Orbit is building a non-invasive neurostimulator that controls sleep, metabolism, and the autonomic nervous system

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Congratulations on the Teal Fellowship. It's great to meet you. It's great to meet you, too. Thank you very much. Uh, fantastic. Would you mind giving us a little uh little intro on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, I'll start with the company I'm building.

um or we build non-invasive neurom modulators. So little devices stick on the back of your ears um and stimulate this inner ear or organ called the vestibular system which controls your perception of motion to generate hallucinations and motion.

So you can like toggle a button and feel yourself spinning around and flying around and stuff. That's crazy. That's huge for VR, right?

Because there was always this question of like, you know, if the VR can be very convincing visually and the audio can be very convincing, but I can't feel like I'm actually flying, but now I can.

It's actually there there's actually even bigger problem VR, which is without this you get incredibly motion sick and so you can't play like most most games. So when we started um one of the primary cells, it's like, hey, we have VR devices are ready to go.

You can hop into a like orthopter right now and fly around and feel like you're flying around. And we always had this guess that like, oh, you could also use this system to build therapeutics that are a lot more powerful than anyone else could ever build. At the time, the field didn't exist.

And we were like, okay, we could be totally wrong. So, we went in going like, all right, we're going to build the tech out for VR. Once we did, we realized that was surprisingly useful as the therapeutic. Um, to the point where it doesn't really make sense to do anything else. So, that that's mostly of course.

I mean uh uh I think Neuralink's going through something similar where you know you could eventually everyone will have one and we'll be all communicating via Neuralink but in the short term let's just cure blindness and you know um and and help people who are parapilgic uh use the computer and play civilization all night which is amazing and and miraculous.

Um so are you going through an FDA pathway? Are you regulated as a medical device? Like what is that process like? Can can you take us through like again reintroducing like what is the actual product experience for the person using it? Yeah. Yeah.

Let me talk about that first um because then the regulatory pathway becomes a little bit more more clear even though it's still pretty messy. Um so the the thing we build interacts with this sensory organ in your inner ear and uh it's called the mistler system.

If you want to look it up if you go to my Twitter you see a video of me driving a human around with an RC steering wheel um just like controlling where they go. Um but uh there a bunch of things you can do with it.

The most important one is the vestibular system evolved like so early on in the evolutionary chain that it's entangled with a bunch of deep brain regions that like some of it it has some business being entangled with and other parts it really doesn't have much business being entangled with it at all.

And that's why you see like parents rocking their child to sleep. Like there there's no good explanation for why that works like from an evolutionary standpoint except the connectivity is there kind of makes sense.

So we started by like sending signals like that and essentially what we did is we built like a precise modulator of this external sensory organ. Um and that makes them really easy. These guys spent like eight months cranking at it um to figure out the things I couldn't figure out before we got it.

But um once you do um you control a bunch of autonomic nervous system functions by making these almost like highle API calls of like oh regulate your heart rate like this or your breathing rate like this. It makes brain stimulation a lot easier and allows you to do like actually important things.

So the upshot of that is can make you sleep a lot better. We're doing some experiments on metabolism right now to see if we can try to beat OEMIC without all those side effects, but we're not there yet.

Um but um I think on all of these things we're not not quite to where we want to be yet, but it's a lot further than Neurosim has ever gone before and we're getting pretty damn close. Yeah. What what's your what's your personal approach to testing? Are you testing everything on yourself first?

kind of you know like a a young Tony Stark or what does it look like? So everything I can say on air um is um I'm testing on myself very heavily. Um everything is tested on me first.

And the the fun thing is like um traditionally what you need in order to test whether these things work is you need like 50 people and you need to hold a control trial in order to see if there's some statistically significant like if you have statist statistical power but we but um we built stuff that's like powerful enough that if you turn it on like you know that it's on and you know what it's doing.

Like I can't naturally sleep like this no matter how placeboed I am.

There's there's no way to achieve this effect of like I have two hours two and a half hours of M3 deep sleep tonight which according to my whoop is aberant and I've never experienced it in my life or like you turn it on you feel the world start spinning.

You don't need like n equals 30 to know that there's some stat you turn it on and you feel your heartbeat drop or like your blood pressure rise. It's just like kind of instantaneous. So what is the actual uh device experience for you or the consumer? Is it something I can put in and take out?

Is it like does it feel like an AirPod or something or or or do I need to go into the knife? Am I am I am I going through surgery to get something installed? Yeah. Yeah. Let me let me grab it. This is why we do this show. This is fantastic. Um Colton, can you grab me an electrode? Thank you. One electrode, please.

Uh one of ours. Um so, uh sticks to the back of your ears and uh like it you can just like kind of peel it off when you want. I'm trying to grab one so I can see. Yeah, but there's no surgery. It doesn't actually have to go undo the skin or anything like that. That's kind of that's kind of nuts, right?

Like if I'm thinking about it of like the central reason to do all this is for building most neuroch, you're kind of constrained by knowledge of the brain. The hardware is compared to what we're used to building not that hard. It's not rocket science.

Um the the big thing is you don't understand how this thing works at all and that's a pretty big challenge and you want to gather a lot of data in order to figure it out and you can't really distribute something at scale in the near future without like you know way if you have to do surgery. What is it?

It's like some 20 30 surgeons are able to do the Neurolink surgery right now. Well, they had to build a robot for it because it was so precise. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, this is what it looks like. Um, we built some of our own hydrogel electrodes with HGCL backings. Um, just stick it in the back over here.

Um, we ripped this out of a system. Um, where's the full the full system is just a headband that you put around. Um, we're all pretty pretty scrappy right now. And that leads into the regulatory question. Um, it's not so clear. It depends what indication we go for. for right now.

Um, we silently hold state of the art for a couple different parts of neurom modulation that maybe I shouldn't say on air, but it's not clear which one is going like month over month a bunch of these effect size and they're going up literally like 1. 5x every month or 2x every month.

Um, so it's not so clear when we hit generation return. Um, but the upshot is like we don't really think that humans should be like necessarily sleeping for eight hours a night in order to get what we need.

Um, it's kind of weird that the way we lose weight or like become stronger is to go into a room and lift heavy objects for a very long time. Let me stop you there. I think it's actually extremely cool that that's how we get stronger. But we won't we won't tolerate sleep slander on the show.

We're sponsored by eight sleep. I think sleeping is great. I all of a sudden I don't like any of this. You're taking away all the things I like. I I So with the teal fellowship money, the first thing I did was I bought eight sleep because it's amazing. It's amazing product.

The next thing I did is actually I placed a wholesale order for Lucy which don't ship to Massachusetts anymore. That's amazing.

So like we're pretty into this stuff but like we think like it's kind of upper bounded right like how much performance increase you can get whereas like if you start modulating the brain you can get a lot better than that. So um hopefully we'll get there in near future. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the feedback cycle?

Obviously like you're collecting data on on sleep or stimulation or anything and then you're feeding that big back into some sort of system to adjust the neurom modulation. Uh is that is that is that cycle time like single days? It seems like you're moving pretty quickly. Yeah. So well it depends what you you mean.

If you're talking about like closed loop stimulation paradigms like this is like like milliseconds delay of like getting a signal sending something back. But um if we're talking about like how we develop, what we do is basically we do a couple things.

Um but um when the effect sizes are large enough, you really only need to run a few trials like 30 minutes each on each person for four or five people before you know that something's working.

And most of the time it surprises you by doing some really weird things um to your body of like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. We just like write it down in a lab notebook and be like, all right, this is what happened here.

You can start parsing together how the brain works and over time you get all these insights that it's hilarious. We confirmed a long-standing neuroscience theory yesterday that people haven't been able to prove or disprove for the last 10 years because they just been running stuff. Wait, this is the only explanation.

So just stuff like this. Um cycle time's usually around two or three days for us right now if we have to build new hardware and software. Um but um if we don't then you know they can be about like two three hours and we're trying to bring most things down to two three hours. That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

I'm extremely impressed and excited. Yeah, this is awesome. And uh feel free to, you know, consider us testing partners, you know. Yes. Um Oh, also if you ever podcast longer, send somebody on your team to set us up and then you can watch the stream and just, you know, Yeah.

Maybe instead of the soundboard triggers and we we involuntarily laugh, we burst out into laughter. That might be shocking. If you ever if you ever want to try the world spinning around thing, let me know and I can hook you. Sounds horrible, but I'm in. I'm in. Count me in for the the tilt whirl in my brain.

Congratulations. Super excited for you and the team. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. We'll have you on. Bye. Bye. Cheers. Uh that is a wild device. I'm excited to try that. Uh next up, we have Elliot Elias from Canopy Labs. We will bring him in in just a second. Um, but you know, you he mentioned it.

You got to get an eight sleep. They have a pod five available now. Five-year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping, clinically backed sleep fitness. You heard it from him. He spent his first dollar of Teal Fellowship. So, he was saying he's getting up to three hours of deep sleep. Yeah.

How much you getting? I put up 90 minutes last night. Double you. And he's getting double just by attaching. It's insane. It's electrode. I mean, seems like a promising product. I got a 91 last night even though I But the potential like you realize Oh, yeah.

The potential economic impact if we could only sleep for three hours and add an additional Yeah. I mean, realistically, you're not going to go from seven hours of sleep to five for