]🌌 Eric Wollberg: it is an extraordinary experience to give mankind on demand, but that it also could help us further that answer to that question. Now in 2018, I found these two core landmark studies in 2013, 2014, where they had used electrical stimulation to successfully induce lucidity, albeit only statistically significant on two of the seven variables of that lucidity scale, intuition, the awareness that you're in a dream, and interestingly, disassociation. Now

[28:37.387]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[28:46.659]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[28:55.708]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[28:59.818]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Electrical and electromagnetic as well, stimulation, are kind of what we call internally the vacuum tubes of neurostimulations. Three core kind of limitations, one is depth. Your skull was evolved to keep stuff away from your brain. Getting electricity past your skull is quite difficult. Should you achieve it, what happens is a phenomenon simply called spread. It spreads across the surface of the brain, so there's no precision and no ability to steer that. Now, the reason it was successful at all, right, is...

[28:59.934]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[29:07.343]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[29:13.324]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.
All right.

[29:19.56]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm. All right.

[29:24.643]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[29:26.63]🌌 Eric Wollberg: It is again, lucidity is loose dreaming is run with the prefrontal cortex activated. So they were clearly stimulating the surface of the prefrontal cortex and having some efficacy, but you know, I was investing in areas of deep technology at the time and the thing you have to determine with deep tech right is, is this in R or is it in D? Because if it's in R it's just not, you know, what the asset class of venture capital was designed for.

[29:33.675]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[29:37.9]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.