The Future Of Our Brains And Bodies - EP 77 Max Hodak Live Event

**Ashlee Vance** (0:14)
Thanks, everyone, for coming. Thank you, Max, for being here. This is our first ever live in-person podcast event. And huge thanks to all the subscribers and the other people who came. I still appreciate you, maybe slightly less than the subscribers, but still very thankful. Thank you to Brex for hosting us and obviously being such a big sponsor of our show. And thanks to all the people that helped pull us off, including the Core Memory crew back over there. And yeah.
Our guest tonight, I think based on the registration list that I saw, lots of you will be familiar with Max Hodak. He's the co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, which is a fantastic name for a company. And previously was president and co-founder of Neuralink. That's kind of where we got to know each other.
Thank you so much for coming.

**Max Hodak** (1:18)
Thank you for having me.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:19)
You're our first repeat guest.

**Max Hodak** (1:24)
Cool.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
Yeah.
It's cool for me. I always enjoy talking to you. I think the first time we met, I think I was your first official interview back in the Neuralink days. You guys had never really talked.

**Max Hodak** (1:41)
This was so long ago. I mean, you'd obviously worked closely with some other people there. Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:48)
I don't think you guys had done a story. I just remember you telling me how much you hated reporters. It was tense for a moment. Now, here we are all these years later, hanging out.

**Max Hodak** (2:00)
I'm just bad at text.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:02)
Then the other thing I remember was that you're like, we don't really want to get into the primate trials yet. We'll get to that eventually. Then there was an event that night, the Neuralink had, and Elon got up stage and was like, we're putting implants in monkeys. I remember you grimacing in the back. Yeah, no, okay.
I was going to take a crack at explaining science, and then I was going to have you tell me how you picture this company. But just in the couple of days where I was refreshing myself on everything you guys are doing, you were quiet for a couple of years. Then over the last year, it's just been, I feel like one revelation after another. For people who don't know, science has a product, a category called Prima, where you guys are helping restore sight, and people who have had degenerative conditions through a sensor that goes in the eye, and some glasses. You have this super fascinating technology, falls into this category called Biohybrid, where you're putting neurons in a substrate, and hole in the skull, and then the neurons have synapses that go down and fuse into your brain to give you extra brain power to regenerate things. You have a pretty new product line called Vessel, which is around keeping organs alive outside of the body.
Then you have a whole set of products, software and hardware that helps other people try to explore brain computer interfaces and associated technology. And so I kind of like watched each one of these things come out. And then when I was sitting back this morning, I was texting you. I mean, I guess, I don't know why, I just never pieced everything together before. It just strikes me, it seems like you guys are the most ambitious or have the most products aiming for a general purpose, augmentation of humans, like a new era of attaching, fixing human beings. Is that how you think about science?

**Max Hodak** (4:21)
I mean, so we have a couple of different programs, as you mentioned, where the furthest along is our retinal prosthesis to restore vision to the blind, then there's biohybrid as a general purpose brain computer interface technology, just a little bit earlier, and then our work in perfusion.
I mean, our goal is to build a big, like an independent medical technology company. There's, we don't, at the heart of this, there's really one program. I think this is sometimes seen as like a basket of different projects, and it's like they're just kind of duct taped together. And why is this one company? Why is this not three companies? Are there other things that we're doing? Why are we bothering to sell hardware or software to other researchers at all? But really, at the heart of it, there's really one idea. So the mission of lower case s science is to use a differentiated knowledge of the universe to improve the human condition. And that's really how I think about our mission at upper case s science. And the video we just watched of looking at these stars, I don't think people realize that you could, if you have enough, if you have enough, like a sufficient propulsion, you could visit every everywhere in the known universe within about 60 years, like within one human lifetime. Like all of these places are theoretically accessible. But I don't know that the kind of the things that evolved for earth are going to match that. And so at some point you have to go further. But really right now, our focus are not the we're not working on products imminently that are designed for augmentation. Our goal is to restore function to people that have lost it. And it's when I think about our road map, we're not really thinking about healthy 30-year-olds or healthy 40-year-olds getting our products. It's our perspective is that many people, possibly almost everybody, eventually becomes a patient if the human condition is complicated. And then sometimes it's great and sometimes it's terrible. And as you get older, it gets trickier.